The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

  His breathing grew a bit calmer after a while. Head still throbbed, though—come on, get up, get yourself some Advil. He aimed himself for the cabinet where the vitamins and nostrums were, scraped a chair, and when he did so he felt an answering thump beneath his feet, in what would have been the basement, had his house had one, rather than the standard California crawl space. The low chamber down there was one of Freddy’s favorite domains, so maybe that was where he was, catching the odd mouse tonight. The house went on creaking and groaning for a while, but Landau was unalarmed—it was a living house, on a moving hillside. He lived in earthquake country.

  Would he ever feel as he once had, as he had felt as recently as a couple of weeks ago, about his house? He still didn’t much want to sleep upstairs, funny little namby-pamby nightmare boy that he was. Still spooked about it: please, Mother, may I sleep in your bed tonight? Yes, Anthony, all right, come along, and bring Teddy if you like. Was that what he feared other people would perceive, his fuzzy, squishy core? No, that was okay: that the boy still lived inside him, remnants of the boy, he felt all right about that. Fatherless boy, hard-trying earnest boy. Scholarship boy who never cried. And now, to his astonishment, he was weeping, the tears were sweeping down. Hot, salt-smelling tears, out of nowhere, and he went on blubbering for quite a while, over nothing. Made himself stop, stand up straighter—come on, stop this foolishness now, get your head above the blubber-waves. But then slipped beneath them again.

  What was he crying for, for Samantha? Had he been denying the great, profound tragedy of her sudden death, at too young an age? Or was it that he still missed her—still, after nine years? Yes, a little of that. The wound had healed, after a fashion, and he had moved on, yet he had found no one to replace her, and probably he never would. All right, stop crying in any case. But the blubbering went on, moist simpery blubbering. Crying for all of it, for the whole thing—for the Appointment in Samarra aspect of it, too, the way death lies in wait for us all, even the most invulnerable. In her charismatic egoism Samantha had seemed immune to death, and if some physician had dared speak to her of a coronary anomaly he’d found on the odd EKG, why, she’d have made him feel a fool. Would have stared him into the ground. Coronary dysplasia, indeed.

  After a while the crying stopped. He stretched his neck and slumped down in a chair, exhausted. Was that a bit of the genuine “grief work” there? What they talked about on TV all the time, the deep-down working through, the “grief process,” the Kübler-Ross–approved process? Whatever it was it had felt like something his body needed to do—an organic transaction even more than a psychological one. And now I feel a bit better. Think I’ll go upstairs now, dare to sleep in my own bed tonight, like a big boy. For I am a big boy, indeed—yes, and I am master of my own domain.

  chapter 7

  Landau did nothing the next day, stayed home reading the Times. Did the Sunday crossword puzzle in ink and felt proud of himself. Fed and petted the cat, who first put in an appearance around 1:00 p.m., when Landau himself arose. A remnant headache, some sensitivity to light, nothing much. He called Deena to discuss the soiree of the night before. But she couldn’t talk just then and promised to call him later. Spoke to Georges and planned a swim for tomorrow, at the Claremont, the high-tariff local swim and tennis club to which Georges belonged. Landau himself belonged to the Berkeley Y, a lesser facility in every respect, but institutionally more attractive, more his kind of place. Speaking of Berkeley, it was all there at the Y, in the over-chlorinated water, all the brown and black and yellow folk as well as the lefty whites. Landau had had it up to here with diversity talk, but the rubbing of elbows, the races all jumbled together in water, that seemed to him on balance a good idea.

  Sundown so early now, barely 5:00 p.m. Had aimed for a walk up through the eucalyptus stands above his house, up along Grizzly Peak Boulevard for a mile or two, but dusk was already here, wintry foreboding dusk. Freddy had stayed by Landau’s feet all afternoon. Sometimes he could convince himself that his cat knew him, felt for him—it was the odd sign of fealty now and then, unconnected to the feed bowl. He watched the sun decline, auburn and rose beneath a high-domed heaven. Walked onto the deck outside his kitchen windows to have a sniff of things, heard a scrabbling down below that drew his gaze that way—shocked to see a fat raccoon waddling off into the bushes, followed by a second, then a third. Why, the cheeky, overfed devils. They had colonized his house’s underparts in previous years, requiring him to spend hundreds coon-proofing the crawl space, but it had never worked for long, and they came back when they wanted. The thumping of the night before, here was the real reason. So, I have roommates again. Four-footed ones.

