The Faculty Club

by Danny Tobey

  I leaned in.

  “Okay. You have lots of bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, right?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Please. Just answer my question.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You’re rich. Crazy Wall Street rich. I know that. And you’re kind of paranoid, right? Always have been. So you’ve probably got offshore accounts, things like that?”

  “I’m not paranoid.”

  “Mike, I don’t have time for this. Do you or don’t you?”

  He shrugged and loosened his collar.

  “Let’s just say I’m diversified for all contingencies. Including the total collapse of the U.S. banking system.”

  “Good . . . Good.”

  I pushed an envelope across the table to him.

  “I want you to keep this somewhere discreet for me. Don’t open it. Get it off your hands right away.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t say. But if something ever happens to me, get it and open it. There’s another envelope inside. It’s already addressed. If something bad happens, mail it. That’s it.”

  “Jeremy, are you on drugs?”

  “Please. Just do this for me. It’s important.”

  He leaned back in his chair and sighed.

  “I’m not an idiot, Jer. Whatever you think of me, I didn’t get where I am by being stupid. This is insurance, fine, I get it. But you want my help, you gotta tell me what I’m getting into. What is it, gambling debts? Is this mob shit? Young fucking cocky lawyers, think they’re so smart, get into poker, I’ve seen it before. That’s what you get for going to school so close to Atlantic City. Listen, if you’re in trouble, I’ll pay off your debts. But it won’t be free. You’ll pay me back with interest. You have to learn consequences. But at least I won’t break your legs, right?”

  “Your money can’t fix this.”

  The words came out harsher than I meant. I sounded bitter. I saw his face twitch. His composure came back quickly, but the words hung in the air between us.

  “Mike, I need your help. Please.”

  He blinked a few times and ran a hand through his hair. It was thick but the hairline was definitely receding. I noticed he had the hint of a double chin. This is my brother, I kept thinking to myself. Jesus, he looked like a middle-aged man.

  He smiled, but it was weaker, less cocky. Strangely enough, I found myself missing the cockiness.

  “Remember when we used to play at the creek?” he asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “There was that dog. Belonged to Mr. Reynolds. Remember that?”

  “Mean animal,” I said.

  “He was. Remember the time he was lost, and we found him down in the creek?”

  “After a big storm, right? He was pinned down, under a tree.”

  “You tried to help him.”

  “I did.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He bit the shit out of my hand.”

  Mike nodded at the memory.

  “I’m gonna help you,” he said. “And I’m gonna play it any way you want. You want me to hold this letter in a mystery bank and never read what’s inside? Fine. I’ll do that for you. You’re a smart guy, Jeremy. Smarter than I am. No, don’t say anything, I know it’s true. I busted my way through. I’m a bull in a china shop, I know. If you think this will fix whatever’s out to get you, I believe you. But you have to promise me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “If this package gets them to leave you alone, then you’re finished with them, right?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “That’s it. You understand? Get them off your back and go live your life. Is that what you plan to do? Can you promise me that?”

  I looked down at my hands.

  “I know you,” Mike said. “You have rules. Principles. Always have. Well, I have a different philosophy. Look out for number one. Because no one else is going to. You don’t understand that, because you’ve been lucky. You’ve never had a real problem. Mom and Dad always babied you. I’m sorry to put it like that, but it’s true. If I’m gonna help you, you’ve got to promise me you’re not gonna keep messing with these people. You have leave it alone. Live and let live. Okay?”

  I took a deep breath.

  I thought of Sarah.

  We can’t let that go. If we do . . .

  “I’m trying to help you,” he said. “I’m trying to save you from yourself.”

  “I know, Mike.”

  “Promise me. Jer, promise me.”

  I felt my whole life branching, tearing in half. I shook my head.

  “I can’t.”

  He closed his eyes. I watched his face. His good looks, a little worn but still there. I could remember the smell of the grass, playing down in that creek with him, even twenty years later.

  “Then I can’t help you,” Mike said. He slid the envelope back across the table.

  “Are you serious?”

  He nodded.

  “Mike, I need you.”

  “No. If you won’t help yourself, I can’t help you.”

  We stared at each other for a long time. No one flinched.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, finally.

  I nodded.

  “I know.”

  I put the envelope back in my bag and stood up.

  “I’ll see you,” I told him. I started walking away.

  He grabbed my arm. He looked like he wanted to say something, but then he let my arm go and turned back to his coffee.

  I dropped my packages in the mail, half in random mailboxes I passed, half in the Penn Street station. I felt totally, radically free. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly what I had to do, even if I didn’t have the slightest idea how I was going to do it.

  29

  Miles handed me the phone.

  “Dial,” he said.

  “Who am I supposed to call?”

  “Call Nigel.”

  “Miles, I don’t know . . . after what happened . . .”

  “Listen to me. You’re going to call him.”

  He told me what to say.

  I steadied myself and dialed. The phone rang, but no one answered. I hung up and shook my head.

  “Okay,” he said to me. “Try again.”

  “Call Nigel again?”

  “No, I want you to call Daphne.”

