The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

  Feeling kind of loopy, mentally sprained. Had spent the last twenty-three days in Buenos Aires—Buenos Aires, of all places. What, I’m not allowed to leave the country, sir? But I am allowed, I’m a free man, traveling on a valid passport. I am not under any indictments, as far as I’m aware. I needed some time to think, that’s all.

  He had promised to return, and now he had. Toward dawn the taxi zigzagged up into the Berkeley Hills, and Landau’s spirits began to lift. A remembered place—good, that’s good. Tree-smothered narrow lanes, oddball houses, looked pretty cold out there, must be mid-thirties. Rounding the corner onto Hopwood Lane he looked for his own house, and there it was, where it belonged, the vanilla villa, standing faithfully forth. Junk around the front door, unpicked-up garbage, police tape over the door itself. Police tape? Uh-oh: back in the TV show.

  The house smelled cold, smelled forlorn. Shamefully he had abandoned his cat with only the briefest of notes to the Shteyngarts, his neighbors to the south, who sometimes left kibble on their porch. Had not allowed himself to worry about Freddy-care and canceling the Times in his rush to get gone, to get himself out of the country, and for what—a sentimental journey? A final forlorn getaway? But B-A had always been their town, his and Samantha’s, and he had needed to see it again. It was where the whole foolishness had started.

  Fell asleep on the downstairs couch. At 8:00 a.m. a pounding at the front door—three Berkeley cops, one of them Officer Hashimoto, from the bedroom inspection. They wanted a word, please.

  “Sir, if you would come with us, we’d like to ask you a few questions, sir.”

  “Come with you where?”

  “To the station, sir.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’d rather not.”

  “Sir, Detective Johnson asked if you would please come down as a courtesy.”

  “Well, Officer Raintree,” Landau said, peering at the man’s nameplate, “I’m not feeling very courteous this morning. I just got back from a long trip. How about this afternoon, say around four?”

  “It would be better if you came in now, sir.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “No.”

  “In that case, it wouldn’t be better. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Somehow, he fobbed them off. Got them to wander away, grumbling. They were so well-behaved, the sensitized Berkeley lot of them! God bless them.

  I’ve lost weight, Landau realized: twenty-five, thirty pounds. In the bathroom mirror he looked markedly reduced. It was all that mournful walking, crisscrossing Buenos Aires following painful memories. On the other hand, it might be a tapeworm, or stomach cancer. When a man of sixty-four drops thirty pounds overnight, well, it can’t be good, can it?

  Even so, he felt well. Had a long, hot shower, in the Roman-style bathing chamber installed in ’02, at great expense. He recalled studying tile samples with Mindy or Windy, some name like that, a hardworking renovation specialist—they’d agreed on sea-green travertine fused with “Mustique” glass, in a special organic process. The shower was as big as a small bedroom now, with exotic shpritz features. It did indeed make him feel like one of the lesser Romans—Commodus, perhaps, son of Cisternus.

  Slept five hours. Ate canned soup for lunch. The phone rang and he took it on the machine, “This is Mark Wormser, of the New Yorker. I wonder if you’ve read the stuff I sent over. I’m—”

  Landau picked up. “Yes?”

  “Oh. Hello there.”

  “Yes?”

  “Professor Landau, Mark Wormser here. I left you some messages.”

  “What can I do for you, Wormser?”

  “Well, I wondered if we could talk sometime. About Samantha Beevors.”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, I’m interested in her work. I’ve talked with Doctor Humphreys, with Doctor Moscowitz, with Ariel Anenberg at the Health Institute, with Bill Beevors of course. Wladislas Slem, of your own department. My editors and I are trying to decide if this is the right moment to put her in perspective—to begin to try to put her in perspective.”

  “How interesting.”

  “You’re familiar with the magazine? With the New Yorker?”

  “The New Yorker? No—never heard of it.”

  Brief pause.

  “The New Yorker is—”

  “I know what it is, bloody hell. You can’t get away from it, the bloody New Yorker.”

  Slight chuckle.

  “Well, her recent Africa projections, Doctor Beevors’, I wanted to get into that with you. Do we read these as summary projections, or are they more of—”

  “What’s your point, Wormser?”

  “My point?”

  “Come to the point, please. Say it in English.”

  Silence. Then the man began again: “I have been following you for years, sir. I guess I just wanted to say that. From way before I got onto Doctor Beevors. You’re central to it all, aren’t you? You’re the person without whom the whole era is inconceivable, intellectually. It goes back to your first treatises, to the first modeling treatises, I guess.”

  Wait a minute there, Landau thought. I know you, Mark Wormser. I know who you are.

  “Wait a minute. You’re the science fraud guy, Wormser, isn’t that right? The one who’s always showing scientists going too far, being Promethean. Getting caught with their knickers down. You also wrote that abused babies series, kind of off the mark for you, tabloidish, got you useful attention, though, a lot of it. That whole period when we were salivating over three-year-olds’ penises, saying that every uncle in his cardigan was into diaper sex. We never got to the bottom of all that, did we, we Americans? No—we just moved on.”

  “I did write on ritual Satanic abuse, that’s correct. Exaggerated accusations thereof.”

