Assault with a Deadly Lie

by Lev Raphael

  “And you should think twice before spreading unfounded rumors,” she added.

  “Where are they? The cameras, I mean. The elevators? The lobby downstairs? The mail room? Everywhere?”

  She was rigid and unsmiling. “I want to warn you, Nick, that you’re in enough trouble already.”

  “Why? I told you: I haven’t done anything.”

  “If you get arrested, what happens to the Nick Hoffman Fellowship? How many authors will want to associate themselves with your name then?”

  I didn’t know what she meant about being arrested, but it unnerved me. $25,000 was a great honorarium, but if it came with bad publicity, people might think twice about applying.

  “You can’t bully me, Juno,” I said.

  She leaned her head back and looked down her nose at me. “Nobody dreamed we could ever get rid of Alberta, and she’s gone now, isn’t she?”

  Alberta Starr had been one of EAR’s least popular professors, both with students and colleagues. Cold, arrogant, insufferable, she had taught at SUM for three decades, but hadn’t published in her field for the last twenty years. Starr held a Guggenheim Fellowship early in her career and acted as if that made her royalty; but once she’d been granted tenure, she just coasted. Starr didn’t have an ounce of collegiality, and showed no desire to mentor or even instruct students. She avoided department meetings, and when she did come, she insulted people directly or obliquely, and always left before the meetings were over. Even worse, she badmouthed other faculty to students, making them feel they were privileged to hear the gossip, but the effect was to poison their experiences in those professors’ classrooms. Starr’s departure had been a jubilee for EAR; even in our notoriously snarky department, the woman was exceptional for malice and narcissism.

  I stared at her. “Starr was ill, wasn’t she? That’s why she retired in the middle of last fall and you had to get people to cover her classes.”

  “Oh, yes, she was unwell. True enough,” Juno said smugly. “But I got rid of her myself.” Juno didn’t explain how she had made Starr an offer she couldn’t refuse, and I didn’t challenge her.

  “There’s something else,” Juno said, and if anything, she looked harder and colder. “I understand that Stefan is still defying the administration about that suicide book.”

  “Why are you talking to me about it? Talk to him.”

  “Because I think you might be a bit more reasonable.”

  I presumed that meant weak, and I felt insulted.

  “Nick, a book like that could cause more damage than you realize. What if it sparked copycat suicides at the university?”

  I hesitated, because the question had occurred to me, too, but I hadn’t brought it up with Stefan because I had never tried to talk him out of writing any book.

  “So what do you want me to do?” I asked, trying to sound defiant, but I suspect I came across as abject and apologetic.

  Juno relaxed, looking almost reasonable. “Tell him that giving up the book would be a tremendous service to SUM. And publishing it would be something he’d seriously regret. Something you would both regret.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Juno buzzed her secretary. “We’re done here, Nick.”

  I wasn’t feeling cocky anymore, and I left with a whole new miasma of paranoia settling over me like volcanic ash. First the dean had threatened Stefan and me, and now my chair was also acting the heavy.

  But that wasn’t the only reason I felt dirty and burdened. The remodeling from last summer wasn’t just egregiously impersonal—it was also intrusive if there was secret surveillance going on. But who was monitoring all of this, and why?

  I felt dizzy with all this anxious speculation. Juno had threatened the viability of the Nick Hoffman Fellowship—was somebody trying to wrest it away from me? That was impossible, surely? The conditions were ironclad: if I wasn’t involved, the money disappeared from SUM. My mind reeled. What if everything that had been happening to Stefan and me was somehow connected to a larger development at the university? The whole country was security-crazed—had the sickness infected SUM, too?

  I crossed the length of the floor to my office on the other side of the building, wondering how many people—if any—were hunched in their cubicles, trying to maintain some shred of privacy and concentration. Talk about surveillance—you could be watched and studied by anyone in there, and you wouldn’t even know it.

  “Honey, you don’t look so good,” Celine said as I walked through her office to mine.

