The Letter Killeth (12 page)

“Why no kids?”

“It's not my fault.” She broke down then, crying like a kid. It broke Jimmy's heart to see a grown woman do that. From that point on, Senski's sympathy was with Jimmy, but that meant he was going to let Hazel call it a separation and head for her sister's in Santa Monica.

It took him fifteen minutes to scrape the ice off the windows. That was probably the most exercise he'd had all week. Maybe he would get a pogo stick and bounce around the house.

He had a couple of lonely beers before heading for the Knights', where Roger had made enough goulash for John Madden. Phil had laid in a supply of Guinness for the game, and during the hyped-up intro, with the set muted, Jimmy asked Phil if he remembered that kid on campus security that had been a help when they were on the Kittock murder. But it was Roger who remembered.

“Larry. Larry Douglas.”

9

Quirk had asked to audit Roger's class on F. Marion Crawford, and Roger had countered with the suggestion that Quirk give a guest lecture.

“I never taught a day in my life.”

“It's just a matter of discussing with other people some topic you know better than they do.”

“I'm not making any headway with the provost.”

Father Carmody felt that he was getting a secondhand run-around himself insofar as Quirk had been turned over to him. Now, as a result of the dilly-dallying, they had lost the chance to put the proposal to Fred Fenster. Of course Mendax in development had checked out Fenster and came back whistling and rolling his eyes. Neither Quirk nor Father Carmody had needed such confirmation. Father Carmody had of course remembered Fenster. He had been very active in campus politics on the liberal side and kept it up after graduation. He could afford it. Carmody knew Manfred's father, a gentleman of the old school, as only his friends would have put it. All the confidence of the self-made man. But he had been generous to Notre Dame so long as you listened first to his extended exposition of what was wrong with civilization. Unlike others, he had never included Notre Dame in his negative estimate of the modern world. Father Carmody could still remember old Fenster's eye damp with sentiment when he returned for home football games and was included in the select group entertained in the presidential aerie on the fourteenth floor of the library.

“Roger,” Father Carmody said, bringing the Knights up to speed, “the problem is that Quirk wants to be generous with someone else's money. I suggested that he pledge something himself, to get the ball rolling. He thinks he's being stalled.”

“Maybe he can't afford it.”

“Ha. He's no Fenster, but he's got plenty.”

“I'm surprised he hasn't just gone ahead and bought the villa in Sorrento.”

“He tried to.”

“He did?”

Carmody nodded. “Given the use to which it had been put in recent years, they want to turn it over to a religious order. So he asked, how about the greatest Catholic university in the world? They liked that.”

“But he could have bought it himself?”

“I know what you're thinking, Roger. Why not just fork over the purchase money to Notre Dame and leave Fenster out of it? Sometimes I thinks he wants the project to fail.”

“Has he been generous to the university?”

“Not lately.”

Notre Dame alumni all looked alike at first, and then they fell into types and subspecies and ultimately into fierce singularity, no two really alike. Roger had classified Quirk among the nostalgics, and there was something to be said for that. His voice could get husky when he spoke of his time on campus. But he had a lot in common with what Roger thought of as alumni-penitents, men and women who bewailed the fact that they had wasted their undergraduate years. Some of these, like Quirk apparently, resolved to do belatedly what they had not done in their youth. But F. Marion Crawford, fascinating as Roger himself found the author, was an odd handle to take hold of initially. Then Roger began to suspect that Quirk's knowledge of the author was fairly superficial. He hadn't actually read much by Crawford. He had found
Ave Roma Immortalis
tough going, and of the novels he had read he preferred
The Ralstons
!

“Fred only reads saints and mystics,” Quirk had answered when Roger asked him what headway he was making with Fenster. That had made Roger curious and he had gladly accepted Fred Fenster's invitation to lunch. And now the mysterious alumnus was gone.

“That's the way it always is,” Bill said. “He shows up without warning, and then one day he calls to say so long.”

“How often does he come?”

“A couple of times a year. His life is pretty much his own, you know.”

