Hardscrabble Road

by Jane Haddam

  “They’re going to investigate me,” Alison said. “They’re going to make an inquiry into my classroom practices and my grading practices. They’ve asked for my grade books for the last five years, so they can go over them assignment by assignment, and they’ve put out a call for testimony to the university community. They’ll mail notices to my former students through the alumni records. So that my students and my former students can come in and testify to, you know, how I behave.”

  “But that’s all right, isn’t it? You don’t really give poorer grades to conservative students because they’re conservatives, do you?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Alison said. “I don’t even know what most of them are, politically. I mean, I don’t teach a political subject. I teach medieval literature and medieval philosophy and that kind of thing. We talk about Thomas Aquinas and bringing Aristotle back into the tradition of Western thought, and Chaucer and the rise of vernacular poetry. I suppose you could make those things political. The Women’s Studies Department probably does make those things political. But I talk about poetic forms and the enthronement of logical analysis in the medieval European university.”

  “So,” Carrie said, coming over to the couch with a cup, a saucer, a bottle of Irish whiskey, and a big electric coffee percolator with its cord hanging down behind like a bridal veil, “there’s nothing to worry about, is there? You’re not guilty.”

  “I’m a professor at an Ivy League university. My students are the result of a long culling process that turns competition into the be-all and end-all of life itself. You know and I know that there are people I’ve given grades to who weren’t very happy with them, people who wanted A’s and didn’t get them, people who want to blame anybody but themselves for their own records.”

  “And these people will all be conservatives?”

  “No,” Alison said. “These people will turn this inquiry into an auto-dafé. It’ll be a chance to get their own back, and they will. There are times I want to slaughter every water buffalo on the planet.”

  Carrie was putting together the Irish coffee. The cup was larger than an ordinary coffee cup, and the percentage of whiskey to coffee was larger than in most Irish coffees. Alison reached forward and took a long swig. It was straight alcohol with essence of coffee bean.

  “Water buffalo,” Carrie said.

  “Oh, it was something that happened a few years ago with the speech code. We’ve got a speech code. It’s completely asinine. It’s the modern university’s equivalent of an old Catholic formulation on free speech—error has no rights. Whatever. There was an incident where this kid who was brought up in Israel or somewhere shouted out his window at a bunch of girls whooping it up in the quad and said they sounded like a bunch of water buffalo, which happens to be an exact English translation of some common light insult in Hebrew, and they were black and took it as a racist remark, so the university tried to prosecute him under the speech code, and he got outside lawyers and whatnot interested and it was a huge scandal, mostly making the university look bad. Which it should have, because free speech isn’t about speech you like but about speech you don’t. Anyway, that’s why they feel they have to investigate every time somebody like Drew Harrigan makes accusations like this. Just in case. Because they don’t want this student to prove his case in an outside court of law and make the university look bad again.”

  “But there may be no student,” Carrie said.

  “I know.”

  “And you’ve got tenure.”

  “I know.” Alison took another long swig of coffee. Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol. Alcohol could be very good to you if you treated it right. Unfortunately, the next morning it made you feel as if you’d been run through a food processor with a bunch of sand. “Tenure doesn’t fix everything,” she said finally.

  “And?”

  Alison shrugged. “I don’t know. I keep telling myself I don’t need to worry, I haven’t done what Drew Harrigan’s been accusing me of. They can’t find evidence of something that isn’t there. But I know university inquiries. You don’t have the same due process protections you have in a court of law. I may end up having to sue the university to clear my record. I may end up ostracized, although I admit that doesn’t seem to be happening at the moment. And all I can think about is the fact that if Drew Harrigan would only spend an extra, oh, six months in rehab, this whole thing would probably die down. Because the administration doesn’t want to pursue it any more than I want them to. They just want to cover their asses.”

  “Maybe the cops will be waiting for him at the door of the clinic when he walks out, and he’ll be so wrapped up in legal troubles he won’t have time to bother about you.”

  “It’s a nice thought, but I talked to a guy over in the law school about that. Apparently, probably not. They’re going to shift most of the blame onto this guy who was supposed to be supplying him with the pills.”

  “The homeless guy?”

  “Yeah. And then, you know, Drew Harrigan is a victim, and he gets ordered to therapy, and that’s that. My guy at the law school said it was practically a done deal.”

  “I think it’s disgusting the way celebrities get treated by the law.”

  “I think everybody thinks it’s disgusting the way celebrities get treated by the law,” Alison said. “But they do, and here we are. I just wish I knew what started all of this. It’s the one thing that makes me think there might really be a student out there somewhere complaining that I gave him a bad grade because he’s a conservative. I mean, how else did Drew Harrigan get my name? I’m not an academic media star. I don’t teach in a sensitive department. This came out of nowhere, and I have no idea why.”

  “Get absolutely stinking drunk and sleep it off and then get up and go on with what you’ve got to do,” Carrie said. “That’s how I handle it. It’s like a catharsis. Once I’m through it, I can do anything I have to do.”