  She, of course, looked great as always in sandals, flowing purple cotton skirt and matching sleeveless top.

  “Sit down and close the doors,” I said. “All of them.”

  Celine gave me an odd look, but did what I asked her to, and then joined me. I told her the entire story of the last few days, all of it, and her face mirrored almost everything I’d been feeling. It was scary to see how affected she was, because it deepened the terror I’d been experiencing, but it also felt cathartic. I wasn’t quite as alone anymore. When I was done, Celine shook her head and said, “Un-be-liev-able. I am so sorry this is happening to you.”

  “Do you think I’m wrong not to report my suspicions to the police?”

  “I wouldn’t want the Gestapo in my house, either.” She added a quick “Sorry!”—but I wasn’t offended. She wasn’t a politician invoking the Nazis to score political points.

  And then she glanced around the office, as if wondering if it was bugged. The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but if there were surveillance cameras in the building, why not listening devices as well? The university was a public institution, but it was increasingly being run like a dictatorship. There was no real oversight of the president and the provost; the faculty senate was powerless; and money and prestige were the driving forces on campus. Or at least they had been; now “security” had been added to the mix.

  “Do you have friends in other departments?” I asked. “Have you heard them talking about surveillance?”

  Celine hesitated. “Well, I did just hear a rumor. There’s some kind of high-level committee that’s been formed, a secret committee, and they’re going to monitor the campus for threats 24/7.”

  “Terrorist threats?”

  She shook her head. “No, like Virginia Tech and other schools, where somebody goes nuts with a gun. They’ll be expecting everyone on campus to report threatening behavior, and the reports can be anonymous. And they’ll be able to investigate anyone, even staff and professors, read their emails, tap their phones, whatever it takes, and then maybe even arrest them or have them committed before they’ve done anything.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “That’s SUM, Nick. And their name is hinky, too: JSOC, Joint Security On Campus. Sounds almost like the military, doesn’t it?”

  I shrugged. The name struck me as typical: a benign-sounding title for something nefarious. And if what Celine had told me was true, that probably meant the reality was much worse. No wonder Juno had mentioned arrest.

  “Can you find out more?” I asked. “Like who’s on this committee?”

  Celine nodded. “Sure. But let me get something straight. Juno threatened you about the fellowship? There’s nothing she can do about that. It’s set up as a trust.”

  “But if the university wanted to break the trust and go to court, I couldn’t stop them, could I?”

  Celine shrugged. “Let me ask my friend in the Law School what she can find out.”

  “Thanks! Now, tell me if you think I’m nuts to suspect Lucky Bitterman of masterminding what’s been going on.”

  “Oh no, he could do it. He’s a lowlife and he hates you. Well, he hates everyone. But he hates you especially. You and Stefan. In my opinion, it’s because he’s a closet case.”

  “A reaction formation,” I suggested.

  “Yes, something like that. And the guy’s a volcano, sooner or later he has to explode. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.”

  “Can you
get me his address?”

  Celine frowned. “You’re not going over there to rough him up, are you?”

  “Of course not! This is for information only. I want to see what kind of car he’s driving.”

  She popped into her office for the department address book, returned to read off Lucky’s, and I thanked her for listening.

  “Be careful,” she warned.

  Downstairs in the parking lot, I noticed a white panel truck with darkened windows, like the kind you see in thrillers. It was off by itself, and had no logo on the side. It was not remotely the kind of vehicle faculty members drove. Was a security team huddled there, listening in on everyone inside Parker Hall?

  13

  Lucky’s neighborhood was very different from ours, studded with rambling, run-down Tudor homes that housed fraternities. The lawns were drier, the trees were newer, and the single family houses were all small and undistinguished-looking, as if trying to avoid attention. This neighborhood had to be pretty noisy on weekends, given all the students, which certainly wouldn’t have made Lucky any nicer.

