Assault with a Deadly Lie

by Lev Raphael

  Without shifting her glance from her Apple laptop, she said quietly, “Go on in, gentlemen.” We did.

  Bullerschmidt had set his desk in front of a windowless wall and so there was no way you could be distracted by a view behind him. His stare was equal parts Medusa and Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, and he did not invite us to sit down. He tore into us immediately: “If you have any consideration for this institution at all, I would like you two to consider a leave of absence next semester. Paid, of course.”

  This was unheard of—we’d just spent the year on sabbatical.

  “Why?” I asked, glad there hadn’t been any attempt to lull us before the assault.

  “It’s obvious,” he rumbled. “Your presence on campus would be a distraction. We have never had faculty disgraced in this manner.”

  “I’d say it’s the police who disgraced themselves. We haven’t been charged with anything and whatever report they got that sent them to our house was obviously phony.”

  Vanessa was right, I thought: someone clearly had it in for us. And that scared me because whoever it was had to be both malign and clever: setting a SWAT team in motion and creating separate hassles for us at the university. What other trouble could they foment?

  I pressed him. “The whole raid was bogus—someone reported a hostage at our house. Pure bullshit. Or didn’t your source on the inside tell you that?”

  He didn’t reply, and I said, “No, probably not. I think somebody is playing you for a fool, Dean Bullerschmidt.”

  He flushed deep red from neck to forehead like some kind of chameleon instantaneously changing its color; it was alarming and grotesque.

  “We cannot allow faculty to behave this way,” he rumbled.

  “You mean be victimized? That’s nothing new around here.” I had never spoken to an administrator like this before, but then I’d never been manhandled by cops, either. I was mad as hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.

  “Admit it,” I said. “You’re just worried about bad PR.” Universities loathe negative press as much as slugs hate salt.

  Bullerschmidt did not concede the point. He just waited. But he’d picked the wrong tactic. Stefan was still so shell-shocked his normal responses weren’t operating. Besides, he was introverted at the best of times, so he couldn’t be bullied by silence. And me, I was enraged by what had happened, and that was quickly burning through my shame the way men in old French novels squander their inheritances on horses and whores.

  So I didn’t just wait. I grinned. Evilly, I hope. And then I spoke up as curtly as I could muster, “If that’s all you had to say to us, an email or a text message would have wasted much less time.” I tapped Stefan’s shoulder and we turned to leave. At the door, I added, “We haven’t done anything wrong, and we’re not taking a leave.”

  It wasn’t as memorable as Douglas MacArthur’s “I shall return” in World War II, but it seemed to rally Stefan, who looked at me with something less than zombie indifference. Bullerschmidt wasn’t letting go just yet, though.

  “There’s something else we have to discuss,” he said darkly. “That book.” He made it sound like something loathsome, and both of us knew he meant Stefan’s work-in-progress.

  A year ago, Stefan had caught a student of his, Casey Silver, committing plagiarism on one of his papers. It was grossly obvious: a steal of several paragraphs from an essay in The New Yorker; how could he have thought Stefan would miss it? He asked Casey to rewrite it, which was a very generous response, because most professors would have just given the kid a zero on the paper or even flunked him for the whole course. Stefan thought asking for a rewrite would resolve the situation, but it didn’t, or not in the way he expected. It turned out that Casey had suffered extreme bullying in high school, and being confronted even mildly about plagiarism had apparently triggered a cataclysmic shame spiral. The poor boy hanged himself. In Parker Hall, no less. From an exposed pipe running across the ceiling in the building’s lobby.

  Stefan felt responsible, though I tried as hard as I could to convince him he couldn’t have known it would happen. His sabbatical had been coming up and instead of traveling, he decided to stay home and cope with his trauma by doing what he did best: writing a book. When it was still only a partial draft, his new agent quickly got him a contract for Fieldwork in the Land of Grief (which Stefan and I usually referred to as Fieldwork). Bullying, after all, was a hot topic. Signing the big-bucks contract made the local news and enraged Casey’s family who lobbied the administration to put the kibosh on Stefan’s project. Their pressure pushed SUM’s president and provost both to personally appeal to Stefan to give it up, but he refused.

  “You cannot keep writing that book,” the dean rumbled now as if trying to sound as magisterial as Winston Churchill. “You cannot publish that book. It’s offensive.”

  Stefan stepped forward, fully present now, chin up. “If I drop this project, I will never understand what happened and what it means.”

  “You’re putting your personal feelings ahead of the family of that unfortunate young man, and ahead of the reputation of this noble university.” Wow, I thought, that sounded like something the dean had practiced for a press release or an interview.

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” Stefan said. “But you can’t censor faculty members and tell us what kind of books we can write.”

  Bullerschmidt nodded sourly as if he’d imagined Stefan using just those words. “I will not be held responsible for the consequences of your recklessness,” he said. “Remember that. Whatever happens, I warned you. We’ve all warned you.”

  I was stunned by this exchange, and grabbed Stefan’s arm to pull him out of there. But before we left, the dean stood, picked up a tooled-leather wastepaper basket and spit heavily into it. That’s what he thought of us.

