The Lure (5 page)

“I just wish I had hit one of them when I threw it. That might have been one or two minutes less for them to stab. He might have lived then, mightn’t he?”

“Why bother thinking about what might have been?” The Fisherman led Noel out of the cell, through the corridor, and into the little foyer outside the glass door. No one else appeared. “I have to apologize for the others. Sometimes they’re like animals,” he said, taking Noel’s hand and shaking it.

Noel took the hand, shook it, looked into the man’s sad brown eyes, and said he understood. He was halfway out the metal door when he had a thought. “Shouldn’t the police be notified?”

“We are the police,” the Fisherman said, closing the glass door with a click.

The note from the department chairman arrived faster than Noel expected. It was prominent in the cubbyhole that served as his mailbox in the Sociology Department general office when Noel stopped there between classes the following afternoon.

“Are you sure this is for me?” he asked Alison, Boyle’s secretary. She lifted her glasses Eve Arden style, and peered at the envelope the note had come in.

“Put it there myself.”

“Is he free now?” Noel asked.

“Will be shortly. Seat?”

“No. I’d rather flirt with you.”

“You mean you’d rather try to extort information from me,” she said. A tall, slender, vaguely washed out blonde, not unattractively approaching her fifties, Alison had a dizzy and capricious surface that hid a shrewd mind. She knew everything that went on in the department, possibly in the entire school. Noel settled on the edge of the desk and watched her go back to typing.

“You have to admit this invitation is a little sudden,” he said. “You know as well as I that Boyle and I talk to each other once a term. The conversation is always the same.”

“This one won’t be,” she declared, then lowered her voice. “Are you in trouble?”

“What kind of trouble?”

She looked around the office, then, certain that no one was listening, she said, “What were the police holding you for? They called here, you know. Spoke to me. They insisted on speaking to
him.
I tried to stop them…” She shrugged.

“Is that all?” he said, with exaggerated relief.

A day and a half had passed and he was still hearing that anguished wheeze, feeling the hands pounding at him, seeing that dread featureless face. But instead of being depressed he was exhilarated. He’d missed his first class yesterday, but had been electric for the others, pulling ideas out of thin air, making associations and connections that had surprised him and awed the class. Half of them had gathered around his desk long after the period bells had rung, asking questions, offering ideas.

This morning had gone well, too, although he was calming down. Frightening as it had been, it had happened to
him.
That made it remarkable. That kept him in high spirits. High enough to tease Alison.

“Promise you won’t breathe a word?” he said, taking on her conspiratorial tone.

“I’m not sure I want to hear this.”

“I deal drugs. Mostly cocaine. But a little heroin, too. The cops raided my place.” He waited for the appropriate confused/horrified response to register on her face. “Luckily the place was clean. Not lucky, really, I was tipped off. There’s this former junkie who runs for me. Actually, he’s still addicted, which is how I get him to work for me, and…”

Boyle’s office door opened. Noel stopped in midsentence and got off Alison’s desk. She turned back to her typing. They heard the voices beyond the door, the department chairman, oily smooth as usual, the excited voice of the young man who exited first, shaking Wilbur Boyle’s hand. Noel had seen his type before—tousled, dirty hair, granny glasses, denims a size too small, a corduroy jacket with worn houndstooth elbow patches—the costume of the career graduate student.

Boyle spotted Noel. “Did you get my note, Mr. Cummings? Do you have a moment now?”

Not waiting for an answer, he went back into his office.

“Here goes,” Noel whispered to Alison and headed after him.

“You must be Noel Cummings,” the graduate student said. “You wrote that article
contra
Wilson.”

“I admit it.”

“Everyone’s talking about it in Chicago. No kidding. We think it’s a terrific critique!”

“Thanks,” Noel said, and would have stayed to find out what else they were saying at the University of Chicago, but Boyle was signaling to him.

“Nice boy,” Wilbur Boyle said when they were alone. “Very up on things. Might join our staff next year.”

He motioned Noel to sit down, but remained standing himself, looking up at the high windows under the prominent eaves of the old building.

“When I first took this office, I thought how wonderful it would be, right here in the heart of Manhattan overlooking the park. A roof with eaves to keep off sun and snow. Birds singing. All I notice now is pigeon shit.”

Noel sat down and automatically inspected the bookshelf. A glance told him not a volume had been moved since his last visit at the beginning of the term. He’d heard such prologues before. They always led into a long, convoluted soliloquy of disappointments, hardships, and department problems. To listen to one was to hear all of them. But to break in was a breach of etiquette.

Noel used the time to prepare answers to Boyle.

The chairman got to the point rather suddenly, breaking off in the middle of a platitude to ask, “By the way, what is all this about, yesterday morning?”

“I witnessed a murder.”

The handsome, well-cared-for, middle-aged face stopped for a second as though a plaster mask had received a light hammer tap.

“No? Really?”

“Really. I think the victim was a police decoy. I never found out more. He was still alive. He sent me for help. It arrived too late for him. They said they would call to check my story. They even began to beat me up. Their chief stopped them.”

“Not a nice bunch,” Boyle said, all sympathy and interest. “What happened?”

“Some men knifed him. In one of the abandoned piers on the Hudson River.”

Boyle winced, but seemed fascinated. “And they let you go?”

“Here I am.”

“If only you’d told me,” Boyle said, “you needn’t have come to class. I would have found someone else. Or canceled it.”

“I didn’t mind,” Noel said. He was enjoying himself now. “I thought work would keep my mind off it. It was grisly.”

