Assault with a Deadly Lie

by Lev Raphael

  “Wait—that actually happened?”

  “Yes, he was in Memphis, but they had enough weapons for Mogadishu, and he was shot and killed. Nick, it’s worse than what Vanessa told us. The War on Drugs, it’s turned into the War on Terrorism—right here, right now. What I’ve been reading makes me sick, because it’s become run-of-the-mill and only makes the news when there’s a lawsuit or somebody important gets targeted by mistake. The standard for evidence to get a warrant now is unbelievably low, warrants are sealed a lot of the time, and cops don’t get prosecuted if they shoot someone, but judges hammer you if you shoot a cop thinking your house is being invaded. The Fourth Amendment is basically dead.”

  Stefan was not given to rants, so a speech like this from him was unprecedented. Listening to these harsh realities was doubly unpalatable in a lovely, calm, blue and gold room filled with philodendrons whose leaves were heart-shaped.

  “You haven’t been checking out any crazy websites, have you?” I had to ask. I didn’t know what being humiliated in jail might have driven him to. I could see him diving into survivalist or libertarian forums, going over the edge after he’d been so profoundly abused. It was abuse to turn shock and awe tactics on an American citizen with no criminal record. SUM’s writer-in-residence, for God’s sake, a professor.

  “Everything I read was legit, not rumors or conspiracy theory. Like the Los Angeles Times. The Denver Post. The New York Times. This isn’t made up, Nick. It’s news. It’s real. Judges sometimes even give the cops more than they ask for, they turn regular warrants into what they call no-knock warrants.”

  “So they could have just stormed in without even saying anything.” It wasn’t a question. I felt into the horror of those hours and imagined them beginning even more violently than they had, without the tiny preamble. In that moment, as crazy as it was, I wished I had bought a gun years ago. But I didn’t say anything. Instead, I reminded Stefan that we had been talking about who might be out to get us, or one of us. I was afraid of going any deeper into how perverted law enforcement agencies and the judicial system had become. Stefan may have gotten his information from legitimate sources, but if he steeped himself in it enough he would likely become a crank, or chronically depressed, or worse, be targeted for surveillance by the FBI or NSA. And I would be swept along with him, one way or another. Marriage was like that.

  And that’s when I told him about the threat at the stop sign when I’d been walking Marco, and how the car might have hit us. Stefan was surprisingly calm. It was as if this information was somehow welcome, was a piece of crucial evidence, though what either one of us could do with it, I didn’t know.

  “I thought the swatting would be it, I didn’t really think anything else would happen, like the phone call, and this nut in the car,” he said. I must have looked blank, because he explained: “That’s what the FBI calls it, ‘swatting,’ when somebody sics a SWAT team on you and it’s fraudulent.”

  “But swatting’s what you do to flies.”

  “Don’t blame me for the term,” Stefan said.

  “Well, I guess that fits. It turns you into an insect.”

  From another yard, I could hear a lawn mower going, and somewhere else nearby, someone was warming up a grill.

  “It definitely wasn’t Bullerschmidt in the car,” I said, trying to put some pieces together, half-closing my eyes to concentrate. “I would recognize his voice.” Which meant that if the dean was involved, he had hired someone to harass us. Was that safe? Wouldn’t he be afraid of being exposed? Unless he had some kind of hold over this guy. Or, worse, more than one person was out to make us suffer.

  “If it happens again,” Stefan said, “you have to get the license plate number.”

  “And do what? Call the police? The same police somebody turned on us?”

  Stefan actually threw up his hands.

  “Cheer me up,” I asked. “Tell me what Father Ryan said.”

  “You can call him Ryan.”

  “I know, I try to. Forget that now. You seemed better when he left, did he give you advice or something? Don’t tell me you felt better hearing about East Germany.”

  “He made me feel safer. He looked me right in the eyes and said very slowly ‘They’re not coming back.’ It was terrific.”

  “But how does he know?”