  October 1989, during the World Series of that year, he had come upon an entire family of raccoons in the middle of his quiet woodsy street, placidly at rest. Parents, three cute kits, all of them simply posing on the pavement in the autumn afternoon. Not two hours later, there had come the greatest earthquake that Landau had yet lived through, the Loma Prieta, which had been heralded all over the region by wild animals behaving strangely. Said to be in response to premonitory tremors in the earth. So, batten down the hatches, mates, here comes another big one. That what it meant? Seeing raccoons in the gloaming? Raccoons owned the deep of night, if you came wheeling home at 3:00 a.m. you often saw them munching your garbage with impeccable sangfroid, but it was odd to see them like this, before the sun was truly down. So, better go down there and see. Show the flag, come on, do the hard thing.

  Armed with a flashlight and a coat hanger, he ventured along the flagstoned path that ran beneath his deck. There was an apron of hard-packed earth down here, adobe, protected from the elements by the overhang. Kind of a dead zone, saw no sunlight and grew nothing, not a single weed. Gad, it smelled, smelled like a den already, raccoony. How long has this been going on? Not clear how they were getting in and out, the latch on the crawl space door was still intact, but yes, disturbances to the earth beneath the bottom of the door, digging signs. Landau thought of a raccoon’s paw at that moment, so anthropomorphic, with its clickety-clackety claws, digging in the cement-like earth. And over there was, indeed, an upturned hand, protruding beneath the crawl space door. A small hand, thin and bony. He straightened up and hit his head hard on a deck timber, a mental flash coinciding with the smash against his skull, and a spasm of fear and disgust raced through him. The blow to his head brought him down onto his knees, down upon the hard-packed earth.

  Flashlight gone, dropped it somewhere, oh shit. Oh, oh, find it, here it is, oh God, oh God. A hand, a pale small hand. Not a raccoon’s, no, a person’s. Extending under the under-dug door as if begging to get out. A female-looking hand, it was. Landau grabbed the latch of the crawl space door to free her, and the smell that a pull on the door released was darkly vast, intensified by the enclosure, a smell out of Africa, of all places, East Africa, if he didn’t miss his bet. Uganda-Congo border, the Uganda side, and then he could see a pit under a turbulent sky, sixty or seventy bodies all tumbled together, a burnt-out church nearby, a lot of red earth. On one of his jaggy Africa trips, one of the last. But this that was before him was but a single arm, a severed arm, with sleeve material still attached. Fifteen feet within, nestled against the crawl space wall, was a human form, the face angled away, one thin knee upbent. Landau shone his light in that direction and looked and did not allow himself to look away. All right, you can breathe now. But get out of here, go settle yourself. Just get the hell out right now.

  Standing up too quickly beneath the deck, gagging, gasping, he hit his head again against a timber. Something not quite right, oh, there it was, the arm, the beseeching needful arm. It had followed him out, had been kicked or dragged as he hurried through the passage. Not torn off at the shoulder, no, very evidently gnawed off. The palm and curled fingers full of personality still, oh, help me, please, they seemed to say, I beg of you. Don’t leave me here, please save me. Using his hanger, with which he had planned to beat
off raccoons, he hooked the arm back up the slope, back inside and out of view. The Poe-ish nature of the situation came upon him suddenly, causing a weird despairing grin to break out across his face. He clicked his flashlight off, then clicked it on again. Forced himself to go back under.

  A young girl, in a shredded housedress. The right leg devoured above the knee, bent up because the bones had locked that way. Oh God, oh God. Hollowed out like a canoe she was, innards all gone, chest cavity all the way down to the back ribs, which were stained and yellowed. Everything else black, black. The brain half devoured, through the mouth it appeared, the jawbone hanging free. Make yourself look, Landau, go on. Then, don’t ever look again.

