The Night Archer

by Michael Oren

  Out of earshot of the students behind him, Professor Morris did not actually hear their conversation, but he imagined it. Such talk was going on all around campus. Ever since his secret was revealed. Asked by an undergraduate reporter for a reaction to the revisionist historians who declared war on his work, he grunted, “I know how we would’ve handled them in the unit.”

  The unit? The news ricocheted around school and hit a local newspaper before finally penetrating the national media. On route, the Unit acquired a capital “U” as well as a number, Forty. That was the office which, according to Morris’s writings, broke the German code during World War I. But unidentified sources now spoke of new missions. Black ops, espionage, and liquidations—all too classified to record. And Professor Morris had been a member, perhaps under a pseudonym, but certainly in a younger life, explaining a gap in his resume between Amherst and Yale.

  The story churned up waves of speculation, admiration from some quarters and from others, disgust. In the faculty club, colleagues treated him with renewed deference or reinvigorated spite, avoiding eye-contact over the salad bar. Administrators pointed out his office to visiting donors and janitors stopped mopping when he passed. But among the students, especially, the reaction was marked. To them, he was no longer Professor Morris, academic superstar and author of too many publications to list, but Benjamin Morris, an agent of Unit Forty.

  Throughout, Morris said nothing. No confirmation or denial—indeed, no sign that anything had changed except for a subtle uptick in his rakishness, a predatory glint in his gaze. Even his detractors, those upstart lecturers who viewed the Great War not as the miscalculation of generals, but as a clash of market forces exacerbated by gender and race, suddenly seemed restrained. It was one thing to dismiss a colleague as reactionary, another when that colleague could garrote you.

  The situation delighted Morris. To think, a single comment to a college newspaper and his career—even his life—veered in a brighter direction. There was no downside, he felt, just as long as he kept his mouth shut about the Unit and fended off further questions with a peremptory, “Sorry, can’t go there.” And he did for several months while the articles about him multiplied, along with invitations to TV talk shows, all declined. The curiosity would subside soon, he figured, an oblique chapter in a linear but illustrious life.

  Morris erred. An inverse relationship emerged between his silence on Unit Forty and the tales spiraling around it. Suddenly, those same anonymous sources were describing a hit job in Serbia, the elimination of a long-sought war criminal holed up in a mountain retreat. Forty got him there, in his bed, the trigger pulled by a black-clad gunman whose face, behind the balaclava, was Morris’s. Then there was Damascus. Abu Yusuf, the head of an international terrorist ring responsible for bombings in eighteen cities across five continents. Dozens had died, and so, ultimately, did Abu Yusuf, while gazing into the eye of a silencer leveled by—who else?—the future Professor Morris.

  Nevertheless, he kept mum. By the end of spring semester, the rumors had spun out of his or anybody’s control. In class, he felt, the students were no longer listening to him but either whispering to each other or staring in fearful wonder.

  “It is a fact that the Germans’ first offensive failed not because of the Schlieffen Plan, because the plan was not implemented. A fact,” Morris stressed, his voice rising to reclaim attention. “A fact. And it was not the result of industrialists on both sides vying for profits and white male hierarchies competing over turf while denying women the vote.”

  He spoke or, rather, shouted, his words rebounding around a seemingly empty hall. Until he spotted him in the back row. A young man, from Morris’s perspective, but not young enough to be enrolled; shabby, not in the studied student way, but earnestly, his hair unkempt and his terrycloth tie mis-knotted. He, alone, was scribbling. Not surprisingly, after the others left, this man remained and introduced himself as a journalist.

  From his podium, leaning over his lectern, Morris squinted. “I told the press many times. No comment.”

  “You know what they say in my business,” the man, still jotting, replied. “No comment is also a comment.”

  “So be it,” Morris pronounced and punctuated his response with a snap of his Dunhill briefcase. Yet, as he left the building, the journalist trailed behind him, puffing to keep up.

  “I’m pursuing a different line, Professor Morris,” he panted. “I’m not interested in your undercover service. On the contrary, I’m interested in why you made it up.”