  On the way to our car, Stefan was muttering to himself, but I didn’t ask him to speak up. Driving home, I started to fulminate. “He’s a dictator!”

  Stefan kept his thoughts to himself, and I wondered if he’d been intimidated by the dean. I knew that Fieldwork wasn’t all that far along; maybe giving it up wouldn’t be a major sacrifice, but how could I be sure? Stefan always showed me his books while he worked on them, but he’d been keeping this one so private it felt like he was either ashamed of it or he was afraid I wouldn’t like it, which seemed peculiar.

  “Have you ever thought that writing this book might be a mistake?” I asked.

  “You’re taking the dean’s side?” he snapped.

  “No, nothing like that. It’s just …” I hesitated. “Is it right to profit from someone’s suffering?”

  Stefan shook his head defiantly. “It’s my book. I have to write it.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. He was a writer, I was only a bibliographer.

  Traffic back from campus was nonexistent, since the tens of thousands of students were gone now that classes had ended, and we were home in less than five minutes. I was fired up now by more than just the coffee I’d been drinking for hours. I was outraged. We loosened our ties, took off our jackets, let Marco out in the backyard and sat in the gazebo watching him chase squirrels. We’d had the yard redone when Stefan’s memoir started selling like crazy and now it was much more private and lush. The oaks and maples had an understory of hemlocks and purple or white azaleas along the back fence, and we’d planted wildly fragrant viburnums along the sides of the yard.

  I was relieved to see that Stefan’s color was starting to return and he seemed much less withdrawn. It probably helped being outdoors and being safe at home.

  Safe? How safe were we really now? I wasn’t paranoid. Someone, somewhere was plotting against us. I didn’t say any of this aloud, I didn’t want to spoil the moment, because Stefan was more present each minute he sat there. I was sure that Bullerschmidt’s high-handedness had penetrated his fog, and maybe my speechifying had, too.

  “You know, there’s nothing he can do to us,” I said fiercely. “We have tenure and they
can only take it away and fire us for things like moral turpitude, or intellectual dishonesty. Having a SWAT team as house guests doesn’t fit either of those categories.”

  Stefan almost smiled. “I can’t believe he accused us of not caring about SUM.” He shook his head. “Twice, really. Well, me twice and you once.”

  “It was slimy. But he’d say anything to dump us, or dump the problem he thinks we represent.”

  Stefan frowned as if he didn’t quite follow, and I’m not entirely sure I knew what I meant, but that was okay. He surprised me by saying, “Maybe we should have some lunch. We can’t just keep eating donuts. I can’t, anyway.”

  I checked my watch and it was close to noon. “Let me take Marco for a short walk before we have lunch.” I went into the garage to get the leash, shovel, and plastic bag ready, then rounded up Marco and headed out, feeling oddly braver for having stood up to the dean. And somehow, being with Marco seemed so completely normal as we made our way to the small neighborhood park a few blocks off that I didn’t feel as self-conscious as I’d thought I would.

  I was about to cross at the corner where there was a stop sign, when a car screeched to a stop only a few feet from us. I jerked Marco back from the road, almost falling as I did so. He yelped at being pulled so sharply and I crouched down to comfort him. That’s when I heard a car window glide down and the driver say, “Walk faster, or next time, I’ll hit you.”

  He sped off so quickly that I wasn’t able to get his license plate or focus well on the car. I hadn’t seen his face, but I registered the menace in his voice.

  This was no joke. And I was frozen. Those squealing brakes were like a broken neon sign, flashing erratically in my head.

  Less than twelve hours after the raid, I was once again terrified for my life. He could have run me and Marco over. I’ve never fainted in my life before, but I came very close to it right then. I forced myself to keep walking, made it to the little neighborhood park planted with enormous weeping willows, sat down on one of the benches, with Marco at my feet. I was stunned by what had just happened, and by knowing I would have to tell Stefan.

  5

  Even in my renewed state of shock, the small park of just about two acres worked on me like a massage, easing the tension out of my body, clearing my mind. A light breeze made the willow fronds sway as languidly as if they were underwater plants. On his retractable leash, Marco wandered and sniffed just as much as I’d let him. This was always a quiet spot because it had been donated to the city years ago by a local real estate millionaire, with the specification that it never have any slides, swings, jungle gym, sandbox or anything like that. Surrounded by an elaborate cast iron black fence, and with only one entrance, it was meant to be a place of contemplation, not a playground. Teens didn’t loiter there at night because it was “boring,” and if people did bring their children during the day, they were usually in strollers and were wheeled away as quickly as possible if they started to fuss or cry.

  The little park had never felt so much like a refuge before. Sitting there alone, I thought that this was the kind of time when people say “What next, what could possibly happen next?” and someone superstitious tells them to be quiet. But I couldn’t shush myself. I did wonder what else Fate had in store for me after my last handful of years of quiet achievement and contentment. Was my luck changing back again?

