Assault with a Deadly Lie

by Lev Raphael

  “I called campus police, of course, but they said there wasn’t anything they could do if the call was blocked. They may send somebody over, but they didn’t sound too interested. But I’m interested. Nick, is something going on?” Before I could answer, she said, “I’ve been compiling a list of authors who got nasty when we rejected them. I figured one of them might have been the caller.”

  I tried not to look relieved. I liked Celine too much to have to lie to her outright, and the idea of another threatening phone call so soon after the first one had unnerved me so much I didn’t think I could keep it together if we got anywhere near the truth. I could already feel sweat dripping down between my shoulder blades, making my polo shirt stick to my back. Bullerschmidt had warned us yesterday, and look what had happened already.

  “The list is on your desk,” she said, and I stood and went through to my office, Celine following. It was an unremarkable space except for that high ceiling, large windows, and the view of lush lawns, sugar maples, and blue sky. For much of the year, you could barely see any buildings because the foliage was so dense, and so I’d had the room painted a soft green when I moved in, and hung posters and framed prints of landscapes by Seurat to capture the soothing feeling of all that verdure.

  The disgruntled author list was anything but reflective of calm. I sat down and stared. “This many?” There were two pages of names, along with salient excerpts from their emails or text messages.

  Celine demurred. “It’s the same people twice, but the second page is organized by threat level.” She wasn’t kidding. “From low to high.”

  The Nick Hoffman Fellowship was a hot ticket. The stipend was generous, and the month on campus offered a kind of writer’s retreat because the university had let us use the guest wing of the president’s Georgian-style house. The work load wasn’t tough, but the response from some people we’d rejected was. A few of them had told me off, while others had sworn they’d get back at me somehow. Some of the authors in each group shot abuse at me, typically authors who had academic appointments. I’d been called “blind,” “provincial,” “arrogant,” and a host of nastier adjectives by writers who had very high opinions of themselves and obviously thought we had no right to reject their applications. The level of their invective was pretty jejune; I would have expected better insults from writers.

  They didn’t know it, but in almost every case, the angry response was from someone I had already figured out would not be good to work with, for students or faculty. I didn’t just read authors’ work. Celine found me interviews, blogs, tweets, anything pertinent they had on Tumblr and Facebook, and public readings from YouTube. It usually wasn’t hard to spot the bores, the potential troublemakers, the narcissists, even the drunks. When there was some doubt, we’d also look at their student ratings online if they were teaching.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I don’t see Ivan the Terrible on here.”

  Celine finally smiled.

  Ivan Popov was a boozy Bulgarian playwright at one of the smaller state campuses in Michigan who ran a summer creative writing workshop in his native Sofia. He was an irascible, self-important clown, a type that was too typical in academe. Despite the miserable pay at his Bulgarian workshop, and the lousy housing and food, academic writers were dying to get invited since they believed that any European teaching post upped their status. Popov preyed on their vanity, and was notorious for demeaning them when they got there, as well as working them too hard. When it came to our fellowship, he had probably figured being a Michigan author gave him an advantage, so being rejected had enraged him. Popov had actually emailed me, “You’ll never see Sofia!” Meaning, I’d never be invited to teach there in his program. As threats go, it was actually funny, since Bulgaria’s capital city hadn’t ever been on my travel wish list, but he seemed to think it was a death sentence. When I ran into him at a conference afterwards, he’d smirked at me and shook his head as ominously as if he’d managed to alert Bulgarian customs agents to arrest me if I ever dared to fly there on my own.

  Celine sat opposite me, her smile fading. “Have you gotten any calls like this at home?” she asked, eyes tight.

  I changed the subject: “What am I supposed to do with this list? They’re all cranks in one way or another. But you were the one who got the phone call. Did you get any sense that one of these people was the caller?”

  “I’m not psychic,” she said wryly. Celine shook her head and turned her amethyst and diamond engagement ring around and around with three fingers of her right hand. That’s what she always did when she was frustrated or annoyed. The list was a kind of blind alley. Phone calls at the office were uncommon. Most communication about faculty matters came via email. Students emailed, too. Which made me think it wasn’t an author.