  Morris ignored him, picking up his pace while cutting across a quad. But the man went on: “Like, what would a man like you—renowned scholar, heartthrob—need it for? Glory? More glory?”

  On the unborn grass, Morris turned suddenly and confronted the journalist. Outdoors, he made an even sorrier sight. His collars curled, jacket ratty, mustard stains on his sleeves and sweat demarking his hairline. A nerd, is what his students would call him, Morris concluded, a twerp.

  “Listen, Mr…”

  “Hassenfeld. Ezra.”

  As if offered garbage, Morris sneered at the extended card, just long enough to glimpse the logo. It belonged to a once-radical now highbrow magazine renowned for defrocking bigwigs. His lower belly clenched.

  “I gave you my statement, Mr. Hassenfeld, and I have nothing more to say. Only that if you keep stalking me, I’ll have to call security.”

  But Hassenfeld merely shrugged. “Call anybody you want. Free country. I just thought you’d want to give your side of things before I start digging. It won’t be deep.”

  Morris squinted at him, half-threateningly. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, you aren’t the CIA, Professor Morris, and it won’t be hard finding the holes in your story. You’re not even Unit Forty, which I doubt even exists.”

  Morris drew himself up, peering down his nose at this waif who probably regarded news as those revisionist twits viewed scholarship, not as the procession of truths but a hodgepodge of opinions. “We don’t pretend to write history,” they taunted him. “We write our history.”

  “Do you know what Unit Forty stands for, Hassenfeld?” he found himself asking.

  The investigator shook his head. “Do you?”

  “Forty, in Roman numerals, is XL. And we excel at getting rid of our enemies. Including those who snoop too close.”

  Morris watched, angered and dismayed, as Hassenfeld carefully inscribed this quote into his notebook. Then, with a snort, he stomped toward his office, crushing sprouts.

  He waited until the elevator reached the top floor of Altier Tower, and he entered his office with its panoramic views of campus. Only then, plunging into his chair, did Morris allow himself to groan. An on-line check of Ezra Hassenfeld’s credentials left him groaning still and pounding his cherrywood desk. Along his walls, the honorary degrees and framed distinctions rattled. Books stood in clothbound judgment. All that and more would now be lost—worse, marshalled against him—and because of what, a single wisecrack? The desperate situation called for a drastic recourse. He hated taking it, but realized the choice was sealed.

  Later that afternoon, Morris slipped out of the tower, avoided the quads, and escaped through some unused playing fields. Scurrying to the rim of a modest neighborhood, he kept to the backyards. Many faculty members lived there and, though unlikely to be spotted at this hour, he took no chances. Creeping up to a porch and rapping on its screen door, he hissed, “Allison.” Louder, he hammered, “Allison, goddamn it!”

  “I’m not sure I should let you in,” Allison remarked, stepping out. “They say you’re a trained assassin.”

  He pressed against the mesh, reducing his face—and his ex-wife’s—to pixels. “Cut the shit, Allison, please. This is no time.”

  “No time, indeed,” she said, releasing the lock and helping him into the house.

  Morris squinted for signs of the new husband. Only when assured that Stephen was still at his practice did the professor collapse into the neare
st chair. Allison brought him a tumbler of scotch along with an indulgent smile and the question, “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “Thinking? Who the hell was thinking?” Already he was sounding defensive, though he didn’t have to, not with Allison. His second wife, the only one who understood him, painfully so. “How am I going to get out of this?”

  She pulled up a seat next to him, her wineglass separating their knees. A long-bodied woman, horse-faced but endearing, dressed much as she did as his graduate student, in a sweatshirt and jeans. Graying hair still braided, oversized eyes that often said more than she spoke.

  “You want the truth, don’t you?” Morris plugged at his drink. “You want me to make an announcement.”

  Those eyes now laughed at him. “It’s your only option.”

  “And be ridiculed by my entire field—the entire country? Besides…” Forlornly, he studied his glass. “It’s too late. A journalist is after me. An investigative journalist. Annoying little turd, he rankled me, and I told him…”

  “Told him what, Ben?”

