The Savage Professor

by Robert Roper

  Finally, the house. Impossible that anything bad could happen inside such a substantial-looking edifice. Shake-sided, complex rooflets, maybe Bernard Maybeck had designed it, Maybeck the historical genius of Berkeley residential architecture. The redwood siding looked nearly new, and Landau estimated the cost of such a shingling job at five figures, over twenty grand for sure. Think of it! You didn’t own such a house, it owned you. You were its sugar daddy.

  He made another call: “Melody, I’m thinking of you at this moment. I’m looking forward to tomorrow very much. We’ll have a good time, I know we will.”

  He waited, considering what else to say. Thirty yards down the block he saw something that rang a bell—it was Graciela’s car, parked under a flowering plum. Fey white petals scattered upon its hood.

  “Melody, you remember the Brazilian Hypothesis? Well, I’m about to test it. I wish I had a gun. I guess I’m more American than British after all. Tomorrow I shall cook us something special, scallops in a red wine reduction, perhaps, or some local cod. Are you a mad shellfish fan, as I am? We’re compatible in so many ways, so many.”

  What’s the matter with me? Am I about to wet my pants? He shut his phone and knocked boldly on the door. Knocked again. It came open a groaning inch; uh-oh, another citizen who doesn’t lock up.

  “Wally? Anthony Landau here, I’m at your front door. I wanted a word with you, but it can wait. I can come back later.”

  The Winckelmanns owned two collies. One was lying on a sofa just beyond the entrance hall—bred into stupidity, collies were, their long noses associated with diminishing braincase volumes. The Winckelmanns’ dogs were always getting into neurotic mischief, and Wally himself spoke of them in a way that seemed to pose the question, why have these animals not been put down? Removed from life’s makeshift stage? Landau waited for the one on the couch to challenge him, come sniff him out, but it was too tired, apparently.

  “Wally, what’s your old dog’s name?” he called out. “Veronica, Victoria, something like that? If this is the female? I hope she’s not a biter.”

  The dog looked dead. Well, it was dead. The neck was askew, and blood had pooled in a corner of the sofa. The sofa was dark leather, the color of half-dried blood.

  “Wally—something’s happened to Veronica. She’s not moving.”

  He had walked halfway down the hall now. He paused.

  “You know what? I think I will come back later, Wally. Or, better, I’ll come to your office tomorrow. See you there. We’ll talk.”

  He hurried out the front door. Breathing heavily. Paused on the portico.

  Could that not be her car, Graciela’s? Ten- or twelve-year-old Honda, dented grill, faded, unwashed: it was the official car of Berkeley, almost, even more than the Prius was. Berkeley being a town of luftmenschen and luftfrauen, of impecunious writers and perpetual grad students who subsisted well below the strata of important university personages, a refuge of financially stressed outcasts who needed to keep the old wreck running. It could be anybody’s.

  No, come on, it was her car—he had just been in it. Then, they are around. Must be inside. What I should do now is call 911, because something odd has happened, and I need my police escort, my backup.

  He heard female sobbing nearby. It seemed to be coming from an upper floor. Into his phone he said, “I would like to report a home invasion, robbery, murder, mayhem, I don’t know what. My name is Landau. That’s L-A-N-D-A-U, and I’m at”—looking to either side of the portico—“two blocks north of Ray Milland Park, and here’s the house number, seventy-one. It’s the big tall redwood-shingled house.”

  There came a scream from within, strangled hysterical scream. Landau rushed back inside. No, what are you doing—don’t be a bloody fool, he told himself. The second-floor landing offered six doors, four shut and two open. The scream was coming from up higher, though, from floor number three or four. These houses had countless floors, they had been built for large families at the turn of the twentieth century, rich Californians with servants.

  On the third-floor landing was the other collie, its head cut off. The head was turned to face the body, in an alas-poor-Yorick arrangement. Screams from behind this door, paroxysmal female screams. Landau felt a sudden loosening in his bowels.