  “What are you thinking?” Celine asked, studying my face.

  “Why did you mention Scream?”

  She shrugged. “I guess it’s the first thing that popped into my mind. You know, sick phone calls, stalking.”

  “You think this is a stalker?” Even if I omitted the SWAT team, I couldn’t tell her about the incident at the stop sign and the phone call at our house. Or that I suspected Lucky Bitterman—even though she knew about his antagonism toward me and Stefan—because he couldn’t have applied for the fellowship. It wouldn’t make sense, and she might start asking questions of her own. I had no idea who in town might know about the other night’s raid, despite it apparently not having gotten into the news.

  And I realized I hadn’t thought to note the time of the phone call at home yesterday, so asking her when she’d taken the phone call here in her office wouldn’t make a difference. Or would it?

  “Isn’t this how things would start?” Celine mused. “First a phone call, then some kind of attack, then—”

  We both looked up at the same time at the sound of a resonant knock on my thick office door, which opened before either of us said “Come in.” It was my old nemesis, Detective Valley, a campus police officer who disliked all faculty members, especially ones like me who got involved in crime and got in his way.

  “Professor,” he said coldly.

  “Detective.”

  Celine glanced back and forth between us and then rose to leave, but Valley stopped her with a sharp, “No. You I talk to first.” He escorted her into her office and closed the door. With the door shut, I could let go, and I closed my eyes, wondering if I was about to get the shakes. The call was shocking enough, but being face-to-face with Valley brought back ugly memories of past confrontations. I had not run into him in six years, and he looked very different. He’d been a tall, lanky, geeky man in suits that looked like they were bought at a consignment shop and had been badly altered, if at all. He was still tall, but he’d gained enough weight or maybe even muscle to look almost threatening—that is, beyond the general intimidation effect that all cops had always seemed to have on me.

  Growing up in New York and knowing that the police tended to miss their shots two out of three times had been the kind of fact that made me wary of them, uniformed or not. But it predated knowing those statistics: for some reason, I’d always disliked cops from a very young age, the way some kids are scared of clowns. When I was little, and my mother told me that if I ever got lost and couldn’t find her or my father, I should go straight to a policeman, I had burst into tears. It must have been a kind of premonition of the trouble that was waiting for me at SUM. And now, after the night we’d been handcuffed and Stefan dragged off, I never wanted to be in the same room again with any kind of cop.

  Celine’s door opened and Valley closed it brusquely, so that it slammed, and he came to sit down. Crossing his legs and leaning back as if in a captain’s chair, he looked like he meant to stay a long time, whether I wanted him there or not.

  “You’re a big shot now,” he said coldly, eyeing the crammed oak bookcases, the leather desk accessories, and the view as if they all disgusted him. I could have been a French aristocrat facing Robespierr
e.

  I didn’t take the bait.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Why are you attracting crank callers and a SWAT team?” Elbows on the chair arms, he tented his fingers, enjoyed my shock.

  8

  For a moment, it was like having an out-of-body experience and I could see the two of us sitting in my office, me trapped, him having pounced.

  I felt weirdly, calmly distant from the scene, noting the surprisingly sharp cut of his suit, the gray above his ears that was starting to soften the coppery red of his hair. Valley waited for me to say something, trying to intimidate me further by his contemptuous silence. In his mind, professors were miscreants always on the brink of bad behavior, not much better than loutish students who ran wild if SUM teams won a major game and rioted if we lost.

  I was dying to turn from the desk and get a Tassimo disc from the credenza behind me and make myself a cup of coffee (without asking if he wanted one, too), anything to not have to look at that smug, angry face. But I wasn’t going to let him see how rattled I was that he knew about the cops hitting our house, and turning away would surely prove I needed a time out.

  “You look good,” I said.

  He squinted so hard his eyes must have hurt. “What?”