  The professor pouted. “That Unit Forty meant excel and that we’d excel in getting rid of him.”

  “I’m missing something…”

  “Roman Numerals? Excel? Never mind. I just wanted him gone.”

  A silent interlude followed, during which Morris peered around the living room that used to be his and for an instant wished it was. He scarcely noticed Allison’s wineglass knocking his kneecap or heard her urging, “A simple statement, one line. Say it was an innocent mistake, a practical joke gone wrong. Say you’re sorry.”

  “You’re right, of course. As always.” Morris emptied the last of the Scotch, drawing strength. “I’ll do it tomorrow. No, right now.”

  He pushed himself up from the chair and let Allison escort him to the porch. She, in turn, permitted him to peck her cheek while she posed a final question, “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why, when you have all the fame you’ll ever need—awards, accolades, women? Just to get back at your critics?”

  It was the same question that Hassenfeld had asked him, only Allison’s could never be dodged. “Those dimwits?” he replied with an imperiousness she knew well. “They aren’t even worth a lie.”

  “I see. It’s never enough for you, Benjamin. You have to be the great historian and the secret agent.” Allison’s eyes lit up. “Brilliant professor and a spy.”

  He didn’t answer her but hurried back across the playing fields to his office. There, he drafted a terse release and read it aloud to his library. He read it again, hoping the indignity would subside, and stashed it away in a drawer. Why apologize when he’d yet to be publicly accused, he asked himself, when the entire affair might vanish? He would never see that mud-chucking Hassenfeld again or even hear his name.

  And his judgment seemed sound for the next few days as spring aroused the campus. The crocuses were out, together with the young women who, shedding boots and sweaters, blossomed. This was his favorite moment of the year, when any desire seemed fulfillable. Whistling, he light-footed along the path worn diagonally across the quad and strode into his brimming lecture hall. There, without pause, he lunged into his nemeses’ arguments.

  “Yes, yes, colonial troops took part in some of the biggest battles. Tirailleurs, Sénégalais, Gurkhas—they were all there. But so were Canadians, Anzacs, and Boers. That’s why we call it a World War. But to say that and then conclude that the war was all about race and racism is nothing short of moronic.”

  He was soaring now, and the students were once again taking notes. All but one. Seated not in the rear which the professor had scanned earlier on but in the front, where he went for a long while unnoticed, Hassenfeld. Catching sight of him finally, Morris coughed and lost his thrust. He rambled on about colonials at the Somme, straining to regain some focus, until the class adjourned. The students sauntered out while the journalist casually remained.

  “I don’t know about them,” he said, referring to the undergrads, “but I believe you. The war wasn’t about color. It was about lies.”

  Ignoring him, Morris shut his briefcase and tried a leisurely exit. A single word sufficed to stop him.

  “Matala.”

  He pivoted to find Hassenfeld still in his seat but fanning himself with a photograph.

  “Matala?”

  “The caves, Professor Morris. On Crete. Of course, you remember.” He held the photo up to the light which, though scant, showed a scraggly, long-haired youth smoking a joint. “It’s where you spent the time between your BA and graduate work. In the caves, playing music, getting stoned, getting laid hopefully. Not eliminating enemies. Not operating behind dangerous lines. In Matala, having fun.”

  With two hands, Morris held his briefcase before him. “And what if that was my cover?”

  “A good one, maybe, but for what? You see, I snooped around Washington a bit, contacted some friends in sensitive places, and guess what? No Unit Forty. Nothing about excel.”

  “So say you.”

  “So will say my magazine in its very next edition.” Hassenfeld reached into his shoddy jacket for a notepad and pen. Now he was ready to write. “Your last chance, professor. Care to comment?”

  “No,” Morris spat out before retreating. “That is my comment.”

  Back in his office, he ground his forehead into the desk. His name, his life’s work, would be devastated. The charlatans would rejoice. He couldn’t face them or the shame of resignation. For hours he sat, racked by indecision. But then it struck him. As simply, as incontrovertibly, as any fact he knew.