  When he went in, Heitor took a lazy playful swipe at him—narrow blade, silvery, long. He backed away now, Heitor, making funny conciliatory gestures, his face full of cringing mirth.

  “Heitor! Heitor! What have you done!”

  “I know, Professor. It’s just what happens. That’s all.”

  “Put down that knife! Do it now!”

  Heitor seemed about to laugh. But he tossed the bloody straightedge onto a throw rug.

  “Step back now! I say, step back!”

  Heitor stepped back.

  Small room. A woman’s foot showed around the corner of a bed. Anklet sock, running shoe, looked brand-new.

  “Is that Maxine, Heitor?”

  “No, I don’t know who she is. She was just here. Another maid.”

  Landau stepped that way for a look.

  “She’s dead, is she?”

  “Yeah, now she is.”

  This is happening, Landau told himself. Do not let the top of your head blow off. Remain within this scene. Remain in it.

  “What have you done to Wally, Heitor? Did you kill him, too?”

  “No, he went to his bedroom. The old people, they wanted to lie down, that’s all. They were tired.”

  “Show me.”

  “Okay. But we don’t have much time, Professor. She gonna be dead if we don’t go soon. She’s bleeding bad, somebody cut her up, and—no, don’t do that,” he said, when Landau pulled out his phone. “She gonna die if you do that.”

  “Who is?”

  “You know.” And he pretended to put something in his mouth—a pickle, perhaps.

  Landau thought for a moment. “Where is she, Graciela?”

  “Come on, Professor. I show you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you, Heitor. That’s not happening.” He picked the barber’s blade up off the rug. Folded it in his pocket.

  Heitor drove, and Landau, a few mental steps behind him, sat behind him in the backseat, twisting with discomfort. He was not in this car. No, he was in it, he had gotten in it voluntarily. Gotten in a car with a madman, to follow a madman’s plan. Oh, a grave mistake, idiotic, he told himself. But here he was.

  They passed his policeman a short distance downhill, hurrying up in his cruiser. Landau did not cry out to him, did not fling himself from the car door: he wanted to, but he could not make himself feel that that was right.

  “She’s already dead, Heitor. I know that,” he said from the backseat. “Why did you kill her, that lovely girl?”

  “Maybe she’s dead, maybe not, Professor, who knows?”

  “What went wrong? Why are you a homicidal monster?”

  The driver threw a winning smile into the rearview. “Funny!” he said. “Funny! You always posed the good questions. Never simple ones, no, and that’s why you are the top rate.”

  “All right, and now tell me.”

  A few blocks later the driver said casually, “There is a someone inside the someone inside me. They keep hatching. I want to see what comes from it in the end, that’s all.”

  “Amusing,” Landau replied. “Very suggestive. But that removes you from agency, and that’s not right. As if some outside process were slitting the girls’ throats. You are the process, Heitor. You, you’re the mind of it.”

  “The mind, the mind, I think I got a problem with my mind.”

  “We can get help for you, Heitor, I’m sure we can. There are medicines, operations, chemical neutering—I’ll find out about it.”

  “No, the only medicine for me is the one that they inject with the governor waiting on the phone.
There, that will give me the cure I need.”

  Landau said nothing to that. He looked away.

  Soon they took the old freeway south. Did not exit at Fruitvale Avenue, went inland of that. Once upon lesser streets Heitor declared, “You look at my paper, first. Then, you can help her. You can have her if you want.”

  “What paper? I’ve already read your crazy paper.”

  “No, the one that no one has read yet.”

  “Oh. What’s so special about it?”

  “What is your new paper about, Professor, why don’t you tell me?”

  “My new paper? But I don’t have a new paper.”

  “Yes you do. I know it. It’s in the air, in the sky. I can feel it that you are writing, that you’re thinking, because me, yes, I’m thinking too.”

  Landau began to say something. Again, he could not. He sat quietly the rest of the way.

  A house on a steep street, a block of charmless stucco bungalows, echt Californian. Twisty camphor and other off-brand trees, trees not seen in high-end Berkeley, too scrubby for that. The street was steep like a ski jump. Landau had never been here before, so he looked around.

