The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

  Joe had found an edition of the very kind of paperback that they had treasured back then, a book of smudged black-and-white offsets of women from the twenties or thirties, poules to judge from their workaday attire, shown pulling up their skirts while they enjoyed a glass of Calvados, or completely bare-assed but for a single garter, posed doggie-style. The book was hardcore in parts, the last pages offering women in leather masks, some tied up within an inch of their lives, breasts strangulated, throats encircled, fetishy, twisty stuff, of a kind that Landau had found deeply puzzling as a schoolboy. He had put it on the shelf right here, not knowing what else to do with it, since old friend Joe had bothered to send it.

  No, the maids wouldn’t have taken that. Probably, it was one of the policemen. There had been scads of them through here that night, touching everything, and maybe this would turn up somewhere down the road, as proof of his ominous psychopathology. Oh, well. If anyone ever asked him about it, he would try to explain Joe’s facetious intent—“You see, we used to go to school together, and at fourteen we went to Paris on the boat-train for three days once, for a first taste of vin rouge. Joe studies yeast prions now. Prions are those things that cause mad cow disease. They occur in yeast cells as well as in human nerve cells. Isn’t that fascinating?”

  By gad, though—it was uncanny how everything seemed to point to this, to his lonely, unhealthy bachelorism. To that part which seemed to mark him out as not quite a solid citizen. Is that what I am, really, an unsolid citizen? The fact that I’m not married, that I have the remnants of an urge now and then, haven’t been entirely a choirboy—is that what defines me? But surely this is the case with everyone, once prying eyes and fingers are allowed inside the boudoir. He decided not to worry about it. He experienced an exhilarating moment of panic, however, as he caught sight of himself in some mental mirror—recognized the Landau whom police investigators and crime reporters might take him for. The man as defined by his actions in the world, not according to some airy-fairy self-conception. By that crude standard, he was a bit funny. Even he thought he was funny.

  chapter 4

  Howe Street, Oakland. Kaiser Hospital. Grimmish stretch of functional California stucco structures, parking garage, patients swarming the sidewalks, black and brown folk, mainly. ER entrance over there. Landau on foot in the medical crowd, pigeon-toed, small stride for so large a man, something almost geisha-girl in his forward shuffle, moving just a little faster than everyone else. Looking, always looking. Up and down and all around. On the streets of Oakland in the eighties he had noticed small vials, two-inch-long glass ones as big around as a pencil, with black plastic screw-tops. Had begun to collect them, in a small way. When he showed them to friends, they were baffled—like him, they had been crunching them underfoot for months, but no one had bothered to pick one up. Crack vials, they were. Some of the very first.

  Son Jad, short for Jared, ate lunch in a windowless room on the fifth floor of the Howe Street building. He had brought an extra sandwich for his father to munch on, plus carrots. Landau had to look up at his slender, balding son, a full six foot five, 195, marathoner, triathlete, stringently fit. Married now, hardworking Kaiser GP. Stethoscope, white coat, the works. “What the fuck, Dad?” asked Jad. “What the fuck?”

  “I know.”

  “Samantha! Samantha!”

  “I know. They can’t tell us much yet. All they know is she died soon before I found her, maybe only a couple of hours.”

  “Just appeared in your bed, dead? After all these years? Did she still have a key?”

  “I don’t know that. They found nothing on her, no shoes, no clothes, no purse. It’s as if she’d been transported there through the air.”

  Landau’s son looked at him intently. Then his gaze went elsewhere, as if some new thought had occurred—these moments of lost focus, if that’s what they were, were all that remained of a youth full of diagnoses of ADHD and other au courant deficits, when his teachers had argued for this or that psych drug, powerful brain-straighteners, paradoxical sedatives, antidepressants. The boy would enter a fugue state, and, true, he had been a mess in school, despite fleeting indications of intelligence. “I’m afraid we’re losing him,” the headmistress at a fancy alternative academy had said to Landau and his ex-wife, Margery, at one dark juncture, but Landau had refused to see the situation as hopeless—“I was just like that,” he told them, “I was all messed up at age twelve or thirteen, always in a sort of dream—some new phrenological bump was forming, some new connections in the brain, and things worked out, eventually.”