  I turned onto his street, noting which side the even numbers were on, and just then Lucky loped by in black and blue running gear, looking far more athletic than I would have guessed he was from having seen him around the department. His quads were enormous and even when he stopped in front of a white Cape Cod with a privet hedge and variegated spirea out front, he looked powerful. I slowed down, watched him let himself in the front door. All the curtains were drawn and I didn’t think he saw me. His garage door was closed, and looking at the modest house, I couldn’t imagine him driving a car that started at $45,000 and could go almost twenty thousand higher when fully loaded.

  But then why not? He could be a car nut or status-hungry and love expensive cars more than anything else. I had to know for sure what he drove, and couldn’t figure out how. Not thinking very clearly, I took several right turns and found myself cruising down his street again. This time when I passed his house, the curtains were open on a picture window and he was staring out at me, shirtless now, glaring, looking angry and tough. Shit! He had seen me when he ran by. Now I was the one who could be accused of stalking. I had truly fallen down the rabbit hole.

  I sped off, deciding to confer with Stefan and see if he could help me come up with a plan. I drove homeward pondering how my whole life had changed in a few harrowing days, as completely as if we’d survived a bombing or one of us had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The vernal beauties of our street left me untouched as I pulled up to our house and parked in the driveway. For the first time since moving in, I imagined what it might be like to leave this gorgeous house. Despite my bluster with Bullerschmidt and Juno Dromgoole, I felt very tentative about my position, and apprehensive about my ability to remain at SUM. It was a far from perfect work environment, but Stefan and I had both fallen in love with Michigan and finding another university where both of us could teach would be very hard, maybe impossible.

  I let myself in and looked around for Marco, who usually greeted me in the foyer when I used the front door. I called his name and heard a faint whine. I followed that sound upstairs to the guest room where Stefan was sprawled on the bed, face down. The beige quilt was rolled back and his right arm hung down over the side, fingers almost touching the carpet. His mouth gaped, and he was breathing so deeply I could hear it. It was almost snoring, and sounded very strange. Marco sat near his hand, sniffing it and moaning. Stefan looked drunk and passed out, but he couldn’t have gotten plastered in the time I’d been gone, could he?

  “Stefan, I’m home.”

  Marco briefly turned to eye me, but shifted his attention back to Stefan, and moaned more loudly. He sounded desolate. I walked to the bed and shook Stefan’s arm, but he didn’t stir. Was he ill? I crouched down next to him, turned his head and felt his forehead—normal. And then I saw a brown plastic pill bottle on the lamp table standing on top of a book about the painter Tamara de Lempicka. The pill bottle was open and empty. I picked it up to read the label. Valium.

  I slapped him. “Bastard! Don’t you fucking kill yourself and leave me alone!”

  Marco shot out of the room, and Stefan groaned. I took out my phone to dial 911, already picturing the new scandal of an ambulance pulling up outside our door, and hesitated. Stefan mumbled, “What are you doing?” He squinted at me and struggled to sit up.

  “Calling 911 to get your stomach pumped!”

  “Wha—What for? What are you talking about?” He blinked at me groggily, as if he couldn’t focus well.

  “How many did you take? How many Valium did you take?”

  Now he was waking up, and he was angry. He felt his reddened cheek. “Did you slap me? You slapped me. I can’t believe it.”

  “I can’t believe you’d try to OD on Valium!”

  He used his right arm to push himself up and sat very straight, like a drunk trying to prove he was sober. Enunciating his words over-distinctly, he said, “I took one to calm down, and it didn’t help. So I took two more.”

  “That’s fifteen milligrams.”

  “So? I wasn’t going anywhere. I needed oblivion.”

  It was a lot of Valium, more than either of us ever took at a time, but it wasn’t an overdose. I sank into the thick armchair opposite him and hung my head, ashamed at having panicked and slapped him. I mumbled some sort of apology, and didn’t say anything about picturing Father Ryan giving him the last rites.

  “Sometimes, Nick, you can be a real idiot.”

  “At least it’s only sometimes,” I said, and looked up at him, hoping he would be amused.