  “Because one of his brothers is a cop, up north, and Ryan said that since the warrant didn’t pan out, they wouldn’t be able to get a second one, no matter how easy it was to get the first. And even if they could, the publicity would be very bad, and we’d have a much better case against them in court.”

  “Court? I would never sue anybody. It would eat me alive … Tell me again what Father—what Ryan said?”

  Stefan repeated it, and I echoed the words slowly: “They’re not coming back.” They made sense. Whatever happened, we wouldn’t be facing a night of terror again. That would have to be my mantra. It helped, somewhat. I could already feel the muscles in my neck and shoulders tingling and loosening up. That’s when I realized I had been physically bracing myself for hours for another crushing raid at our house, another flood of terror and shame.

  Stefan grimaced, his mouth twisted, and I thought he was in pain, but then he started to laugh. He stopped as if embarrassed.

  “What? What is it?”

  “You’re the one who always thinks of movies,” he said. “Well, I just remembered that scene in True Lies when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s interrogating his wife—”

  “—Jamie Lee Curtis—”

  “—in that huge concrete holding pen or whatever, and his voice is all distorted and crazy-sounding.”

  I was about to ask how that really connected to anything, and then it hit me. I said, “Lucky Bitterman.”

  He nodded. “Lucky Bitterman.”

  Bitterman was a fairly recent import to EAR, a graduate of NYU’s top-ranked Film Studies program, and Lucky wasn’t a nickname; his parents had given him that name because they were inveterate gamblers. Lucky’s expertise was thrillers from Hitchcock to Brian de Palma. The department was beefing up its film courses and he’d been hired with tenure on the strength of James Franco as a reference and several screenplay deals. The hiring committee hadn’t known how few film deals ever turned into actual films and had been snowed by his apparent promise, his New York hauteur, his Franco connection, and his references to “Marty” Scorsese.

  If it sounds hard to believe they could be so gullible and uninformed, a different EAR committee seeking diversity had once hired someone from Indonesia assuming she was Muslim. That was Lucille Mochtar, who had lived across the street from us in a house that was almost a twin of ours. Of course, the committee couldn’t ask her religion, but if they had, she would have told them she was a Christian. It hadn’t occurred to them anyone in Indonesia wasn’t a Muslim. Never underestimate the myopia and narcissism of a group of university professors working together.

  The film deals had collapsed after Bitterman got to Michiganapolis; James Franco had never accepted an invitation to speak at SUM; and our department and Bitterman were equally disappointed in each other. But thirtyish Bitterman stood out even among our generally sour faculty for the steady bile he poured out on pretty much everyone and everything. He invidiously compared our university to NYU. He called all Michiganders “hicks” and thought the state was a cultural wasteland. He hated both me and Stefan and wasn’t afraid to admit it, perhaps because we were also from New York but liked living in Michigan. Unless it was that we were a couple. Whatever the reason, he’d called Stefan a hack writer more than once, and told me my Edith Wharton bibliography was a giant Post-It note. I actually thought that was kind of funny, but didn’t tell him.

  A runner, Bitterman was a lean, handsome, blond, but his mouth was always turned down at the corners, his nose was usually wrinkling in disgust, and seeing him at any time of the year was like being splashed with a pail of scummy pond water.

  Why did I think of him? Because Bitterman, who coul
d not have been born with a more fitting name, had recently published a study of Schwarzenegger’s thrillers called Double Trouble. And even a good review in the New York Times Book Review hadn’t made him more collegial.

  “It might have been him in the car,” I said. “I can’t be sure it wasn’t. I don’t know what he drives. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in the parking lot at Parker Hall.”

  “That’s a good enough place to start,” Stefan said.

  “The parking lot?”

  “No, Bitterman.”

  “And if it’s him?”

  “Well, he likes Schwarzenegger so much, remember the line from Conan the Barbarian about what is best in life?”

  I sure did: “‘To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.’”