  “Okay. So I know you, Wormser. But where you really hit your stride is on these science stories. The one about the neurologist—the one who got it all out of a textbook. Would go into the operating room in the morning with his drill and his scalpels and skull clamps and just take out masses of tissue, scramble all the eggs, invent. Had no degree, had never been to med school. Had comparable results to the actual surgical neurologists, God help us. Some woman was on to him, some former colleague, and he killed her. If not for that, he’d still be scrambling people’s brains.”

  “Guilty as charged, sir. I did write that, yes, I did.”

  “Good on you, Wormser. And let me take a daring leap now: I’m the next monster to be exposed. The next one succumbing to his own self-intoxication. Destroyed Samantha Beevors, didn’t throttle her in his own bed perhaps, but bullied her to death, drove her mad, made life impossible. Stole from her, literally stole from her. There’s a swell piece here, male chauvinism, science hierarchism, twenty-first-century plagues, it’s all there. Juicy sidebars on the math, on drug-resistance cul-de-sacs. Kind of thing your average New Yorker reader likes to keep up on.”

  Another slight chuckle.

  “Actually, I don’t see you as the villain of the piece, Professor—not at all.”

  “No?”

  “No. You’re a hero to me. Probably why I got into science writing in the first place. ‘Best 630 words of speculative prose written in the last half century’—that’s what my biostatistics professor, Dingell, said about your first treatise. He began his whole course with that, with your first.”

  “Good for him. Smart man, Dingell, whoever he is.”

  “What can we compare it to? ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’? Turing’s first? For me it was that transformative. That revelatory.”

  “Baloney.”

  “I want to show the social-intellectual nexus out of which Beevors emerged. That whole generation of epidemiologists and biostatisticians and infectious-disease crusaders unthinkable without you—those who emerged from you as Athena
from the head of Zeus. I’ve been wanting to write this story for years, and now, with the Beevors angle, there’s some journalistic mojo on it. But that’s not what I care about—that’s just the door opening onto it.”

  Oh, this one is good, Landau told himself. Watch out for this one.

  “So, Wormser—you’ll do my bidding? In all things? Prominently feature all I’ve done for the poor pitiful AIDS sufferers? The drug-resistant TB victims? I kind of see myself up on Mount Rushmore. Take Teddy Roosevelt down, put me up there, instead.”

  “I didn’t know that about you. That you were funny.”

  “Am I? I don’t intend it. I’m entirely in earnest.”

  Called Deena after but she wasn’t picking up. Wanted to call Georges, too, but Georges saw patients all day Tuesday, so he called Raboy, his lawyer, instead. Raboy wasn’t in the office, and are you really back in the States now, Dr. Landau? asked the receptionist. So glad to have you back.

  Did a big load of laundry. Listened to phone messages. While the laundry was drying he ventured belowdecks, toward the region of his house that had become a nightmare corner in his mind—he was breathing quickly as he followed the garden path and stuck his head up beneath the joists, took an anxious look. Forest of yellow tape, jungle of it. So the police had been excavating down here, the police and others. Looked like one of those archeological sites where they map every square inch of ground, go over it with toothbrushes. The planking had been removed, so one had an unobstructed view into the crawl space, the foul burrow back there, where she had been deposited, Elfridia. Landau had been afraid he’d find her still present—that the police and coroner would not have come up to collect her remains, would have overlooked her somehow. Right knee still upbent, remnant housedress on, right arm missing. But no, she was gone. Still a bit of a gamy smell. Perhaps the raccoons were back, remembered the good munching they’d had here. The forest of tape no impediment to them—raccoons admitted of no impediment.

  I don’t know, thought Landau, I just don’t know. Hardboiled crime investigators see victims all the time, and it rolls right off them, makes no nevermind. Myself, I’m genuinely cast down. It’s that this thing has happened at my house. A madman has been playing up under the skirts of my house, ranging up into my own bedroom, even. It has to be a man who did this—only men do such loathsome things.

  The battery was dead on his car, so he roll-started the heavyweight BMW down the incline of Hopwood Lane. At 4:00 p.m. he walked into the Ron Tsukamoto Public Safety Building, a location he had visited formerly only to pay parking fines. The guardian officer buzzed Detective Johnson. Holiday decorations out, Kwanzaa this, Hanukkah that, the moon and star of our Muslim brothers. The Christmas elements were oddly few—as if, feeling itself the dominant culture, Christianity had elected to keep a low profile, for fear of hurting feelings. Those bloodthirsty Berkeley Christians, about time they stepped back, after all these overweening years. Especially the Unitarians.

  Detective Johnson, when he appeared, was wearing a sport coat and tie and looked relaxed. Something different about him—new haircut. They went upstairs. His office was about as big as Landau’s shower, with desk, phone, three metal chairs, file cabinets in bureaucratic gray. Just what to expect in the way of an office for a detective fitting the outmoded idea of an honorable public servant, someone who did the world’s work.

  Yes, he had received Landau’s emails, the detective said. Had received no responses to his replies, though, and why was that?

  “Because I was using a computer in a public facility. I didn’t wait around for responses. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay. So, Buenos Aires. Why Buenos Aires, Professor?”