Mary Alice said, “I think he really liked
Via Media.
Except for the symposium on abortuaries.”

The question was, can force be used to protect innocent life, and one or two participants had been all for marching on the clinics and forcibly shutting them down. Even burning them down. The consensus had been against that, thank God. But to the zealous young it seemed a counsel of accommodation to recommend the slow path of legislative reform. The trouble was that the flood of abortions had not been begun by the passage of any law. Roger could share the anguish, who could not?

“What did your father say?”

“He said that in his experience any attempt to change others usually led to something worse.”

“He suggested prayer and penance,” Mary Alice said. “No one could stop us from doing that.”

Quirk, on the other hand, applauded the more fiery contributions to the symposium. Not that he wanted to defend the position.

“It's just a gut feeling,” he told Roger.

“Civil disobedience. Like Dorothy Day?”

That was sly, of course. Roger had gotten some sense of where Quirk stood on the Catholic Worker movement when Quirk mentioned that Fred Fenster had paid the local group a visit.

When eventually Quirk did show up for Roger's class on Crawford, he sat in a corner and said nothing, following the discussion but not taking part. He stayed around afterward, and it seemed that he had come to the class largely to talk with Roger.

“Did you know there's an atheist on the faculty?”

“You've been reading the paper.”

“I can't believe it. It's not just what he might or might not believe himself. He preaches it in class.”

Roger disliked feeling this kind of indignation. Quirk was puffed up with rectitude, a defender of the faith. Well, no need to doubt his sincerity. But Roger could understand why Fred Fenster had withdrawn into quietism.

10

Oscar Wack gnashed his teeth in indignation. The story in the campus paper featuring Izquierdo should have been the kiss of death. Instead he was being hailed as a hero of academic freedom. The intrepid atheist. And he had stolen Wack's thunder! That hurt. That and the realization that he himself would not have had the guts to bare his soul to a student reporter. Now, of course, the burning of Izquierdo's car was seen as an attack on a man who had the courage of his convictions.

How accommodating could the university be? Did they imagine that a Holocaust denier would be feted at Brandeis? You could understand all the waffling about
The Vagina Monologues
and other activities of campus gay groups. To oppose those would invite being pilloried by the national media. That would have been a real clash of creeds. And Notre Dame blinked. But for God's sake, how could you sit still for a professor who used his classroom to argue atheism and mock Catholicism? If that wasn't rock bottom, Wack didn't understand the faith of his fathers. Yet Izquierdo was a hero.

Huddled at the desk in his office, muttering to himself, Wack asked half aloud when that blimp of a Roger Knight and his obsequious minions would take on Izquierdo. After Izquierdo, Roger Knight was Wack's greatest complaint. So he had earned a Princeton doctorate when he was still using a teething ring; he had never held a teaching position, and his reputation reposed on a single monograph, the incredibly successful little book on Baron Corvo. That was the unkindest cut of all. Wack had long nursed a secret passion for the writings of Corvo. Not the sort of thing you could admit in the department, of course. Wack had every biography ever written on the tragic author, beginning with Symonds's
Quest for Corvo.
The man had fascinated many, but they were all outside the walls of academe. No matter. When his disbelief wobbled, Wack could curl up with
Hadrian VII
and feed his disdain for the church that regarded what was delicately called his sexual orientation as sinful. It had been the thought of subjecting himself to the humiliation of the confessional that had opened Wack's mind to the flaws in any proof for the existence of God and liberated him from the faith.

Of course his personal life was concealed behind the armor of indirection. Never anything overt! Stolen holidays, trying to live out his convictions in the Caribbean sunlight but always hampered by the repressive beliefs of his youth, that was as much as he dared. On campus Wack was as chaste as a Trappist and kept all crusaders at arm's length. Izquierdo, of course, was flamboyantly heterosexual, and Wack was not misled by the man's lip service to sexual liberation in the fullest sense. Izquierdo had guessed his secret, he was sure of it, though the taunting was always ambiguous enough. Item, his teasing of Wack about Lucy Goessen.

