The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

  Protein crystallography, that’s what the talk had been about. Meant nothing to Landau, whole thing quite boring really, except for the brilliant talkiness of the man in the audience. This is science? One fellow stuttering and hemming while another makes jokes, “setting the table rolling” over and over, jokes with a logical innuendo? And afterward, a lot of good-natured talk as the men gathered together in front of the blackboard, writing more nonsense upon it. Not a lab coat in sight.

  It was years later that he figured out who the loudmouthed one had been. Crick was famously noisy, someone who liked to do the other guy’s crossword puzzle for him, eat his lunch. Had this been an inspiration to Landau? Well, he always remembered it. And he was in a very, very small way Crick-like, in that he enjoyed swotting up areas of expertise that he had no right to, immunology, microbiology, Asian languages. He was that rare prominent epideme without a medical degree, one who had never even taken a class in organic. (Crick had been a physicist before plunging into biology.) Yes, Landau taught in a medical school, he was continually surrounded by MDs, and he often told his ferociously bright students, “I am not a doctor but I play one on TV,” quoting the ad for cough syrup. This had turned out to be a big theme for him—not quite being what he should. Having to hide intellectual deficits, make them up on his own, do homework.

  One of the reasons Samantha Beevors had appealed. Also not an MD, also largely self-created. Had she been born twenty years later she would have been a computer scientist, tout court, and indeed, her work in the last decade had all been high-end programming stuff, the elaboration of complex models for disease, for giant drug-treatment campaigns. Figuring out what happens if you give this rather than that to the benighted millions. His judgment of her significance and the value of what she had done colored by their falling out, inevitably, but his considered opinion was that she had lost her way scientifically, modeling the models that modeled models. She believed you could make human misery predictable. Model everything.

  He believed that, too, sort of. But at the far edge of an evolving retroviral plague there was a spirit of mad fun, the killer microbe rejoicing in its profound resourcefulness, o’ertopping itself, reengineering creation. Samantha would have said, “I program for that, too, and nicely.” But she had gone global, become a celebrity, begun to believe her own press. No longer called herself an epidemiologist, no, she was a biomathematician now, also an evolutionary biologist, and when the mood was on her, a population geneticist, too. Obsessed with the question of drug resistance, how did you devise an inoculation regime that minimized that, for which researches the mighty had vastly enriched her. Landau and a few others sniping from the sidelines. The idea of the centrality of resistance, that that was the only question, disturbed him. My God, just count the bodies piling up from good old non-drug-resistant TB, if you want some evidence. From endemic malaria.

  He awoke at seven fifty. Cat Freddy on top of him, kneading his chest. Voices outdoors, several. Landau lying on the hard, artsy couch in the downstairs den, staring at the cracked ceiling.

  My God—Samantha’s dead, he realized. Samantha Beevors is dead. The thought hit him with a twist to the gut. Good God.

  His doorbell was ringing. Oh, a bloody circus out there already, TV station vans, people scurrying about, someone speaking commentary into a microphone. They saw him at the window and rushed the front door. So, just get away from the window. Go put on your pants. Do something.

  The telephone rang. Then his cell phone rang, and he hunted the gadget down inside his sleeping bag, found it just as it stopped. A UC Berkeley number, with no name attached. More mad doorbelling. And now door-knocking, too.

  He called back the Berkeley number.

  “Yes?” asked an impatient baritone.

  “Harold, is that you?”

  “Oh, Anthony. Yes. I have those numbers we talked about. Those lawyers we talked about last night, the ones I thought might do okay by you.”

  Landau tried to remember. “All right, go on. I guess I’m sufficiently awake.”

  Landau took down the numbers—the office numbers of two eminent criminal defense attorneys.

  “Call them this morning, Anthony, as soon as you’re able. I’ll call ahead if you tell me which one you like better.”

  “Eeny meeny miney mo, Harold.”

  “In that case, I suggest Raboy. Cleveland Raboy. Slightly bigger office, and they never lose a case, never an important one.”

  “Am I important? But I’m not worried about losing, Harold. I have done nothing wrong. I want someone willing to take one for the team, though, to get out ahead.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Willing to deal with the press, for instance. There’s a whole herd of them at my door right now. Trying to knock it down.”

  “Listen, Anthony—don’t talk to anyone until you choose your lawyer. Don’t let them get their hooks into you. I’ll call ahead so he’ll be ready for your call. Make it at nine thirty on the dot. Without fail.”

  “I’m feeling much poorer already, Harold.”

  “I know. It’s what it is.”

  Not exactly a hand-holder. But steady, competent, thorough. Landau’s male friends tended to be more ragged than Harold, less worthy, and he and Harold had never quite become intimate, although they’d tried. Harold might not want him for a friend, Harold being the Barbra Streisand Chair and all that. Or, perhaps it was only Deena that made him wary—that Landau had messed with Deena, too. That was surely part of the problem.

  He moved in stately fashion down the hall of his villa, catching views out windows and through glass doors of people walking through his bushes. Trampling his native-plants garden. One man was waving at him through a kitchen window—Doctor, can I ask you just one question? Just one single question? Landau made some coffee. Get the hell away from my kitchen window, you fool, you chucklehead. Eventually, the man backed off, shaking his head regretfully—all right, it’s your call, Professor, but I could have helped you. I could’ve put you on TV.