  “You’re working out, aren’t you? You must be. Your delts are definitely bigger. That suit does not look like the shoulders are padded.”

  Now he was the one off-balance, since I had never complimented him before, and with some men, saying anything to them about their bodies feels invasive and threatening, whether you were gay or not. I had correctly guessed he was one of them, because he looked away, distressed or discomfited. That made me even more determined not to give any ground. I wasn’t the same person he had interrogated years ago. I was a full professor and my name was attached to a prestigious fellowship. I wouldn’t call myself a big shot, but I wasn’t a nobody, either. This wasn’t about speaking truth to power, it was about not being intimidated.

  To my delight, Valley finally caved. “What do you know about this phone call?”

  “Just what my assistant told me.”

  He nodded skeptically, his narrow chin like a weapon. “Have you been getting other calls here?”

  “None.” That was true, but only part of the truth, of course. And if he asked about other calls anywhere else, I would have to lie.

  “Why would someone be threatening you?”

  I explained the possibility of a rejected writer: “Authors live with constant disappointment, and it doesn’t take much to push one over the edge. Even a bad review could do it, so not getting the chance to earn $25,000 you feel you deserve and maybe even fantasized about spending, that could be a pretty strong catalyst.”

  “You’re all crazy,” he said, upper lip curling in contempt. “So what about your … partner? Could he do something like that?”

  I snapped at Valley: “You’re saying Stefan called the office to threaten me? Are you trying to turn this into a domestic dispute? That’s bullshit.”

  He shrugged those newly sturdy shoulders of his and uncrossed his legs, folding his long hands in his lap. “You’ll have to report what happened to the phone company. And your assistant needs to fill out a police report at our headquarters. But I have to warn you, people like whoever called, they’re not morons even if they are wacko. They plan ahead. They watch the crime shows. They know what to do. So even tracing the call might not tell us anything. There are lots of ways to hide who they are.”

  “Basically, you’re telling me it’s a waste of time.” I knew that already, but I didn’t want him to realize I’d already worked it out myself. I hope I sounded frustrated enough. It was very quiet in the office; the whole campus was quiet with most of the students gone. I could hear the ticking of the antique brass carriage clock Stefan had given me for one birthday, and the air whooshing through the air conditioning vents. I was waiting for Valley to come back to the SWAT team. I didn’t want to raise it myself. Not to him, not to anyone, and yet I was eager to find out how he knew.

  That wasn’t going to happen. Not right then, anyway. He slapped his knees as if he was in a Western and rose. “You know what you need to do,” he said somewhat obscurely, and he left via Celine’s office. What did he mean? Despite trying to stay calm, I felt unnerved by his visit, and I wished I had some Valium in the office.

  Celine bustled in, mimicking the stinkeye Valley always gave me. I laughed at her imitation of his glare, partly out of exhaustion. I didn’t care much about hiding the truth from Valley, but I liked and respected Celine. And I felt sorry that she had been harassed, even indirectly.

  She cocked her head at me. “What’s with the stiff ?”

  “We have a history.”

  “I gathered.”

  “And he’s not, shall we say, open to diversity.”

  “He’s a bigot.” She shrugged. “Okay, then. Let’s get to work,” she said, as if offering me a vacation from trouble. We spent over an hour discussing some YouTube readings we’d both watched and were in agreement that the three writers I’d been considering this week were all duds. Their books were great, they were all personable enough, but they didn’t engage with their audiences and their Q&A sessions were dreadful. All three seemed profoundly uncomfortable even though they were well-known. Maybe because of that?

  “Introverts,” Celine ventured. “I like being married to one. But I wouldn’t want to take a workshop with an ‘inny’ or sit there and try to listen to one—I’d go to sleep!”

  “Can you get started on the letters?” I handed her my notes. Though I’d developed a form rejection letter, each one was always personalized with references to the author’s work I’d liked. And if I hadn’t liked any of their books, I made sure to mention an interview, a film adaptation, whatever I could come up with. It might not be much to soften the blow, but it was better than nothing. I’d lived with an author for over twenty years and I knew that rejection letters were likely to feel poisonous, so I tried to make mine as anodyne and even cheerful as possible. I know it was like going vegan to slow global warming, but at least it was something.