“Of course I know the impediment,” Izquierdo had said, his eyebrows dancing. Wack was furious. Was this a reference to his lisp?

“She's married.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Isn't that what holds you back?”

Oh, the homophobic beast. But it had drawn him closer to Lucy. How buoyant she had been when she displayed her agility on the pogo stick that had somehow ended up in Wack's office. That memory led on to the memory of that late-night investigation of Izquierdo's office. He sat back, and some of his anguish left him.

Were they on to Izquierdo, after all? Were they looking for something that would provide an oblique way of bringing the man down? Of course. Why take him on frontally and turn him into a martyr of academic freedom? Everyone is vulnerable in a dozen ways. Wack shivered at the thought of anyone rummaging through his office. It was sneaky, of course, entering an office when the building was empty for the night, or so they thought. What if someone else had come upon them, someone other than Oscar Wack? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. What did Lucy make of all this?

He went downstairs for a sandwich and saw Lucy huddled with a man at a table in the lobby. Oscar studied them as he moved slowly through the line. The man wasn't faculty, and he was too old to be a student. The conversation seemed anything but casual. Oscar made a beeline for the table when he had his sandwich and milk.

“Lucy!”

She looked up at him, startled. Oscar pulled out a chair, smiling at her companion, and got a cold look in return. “I'm Oscar Wack. Lucy's colleague.”

“This is Alan,” Lucy said.

The man nodded and pushed away from the table. “I've got to get back to work.” And he was gone.

Oscar was dying with curiosity but decided on indirection. “Have you seen Giordano Bruno today?” he asked Lucy.

“I know I should understand that.”

“His statue is in the Campo dei Fiori. Burned at the stake for heresy.”

“You mean Raul?”

Good Lord. But she did have a mind of sorts. Several solid articles on Kate Chopin.

“I didn't know he had a daughter,” Izquierdo had said.

“Oh you.”

“You think he's kidding?” Wack had intervened.

But there was no point in trying to score on Izquierdo, not when there were witnesses.

“I wish the weather would break,” Oscar said.

“I've gotten used to it.”

“If it gets too cold you can always touch a match to your car.”

She leaned toward him. Honey-colored hair, green eyes. Had he ever seen green eyes before? “Do you think there is a connection?”

It had been a mistake to make Izquierdo the topic of conversation, but he had no gift for small talk. “Who's Alan?”

She seemed to be considering several answers. “A friend.”

“Is it true that you're married?”

She sat back and stared at him with wide eyes. “Who told you?”

“Told me? It's not a sin.”

Tears were leaking from her green eyes. And suddenly she was telling him all about herself; his gaucherie had proved the open sesame. Her husband initially backed her graduate studies, then came to resent them, finally saw that he would look like an appendage, and left.

“What does he do?”

“Do?”

“I mean workwise.”

She lowered her voice. “He has a chauffeur's license.” Her chin lifted. “He drives a cab.”

“Tell me about it.”

It was another world, but talking about it removed a barrier between them. He could imagine their becoming friends, even good friends. Brother and sister. Maybe he could be instrumental in bringing her and Alan together. The idea had the attraction of seeming aimed against Izquierdo. But all that would have to wait. She was off to class then, and Wack went up to his office.

His phone rang, and Hector, the departmental secretary, asked if he had seen Izquierdo.

“Did you try telephoning his office?” he said huffily.

“No answer. His wife is looking for him.”

Hector hung up before Wack could slam the phone down. What insolence. After a minute, he stood and put his ear to the wall between his office and Izquierdo's. He could hear nothing, but then he wasn't answering his phone. If he was in there.

Wack opened his door and looked out at an empty corridor. He slipped next door and wrapped his hand around the knob of Izquierdo's door. He turned it and the door began to open. That was a surprise. One didn't go away and leave the door of one's office unlocked. Not that investigators couldn't invade if they wanted to. He pushed the door open, flicking the light on as he did.