“It must have been.” Those words said, Wilbur Boyle was once more the unworried, slick university administrator, his hair stylishly long, neatly combed, his clothing meticulous, his tone that of an aging politician. Boyle had made his name with one idea in one book twenty years ago. Since then, nothing had panned out, except this job. He’d done his best to glamorize it and himself.

“What were you doing there? In that area, I mean?”

“I bicycle every morning, before class.”

“Sounds invigorating.” Boyle shuddered. “And that’s all?”

“What else would I be doing in an abandoned pier at that hour?”

“Then you aren’t the one,” Boyle said, sighing with obvious disappointment.

“What one?”

“No one tells me anything in the department. But I had heard an intriguing rumor that one of the staff was seen at curious hours recently in that area. Getting material. You know, of course, that area is a center of homosexual bars, clubs, haunts of different sorts? I was certain I’d soon be reading a proposal for a ground-breaking study on that milieu seen from within. It’s needed. It sounded good. Very good. I’d hoped that person was you, Noel.”

“Me?” Noel had been following Boyle with interest. He hadn’t heard such a rumor nor did he know of the area’s reputation. Boyle’s last words startled him.

“Vain hope, I see,” Boyle said, curling his upper lip. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you
do
owe the department a thesis, don’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“So it wasn’t entirely foolish of me to harbor the thought that this would be the long-awaited work?”

“But we’ve always discussed my ideas beforehand.”

“I know. I know. To what end? What was the most recent one? Ah, yes, something about the impact of a drug rehabilitation center suddenly placed in a middle-class neighborhood. What happened to it?”

“The crime rate rose five hundred percent in four months. A month later it was closed down, reopened in Harlem. It was nothing.”

“It might have been something. If you had chosen to do it.”

“As a book?”

“The Current Ideas imprint needs such books. That’s why I began it. Or have you forgotten?”

How could anyone forget Boyle’s pet project? Noel was reminded of it in some way every week. Boyle was using it to show up the other branches of the University Press: it was becoming an obsession.

“Would you really print something like that?” Noel asked, hoping to deflect Boyle onto his favorite topic.

“Like what? The rehab center? Or the murder?”

“No. I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“Maybe you ought to, Noel. No, don’t interrupt. You realize that the social sciences are based on being right on the spot, living it, reporting it. All the great ideas in our field have come from being
within
a society. Look at Mirella Trent. She worked three months as a guard in a women’s prison for her book. And it turned out to be the best one we’ve done in the series. We need more of that. Not more critiques of someone else’s ideas in another grad school journal.”

When was the last time Boyle had done fieldwork? Noel wondered resentfully. Unless that was what he called all those uptown cocktail parties. He was even more irritated by the department chairman pointing out Mirella’s book as a guide. Everyone knew what a sensational muckraking feminist tract that had been: a best-seller that had pulled the Current Ideas imprint out of a financial hole. Not to mention the decisive blow it had dealt to Noel and Mirella’s on-again, off-again two-year relationship. Boyle couldn’t be ignorant of that, either.

“May I remind you,” Boyle was saying now, “that when I first took you on here, I had high hopes. I know you’re good in class. Students fight to get into your lectures. But I can no longer guarantee that will be enough to keep you in line for tenure.” There it was—the threat. Noel had been waiting for it.

“You saw that young man who came out of my office before. He’s already coauthored one book. He’s bright, eager. Why shouldn’t he work here?”

“You’ve made your point,” Noel said, standing.

“You have to realize my position, Noel. I have to answer to a dean, a board of directors. I’m attacked on all sides.”

“I know.” Which he did, from hearing it from Boyle so often. But he didn’t care. All he wanted was to get out of that office.

“And you know I hate to exert pressure. It’s not my style.” Of course not, Noel thought. It doesn’t match your mirror-shine shoes or four-thousand-dollar face-lift.

“Don’t let me go into the board meeting this term-ending with empty hands, Noel. Give me something to show for keeping you.”

“I will,” Noel lied: anything to get out.

Boyle seemed surprised, pleased. “Good. You must know how I detest these administrative duties,” he said, suddenly unruffled and friendly again. “Why don’t you show me something substantial soon? We’ll meet over lunch. Wouldn’t that be pleasant?”

“I won’t let you down,” Noel said at the door. He had to force himself to shake the plump, slick hand.

“Shit!” he said as Boyle’s door closed. “Shit!”

What was happening to him?

He was in a black mood by the time he left the uptown IRT and walked to the apartment he had taken on Madison Avenue after Monica died and the five rooms on Riverside Drive had seemed so vast and empty. This place satisfied him. It was a good-sized studio—with a tiny kitchen and bath off to one side, a sleeping loft built over a small study area. The ceilings were twelve feet high. He had a working fireplace, long walls for built-in closets and bookshelves. There was traffic, loading and unloading outside from seven in the morning until noon, but by afternoon the neighborhood was quiet and most nights it was country silent.

He had let himself into the apartment and dumped his books when the phone rang.

“Noel? Is that you? This connection is bad. Should I call back?”

“Mrs. Sherman? My side is fine.”

“Well, I guess this will do then,” she said, her nasal voice unmistakable. “I just wanted to check if you were coming up this weekend.”

The minute she said it—half pleading, half reminding—Noel remembered: today was March third. In two days, Monica would have been twenty-eight. They had always visited her parents for her birthday, and after she died, the Shermans had insisted Noel continue the tradition. How they had loved her! How good they had been to him after it happened, never leveling a hint of reproach for letting their only, their wonderful daughter drown. Of course they had known Noel most of his life, were almost family to him. And usually Noel looked forward to seeing them.

“I know it’s a long trip, now that we’re so much farther away,” Mrs. Sherman apologized.