  “I keep thinking that maybe that homeless person will just disappear. Isn’t that awful? I just can’t help thinking that if he wasn’t around to be the convenient scapegoat, Drew Harrigan would be in a lot more trouble than he’s in, and I’d be in a lot less.”

  “He’s filed a lawsuit, hasn’t he?” Carrie said. “Maybe he’ll win.”

  “Maybe he will,” Alison said, but she didn’t believe that. In at least one case, the socialists weren’t entirely crazy. There really were disparities of power in the world, and there was no disparity greater than the one between a homeless drunk and a media powerhouse. This homeless person would take the fall for Drew Harrigan, and Drew Harrigan would go on giving lectures about how all drug addicts should be locked away in penitentiaries for fifteen years every time they got caught with a half ounce of marijuana in their pockets, and the university inquiry into the allegations of bias on the part of Professor Alison Elizabeth Standish would proceed as planned, delivering ruin to somebody, because that was what it was designed to do.

  Alison took another long swig of the Irish coffee, and decided that getting blind drunk was not that stupid an idea after all.

  9

  It was just turning midnight, and Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation thought she could not read another page of Ascent of Mount Carmel without going completely, utterly, and irrevocably insane. Beata had come to Carmel because she loved and admired Carmelite spirituality, by which she meant the works of St. Teresa of Avila and St. Edith Stein. She’d never read anything by St. John of the Cross before entering the novitiate, and she had only grazed that silly book by St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Journey of a Soul. It hadn’t occurred to her that there might be good reason why Thérèse’s book had sold more than any other work of Catholic piety in hundreds of years, and why a modern Carmel might want to build on that popularity to keep its sisters dedicated to the contemplative life. Quite frankly, if Beata had to read much more of this overwrought mysticism and sexually charged ecstatic transportation into the presence of God, she thought she might quit Carmel for a life with the
Dominicans as a mistress of the Inquisition.

  Except, of course, there was no Inquisition anymore, not in fact or in name. There was the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which used to be called the Holy Office, which used to be called the Holy and Roman Inquisition, but that was the wrong Inquisition for her purposes, not the one in Spain but the one in Rome. Of course, she didn’t really know what her purposes were. She had come to Carmel wanting only to find silence, and she had found that, even though the silence wasn’t silent enough.

  At the moment, the silence was being broken by the sound of the monastery bell ringing the hour. It was the ordinary bell marking ordinary time, not the one that rang for prayer. She was tired. She should lie down on the cot for a rest, as she was supposed to do, but it had been a restless day. The one time she’d tried, she’d ended by staring up into the dark that obscured the high ceiling. It had seemed a better idea to get up and read. That way, when it came to tomorrow night, when she was not on duty, she would lie down at nine when the lights went off and have no trouble at all dropping off.

  It was hardly possible that she had lived in this monastery for years, and her body still hadn’t adjusted to the schedule. But it hadn’t.

  There was a knock on the door. For a second, Beata thought it was nothing. There was a lot of wind out there. Maybe a branch had been knocked against the side of the building. Then the sound came again, and she got up to look through the eyehole at who was standing on the front steps.

  She’d had a roommate in college once who’d called those eyeholes Judas holes. She had no idea what had made her think of that. One of the homeless men was standing on the doorstep, his arms wrapped around him, without a hat. She was not supposed to let anyone in when she was here alone at night, but she couldn’t imagine keeping this man waiting outside like that, in that weather. She pulled the door back and pulled him in.

  “You’re going to freeze to death,” she said. “You shouldn’t be out in the wind without a hat.”

  “They stole his hat,” the man said.

  “Whose hat?”

  “They stole his hat,” the man said again. He smelled of beer and vomit. They all smelled of vomit. It permeated their clothes, even when the clothes were newly washed. “The dead man. They stole his hat.”

  Beata tried to process this. “There’s somebody dead,” she said. “Out in the barn.”

  “They stole his hat.”

  “Yes, I see. They stole his hat. And he’s dead. Are you sure he’s dead? Are you sure he isn’t just passed out?”

  “He’s not breathing,” the man said. “And they stole his hat. I didn’t think that was right. Even if he’s dead. It was a good hat. Red.”

  Beata paused. She remembered the man in the red hat, waiting to get into the barn, when she was coming back tonight to tell Reverend Mother about the property. She shut the door to keep the wind out and tried to think.

  “Let me get a sister,” she said, “and we’ll go see. Then we’ll know if we should call the ambulance.”

  “I can tell you who stole the hat,” the man said. “I saw them do it. I tried to stop them. But nobody listens to me.”

  “It’s all right about the hat,” Beata said. “Let me get a sister, and let’s see what we’ve got to do now. Is he just lying out there, in the barn?”

  “He’s on the floor,” the man said. “He had a cot, but when they took his hat they rolled him off on the floor, and they’ve got the cot now. It wasn’t right about the hat.”

  “No,” Beata said. “No, of course it wasn’t.”