  They put Jad on antidepressants. Did him no good whatsoever. Thereafter, Landau had decreed, he would have to experience adolescence cold turkey, or only under influence of such drugs as he could score himself. The fey fuguer had turned into a skateboarding snotnose, savagely at war with all adults, Landau included, Landau indeed preeminent. Father and son never really “bonded” afterward. And after the dark time had come the indifference. Jad chose to live with his mother, and Landau wanted to tell him, “I wish you all the best, son—I could never manage that myself.” Something raffish about Landau, too powerful, bothered the straight-arrow college boy who emerged from all the skateboarding and video-gaming. He was going way over to the bad side, Landau suggested to Georges, would probably end up a churchgoer and a Republican.

  “Dad, I have good memories of Samantha, very warm memories. We were good friends, though it sounds kind of funny to say that.”

  “I know. She was very fond of you.”

  “She was always joking, making things seem bearable. And she gave me cool presents.”

  “I remember that. You loved her for the presents.”

  “You had your thing with her, but I had a different thing. Maybe a better thing, almost.”

  “Absolutely, it was better. No contest.”

  “Karin made you a portobello mushroom sandwich, you want it?”

  “Sure, that sounds good.”

  Karin, pronounced car-inn: six-foot-one-inch Stanford Law grad, ex–volleyball star, happily unemployed for several years now, glad to be Jad’s wife and not much else. She would pick up her career somewhere down the road—there was no hurry. They lived in a steroidal mansion on Alvarado Street in the Oakland hills, built in the wake of the 1989 fire, which had wiped out hundreds of modest older houses in the neighborhood. The professors and tax attorneys and neurosurgeons who had lived in charming rustic cottages before had scored fat insurance settlements and had rebuilt out to the edges of their burnt-over lots, and it was in one of these white-walled palaces that looked vaguely like research facilities that Jad and Karin were having their life now, just the two of them—they were determined not to have children.

  “Mmmm, this is delicious, Jad, really good.”

  “She can cook, my wife, that’s for sure.”

  “Yes, she knows her way around a fancy mushroom. I always said that.”

  “Tell me about it, Dad. The accident.”

  “They don’t know if it was an accident. You want the police angle, is that it?”

  “Start with that.”

  Landau narrated the day, the evening, what had followed. The story he told had acquired fluency and polish and a certain degree of irreality, Landau having read all the news accounts, of course, and seen all the TV and other coverage. That nice Detective Johnson was feeding reporters solid information, Landau suspected—he wanted to discourage speculation about Landau as mad-dog murder suspect, as savage killer amongst us.

  Jad, as usual, seemed to go away as you spoke with him. If I were a patient, Landau reflected, if I had come in here to report some worrisome pains down my left arm, I would say at this point, “Hey, Doc, am I boring you? You got something more important to do? I’m thinking I could use your full attention.” But all reports on Jad were that he was an excellent doctor, perspicacious, sensitive. They liked him at Kaiser, had already offered him a
bump up in status, fewer clinical hours plus administrative duties, the usual Faustian sign of favor.

  “Dad, did you kill Samantha?”

  “Did I kill her? Gosh, Jad, you come right out and say it, don’t you? Cut right to the chase.”

  “Well, I know she got under your skin. She brought that suit and everything.”

  “Jad—am I the sort of person who would kill a helpless woman? A former girlfriend?”

  “She was never helpless, but no, I wouldn’t think so.”

  “You wouldn’t think so?”

  “No.”

  Hardly a ringing endorsement. An effusive show of filial support. But don’t go getting all huffy on him, Landau advised himself, no, applaud him for wanting the truth. That’s good.