  I nearly choked when he said her name. I felt a burning shame that I tried to press down. My last conversation with Daphne involved stealing her purse and some borderline stalking. Not a part of my life I was eager to revisit. Then again, it occurred to me that Daphne—that Daphne—didn’t even exist anymore. Miles pushed the receiver into my hand.

  I still knew her number from the long weeks of trial prep. I pressed the digits in, lingered over the last one, then felt it depress. I closed my eyes.

  “Hello,” came the milky voice. It set off a firestorm inside me. I tried and failed to ignore the image of her coming out of the shadows outside my room, grabbing me and brushing her lips across mine. I looked at Sarah and encouraged myself to focus.

  “Hello,” I managed.

  A pause.

  “Jeremy . . . is that you?”

  It was disturbing how much power she still had over me. Deep breaths . . .

  “Yeah. It’s me.”

  Another pause.

  “I was just thinking about you,” she purred into the phone. I could picture her, curled up by the window, legs tucked under, her long hair in a ponytail slung over her shoulder; those fire-blue eyes. “I want to see you.”

  I bet you do.

  “Daphne, I need you to listen to me.”

  “Come on, why talk on the phone? I miss you.” Her voice was melodic. “I want to see you.”

  “Listen to me. The situation has changed.”

  I repeated Miles’s words exactly. We’d protected ourselves. We wanted to meet. No details. No fear. My voice was confident, firm.

  This time there
was a longer pause on the line. I heard voices in the background. Then Daphne spoke to me. All the purring and silkiness was gone. Her voice was all business now. I listened to what she said and nodded. Miles and Sarah looked on, eyes wide. Apparently, Miles was just as surprised as I was that his words hadn’t led to hysterical giggles on Daphne’s end. Glad I didn’t know that before I’d spoken them. “I understand,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  I realized I hadn’t breathed in a while. I exhaled and rubbed my eyes.

  “Well?” Miles said.

  “They want to meet us tonight.”

  “Really? Where?”

  I smiled wearily and made a face that said, Where else?

  “In my room.”

  I’ve never been on the victim’s end of a burglary, but I was pretty sure this was how it felt. I hadn’t been back to my dorm since coming out the hatch under my bed. Everything was in the exact same place, but it all felt different, foreign and contaminated. My Albert Einstein poster—the one that says “Do not worry about your troubles in mathematics, I assure you mine are still greater”—used to be cute (a little juvenile for law school, maybe, but a concession to the fact that I never had a college dorm room to decorate with clichéd posters). Now Mr. Einstein’s face, larger than life on my wall, looked sinister, as if the benign genius in his eyes had slipped into lunacy while I was out. The troll dolls in a line along my desk used to guard my computer; now they struck me more like a druid assembly, here to hack at our shins with tiny adorable axes.

  When we arrived, the door was still locked, but of course I expected to see Daphne waiting for us on my bed anyway. Locked doors had never been a problem before. But the room was empty and eerily silent. The only relief from the darkness was the moon shining through the blinds, splashing old Albert in silver light.

  I flipped on the fluorescents, and the shadows vanished and the room became much, much closer to normal. I forced myself to sit in my old chair, a nice leather one that rotated and complemented the Stickley furniture. It felt the same, creaked in all the same places.

  Sarah sat on my bed. There was one other chair in the room, wooden, yellow, and surprisingly uncomfortable. I bought it at a thrift store for seven dollars, the last chair from a long-gone kitchen table. Miles tried it, said oomph, and joined Sarah on the bed.

  We left that chair open and waited.

  No one spoke.

  My mind started messing with me again. Were they standing us up? Did they think we were bluffing? Was this a trap? Why the hell did we come?

  How many times was I going to lower my fists and show my neck?

  How many more times would I get away with it?

  I was about to curse Miles for . . . for something . . . (not fixing the mess I’d created?) . . .

  And then I heard it:

  Three knocks—slow, soft, and polite.

  30

  Two questions: first, who opens the door in a situation like this? And second, is there a cannon with a lit fuse on the other side? As any good lawyer would tell you, the answer to one question might affect your answer to the other.

  I gave a last hopeful glance at Miles and Sarah, then stood up and went to the door.

  Through the peephole, the man didn’t look like a murderer. He was neatly dressed, in a plain and somewhat worn gray suit. In his left hand was a battered briefcase. His hair was a little ruffled, but he had a tidy mustache, thinner than a drug lord’s and thicker than a magician’s.

  When I opened the door, he held out his hand.

  “You must be Jeremy,” he said in a tired voice.

  I sat in my leather chair and left the wooden one open for him.

  He sat hard and cringed, popped off the chair, and sort of half-stood and put a hand on his flank. He let out a little groan.

  “Bad back,” he said apologetically. “Just give me a second.”

  The man seemed like he was in real pain. He sort of hovered, half-standing, half-sitting, with his eyes closed. He kept one hand on his lower back; his lips moved like he was counting slowly to wait out the spasm. I shot Miles and Sarah a look. Miles shrugged. Sarah cocked her head. The doctor in her couldn’t resist.

  “Have you tried a lumbar pillow?” she asked him.

  He turned his head to her, still crouching, and half-opened his eyes.

  “I heard they don’t work.”

