The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  “Miss Occasional Rain Morgan,” the sheriff intones, “we got us a signed, sealed warrant to search the premises.”

  Norman adds, “You could save us all a lot of pain by handing over the hollowed-out sex book called The Weight Report.”

  From inside the loft, a man’s voice calls, “What’s the deal, babe?”

  Rain can be heard groaning, “Oh, shit, this is all I needed.”

  The sheriff, his three deputies, the four state troopers and the reporter filming the scene with a shoulder-held camera crowd into the loft.

  Gripping The Hite Report under his arm, Lemuel disappears down the dark alleyway.

  Lemuel lets himself in the front door of the Rebbe’s house, wipes the soles of his shoes on a shabby carpet in the vestibule before making his way into the living room. He hears the sound of a radio coming from behind the closed door of the kitchen. Still clutching Rain’s hollowed-out book, wondering if The Hite Report has the sacred name of God buried somewhere in its pages, he looks around at the Rebbe’s waist-high leaning towers of books stacked, spine outward, snaking along the walls of the room and on up the stairs. Back in the alleyway, he flirted with the idea of flinging the book and its contents into a garbage bin, but decided against it; the book, which surely had Rain’s fingerprints all over it, might be discovered and turned over to the police. Better to hide it, but where? The last place anyone would look for a book, he reasoned, was in a pile of books. And the first pile that leaped to mind was the Rebbe’s collection of books with the name of God in them.

  Lemuel just manages to slip The Hite Report into a stack of books halfway up the staircase when the kitchen door swings open.

  “Lemuel?”

  The Rebbe, looking more Lilliputian than Lemuel remembers him, pushes through the door into the living room and snaps on the overhead light. Hunched over like a parenthesis, his coiled sideburns dancing in agitation, his beetle brows skydiving toward each other in anxiety, he peers up the stairs. When he speaks his voice is uncommonly hoarse, as if he has cheered too much. But for what? Or against what?

  “For hours I have been asking myself, Where could the schlimazel be?”

  “Better late than never.”

  “How could you do it?”

  “How could I do what?”

  “I thought I was your friend.”

  “You are.”

  “I thought you trusted me.”

  “Hey, I do.”

  “Then explain, if it’s within the realm, why you didn’t confide in me.”

  “Confide what, for God’s sake?”

  The Rebbe lowers his voice to a croaking whisper. “We sat at the same table, we shared the same bread, we drank the same Puligny Montrachet. The least you could have done was tell me about the codes.”

  Lemuel shuts his eyes. “Not you too!”

  “Everybody in Backwater, also everybody outside of Backwater, seems to know about it except me. What have I done that I’m the last to learn? Do I deserve this?”

  “Who spilled you the beans?”

  “A little birdie spilled me the beans. Oy, Lemuel, Lemuel, if you had taken me into your confidence, I could have saved you a lot of tsouris.” The Rebbe advances onto the first step. “I still can.” He mounts another step. “Save you a lot of tsouris.”

  Lemuel begins to massage his eyelids with his thumb and third finger. “Do not tell me you work for an intelligence agency.”

  “Being a spy is like being a Messiah.”

  “Do not tell me you work for the Israelis.”

  “I don’t actually work for them.” The Rebbe inches higher on the staircase. “I am what they call a headhunter and I think of as a heart-hunter. When I come up with a warm body who’s a hot prospect, I remove the enciphering instructions they gave me from its hiding place”—the Rebbe points with his beard to a particularly high pile of books near the kitchen door—”and send a coded picture postcard to an address in Israel. Air mail. Don’t look at me like that. I am not ashamed to be part of the international Jewish conspiracy. The world is crawling with anti-Semites, which is to say with people who hate Jews more than necessary. It is a matter of life or death for the pro-Semites to read their mail.”

  “Why me?”

  “If not you, who? I beg you, Lemuel, do not turn a deaf ear to the handwriting on the wall. A day doesn’t go by, an hour even, when I don’t patrol the back pages of the newspaper looking for little articles that indicate the start of a new Holocaust. You are trying not to smile at things that strike you as absurd. Your cynicism is an insult to the parents who raised you. Read it and weep. ‘Seven hundred thousand Jews reportedly exterminated in a Polish backwater called Oswiecim.’ That was how The New York Times, which calls itself a newspaper of record, which prints all the news that fits, broke the story of what the Nazi bastards were up to, it was on a back page, the crossword puzzle was more prominent, the front page was otherwise occupied with a hot scoop on summer vacations.”

  Lemuel settles down onto the carpeted step. “I can say you, Rebbe, I have had it with code books. I have had it with subtexts.”

  The Rebbe sinks to his knees on the step below. “Lemuel, Lemuel, everything in life is coded. The Torah I love more than oxygen, the whisperings of lovers, the rantings of a rebbe, your left, right, either or, novels even, novels especially, they all have a subtext. If there is no subtext, the absence of a subtext is the subtext, it makes a statement, it says, It is important for me to convince you what you see is what you get. As your former shiksa lady friend would say, get a life. In this meshugge world, between the experience and the language available to describe it—ha! between joie de vivre and its exegesis—there is an abyss. Codes, subtexts are the bridges across the abyss.”

  “At this point in the spiel dudes usually tell me what is in it for me.”

  “Oy, you haven’t deciphered my subtext. Nothing is what’s in it for you. If you go to Israel to help the Jews make and break codes, you will reside in a cramped, noisy apartment in Tel Aviv, Petersburg compared will look like a paradise lost. Like everyone else in the Holy Land you will live on bank overdrafts to make ends meet. You will vacation on a polluted seashore crawling with snot-nosed kiddies kicking sand in your face. But you will serve Israel, and through Israel, Yah-weh.”