  “We had an Argentine chapter, Doctor Beevors and I. We met at a conference there to begin with. Had so much fun we went back in ’90, ’91, ’93, ’94. Couple other times. One time we rented an apartment, and thereafter we always returned to that address.”

  “You went back for conferences?”

  “Yes. After a while we had some minor studies going, and we pretended to tend them. It’s different in B-A. It’s like Paris with barbecued meat. You should go some time.”

  “Lechón a la parrilla. I know about it, it’s an Argentine dish.”

  “Right. You know something about a lot of things, don’t you?”

  “A little, very little.”

  Samantha had had her own Argentine past, Landau explained. She had worked there with Ettore d’Iulio, one of the preeminent South American epidemes, man now in his eighties. One of her protectors, her institutional allies. She’d gotten in a few hassles down there, insulted some colleagues, but d’Iulio had been behind her, so it hadn’t mattered.

  “How do you spell that, Dee-ooly-oh?”

  “Little dee apostrophe, eye you el eye oh.”

  The detective opened his laptop.

  “Okay, that explains why she would go. Now tell me why you did this stupid thing, and I’m sure your lawyer is very, very angry with you.”

  “I explained that in my letter.”

  The detective searched his emails. “Where you say you have to talk to ‘some people’? Heitor Burgos-Pereira, Juan Jorge Soldana, Emilio Chertok, people who knew her, is that who they are?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you talk to those people?”

  “No. D’Iulio was around, but the others either weren’t in Buenos Aires anymore or were on vacation—it’s Christmas there, same as up here.”

  “What did he say, Dee-ooly-oh?”

  “He said he knew about the coronary dysplasia. I think he thinks I killed her. He remembers when our affair came to grief, that I acted a little funny, I said some mean, crazy things. We were never very friendly, d’Iulio and I. We were rivals for her affection.”

  “Did you kill her, Professor?”

  “Oh, I like how you slip that in. No, I didn’t. But what do you think, yourself?”

  “I don’t think so either. But you know me—I have to do my job.”

  “I know.”

  Detective Johnson fooled around on his computer some more. “Wow! This Dee-ooly-oh guy, impressive. This is some important scientist, down there on the Argentine pampas.”

  He slewed his laptop around. It was the University of B-A Web site, and the list of d’Iulio’s publications was near endless. “He must have an out of sight h-index,” Detective Johnson said, hurrying to check d’Iulio on the Web site that records the number of citations of a scientist’s papers. “My God, he’s off the charts, would you look at that. Shall we take a look at yours now, Professor?”

  “No, why bother? It’s nothing like that.”

  “It is, actually. It’s very robust. I’ve already checked.”

  “Means nothing, mere citation porn. But how do you know about the h-index, Detective? That’s very smart of you. Very au courant.”

  “I live in a town full of scientists, and I need to concern myself with that. Anybody would do the same.”

  “No, not anybody.”

  “Ettore d’Iulio. They have a lot of Italian names down there, people in Argentina. He’s a major twentieth-century health guy, health sciences guy. Thank you for bringing him to my attention. Another one of these great brains intersecting my humble life-path. It gives me a special feeling—gives me a thrill.”

  * * *

  Free as a bird. You can go now, Professor—and thanks for coming in. When Landau walked out of the police station onto Martin Luther King Jr. Way, he had an attack of disorientation—weren’t there supposed to be harsh consequences, punishments for what he’d done? He had emailed the news about a second dead woman to the police. Had sent it in from another continent, most casually. Surely they thought he’d taken French leave, and if truth were told, Landau had flirted briefly with the idea of going long walkabout, cashing in his CDs, liquidating the bursting pension, becoming an international man
of mystery. You saw it in movies all the time, people disappearing, as if that were a great thing—oh, just what I’ve always wanted to do, go live my few remaining years in some squalid city in Ecuador, say, pretending to be a Canadian geologist. Dr. Fred LaPlante, the tall fat guy with no friends. Lives above the tienda over there.

  Why had he run away, for twenty-three days? Had the detective pressed him on it, Landau might have said, “It seriously got to me, seeing that poor girl’s gnawed-off arm. I’m grieving for her, it may not look like I am but that’s what’s happening. Grieving for both of them, in my useless sort of way.”

  His phone rang. The lawyer’s office: someone higher up than the receptionist was asking if it was true he was back, and if so, he needed to come in soon, tomorrow. They could arrange his surrender then.

  “My surrender? What are you talking about? I don’t have to surrender.”

  “Sorry, I misspoke. We need to speak with the police, that’s all, because we owe them that much. You’ve put us in a terrible position vis-à-vis the police.”

  “I’ve just spoken with them. Everything’s fine. I’m walking out of the station right this instant.”

  Silence. Apparently, he had made another boneheaded move, speaking to the police, without a lawyer present.

  “No, everything isn’t ‘fine,’ Doctor. It’s not fine at all.”

  “Look here, Marsha—”

  “Masha.”

  “Masha, Marsha, stop nannying me, please. Short-roping me. I can’t make it in tomorrow, the day after is better. Around noon.”