  He tried to chuckle, but was still too woozy to make it work. Marco crept back into the room, sensed all was well, and then loped over to me, tail wagging, to get his neck scratched. He repeated the process with Stefan, who gingerly helped him onto the bed. Marco settled against a pillow and promptly fell asleep. As always, I envied that.

  “You can put away your phone,” Stefan said softly.

  I looked down and saw that I was clutching it hard enough to draw blood if it’d had any sharp edges. I slid it into my jeans pocket.

  “I came in here,” he explained, “to try the room out, to see if it felt comfortable.” We’d ordered everything in it—bed, chair, tables, lamps, linens—from Restoration Hardware the day after we’d seen a new catalogue, admiring the beige, black, and white blends of fabrics and the bed’s high quilted headboard.

  “Do you think we can ever go back across the hall, back to our bedroom?” I asked, looking around the guestroom I rarely went into. It had always seemed attractive to me before, but today, the room looked unlived in. Though I suppose if we slept there, eventually it would feel comfortable, wouldn’t it?

  “Nick, you really thought I would commit suicide? After what happened to my student?” Stefan was glaring at me, and I dreaded an argument. I was too worn out.

  “I’m sorry, really sorry. But I couldn’t wake you up, Marco was whining, and I saw the pill bottle. How was I supposed to know you only took three?”

  “That’s all that was in there, and did you see a suicide note? No. I’m a writer. I would never go without leaving a note.”

  “Oh. Good point.” Now I felt truly abashed.

  “Hey—that was a joke.”

  I couldn’t take it in. As if my body had been frozen somehow in the few minutes I thought he had taken an overdose, I could now sense the blood pulsing too quickly in my veins and my face was flushed, my breathing raspy, and I felt as if I’d been running after something I couldn’t catch. Or maybe running from something was a better way to put it.

  Stefan read me perfectly, and said what I was thinking: “Things have been happening so fast, we haven’t had any time to really process what’s been going on.”

  “Even if we had the time, would it make a difference? I feel like I’m trapped on the roof of my house in a flood, and the water keeps rising.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been praying, trying to pray,
but I can’t concentrate, I can’t get quiet enough inside.”

  I had never put much stock in prayer, but I sympathized because I knew it was important now to Stefan, who seemed surprisingly alert, given the Valium and the last few days of trauma.

  “It must be dinner time,” I said. “Let’s eat something and try to clear our minds. We need to take control. Or at least try.”

  We found Marco in the kitchen waiting for his own dinner. I fed him his kibble while Stefan set the table and put some goulash in the microwave to defrost. I told him about Juno’s claim to have axed Alberta Starr herself, which seemed even more extraordinary when I repeated the story, because what could she possibly have done to get rid of a tenured faculty member?

  “Maybe she blackmailed Alberta?” Stefan suggested.

  “How? With what?”

  Then I told him about Juno’s threats if he didn’t stop writing Fieldwork in the Land of Grief.

  “Nobody’s going to keep me from finishing that book, not the dean, not Juno, not even you.”

  I protested: “Don’t lump me with them.”

  “But you’re not crazy about the book, admit it.”

  “I’m ambivalent. The whole thing is so raw, and look how much trouble it’s causing us without even being published.” I didn’t want to continue, so I told him that Juno had implied EAR was under surveillance. Stefan went pale, whether from anger or fear, I don’t know.

  “Sex tapes,” I said. “What if Alberta Starr was screwing a student in her office? Or doing drugs?”

  Stefan thought that over and said, “The timing fits, if there is full surveillance at Parker Hall. The remodeling was finished last summer before the fall semester began.”

  “But that would mean everything I’ve said in my office to anyone has been recorded.”

  Once again, Stefan looked like Death eating a sandwich, and I felt queasy myself. I told him what Celine had said about the rumored secret committee, and if possible, he looked even more stunned, eyes glassy, mouth tight. “They’re turning SUM into a police state,” he muttered.