Assault with a Deadly Lie

by Lev Raphael

  My office was all the way across the building on the south end, and it was connected with my assistant’s. Stefan’s office was on the other side of hers, but without a connecting door to hers. Between these triads was a yawning space studded with four groups of six cubicles; each group separated by what I guess you’d call a corridor four or five feet wide. The partitions separating faculty were only four feet high and privacy was nonexistent. In the actual offices, the high ceilings made for a feeling of openness, whereas here in what some people called “The Pit,” they turned everything sterile. Even worse, the windows facing the Pit had been redone, and now had electronic blinds which were light-sensitive and adjusted themselves or closed on their own schedule. Nobody on-site could control them.

  The set-up was a shock the first time I saw it, and the shock hadn’t faded much over the course of my sabbatical year. I suppose it could have been worse, and there could have just been rows of desks and chairs like some old-time typing pool. One floor down, the only rooms with doors were for supplies, the photocopier, and the mailroom directly under my side of the building, and meeting rooms directly opposite. The rest of that floor was also set up entirely as open space with cubicles, mingling graduate assistants and temporary faculty. Temporary, of course, is an odd term to use for people who keep getting hired every year—but that’s the way of a university. Never call things what they really are.

  The surprising architectural changes in Parker Hall had been made over a summer, the university’s typical policy when doing anything unpopular or possibly controversial. The student newspaper was published infrequently, people weren’t around, and it was the best time to be sneaky. Returning faculty had been stunned. The offices of the Department of EAR, which had been stuck in the early nineteenth century, now looked painfully up-to-date: an anonymous business staffed by drones who couldn’t talk behind people’s backs anymore because the acoustics allowed even whispers to carry many partitions away.

  My own office was nothing extraordinary, but it was of course a real office, not a cubicle, and spacious enough. People have killed for less, though, and in a department that was all knives and very little steak, I was now an even easier target than I’d ever been. Colleagues congratulated me, but it was fake. They thought I didn’t deserve the step up (or the view), and they hoped I’d fail or bring scandal upon myself in some way that would invalidate the gift and get me ousted somehow. If the department were a movie, I would have been the guy holed up in a boarded-up house surrounded by flesh-eating ghouls.

  I even sensed resentment from the new chair, a former friend, Juno Dromgoole. Once foul-mouthed and excessive, a stormy cross between Bette Midler and Tina Turner who dressed with excessive panache, the professor of Canadian Studies had toned herself way down. She was still as haughty as ever, but now with the aloof distance of a dowager empress. Juno had liked and teased me before, but now she seemed to suspect me. Of what? Wanting her job?

  It was a very strange reorganization in a department that had long felt under siege. Stefan and I had been teaching there for over fifteen years and had seen the department shrink as class sizes went up. When senior professors retired, their positions weren’t filled, but temporary professors—adjuncts—were hired to teach their courses at a quarter of the cost. Fiction writing classes that once had fifteen students went to twenty, then twenty-five, and now were at thirty on the way to thirty-five. Stefan said you couldn’t possibly teach writing well with a class that big, but there was nothing he could do about it. SUM wanted fewer full-time faculty everywhere and “efficiency” in departments that weren’t bringing in outside funding through grants. Read: do more with less.

  Marco was nuzzling my leg, which meant he was done with my contemplation, so I headed home with him, reluctantly, looking around me for anything suspicious all the way back home. And when I could see our house a block away, it felt painfully exposed somehow, as if this time the SWAT team was about to descend on ropes from helicopters. The image was so fiercely real, it could have been a hallucination, and for a moment I had an urge to turn and run.

  I didn’t need to force myself to keep going, though, because Marco was pulling me home. The last thing I expected when I approached our driveway was laughter, but I could hear it funneling out from the kitchen window, and I knew we had a visitor, because there was only one person who made Stefan laugh that hard: Father Ryan Burke.