  Back outside again, gagging. He headed back up his flagstoned path. He could remember when he had put in this path, an Irish fellow and his crew, a team of energetic Guatemalans, had done it for him, the Irishman named Ian Something, Ian Pardee. Good workers, meticulous, cheerful. They had done such an excellent job that he’d had them build a retaining wall in the downslope corner of his backyard, and afterward he’d wished he had more work to give them, they’d been so much fun to have around. Pardee in the country on some questionable visa, those were the days when you often ran into stray Irishmen in the U.S., most of them back east but some trickling west, as their ancestors had done. There was a story he’d read in the papers, of a trio of brothers from County Down who had made it out to Mill Valley, of all places, who’d worked installing household appliances among the wealthy leisurely folk of Marin County, got in trouble with married women there, all three of them, women they’d met installing fridges. “It’s the lingo,” one of them had explained, “they can’t get enough of it, hey? ‘Say it in Irish,’ they tell you, and the next thing you know, it’s over the moon.”

  Glad I can remember that silly story, Landau thought. Made a big impression on me, obviously. Freud said there is never anything in behavior that’s pure happenstance, and by the same token no thought ever appears in the mind for no reason, although to plot its etiology may be hard. But why am I thinking of Irishmen and their intoxicating, to American ears intoxicating, way of speaking the English? No idea. Here’s my back deck, my expensive redwood deck, and here’s what we call the side-deck entrance to the house. I will now pass through as I have passed through numberless times. Foolishly left the door wide open—a family of raccoons might have entered in my absence, might even now be making itself comfortable in the den, father raccoon taking a book down off the shelf, something in natural history perhaps, mother raccoon curling up on the couch with the kits, getting ready to read them a story, something by William Steig, maybe. All full-fed on gore. And here’s why I’m remembering those Irishmen: because she also spoke a language that I have always found intoxicating, a language that’s music to my ears, indigenous Mexican Spanish. And now not one word more from her in that language nor any other. Never one more.

  * * *

  There was the problem of whom to call. All right, call the lawyer first, be smart. But it was Sunday night, and the lawyer wasn’t answering his phones. Landau left messages on two of them, suggesting that Cleve Raboy call back to discuss something that had just come up. By ten o’clock he had gotten no calls, so he left another message, sounding rather calm, he thought.

  Deena called. “What’s the matter, Anthony?” she asked after a few seconds, “You don’t sound right.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, Deena, I’m fine.”

  “What is it? Where are you now?”

  “I’m in my den. No—let me call it my reading room.”

  “I hear television is going.”

  “Yes, so?”

  “By this time, the television is always on but the sound off, and you’re reading a book. On Sunday night you are always reading.”

  “Oh, you know me so well, Deena. Maybe I just wanted a soundtrack tonight. I felt a little lonely.”

  She fell silent. Landau turned off the TV, thinking it might be bothering her. He couldn’t remember having turned it on.

  “Please, Anthony. What is the matter?”

  “It’s nothing. Last night I saw Arthur Fromm at your party, but I didn’t see Melody Fromm, his attractive wife. What gives?”

  “I don’t know. Why, you are interested?”

  “Not especially, just for informational purposes.”

  “He had a lover. Then, she had a lover. That’s what I hear. Something like that.”

  “Arthur Fromm had a lover?”

  Landau praised the refreshments served last night: Deena prepared her own food, and he asked if she had made the dolmas, too. She had. He had intended to ask if she’d heard anything about a writer for the New Yorker, but he didn’t care about that now, really he didn’t care.

  “When my mother had faculty parties,” Deena said, “in the fifties-sixties, a man who lived in the house behind us would come, and he would play the piano. And his name was something interesting—Albert Einstein.”

  “Einstein, you say? Why, that’s funny—I was just talking to someone who mentioned Einstein. Said the Berkeley Hills were full of Einsteins in the old days, full of geniuses. But he wasn’t really here, was he? He was at Princeton—Institute for Advanced Study.”

  “No, this was the son, Hans Albert. Kind of minor physicist. A woman from Keeler Street played cello, and they made music together. Schubert, Massenet, I remember those.”

  “Sounds very civilized.”

  “Yes, it was. The professors stopped their drinking and talking and thinking about themselves. So respectful for high culture they were, in a house where the hosts spoke good German. My parents thought that was funny, that they wanted only to hear Chopin, to talk about Schiller, but that’s how they were back then.”