  And here it was, the madman’s house of horrors. Anonymous little house, ecru in color. “He was hiding here among us,” he could imagine a neighbor telling a reporter, “third house on the left up there. I’d say hello when I walked my dog. Clean-cut young man. No question how he got the girls, looked like Antonio Banderas in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! He always petted my dog, Sugarbaby.”

  “Have you killed many women here, Heitor?”

  “No, I live here, that’s all. You’ll see.”

  Landau was betting on a Japanese landlord. The shrubbery had a bonsai look, and there was an area of clean beige sand, with black rocks arranged within it.

  “What’s this set you back a month, Heitor, about three grand?”

  “Almost. But I won’t stay here much longer, so it doesn’t matter.”

  He left the door to the house open behind him. Landau did not have to go in, and for a puzzled minute he stood outside arguing with himself. Again, could not find a pretext upon which not to go ahead. Deeply gloomy inside, drapes and blinds all closed. A lamp came on in another room. Tatami mats, shoji screens, plus rental-house furniture from the eighties. A trace of a Mexican-food smell: Heitor had been eating takeout, Landau guessed. Maybe from that huarache place.

  “I have to check her out before I do any reading of papers,” he announced to the empty living room.

  “Okay, that’s fair,” came a voice from farther within.

  Graciela was in a bedroom with taped-over windows. She was dressed in a flannel nightgown, her hands tied to the bed frame. Her eyes had been taped shut. Something was at her throat, a collar or bandage made of old towels, bloody, soiled.

  “Graciela,” Landau said from the doorway. “Graciela, I’m here.” Heitor held him back with a hand against his sternum. Her ears were taped over, too. She shifted minutely in the child-sized bed.

  I need to awaken from this. This cannot be happening, Landau thought, this tired episode of sordid captivity-theater, it cannot have her in it, and me, too, it feels all wrong. Heitor pulled him roughly out into the hallway. In the kitchen he asked for Landau’s cell phone. When Landau would not produce it, he searched his pockets till he found it. Crushed it under his shoe.

  “That won’t help you, they’re on their way, Heitor. They’re going to find you very soon. Have you been giving her fluids? She looks weak. She looks half-dead.”

  “She has an infection, that’s all. I give her some pills.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  Landau suddenly rushed the kitchen doorway. Heitor got in front of him, they wrestled briefly, and Landau ended up on the floor, panting.

  “I don’t read anything till we tend to her,” he declared from his position, flat on his back.

  “Don’t read it, then. I don’t care.”

  After a few moments, Landau got to his feet. Smoothed his sport coat. Dusted his knees.

  Not a research paper, more like a book. Three hundred manuscript pages, neatly stacked on a desk in another back room. “Madmen are not necessarily explosive, chaotic, unstructured,” some voice in Landau’s head calmly explained, “some are highly orderly, yet that doesn’t make them more predictable.” Six sharpened pencils in a plastic tray, a Physicians’ Desk Reference on a nearby shelf. A statistical compilation in Portuguese.

  “You know what would help me, Heitor? A cup of coffee. Will you get me that?”

  “No, no coffee, nothing.”

  “No?”

  “No, get started.”

  Sometimes you could tell about a paper. You only had to put your hands on it, if you knew the author and what he was about, what his tendencies were. Landau had always sampled Samantha’s work this way, first by a mumbo-jumbo laying-on of hands, a kind of low-level feeling of emanations. Then he read every word carefully, of course. He had once known Heitor well, too; had known him as well as any student. There was energy coming from the stack. Landau felt it, even without putting a hand on it. He nodded.

  It read terribly, parts of it not readable at all. A mistake to have composed it in English: Heitor spoke English passably well, and once he had written well scientifically in three languages, but that skill did not stay with you, you had to practice, practice. He could make rough sense of the mathematical symbols that Heitor was using, but what was this here, drawn freehand on the twelfth page? It looked like a Rubik’s Cube of sections of spheres. Something like a Venn diagram in three dimensions—that was all he could tell.