  I let myself in and Marco raced to the kitchen for water. Father Ryan was at the counter with a mug of coffee, out of his “clericals,” in skinny jeans and a black polo shirt, and he beamed at me. Stefan must have called him while I was gone and he’d walked over from St. Jude, and I was glad Stefan had been forced by Bullerschmidt’s call to get dressed, because it made the day seem slightly more normal. We had one neighbor who would amble down to his mailbox in his robe and slippers at all times of the day and I dreaded becoming as heedless of time and place as that.

  “Nick, I’m very sorry about your trouble.”

  “Thanks, Father Ryan.” He insisted on us just using his first name, even when he was wearing his collar, but I wasn’t comfortable with that yet.

  “It’s shameful. Not my idea of America.”

  He was not my idea of a priest. Tall and slim, he had the dark eyes, curly black hair, angular jaw and high cheekbones of a Romantic poet. Or my image of one, anyway. He was thirtyish, easy-going, and surprisingly progressive, with a resonant mellifluous voice you’d expect from a radio announcer. Stefan said his homilies were terrific, and I could believe that. Ryan was also a rock climber, a marksman, an avid hiker, and Stefan said that he brought those experiences into what he shared with his parishioners.

  Father Ryan had guided Stefan through his long conversion process and had become a friend. At first I was jealous of the time they spent together, but gradually I saw how happy Stefan was to be converting, how deeply contented, and I let go. I grew grateful that Father Ryan had initially sought Stefan out with questions about publishing a book of his own and their conversations had unexpectedly led Stefan to start attending Mass, looking for a spiritual center in his life. His career at that point was a disaster, and he’d had enough dark nights of the soul to fill a calendar. As the mystics put it, he’d been “hollowed out” by suffering. And then one afternoon, at Mass, as Stefan described it, he knew that this was going to be his new home. “I felt it as sure as the blood was moving through my veins,” he reported later.

  We talked a bit now, Ryan encouraging us to take a vacation or do something that would heal the injury. “The summer’s barely started. Do something, go somewhere. Take a cruise.”

  Stefan shook his head. “There isn’t any scenery in the world that would make up for the raid and how they treated us.”

  Ryan nodded, taking it in the way a smart, warm-hearted therapist might, not offering any bromides. And I was glad he didn’t quote any Fathers of the Church at me, or talk about loving one’s enemy. I had gotten used to Stefan relying on him, on them calling each other “brother,” on Stefan going to Mass more than once a week, but Stefan’s Catholicism was still new enough for me to feel uneasy at times about his midlife conversion and everything that went with it. Hearing them talk about Christ or “God’s love” made me uncomfortable, since I’d been raised Jewish, and Jesus and the New Testament had always been terra incognita for me.

  I knew there was no danger of Stefan becoming an ideologue, since he didn’t have the personality for it, but now that he was a Roman Catholic, I felt he was connected to some very crazy people—at least distantly. Like all the bishops who had tried to muzzle American nuns for speaking out on social issues like marriage equality. And even conservatives at the church he attended, who were stuck in some 1950s version of their religion and seemed uncomfortable with the new pope’s openness.

  Father Ryan checked his watch, got up to give Stefan a hug, said “Don’t forget to call me,” and headed for the front door with his typical loping, athletic stride. He and Stefan sometimes
played racquetball, and he usually won. I followed him out, and before he left, Ryan said intensely, “I hope they nail the bastard who screwed you guys over.” I laughed. His talking like a real person was something Stefan had been enjoying for a long time, but it always startled me. I also admired the way he listened, with an intensity that felt musical, as if he were the accompanist in a violin sonata. Even his silence was participation.

  Stefan was looking less crushed when I returned to the kitchen.

  “Call him about what?” I asked.

  “Whatever.”

  He looked almost embarrassed, so I asked, “Did Ryan help?” I asked. Between us, I could use the priest’s first name without discomfort.

  “For sure. He’s always good to talk to. He was telling me about someone at church who grew up in East Germany before the Wall came down, and how she’d had the secret police drag her father away. He never came back.”

  “And that made you laugh?”