  “Jad, this is your father speaking. The only father you will ever have. Maybe you think I am that sort of person, because of all the bodies that kept showing up during your childhood. The ones down in my torture chamber, in the basement. All my guns and thumbscrews and whips.”

  “You did have a nice gun. A really nice little gun.”

  “I’ve never owned a firearm, Jad, I’ve never needed one.”

  “It said ‘Heckler & Koch’ on the handle. It was black. You let me play with it from time to time.”

  Landau puzzled this over. “Oh, the prop, you mean. The fake gun from Naomi’s play. Okay, I remember that.”

  “It felt real. Felt dangerous in your hand. It was a perfect replica.”

  “Didn’t I give that to you?”

  “Then you took it away again. Because I was bad.”

  Ah, ah. Landau was recalling more fully now. The great hugger-mugger when Jad had showed up at school one day with the gun. This was pre-Columbine, but even so. We take this most seriously, Dr. Landau, the administrator had told him, even though we understand it’s only a toy. And hadn’t that been the beginning of the shrink-driven attempts at an intervention? Wasn’t that the prelude to Landau allowing his son to be drugged for a time? Aged thirteen or so, when he was just starting to grow freakishly tall?

  “You’re the one who’s been busted with a gun, Jad. The only one in this family.”

  “Yes, but it was your gun.”

  “Why is that important?”

  “I don’t know. It just was.”

  “Jad, my son. Some day we’ll find a discount analyst and work all this out, but until then I advise you to take two glasses of red wine a day and sleep eight hours.”

  “Dad, how much do you weigh now, do you have you any idea?”

  “I’m not a weighing sort of man, never have been.”

  “Care to step into my office?”

  “No, I prefer not to.”

  Jad suddenly lost all expression. Half turned away. “Suit yourself. But just look at you. I mean, come on.”

  “I get weighed and measured every year. They give me an echocardiogram and probe and palpate and send me on my way. And remember, I swim like a fish.”

  “There’s nothing magical about swimming. It has to be combined with not gorging.”

  The face with no expression suddenly looked displeased. Was swimming a sore topic? “Probably I swim five times as much as you do,” Jad added. “And I swim hard. I cross-train. So, I have a good idea of the benefits of swimming.”

  “Good. Then that’s settled.”

  Landau went shopping afterward, at one of the monster local health-food depots. Long crowded aisles, down which he bulkily wended his way, able to find exactly what he wanted, exactly, organic bulgur wheat, goat cheese from that nice little farm in Bolinas, the wood-cured balsamic vinegar di Modena with the antique label. Whatever else was going to hell in the sixth year of the George W. Bush presidency, food delivery and food obsession were continuing their explosive evolution, and one could fondle six varieties of imported avocado on offer in the month of November, four of them organic, thank God.

  International capitalism was working out the details for everyone with some money: for health nuts and fair trade–organic partisans as for buyers of SUVs and consumers of cosmetic-surgery services. But why is my world, my chosen little corner of it, all about eating and drinking? Why that, and not some other fanaticism? Here, look at this fabulous wine section, occupying a full aisle of the store. Good God, the sophistication of it, the geographic reach, he thought. Eight new pinots from Oregon, a clutch of South African syrahs, six award-winning Argentinian malbecs. Raised at such-and-such a height above sea level, by fourth generation vintners in alluvial soil of large granulometry, six months in American oak, three in French. One good-looking bottle offered for $8.99. Why, that was basically nothing, basically pocket change. How did the world do it, year after year? Who was getting screwed, the pickers of the grapes? The middlemen?

  Berkeley had once been about other hungers, sex, revolution, that kind of thing. Landau had been close to a group of aspiring revolutionaries for a while, back in the now-risible sixties, and he was that rare veteran of the storied era who believed that it had come close to doing something dreadful, catastrophic. The right wing and the center, and most of the left wing now as well, mocked much of what had happened then as the self-regarding inanity worked up by a generation of draft-avoiding suburban babies, but Landau had looked his fellow grad students in the eye while sitting around kitchen tables with them, calmly discussing blasting vectors, wiring algorithms, throw-weights. The thing about Americans is that they love abstract ideas, and given an abstract premise for hating each other they will grow demented in the exhilarating ensuing slaughter—why, just look at the American Civil War, and it’s not over yet. The country is still divided down its heart. It’s a violent country—it has a violent destiny.