  Already all over the web, good God. Death of Samantha Bernstein Beavers, as facesofdisease.com misspelled her last name. Focus so far on her death, her fame, no mention of him at all. Landau leaned against his expensive butcher-block island sipping the brew of Sumatra Mandheling, while exercising his slim new laptop. A CNN news report was just now being filed, 11:59 EST, “Samantha Bernstein Beevors, AIDS Pioneer, Dead at 57,” with links to her vast CV and to a recent paper, “Forecasting the epidemiological aspects of antiretroviral allocation protocols in KwaZulu-Natal: Is there still time?” in Nature Medicine. He’d read it, could remember none of it. Uh-oh, here was his name on another story, and Landau quickly closed the lid of the trusty Mac and pushed it away from him. Must eat breakfast first. Give me another half hour.

  Forty minutes later, as he eased out his back door on the way to the green plastic garbage container in his fenced backyard, there to deposit some compostable refuse as conscience and city ordinance required, the redwood-and-wrought-iron gate to the yard came cautiously open, and a slender young woman slipped through. Dressed in a silky pantsuit, her hair just so, her makeup refined. Microphone in hand. Raised her eyebrows at Landau, then bit her lower lip, as if to keep from laughing.

  “Good for you,” she said. “Really good.”

  “What?”

  “Going right up there. Knocking on his door. Getting a foot in.”

  “Oh—yes, yes. But he threw me out. The bastard.”

  “You’re Solly Gravenites, right? Politico?”

  “And you are—wait—I know I’ve seen you before.”

  “I’m Katherine Emerald. Of KRON.”

  “Oh, of course. Katherine of KRON. Hello there, Katherine.”

  “So, what now, Solly?”

  “Well, he’s not saying anything. I guess we’re stuck.”

  “Is that door unlocked?”

&
nbsp; “Hmm, what, his back door? It might be. Yes.”

  Landau put his banana peels and orange rinds into the plastic dumpster. The woman looked hard at the back door.

  “I guess I just don’t have the balls,” she said. “The raw chutzpah. He’s a murder suspect, after all. Murder of a woman.”

  “No, don’t be like that. They like talking to a pretty face. Go on.”

  “No, I don’t think so, not today. I’ll just wait back here with all the cowards.”

  “You’re missing a big scoop. It could be your golden hour.”

  The young woman made some adjustments to her recording device.

  Landau continued, “He’s just a fat old professor. A bit depressed, is my lightning reading of him. Too much time alone. Got an old pussycat in there, mangy orange pussycat. Just waiting for you.”

  She looked at Landau more directly. Blinked twice.

  “You’re not Solly Gravenites, are you?”

  “Probably not. Is that a problem?”

  “Could I ask you one question?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why didn’t they arrest you yesterday?”

  “Why didn’t they? Well, you’d have to ask them. Because I didn’t commit a crime? I did nothing wrong?”

  Katherine Emerald nodded. She made as if to turn on her recording device.

  “No, no, none of that, please. No electronics.”

  “Just so I get things straight. So I don’t misquote you later.”

  “Very professional of you. But this is just between you and me, Katherine of KRON. What we say is just for us. For this special moment.”

  “So, what gives, Professor? What really happened?”

  “You know. I came home. Found a woman in my bed. A former colleague. She was dead.”

  “Sarah Samantha Beevors, right? The professor, the Gettleman Distinguished Professor of Mathematical Biology and Something-something at Stanford, right?”

  “Right. But more recently USC. They gave her a whole damned institute down there. Named it for her.”

  “Your former boss, correct? Your research director.”

  “Actually, I was hers. But we worked together. We were colleagues.”

  What am I doing? Landau asked himself. Really, what in the world? Stop talking now, right now. Enough of this little divertissement.

  “She discovered the new cause of tuberculosis. Disease-resistant tuberculosis, is that right?”

  “No, there is no disease-resistant tuberculosis. What would that mean? Tuberculosis is a disease.”

  She seemed perplexed. Then smiled at herself, a lovely smile. “I’m a complete scientific idiot, forgive me. I’m way out of my depth here.”

  “No, you aren’t out of your depth, Katherine of KRON. I’ve seen you on the tube. You’re very clever, when they let you be.”

  “Thank you. But the fact remains, I know nothing about what you do. Could you tell me about it?”

  “You were clever enough to sneak in here and say I looked like Somebody Gravenites. You’re rather quick, you are.”

  “You do look like someone else, some actor.”

  Landau was backing away now. Making little gestures, funny little expressions of regret.

  “Professor, Professor—may I ask just one more question?”

  “No.”

  “Are you an American citizen?”

  “Am I what? I am a hardworking, taxes-paying half-American. Foreign national, to be technical about it. But why do you care about that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Back safe in his kitchen, watching her exit the yard—glorious-looking young female, whatever else she was—Landau remonstrated with himself. Must not do that anymore. Must not stray off the reservation. But he had given nothing away—right? The whole incident was already a little like a memory of something experienced under a drug. The drug being the influence of her dewy young womanhood. Always has had a deranging effect upon me. Makes me want to show off.