  Morris reached into his drawer and extracted the apology. He read it once more, folded it neatly, and ripped it into quarters. Then, on stationary emblazoned with his title and chair, he penned a new note. Shorter. Immune to interpretation.

  He left the letter face up on his desk and moved toward the window. Opening it, he let the late spring breeze tussle his hair. The night was clear, the stars beaconing, Gothic spires, lamplights twinkling on campus. He would lose all this, either through a frantic leap or prolonged humiliation. Both options made him shake. Then again, he reasoned, he would still have his looks, his publications, his prizes. No scandal could strip him of those. He thought of Allison and his other wives and of the women yet to come. And of the idiots who’d dominate the field in his absence, desecrating history with myths.

  Minutes passed and Morris remained at the window, deliberating. He was dithering still when the intruder stepped through his door. The professor barely had time to turn, much less protest. Only his face writhed with recognition as his feet lifted off the floor.

  The intruder backed away from the window, glanced down at the desk, and perused the letter approvingly. Then, with a gloved hand, he reached within his jacket pocket and produced an encoded phone.

  “It’s over, sir,” he said, waited for a response, then added, “No worry. It’ll look like he did it himself.”

  He quietly backed out of the office. “Unit Forty? Excel? An unlucky guess, maybe, we don’t know sir,” he continued while shutting the door behind him. “Probably never will.”

  Ten stories below, students inspected the crumpled mass blocking their shortcut across the quad.

  “The good news, sir, is,” the man posing as Ezra Hassenfeld said in the hallway, above the echo of screams, “neither will anybody else.”

  The House on

  Kittatinny Lake

  The story was about an insecure woman in an abusive marriage who one day meets a man who tells her that she’s perfect. She’s more than perfect, he assures her—goddess-like. Leaving her husband, the woman moves in with this man who replaces her self-doubt with a self-love so unassailable that she begins to think she’s too good for him. She abandons this husband for someone better-looking and rich but who, after time, again persuades her that she’s worthless. So the cycle spins and, with it, this woman. Around and around until she dies, marred and marvelous and alone.
>
  Another story starts with a young man, the square-jawed heroic type, climbing the cliffs of Dingle. The wind lashes his auburn hair and waves smash against the gnarled Irish coast that dares stand up to the Atlantic. Athlete, a straight-A student, the man stands strong against the elements. He believes he was born to greatness but to what greatness, exactly, he’s uncertain. This is why he wanders, searching, hungering, for himself. “Fate is what you travel to,” is his logo, and he shouts it into the gale. “But destiny comes to you.”

  * * * * *

  Pamela leans back on her desk and chews the end of her pencil. The ideas she’s jotted on her yellow legal pad look, on rereading, yellow and legal. Again, she stiffens with the fear that her best writing—any writing—is behind her. The days when she could scribble off the top of her head and riff on for pages, when reviewers referred to her as “one of our best,” feel distant. The pencils that she habitually chews while writing—a ten-pencil story was once standard—remain stacked in a jar, like some rare, pollarded plant.

  Instead, she stares out of her office window at Kittatinny’s banks below. Named for the Native Americans who once fished it, the lake is, in fact, an elongated pond too small for vacation boats. Which is one of the reasons Pamela settled here. The other reason—the real one—is a dream she once had of a white, antebellum two-story with black shutters, its reflection shimmering on water. The image was both comforting and wistful. It stayed with her for days until miraculously, on a rural leg of a book tour, she chanced on the real thing. At once, she made an outrageous offer. The house, the lakeside, the dream—became hers.

  Here she can live out her life after Maxwell’s death, in celebrated solitude. Readers still made pilgrimages to her, a succession of old ladies who remembered her from book clubs and wide-eyed students who’d discovered her on syllabi. Through her editor or the station agent in town, paid to phone when strangers asked directions to the house, Pamela can control the flow. She touches up her fine dishevelment and, in a whiff of silken scarfs, glides to the door with a face both startled and imperious.