  Stefan gave me a high five, and I thought “Shit, this is dangerous territory.” But that didn’t stop me from contemplating sweet and lasting revenge.

  7

  We spent the rest of Thursday watching the Bourne Trilogy again, ordered Domino’s Brooklyn-style pizza for dinner, and killed two bottles of Chianti. We’d enjoyed the films before, but this time I think both of us connected viscerally to Jason Bourne floating in the sea, getting picked up by that Italian trawler, not knowing who he is or why he remembers the few things he does. That was us after the nighttime raid: confused, isolated, lost.

  Stefan watched the three movies in virtual silence, transfixed, but he didn’t seem to experience any catharsis by the end of the evening, because the next morning, Friday, he didn’t want to get out of bed or even talk about investigating Lucky or anyone.

  “Leave me alone.” He actually pulled a pillow over his head as if that would make me and the world disappear. I wasn’t going to argue with somebody who’d been humiliated so profoundly by the cops, so I walked Marco and then had breakfast by myself. I left Stefan a pot of fresh mocha java coffee and hoped the aroma would finally tempt him downstairs. Marco might manage it, too, because sometimes he’d jump onto the bed and nuzzle your face till you had to admit he was there and that he needed your attention. He was a Westie, and the one time I’d watched the Westminster Dog Show, the announcer said of the breed, “Westies will not be ignored.”

  I didn’t like the idea of Stefan glooming in bed, but I had to get to SUM. I could have walked the ten minutes to campus from our house, but I drove because I felt I needed the safety of metal around me. On the way over, I was startled to realize that we hadn’t received any media calls yet. Was it possible the police raid had slipped under the radar? But what about all our neighbors? Wouldn’t somebody have notified the Michiganapolis Tribune or one of the trashy AM stations? Nowadays everybody wanted to be a mini-celebrity and break a story of some kind, or be interviewed about it.

  Campus actually wasn’t quite as lush as usual this spring, because of our drought, but even so, it looked appealing, though it wasn’t remotely as old as Yale or other eastern schools. It’s a vast sprawling place with architecture ranging from sandstone buildings of the 1850s through glass boxes only a few years old, anchored by a core of ugly 1950s buildings of brick construction that was for the most part well landscaped enough to seem inoffensive. I was headed to my office in Parker Hall to consult with my administrative assistant, Celine Robichaux, about fellowship applications. We already had picked someone for this coming year, but we were scheduling people three years out, and there were hundreds of applications.

  I say “we” because Celine was my sounding board as much as Stefan when it came to picking the visiting author. As a Wharton scholar, I was drawn to social satirists, and they both helped me widen my range. Her opinion helped a lot because she was astute and widely read but didn’t feel any investment in the world of authors and academics, and she was quick to spot phonies, snobs, and potential trouble makers. There was one author of literary novels whose books I enjoyed, but Celine had studied the man’s tweets and Facebook posts and this author had bad things to say about almost everyone, especially his students. “We don’t need that kind of PR, Nick.” Likewise, Celine had suggested we pass on an author of literary thrillers who it turned out would only travel from New York with an entourage including his acupuncturist, his nutritionist, and a tennis pro for whenever he felt the need of a game. And she had also nixed an up-and-coming young author of trashy, amusing “bloodbusters” (vampire-killer novels), because the author, Tiffani Lovegrove, evidently took her last name too literally and had some raunchy photos on Tumblr. They would surely have gotten into the local news and caused a PR tornado if she came to our campus.

  I was lucky to have Celine, who was originally from Louisiana, though I didn’t detect much of an accent. She was efficient, imaginative, and cheerful in a department of depressives and malcontents, and kind in a university whose values had become increasingly corporate over the years. She helped balance the downsides of teaching at SUM.

  Celine was the type of person who seems to be bustling even when she’s standing still. I could almost feel the dynamism flowing when our connecting door was open, and definitely experienced that energy whenever she was in my office, radiating from her shoulder-length braids, her glorious smile, and her hugs. Yes, she hugged me—when she was happy or we’d done good work together. I suspected there was muttering about her out there in the sea of cubicles, but they would have to keep it quiet because she was African American and nobody would want to invoke charges of racism.