  On the short drive home, I had the distinct feeling that the same black car from the stop sign was following me. I thought it was one of those new Cadillac XTSs with the distinctive grill, a car I’d seen a lot around town because it was made in Michiganapolis and very popular that summer. This one seemed to be following behind me for more than a few blocks, making every turn I did, but keeping far enough back so I couldn’t make out the driver’s face. When traffic (such as it was) cleared, and I slowed down to make a right turn, whoever it was sped up to make a left and screeched off too fast for me to be sure what had been going on or even if it was a Caddy. Michiganapolis was filled with bad drivers, so maybe it meant nothing at all, but with two ominous phone calls in a row and the threat at the stop sign, I was primed for the worst. Yet I couldn’t have told anyone for sure what make the car had been; I was too rattled and edgy to be a calm, reliable witness.

  Stefan was out of bed and dressed when I got home. Good signs. He had started making dinner. Even better. But he hadn’t gotten very far. I could tell he had planned on Eggplant Rollatini, one of our summer favorites, since I saw eggplants, fresh basil, and the makings of tomato sauce on one counter. Stefan himself was sitting cross-legged on the floor, Marco in his lap. Marco wagged his tail hello, but didn’t move. Eyes dead, Stefan looked shell-shocked and was clearly the one who needed canine attention.

  I apologized for being late and not having called. Then I asked, “How was Mass?”

  Stefan looked away. “I didn’t go.”

  Now that was a very bad sign, since Father Ryan was celebrating it that day. Stefan had become a regular at the weekday Masses, in addition to going Sunday mornings. He almost always returned calmer, usually talking about the homily. Sometimes he shared the intense feelings of gratefulness and connection he felt there, but not often. He didn’t have to. I’d read his memoir New Home and unde
rstood how for the first time in his life, he felt spiritually grounded, though I myself couldn’t identify with Jesus or anything connected to the Catholic Church. It hadn’t been something we spoke much about until he wrote the book, but we did when I read the early drafts, and I’d admired his courage. He was the son of Holocaust survivors, and yet he’d broken with his past, their past. And because he was well-known as a Jewish author, he had risked alienating his audience. Who knew he’d gain a much larger one with the memoir? Readers loved the cool, brainy prose that many reviewers compared to Joan Didion’s. I suspect they were surprised by his tone, given the controversial subject of his book—at least for some people. After all, according to some studies, fully a quarter of all Americans changed from their religion of birth to something else.

  Before I could say anything now to lift Stefan out of his stupor, the doorbell rang and his eyes widened.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Remember Father Ryan? Repeat after me: They’re not coming back.”

  He repeated it in a low voice, like someone heavily sedated.

  I left him there. Waiting at the front door was one of our elderly neighbors, Binnie Berrigan, holding a domed Tupperware cake plate. Binnie went to Stefan’s church, was in her eighties, widowed, a raging progressive, and a devotee of hiking and biking vacations. She was short, lean, with a white braid down her back, and given to flowing Indian print skirts with matching tops and chunky turquoise necklaces. She’d been arrested many times over the years and was proud of her protests against Vietnam, the Cambodia bombing, nuclear power, the wars in Iran and Afghanistan. “As long as they keep electing idiots, somebody’s got to hold them to account,” she liked to say. “I knew Nixon was a chiseler from day one, and little Bush was a bum.”

  It was a sign of how troubled Stefan was that Marco hadn’t trotted to the door, since he loved Mrs. Berrigan. Marco knew Stefan needed taking care of.

  “Nick, dear, I won’t come in, but when I didn’t see Stefan at Mass today, I made you boys your favorite sour cream coffee cake.” She handed over the plate. Despite myself, I looked behind her, wondering who might be watching our front door. “You’re good boys, both of you, I know that. If police come to your house the way they did the other night, I know it’s a mistake or a lie.”