  She looked hard into the face of this man, but it just blurred. As soon as she blinked, she could no longer remember what he looked like. She thought of the man in the red hat, and decided she had never really known what he looked like, beyond noticing that his clothes were cleaner than the clothes of the other men in line. If civilization was the process of learning to see our fellow human beings clearly and plainly, in their blood and skin and bone and brain, as vitally a part of us—Beata didn’t think she was yet very civilized.

  She went to the portress’s desk and picked up the phone to get Reverend Mother out of bed.

  You came to Carmel to look for answers, and all you ever got was the silence and the darkness and the long line of men and women who had come before you, who had wanted to look into the face of God without falling down dead. Some of them thought they had seen what they were looking for, and some of them were sure they had not, but in the end it all came down to the man in the red hat whose face was nothing but a blur and a shadow, and the man standing in front of you whom you couldn’t make real no matter how hard you tried.

  Reverend Mother was not going to be happy to be woken at midnight, and the ambulance men were going to be even less happy to come by to pick up the body of somebody who was not only already dead, but of no damn use to anybody at all.

  PART ONE

  Monday, February 10

  High 3F, Low –14F

  To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES

  The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie about the greatest things.

  —UMBERTO ECO

  ONE

  1

  There were times when Gregor Demarkian forgot where he was, not in space—it was impossible to forget you were on Cavanaugh Street when you were on it—but in time, so that he turned over in bed and expected to see Elizabeth sleeping next to him, or opened the top drawer of his dresser to look for the laminated ID card he’d carried his last five years in the FBI. He would have felt better about it if it had only happened to him when he was asleep, or just waking. He knew enough about dreams to have lost all tendency to feel guilty about the content of them. He had been thinking about Elizabeth a lot lately, and about the FBI, although he had to admit that he was more than happy to be retired, given the way things were going at the moment. He had come to the Bureau when it was still run by J. Edgar Hoover, a psychopath with sexual problems and a driving obsession to redefine normality for the rest of the universe. He had quietly celebrated on the evening of Hoover’s funeral, because he’d known that only death would exorcise that man from the Bureau’s soul. Then he’d had his own life to worry about, and his own problems, and now he was here, no longer concerned with serial killers or office politics. He could not imagine what he would have done if he had been one of the people responsible for ignoring the evidence that could have stopped the 9/11 attacks. He could not imagine a Bureau culture where so few people had been fired in the event. He had no idea what he was doing thinking about 9/11 now, so long after the fact, but for some reason it had been on his mind for weeks.

  The truth is, he thought, I’ve got too much time to myself. It was true. There had been nothing in the way of a consulting job coming through the door for some time now. Since he made a point of never going out to solicit them, that meant there had been nothing in the way of crime to think about for some time now, either. Watching true crime on Court TV and A&E didn’t quite make it. Then there was the problem of the apartments, plural. The new church was finished, or as finished as any church ever got, what with committees to worry about carpets and pews and better glass for the windows, and Tibor had moved back into an apartment of his own, with a new little courtyard and a new set of hyacinth bushes, behind it. Bennis was on tour, the first one she’d agreed to in five years. On an intellectual level, Gregor knew that this was a professional necessity. Authors didn’t go out on tours just for the hell of it, since they were apparently very confused and confusing things. Wires got crossed, bookstores didn’t get their copies of the books on time, hotels had the wrong reservations, airplane tickets turned out to be for the wrong days to the wrong places. On an emotional level, he was—he didn’t know what. It would have helped if he had understood what was going on in his relationship with Bennis these days, but Bennis was not like Elizabeth. If Elizabeth was
mad at you, she shouted at you until you surrendered. If she was happy with you, she did little things around the house for you and made your favorite foods for dinner several times during the week. Beyond that Elizabeth did not get too complicated, at least when it came to their marriage. There was mad and happy and sexy on at least a few nights a month. That was it, until the cancer got her, and things got very complicated indeed. But dying was complicated, Gregor thought. You couldn’t blame a woman for becoming complex and hard to unravel when she was dying.

  Bennis was complicated as a matter of principle. She was complicated about her morning coffee. She was complicated about her shoes, none of which she liked, except for the clogs, which didn’t go with anything. Most of all, she was complicated about their relationship to each other, which had none of the clean obviousness of what Gregor was used to in something “settled.” Maybe it was just that Bennis did not consider them settled, while Gregor did. Gregor had tried to fix that by asking her to marry him, but she’d gotten complicated about that, too, and now she was off in the Midwest somewhere, signing copies of a book called Summer of Zedalia, Winter of Zed. Gregor had tried to read one of her books while she was away, but he couldn’t do it. They were filled with fairies and trolls and elves and unicorns, and in spite of the fact that they were very well written—even he could tell they were very well written—he couldn’t get into them. They were of different generations. Maybe that was where all the complications came from. At any rate, his generation wanted realism, not fantasy. His generation didn’t believe in ghosts or angels or the supernatural. His generation wanted the solidity that came from the laws of nature rather than the laws of Nature’s God. He wanted to chalk it up to the fact that his generation had fought a war, but Bennis’s generation had fought one too. They’d just gone about it oddly.