  “No, what was funny was jokes they used to tell in East Germany.” Before I could ask him to repeat some, he said, “You know, Vanessa was right. We have to start thinking about who could be behind the raid, who hates us enough to set something like that in motion.”

  “Okay. Deal. Ready for lunch? We have some of that casserole left.”

  Marco knew the word “lunch” and so we had to get him his kibble first. Once Marco was fed, pottied, and napping, Stefan broke out some of our favorite Belgian beer, Duvel. I put the “gourmet” mac ’n’ cheese (made with penne riggate and a carrot/orange puree) in the microwave. I set the table and put out a pad and pen for each of us as if we were lawyers or diplomats at a conference. The only thing missing was a bottle of Appolinaris or some other European water for each of us.

  When we were eating and the beers were half-downed, I said, “Doesn’t Duvel mean Devil in Flemish? That’s appropriate. Only a fiend would send a SWAT team for no reason.”

  Stefan put down his fork. “No, it has to be a good reason. Somebody who really hates us, wants us to suffer, maybe even go to prison.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe they just wanted to humiliate us. Or you.” Stefan turned red. “Or me,” I added uncertainly, feeling extra hungry. I guess fear and dread can do that. We ate in silence for a while. “I guess that’s a good enough reason if you’re unbalanced,” I said.

  “Bullerschmidt,” Stefan finally brought out, as if turning over winning cards in baccarat. “It’s obvious. He would have had us arrested in his office if he had the power to do it. He’s vicious and he hates us.”

  That was no hyperbole. It wasn’t just that my involvement in crime had made SUM look bad to the general public, or that Stefan’s new book had the administration furious. Stefan and I had once, in a very unproductive and ill-advised visit to his home, basically accused the dean of murdering a new faculty member. That had been almost a decade ago, but he was the kind of man who didn’t just nurse a grudge, he moved it into a private clinic.

  “And—” Stefan added slowly. “How did he know about the police raid so quickly? Even the way he talked to us, it felt planned, like a little speech he practiced. Didn’t you think so? He wasn’t shocked, or even startled.”

  I nodded.

  “So … what if he didn’t have an informant inside the police, what if he’s the one who started it? I just can’t figure out who his target was, you or me …”

  “Stefan, if either one of us gets hurt, so does the other. We both suffer.” I sipped some beer and thought the dean was a very likely candidate, and someone sadistic enough to wait, plan, and strike unexpectedly. “But if this thing blows up and there’s bad publicity, it doesn’t make SUM look good.”

  “He’s a bully. He’s the Mother of All Bullies. He wouldn’t care. He’s beyond caring. He’s like somebody in a Greek tragedy who wants revenge no matter what.”

  It fit. We’d seen Bullerschmidt intimidate his wife and faculty members, and we’d been on the receiving end of his steamrolling more than once, even before that time we confronted him in his home with our half-formed questions that sounded like accusations.

  I had been listing pros and cons of the dean as a suspect, but I put my pen down. “This cannot be happening to us. Everything was perfect. You finally had a best seller. I finally got promoted to full professor and I have my own little power base in the department, and now we’re like conspiracy theorists. This whole thing is unhinged.”

  Stefan leaned forward. “Nick. It’s not a theory. It’s real. Our house being invaded, me being dragged off to jail, that was real, that was our life, not somebody else’s, not a book or a thriller. That’s our life now, whether you like it or not. And it could be like this for a long time, how can we assume otherwise?”

  The landline rang and we both froze, neither one of us moving to answer the call. We let the recorded message come on, and then a grotesque, ominous, echoing voice—clearly the product of a digital voice changer—filled the kitchen: “We’re not done with you yet.”

  Marco started to howl.

  6

  Stefan shushed Marco and looked at me, eyes bleak and angry. The call had been brief, but the sound of that voice was as dismal as the stench of burning plastic, and I felt my mouth go dry.

  Marco headed out of the kitchen, possibly searching for someplace saner and quieter. It crossed my mind then to say to Stefan that we should quit our jobs, sell the house and move as far away from Michigan as possible. We’d have to downsize, but we’d be free of this insanity. From a golden routine, we had gone to base unpredictability.