  After a phone conversation with his lawyer, Raboy, Landau took a bath. His home phone ringing every two and a half minutes as he calculated, his cell phone ringing a little less often. Deena called, and they agreed to have lunch if he could figure out how to get away from his house. He went to his bedroom. My God, they took my fancy comforter away—did they have to do that? Did they have the right? His chest of drawers was also different-looking inside, depleted of several pairs of boxers, all his striped boxers. The damp, heavy sumo-wrestler’s bathrobe piled at his feet, Landau put on a pair of lavender-tinted briefs, and surely they must not be mine, must belong to someone else—to Jad, his slender son, for instance, or to some other svelte occasional visitor to his house. Good God, man, you start on a diet right now. Right this very hour. Look at those thighs. Why, you look like Rod Steiger in The Loved One. Mr. what’s-his-name, Mr. Joyboy.

  The bed spooked him, stripped bare as it was, violated. Beds in which people have died whom I’ve cared about: mercifully, it was a short list, the bed in which darling Mother died, a raise-and-lower hospital number, brought in for her last few wheezing weeks, and the bed in which Gramps died, Gramps not his real grandfather, rather old Isidore Landau, the movie theater owner, the family benefactor. Landau grappled at a memory now, the old gent dead in bed beside him one frosty winter’s morning, their great pleasure, the two of them, old kindly grandpa-figure and squirmy ten-year-old boy, to sleep together on the old fellow’s occasional visits to the flat where he kept Landau and his mother, off Stoke Newington Road, Hackney. Then, dead one morning, eyes open upon the ceiling, expression of dubiety. That why he hadn’t been able to sleep up here last night? From a fright delivered to him fifty years ago, when he was but a tender lad, still wet behind the ears?

  Early afternoon, just short of two. Here came Deena up the steps, bearing takeout bags. Landau had convinced her that he was besieged in his house and so she had taken his order for Cha-Am, his favorite Thai place on Shattuck Avenue, entrée number twenty three, chicken and fresh green beans, not too spicy, extra rice. As she swept up his front walk, some remnant press were coming after her, looking a little dispirited now, just going through the motions, not really hoping for anything.

  “Deena. Deena, baby. So good to see you.”

  “Anthony, you are the big baby. The pretender.”

  “I know. I lied when I said I couldn’t get out. I just didn’t want to. Ooh—that smells so good.”

  “Please, don’t maul me.”

  “Just trying to take the bags, sweetheart. Help you out.”

  They settled down in the kitchen. There was that correspondent in the side yard again, looking in at them, waving.

  “No, leave the drapes open, who cares,” Landau said.

  “You want him filming you as you eat your peanut curry?”

  “Peanut curry? Hey! I didn’t order no stinking peanut curry!”

  “I know, I know! Is only a joke, Anthony. You want too much your food.”

  “Food is all I have now, sweetheart. All that’s left me.”

  Deena, on her own authority, pulled the curtains. She sat down and they began to eat.

  When the drastic rush of first pleasure was over, Landau sat back in his chair, continuing to eat but at a more dignified pace. Deena had barely begun. She was the one eating peanut curry. Wearing her office clothes, a rumpled, forgettable skirt mit blouse. She was the departmental secretary for the East Asian Languages Institute, Berkeley, the daughter of two distinguished language scholars, Belgrade Serbs, lost everything getting out of Yugoslavia in the fifties, arrived complaining about America and never stopped, just the one daughter, exceedingly dutiful, subtly discouraged from following in the parental footsteps. Not smart enough, you know. Not true professor material. Another of Landau’s self-starters, hot autodidacts. Went to Taiwan on a vacation at eighteen a
nd came back speaking Min-nan, the southern Fujianese dialect, then picked up Guoyu, Taiwanese Mandarin, later from a boyfriend. Read novels in Japanese, emailed in nine languages. Landau’s tutor in all things Asian-linguistic, the gentlest of task-mistresses, a connoisseur of imprecision and error, her own English, for example, stubbornly a little off, still accented after forty-five years in-country.

  Acne-scarred shoulders. Some scars on her face. Gravy-brown hair, always a little greasy. All her life men had been discovering her, diamond-in-the-roughing her, thrilled to find someone whom surely no one else had noticed—why, you’re quite attractive, you know. Come have a drink with me, I will condescend to want you. All the big empire-building professors wanted her in their office, please. Landau no less than the others. He had come into the Language Institute one afternoon in the eighties casting about for a translator, a toothsome Chinese girl grad student perhaps, and had been taken by this incarnation of Mitteleuropean longing. A hard, sexy face. Am I in the Slavic Languages Department, by mistake? Did I open the wrong door?

  “Deena. I really stepped in it this time, I think.”

  “Why? It’s okay, Landau. Forget it.”

  “No, it’s all out there now. It’s all over for me. I’ll be ruined.”

  “It was over for you before.” She shrugged and ate.

  “Look at this,” and he began to play with his laptop. But Deena refused to look.

  “Come on. Just for a second.”