  “I see four or five intersecting spheres, Heitor. That’s sixteen intersections for four, and I don’t know how many for five. If I remember my four-dimensional geometry, it’s something like a tesseract, and I remember we talked about those way back in the eighties. Sixteen intersections corresponding to sixteen vertices. Good show, fellow. I’m eager to see where you go with this.”

  Heitor turned away, fighting a mad grin of pleasure.

  Why not read some more. Nothing to lose. Garbled madman’s drivel, depressing brain-misfirings, mostly. Occasional glimmers of straight thought. He read then skimmed then slowed down to read some sections microscopically. Surprising outbreaks of clarity. They didn’t add up, but they were there. The mind is flawed, the monstrousness has leaked everywhere, like a bad battery. On balance, horribly, terribly mad.

  An hour later Heitor came back in with a cup of tea.

  “Thank you. Tea for the old Englishman. Sometimes the old ways are best, I guess.”

  “Bloody right, old sport.”

  He left, locking the door behind him.

  It was like reading a printout of the genome. Scores of pages of indecipherable junk, then, a coherent passage, a gene, as it were. Five or six of these, obliquely deriving one from another, the coherent passages all bearing on topics in set theory, bringing to mind S. Boichenko, actually, Landau’s lodestar, his current mathematical soul-brother. Good God, Heitor had come close to reinventing him. Had glimpsed the few radiant ideas.

  He wanted to ask how this had come about. He felt sadness, catching glimpses of a ruined mind, then he recalled that Heitor was the razorer, the girl-dissector, the crusher of lives. Graciela was in another room at this moment. He lurched to his feet, toppling the cup of tea. The fluid stained the page of genius: ah, how sad.

  He called out. Grabbed the locked doorknob and throttled it, then threw himself against the door over and over. Calling out all the while.

  Half-past three a.m. He awoke with a jolt in the desk chair. In his left hand he held a thick wad of manuscript pages, and instead of putting them back in the pile he stuffed them inside his sport coat. That way, he could pull them out to argue some fine point, if necessary. What did you mean when you spoke of the square of the set of null sets, Heitor? Very
suggestive, that. Explain yourself.

  Again, the study door. Instead of throwing himself against it he stood on the wobbly roller chair and put his foot directly on the knob, forcing it to crack, to shear off. Ah, most gratifying. That was progress.

  Heitor was just coming out of the captivity room as Landau turned a corner in the dark hall. A second’s worth of illumination from the opening and closing door revealed an increase in Heitor’s bulk, and Landau heard an odd crinkling, making him think of Christmas presents, of torn wrappings. Like the wolf on the fold, he rushed forth and leapt upon the younger man in the dark, riding him to the floor. Heitor was dressed in a shower curtain, it felt like.

  The youngster struggled to stand up. Landau would not let go of his leg, however, and Heitor stabbed him twice in the chest, twice in the thigh, efficient downward thrusts.

  “Ow! Ow!” Landau roared, twisting away.

  The femoral artery is in the thigh: he thought of that, and if that were nicked, well, one could bleed out quickly. Maybe I’m going to die. But he did not feel badly nicked; didn’t seem to be bleeding much. Ow, though. Ow, that hurt.

  A light came on. Heitor was wearing a plasticized lab coat flecked with blood. He disappeared briefly and returned with a kitchen towel and a can of cold diet soda. He put the can on the floor by Landau’s legs.

  “Your manuscript, Heitor. It protected me. It guarded my chest.”

  “Okay.” Heitor said something else in Portuguese.

  “I want to talk to you about it, Heitor. It needs work, but it’s a fantastic start, in parts. I advise you to rewrite it in your own language, in Portuguese, then put it in English. I’ll give it to some people I know. They’ll be thrilled to see it.”

  “No, don’t lie to me. You fell asleep when you were reading.”

  “Means nothing. I fall asleep often when I do anything these days. I’m getting old. What’s important is that this is a bold, original piece of work. Where did you hear about Boichenko? I never told you about him, I don’t think—I hadn’t thought about him myself until recently.”