  “Hochkultur und Geschichtswissenschaft, it’s better than Kinder, Küche, Kirche, no?”

  “Yes, you’re right, Anthony. Hochkultur is what it was.”

  He got off the phone, wondering why he was so sure it wasn’t a good idea to tell Deena. Am I protecting her? Sparing her involvement in this mess? But it’s more that I don’t know how to say it. Deena—I just found a body under my porch, Deena. A half-eaten woman’s body. It’s that Mexican maid we both liked so much, Elfridia, I’m almost sure it is. That’s why she couldn’t clean at your house on Friday, because she was dead, Elfridia. She’d been eaten by raccoons.

  No, tell her later, Landau decided, there’ll be a better time later. First, notify the police, after the lawyer gives you the go-ahead. Do it in proper fashion, in proper order.

  Here was something that he could do right now. More eating was going to go on unless he blocked up the hole beneath the crawl space door, stuck a piece of wood in there or something. But the idea of that appalled him—the idea of going down beneath his deck again, seeing the chewed off arm. Oh, whither your famous tough-mindedness, Landau, your legendary disease-hound’s unflappability? You took twenty trips to Africa, sir, you larked about during Rwanda, during the Congo dustup. And now you can’t protect one soul, one small body?

  He thought of the burial pits, of the tales he used to tell of them, his tight-lipped renditions. But he’d been younger then, more in tune with the horrorful side of things. Now he was but a softheaded old granddad-type, querulous, labile. Why, last night I was blubbering all over my kitchen, sir. You should’ve seen me, a rank blubberer.

  Call the nice policeman, then, make a clean breast of things. But you don’t have to clean-breast anything, Landau, it’s not your doing. You didn’t commit a crime, you didn’t commit anything. God—look at me, I’m Raskolnikov-ing. I’m already blaming myself. Where’s the whisky—I need a shot of whisky.

  Somewhere past midnight, Landau found himself beneath his house, a third-full bottle of pear brandy at his feet. He had arranged a kerchief over his mouth and nose, making him look like an Old West bandit. The smell was simply unendurable. Had it smelled this way all week?
My God. He pounded a piece of thick particleboard in place, to keep the varmints out. Poor Elfridia—Elfridia Tojolobal Somebody-or-other, to remember her name in full, which he couldn’t, quite. But say what you remember of it, go on, pronounce it correctly: Elfridia Tojolobal. My God, is it really you here, Elfridia? Has this happened to you, pleasant, slyly funny person that you were? How do I begin to apologize for this fateful turning, this bizzarity whereby you find yourself not alive tonight, not sleeping at home in one bed with your girl cousins, but here beneath my porch? Your young life at an end, an absolute end?

  He picked up the bottle and had a deep swallow. Down at the bottom of his block a car backed out of a driveway and began motoring slowly toward him, its headlights pushing a zone of illumination before them. The area beneath his deck was briefly illumined as the car passed, and Landau held out the bottle of pear brandy as if to offer it a drink. Yes, it’s me, he wanted to call out, it’s Landau, the masked marauder. I’m down here under my house doing nefarious work. Got another dead woman here, my second in as many weeks. Who knows how many will be dead by the end of this? Now, where are you going at this hour of the night, neighbor? Let me see your license and registration, please. Come on, come on, hand ’em over. The whole world has become suspicious.

  Part II

  chapter 8

  Landau arrived at SFO in the wee hours, having caught a connecting flight in San Antonio. No problems with immigration—he was nothing to them, raised no flags. Back ravaged from thirteen hours in the air, no upgrades possible, just sitting back in coach with the rest of the hoi polloi, in a midget seat. Took a taxi over the Bay Bridge. Samir, his driver, came from Lahore, he announced, had a wife and kids still back in the Punjab—kept ranting against the Pakistani intelligence service, which had been persecuting his family, beating up cousins and uncles. Hey, Samir, it’s four twenty-two in the morning! Landau wanted to rant back at him. My capacity for outrage is exhausted, along with the rest of me. Get me home in one piece and I’ll give you a nice fat tip. But keep one eye on the road, please. Stop turning around to face me.