  I parked behind the dilapidated building that until recently had been filled with myriad cracks in the walls and tribes of bats in the halls. Rumors had circulated for years that it would be torn down for a parking structure since parking was always difficult on campus, so the interior restoration was a huge surprise to almost everyone. EAR, like other departments in the College of Arts and Letters, was not a wealthy program that brought in research dollars or alumni donations, so it had been a Cinderella without a prince. Suddenly it hit me: Could the remodeling have been designed to make people forget about the suicide? Would SUM spend that much money to cover up one person’s death and the bad PR?

  I hadn’t been to my office in weeks, and when the elevator doors opened on the cavernous third floor I saw something new hanging over the long front counter. The department had installed a long electronic message board that read “Welcome to EAR. We’re here to help you!” That flickered off, then came the date, the temperature outside, and the welcome message again. Insane.

  The receptionist was new, and she chirped out, “Hi, how can I be of service?” She was as perky as an old-fashioned weather girl, though she didn’t look like one. Her head was shaved, she had a multicolored complicated “sleeve” tattoo on her right arm, and a pierced lower lip. Her clothes were a page out of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” years ago: lace, chains, gloves.

  “I teach here. I’m Nick Hoffman.”

  She glanced down, obviously consulting a list on her tablet. Was this some kind of new security check?

  Then she grinned up at me. “Yes you do! I’m Estella!” She shot out an arm to shake my hand as if congratulating me—but if that was for being an EAR faculty member or for meeting her, I didn’t know. I did know that Estella was partly there because the renovations had unaccountably not included a wall directory listing where every staffer and faculty member could be found, and it wasn’t clear whether we’d end up with one or not. But she was also planted there to make our department seem friendlier. I guess it could have been worse. We could all have been asked to wear t-shirts with smiley faces on them.

  I skirted the nearest set of cubicles and headed left to my office at the south end of the floor, keeping my eyes down. Almost everyone who used the cubicles now tended to glare at me, envying my privilege, and I hated that. Though not enough to give up my office or even share it with anyone, of course. But I did feel sorry for all the faculty who had lost old fashioned offices and now had to contend with nothing more than carpeted partitions between them and colleagues they either
despised, envied, or both. The fact that the designers had worked in a soothing combination of blue, beige, and gray could not assuage the damage of three dozen faculty members essentially having been evicted, and losing the privilege of privacy and space. I would have hated working in a cubicle under glaring fluorescent lights, hated feeling that everything I did and said was being observed. Even the retrofitting for central air wouldn’t have made enough of a difference. Clearly a recipe for menace simmered beneath the surface, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if somebody freaked out and had to be carted off for observation.

  Celine was in black slacks and a purple cotton Indian-style shirt, and she seemed to have been waiting for me. She rushed forward, grabbed my arm and hustled me into her office which was hung with posters of classic Hitchcock movies like Vertigo and Notorious. Her hazel eyes were wide with concern and I closed the door behind me, waiting for her to tell me that the assault on my house was in the news and ask if I was okay. I felt my throat tighten.

  “Sit down,” she said. “Just now, I got a scary phone call from a blocked number. The voice was male, and very strange. He said, ‘Nick Hoffman is a dead man.’”

  “Strange how?”

  Celine frowned, clearly puzzled that I asked about the voice without reacting to the threat itself. She crossed her arms and hugged herself, trying to remember. “Like the guy in Scream, you know, not natural, but … well, crazy.”

  “Did it sound altered, I mean digitally?”

  “No, not at all. It was somebody real, and somebody freaky. It did not sound like a joke. This guy was as serious as a heart attack. And hard. You know, like some kind of criminal. Are you in trouble with the Mafia?”

  I waved that away. “What did you do?”