  Vanessa was right: we were privileged white men who had never been treated the way millions of less fortunate Americans were treated all the time. Academia made our lives even more remote from reality. It wasn’t just a shock being manhandled and brutalized; it was as if we had been radically ripped from our own lives and dumped into an alternate reality.

  “Son of a bitch,” Stefan said, and it was the second time in an hour I’d heard him curse in a way he never did. I didn’t object, but it bothered me that he didn’t sound like himself.

  “We need an unlisted number,” I muttered, feeling a surge of helplessness, because I knew that nothing would make us safe, not even cancelling our landline. Nothing really could, not flight, not drugs. What was going to happen next? Hacking our email accounts? I thought of the terrible sad observation in Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays: “In the whole world there was not enough sedation as there was instantaneous peril.”

  Stefan rose and headed for the phone. “Hitting star fifty-seven gets you the number that called, right?”

  “Forget it, Stefan. Knowing the number won’t matter. Anybody taking the trouble to disguise their voice like that would make sure you couldn’t track them. It’s like murderers using gloves. Whoever called us would have used a burner phone, or a payphone if they could find one, or a soft phone.”

  Stefan sat back down heavily, pushed his plate away and finished his beer without any sign of enjoyment. “What the hell is a soft phone?”

  “I don’t know how it works exactly, but it’s software so you can phone from your computer.”

  “But all of that can be traced somehow!”

  “Only if you have a subpoena, or if you’re the government and you don’t need one.”

  “Great.”

  “Still think it’s Bullerschmidt?”

  Stefan frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s malevolent, sure, but is he tech-savvy enough?” I answered my own question before Stefan could even consider it. “He wouldn’t have to be, you can probably get one of those voice things on Amazon. And who knows what else.”

  “Or he hired someone.”

  I felt momentarily ashamed of myself at how ugly our speculation was. But then what we were saying about the dean wasn’t uglier than what had happened to us.

  “Couldn’t we hire someone?” I asked.

  “You mean a bodyguard?” Stefan squinted as if seeing an ex-Marine in a black Brion
i suit standing in the corner of our kitchen.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure what I was thinking.” I might have meant an assassin, but that never turned out well, in movies or in real life. Besides, we didn’t have a definite target.

  Stefan abruptly pushed back from the table and said, “Let’s go out to the sunroom.” He didn’t even suggest cleaning up from our lunch, which was a sure sign he was distraught. Stefan wasn’t obsessive-compulsive, but he was orderly, and leaving a mess behind was totally unlike him.

  Marco was already there, curled up behind one of the well-stuffed bamboo-framed blue chairs and didn’t even stir when we walked in and sat on the couch. I thought briefly of Vanessa’s warning to talk outside, but I needed to be indoors, as little protection as that might be.

  “I know I said I wanted to shoot people,” Stefan brought out quietly. “But even if I did, it wouldn’t change anything, it wouldn’t help. There’s no such thing as closure after last night.”

  “Well, maybe there’s justice. Or revenge.”

  “The country’s changed. Vanessa’s right. Since the raid, I’ve been reading online about SWAT teams, and they’ve taken over the country. They’re supposed to suppress violence, but they only end up causing more of it.”

  We had talked before about how too many Americans had lost their minds after 9/11 and the country had drifted closer and closer to being a national security state. How the president was somehow always referred to as the country’s commander-in-chief even though he was constitutionally only that for the armed forces. How military men and woman and military equipment were used as background for photo ops and speeches.

  I asked, “What do you mean they cause violence?”

  He shook his head wearily. “The team shows up, regular people freak out, think they’re being attacked by thieves. They’re asleep, they’re surprised, they don’t hear anyone say the word ‘police,’ they panic. And even drug dealers can think they’re being hit by other drug dealers. If anyone has a gun, they’ll go for it, and sometimes use it. Either way, they’re the ones who get shot, most of the time. Cops even use SWAT teams for things like insurance fraud. Some dermatologist cheating Medicare had a small army take him down.”