  I had entered a department of misfits, malcontents, and misanthropes under a cloud: I was a “spousal hire.” That means that EAR had wanted to hire Stefan, not me, and had to scramble to create a position for me to make sure Stefan accepted SUM’s offer. As is usually the case, the circumstances were held against me in a group of professional divas and detractors. Not that the department needed any more reasons to dislike me, or even the idea of me. I wasn’t respected for having authored a secondary bibliography of Edith Wharton, despite all the work that went into the five-year project. I’d read everything ever written about Wharton—whether books, articles, or reviews—and summarized it so that students and scholars had all of Wharton scholarship for over a century laid out for them in one fat book. If I’d have written anything that used the latest impenetrable critical jargon, something that might sell only a handful of copies, I would have been considered at least upto-date by my colleagues. But my book was too practical a work, too useful; bibliographies were as unglamorous and old-fashioned to most academics as spittoons.

  My cousin Sharon worked at Columbia University as a research librarian, and she’d once quipped, “If Tolstoy had been a professor, he would have said that every unhappy department is unhappy in its own way.” The Department of English, American Studies, and Rhetoric owed its sniping and bitterness to a history of division: The faculty teaching rhetoric (basic composition) had been forced on English and American Studies when the Department of Rhetoric was dissolved in a budget-cutting move. Nobody wanted the Rhetoric refugees, who were considered second-class academics and treated like smelly drunken guests at a wedding. Force people to work together, share a building, serve on committees, and you end up with volcanic animosities building up pressure year after year.

  And I was soon derided, even suspected, because I truly enjoyed teaching basic writing well before I ever taught literature classes like an Edith Wharton seminar and The American Crime Novel. Teaching writing skills demanded tremendous dedication and time, and most faculty preferred to be as untrammeled as possible. To them, tenured positions meant freedom to spend as many hours away from campus and their students as possible. But there was more working against me: once I’d gotten drawn into murder investigations, I had become a cross between a pariah and a joke.

  Then the bequest by my former student had totally sealed my fate. The small fortune he left to the department had severe restrictions on it: the money would go to inviting an author to teach and speak there once a year; I was to be in charge of this new lecture series; and it wasn’t named after the student, but after me. More surprisingly, the money would pass to a leukemia charity if I either died or left the university. If EAR wanted the money, they had to accept my rise in status, and my newfound independence from Stefan, and even the rest of the department. I suddenly had my own little bailiwick: The Nick Hoffman Fellowship. No, it was more than that, it was an oasis in a desert of academic insanity.

  If I’d been disliked before, now I was hated. Despite that, I was courted, because of course everyone had their favorite candidate for the yearly visitor, given that the stipend was $25,000 and the work wasn’t onerous. Fellows had to give a lecture, a reading, teach some workshops, and remain in residence for only one month. So I was sought after even by people who felt it was demeaning to try to win me over. They resented my new importance, and that I’d been given promotion to full professor by the dean (though it was only because of the fellowship and the university wanting me to look better on paper). I even had my own administrative assistant to run the little program, and a larger office than before. Hell, larger wasn’t as important to me as being out of Parker Hall’s basement, which I’d been exiled to years ago.

  The fact that I had any real office was the coup de grace for my enemies. A new initiative at the university was dedicated to making all the departments more “open,” and in ours, that had translated into two floors of Parker being gutted and remodeled last summer, right before Stefan and I took our sabbaticals together. Some of what they had done was practical: every individual office had a fire extinguisher because the building was so old and had long been considered a fire trap. But that was the most positive change. Other renovations were insidious, though on the brighter side, it didn’t look as much like the setting for a slasher film as before.

  Why the changes in our building? Because at SUM, appearances were what counted, not realities. The university was constantly reinventing itself rhetorically, coming up with new slogans like “We Care”—seriously! These were always the result of endless deliberations in specially constituted committees with impressive-sounding names, and later we
re rolled out through a new mission statement. It was pomposity masquerading as thoughtfulness, and typically meant about as much as the campaign buttons of the losing party the day after a national election.

  Universities were not just political in their infighting, but also worked in similarly hierarchical ways that bred resentment. And people were jealous to the point of mild hysteria about their perks, so the redesign of EAR’s two floors hit the department like the barbarians sacking Rome. Except for the administrators who were in their own suite, Stefan as writer-in-residence, and little old me and my administrative assistant, everyone else now had the cubicles for office space that you might find in a call center in India. Bathrooms, meeting rooms, the supply room, mail room, and copy room were one floor down along with more cubicles for graduate assistants and temporary faculty. Full-timers seeking privacy or relief from the din in the department sometimes lurked down there like unpopular kids at a birthday party, since they were less likely to be found. Or they just stayed away entirely.

  So, picture the main floor of the department as an enormous large rectangle. Three actual offices with doors had been carved out on the short sides, each office about ten feet by twenty feet. Not palatial, but the old fifteen-foot ceilings and enormous windows made them seem bigger than they were. And the architects had kept some original, heavy oak doors that were twelve feet high and had old-fashioned transoms. On the north end the chair and the associate chair had their offices, with one between them shared by their secretaries, and all three of those offices were connected.

  The elevator was in the middle of the long, eastern side of the building with staircases flanking it. I avoided the stairs because they were very old and the metal treads echoed abominably, as if you were in a hellish high school.