  “Actually, they’re great,” she told him. “Takes the pressure off your lower back.”

  “Well, you are the neurosurgeon in the room,” he said, trying to smile but still wincing.

  “Listen, just take this one,” I said and stood away from my chair.

  “Thank you, much obliged,” he said and walked, still bent, to my chair, grimacing with each step. He settled down slowly into the chair, then let out a big sigh. “Very kind of you,” he said.

  I went to the wood chair and sat. The angle of the back against the seat was preposterous—an angle unknown to human spines in the history of sitting—and the wood planks jabbed into me. I accidentally let out an oh.

  The man in the suit smiled sheepishly.

  He was sitting in my chair!

  The negotiation was off to a great start.

  He looked around the room, soaking it in. He smiled at my Einstein poster. He shook his head at the stack of books on my desk. “I don’t miss school,” he chuckled, in a way that suggested he did miss it, a little.

  “We don’t want to play games,” I said to him.

  “Good, good.”

  He smiled pleasantly.

  The man picked up one of the troll dolls from my desk and turned it over in his hands. “My sister used to collect these. She had ones for different countries. I remember, she had a whole cabinet full of them.” He smiled at the memory. “Shall we get started?”

  This guy was messing with me!

  “Yeah, let’s get started.”

  I handed him one of our packages.

  The man took it. He pulled out the paper and read it slowly, taking his time. It contained every single thing we knew about the V&D: facts and rumors, puzzles and solutions, maps of tunnels, the location of their temple, lists of names. His face was passive, perfectly unreadable. Not blank—just mild. He might’ve been flipping through Reader’s Digest, waiting for a haircut. When he was done, he handed it back to me.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay what?”

  He didn’t reply. He just sat there patiently with a polite smile, hands folded in his lap.

  He sat there until I couldn’t stand it.

  “We want protection. We want you to promise you’ll leave us alone. Me, Sarah, Miles, Chance. That’s it. We have copies of this all over the place. If anything happens to us, they go out—newspapers, internet, you name it. If we’re okay, they never see the light of day. We don’t care about the V&D. All we want to do is live our lives. That’s it. That’s all we want.”

  I tried to think if there was anything else to say. But there wasn’t.

  “Well?” I prodded him.

  “Well what?”

  I wanted to jump the space between us and throttle him.

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  I almost didn’t catch it. He said it quietly. No haggling, no comebacks. Just “okay.” It seemed too easy. But then again, it wasn’t a very complex situation. I didn’t buy his Willy Loman act—behind those placid eyes I saw a snake-brain coiling. It seemed like the smarter someone was, the less there was to say.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Is there something else?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then.” He used his thumb and forefinger to smooth the two halves of his mustache. “I better get going. Seems like I’m always running behind. You know how it is.” He chuckled. “Say, I hate to ask, but can I have this?” He picked up one of my troll dolls, one with wild pink hair. “Haven’t seen this one before. I bet my sister would like it.” He gave an apologetic smile.

&nb
sp; I think my eyebrows were knitting tighter than if he’d asked me a math question.

  “Sure. Fine.”

  “Thanks. Really kind of you.”

  He did a couple of mini-bows to me and shook Miles’s and Sarah’s hands.

  He was at the door with his hand on the knob when he turned around.

  “Oh, sorry, one other thing. Your friend Chance.”

  Suddenly, the entire room froze.

  “What about Chance?”

  The man in the suit shook his head. “Sad news. He was killed in an accident. Drunk driving, I’m sorry to say.”

  I looked at Miles and Sarah. Sarah’s eyes were wide. Miles’s were burning.

  “It’ll be in the paper tomorrow,” the man said. “We were waiting to put the rest of you in the car, but I guess there’s just one victim in this accident, after all.” He scratched his head. “Well, good night.”

  31

  For a moment, I thought Miles would jump across the room and tear the little man limb from limb. The look in his eyes scared the hell out of me.

  But he didn’t move. He just sat there, his eyes burning like coals. I heard the door close. The man with the mustache was gone, and he took all the air in the room with him. Miles just kept staring at the spot where he’d been.

  Chance is dead. That’s what kept running in my mind, over and over. Chance is dead. Chance is dead.

  Miles shivered. I thought he was cold, but then I saw his eyes. They’d dimmed from burning to a low simmer. His shiver was like a lion’s shaking off a hunt. He walked to the window and threw it open. Cold air rushed into the room. It stung. It felt like an exorcism, cleansing the room of that man’s affable malice.

  Miles turned to us and opened his hands.

  “We’re free,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We’re free. We did it. We have our lives back.”

  “But Chance.”

  Miles shook his head.

  “Chance was an adult. He knew what he was doing.”

  “They killed him.”

  “They did. And if it hadn’t been them, it would’ve been the Sandinistas. Or the Taliban. Chance was only happy in the middle of a war zone. I’m surprised he made it this long. You know what would’ve been a tragedy? Chance dying in a Boca Raton retirement home with pea soup on his chin. His only crime was getting Jeremy involved in all this.” Miles rubbed his hands briskly. “Listen to me. We’re moving on with our lives. This is a gift. This is as good as it gets.”