  In front of a cooler full of exotic yogurts, Landau felt someone’s eyes upon him, and he turned to face a woman of about fifty, long gray hair, no cosmetics, yogini pants, earth shoes. Simply standing there staring.

  “Sorry. I’ll get out of your way.”

  But it wasn’t the yogurts she was looking at. No, it was Landau himself. It amazed her that he was here, blandly, unapologetically here.

  His first public sighting—that’s what it was. His first celebrity unmasking. Now she wheeled away abruptly, somehow disdainfully—“Excuse me, madam,” he wanted to call after her, “did you have something you wanted to say to me? You Birkenstock worthy, you? Yes, I’m here in public just like an ordinary citizen—they let us monsters out in the daylight hours. And after I finish here I’m going out on the street and eat a couple of babies. Juicy black ones.”

  Maybe she mistook me for someone she doesn’t like—her ex-husband. Her brother-in-law. But no, no, it’s me. In a way, it was remarkable that so little had been made of him, him and his curious case. It was Scott Peterson fatigue, perhaps. The wife-and-baby murdering California brute of the last few years had exhausted everyone, even the San Francisco Chronicle, and in comparison his own situation was barely tabloid worthy. The death of a scientist, a woman pushing sixty herself—come on, where was the thrill in that? No fetuses fished out of the bay, no armless torsos. Five books had already been written about depraved, magnetic Scott, who resided these days on death row, San Quentin. Many women were said to be writing to him.

  Landau found an email awaiting him at home. Elfridia, the maid, who cleaned at Deena’s alternate Wednesdays, had failed to show up, Deena said. Elfridia’s cell phone was now dead. Deena reminded Landau that the maids had once gone silent following a simple traffic stop—they lived in fear of the Immigration, and any attention from any police agency was likely to put them in deep cover. She’d hoped they’d show this week though, because she was having a party Saturday and the house was a mess. Was Landau free Saturday, by the way? And did he know what had happened to the maids?

  chapter 5

  He didn’t know, and then Detective Johnson reported the same thing, that Elfridia Tojolobal couldn�
�t be found—her phone wasn’t working, and she wasn’t at the apartment on San Pablo Avenue whose address Landau himself had provided the police, where she’d been living with her cousins. Some men were there now, also from Chiapas. Detective Johnson spoke bad Spanish, he confessed, and probably he had said the one thing he shouldn’t to the man who had come to the door: “With permission, señor, I’m looking for someone, and I’m with the Berkeley Police Department….”

  “Right,” Landau replied, “that would’ve put them off. She gave me that address over a year ago, anyway. Probably they just moved somewhere else.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What else can I help you with, Detective?”

  “Well, if you hear from them, just to tell them that I would never report them. That’s not how I behave. We want to know what they saw that day, that’s all. And you want us to know that, too, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, three of them, you say?”

  “Three maids? Yes, sometimes. But mostly it was just Elfridia who came. She was the one I paid.”

  Landau was doing a wrong thing, he knew—meeting with a policeman without his lawyer present. But when the detective had called, reporting the missing maids, he’d mentioned that he’d seen Landau in Café Torino having a cappuccino, and Landau had replied that Torino was his favorite these days, of all of Berkeley’s cafés, because you could usually get a window table. Somehow this had turned into a coffee date. Landau was often there on Thursday and Friday mornings, and the detective had observed that the problem wasn’t getting a window table, it was getting one close to an electrical outlet, so you could plug in your computer.

  “Plug away, Detective. There’s a plug over there, and there’s one behind the chair, too,” Landau said.

  “That one’s dead. It’s been out of whack for over a year.”