  “I am still not one hundred percent sure He exists.”

  The Rebbe plunks himself down next to Lemuel. “So where is it written you cannot serve God while you are searching for Him?”

  “Tell me something, Asher. Do you really believe the dude exists? Come at the problem from another direction: Have you discovered Him or invented Him?”

  The Rebbe’s bulging eyes flash. He fixes Lemuel with a fierce regard. “When you see a three-piece suit, you discover the tailor, you don’t invent him. Why should it be different when you see a rose in bloom, a bird in flight, a swirling tempest of ice paralyzing the East Coast, a footprint of chaos in the dunes of time?”

  Sighing, he pulls the enormous handkerchief from the inside breast pocket of his jacket, opens it with a theatrical flourish, mops his brow. At length he says, “I caught you on the tube tonight. Thanks to you, they nailed the serial murderer to his cross, so to speak. You are once again a local hero.” One of his hands comes to rest on Lemuel’s forearm. “I saw you cringing in the back of the car, I heard you say the quest for a single example of pure, unadulterated randomness is the search for God. So what are you waiting for, Lemuel? Go for it. Do what I couldn’t bring myself to do. Make the leap.”

  Lemuel squirms uncomfortably. “What leap are we talking about?”

  “The leap of faith. Okay, Torah is maybe a can of worms. Was it David who killed the goy Goliath—I’m talking 1 Samuel 16-17—or some local hero named Elhanan—I’m talking 2 Samuel 21:19. Either or, To-rah is still the work of God and the word of God, Blessed be His holy name. The subtext, the codes, what’s written between the lines, are His handiwork too. You and me, Lemuel, we maybe approach Torah from opposite direction
s, but in your heart of hearts you are as kosher as I am. It is no accident your name means ‘devoted to God.’ “

  “You put on a good show,” Lemuel says tiredly.

  “Every word comes from the gut,” the Rebbe says quietly.

  Suddenly aggressive, Lemuel asks, “Like what is in it for you if I sign on the dotted line?”

  “Ask, ask, I am not insulted. What is in it for me is a bonus for every recruit I sign. Where do you think I get the seed money to start a yeshiva in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn, from a goy bank?” The Rebbe manages a smile that is both lopsided and delicate. “What is in it for me is finding grace in the eyes of Yahweh.” Rocking gently, he recites, “ ‘He brought me forth … he delivered me, because he delighted in me.’ “ Out of habit, he coughs up his source. “I’m talking 2 Samuel 22:20.”

  There is a sharp knock on the front door. Suddenly alert, the Rebbe eyes Lemuel. “You are maybe expecting someone?”

  “Not.”

  The Rebbe heaves himself off the step, pads through the vestibule to the front door, opens it a crack. The first thing he sees is a shoe wedged between the door and the jamb.

  From his place on the steps, Lemuel hears a muffled argument. Seconds later Mitchell and Doolittle, trailed by five FBI clones in tight-fitting three-piece suits, push through the vestibule into the living room. Wringing his hands, the Rebbe brings up the rear.

  Mitchell spots Lemuel on the staircase. “Small world, isn’t it, sport?”

  “You want to hear something hilarious,” the Rebbe broadcasts in a high-pitched voice, “these guys, who barge into a private house without an invitation, without kissing the mezuzah on the doorpost of my gate, without wiping their feet even, these guys with the razor-sharp creases in their trousers think I am maybe the agent of a foreign country.”

  “We don’t think,” Doolittle corrects him. “We know.”

  “If the Syrians turn up in Backwater,” one of the clones remarks, “can the Israelis be far behind?”

  The clones spread out and begin rifling through drawers. The Rebbe grabs the sleeve of one of them. “You can’t do that.”

  With a snap of his wrist, Doolittle unfurls a paper in front of the Rebbe’s face. “A circuit court judge disagrees with you.”

  “Chazak,” the Rebbe mutters to himself. “Be strong.”

  Mitchell settles onto his haunches and starts to leaf through the top book on a leaning tower at the bottom of the stairs. “What’s with all these books?”

  “I’ve collected them over the years,” the Rebbe explains. “They have the name of God in them.” He swallows hard. “It’s against Jewish law to destroy a book containing the name of God.”

  “If we have to,” Doolittle vows, “we’ll examine every book in the house.”

  “It will take days,” the Rebbe says hopefully.

  “Time,” Mitchell announces, shaking a book by its spine, “is what we have on our hands.”

  Doolittle motions for the agents to start searching the books piled against the walls. Mitchell looks up at Lemuel. ‘Join the movers and shakers, sport. Tell us where he’s hiding the incriminating evidence.” He dangles a book upside down by its spine and jiggles it. “You haven’t forgotten who the good guys are, have you? Show us whose side you’re on.”

  Halfway up the steps, Lemuel is trembling like a leaf in a tempest. In his mind’s eye, dear God, if only it had been another one of his fictions, he hears a voice whisper in his ear: “You want to show Comrade Stalin whose side you’re on, don’t you, sonny? Tell us where your father hides his code book.”

  He hears his answer spiral up from his lost childhood. “What is a code book?”

  Cowering in a corner, he watches, spellbound, as one of the faceless men slits open his parents’ mattress with a bread knife and starts to gut it. Two others tear clothing out of the armoire and pass it to a third man, who cuts away the linings from his mother’s coats and dresses before flinging the garments onto a heap in a corner.

  “Be strong,” his father calls across the room. “There is nothing for them to find.”

  One of the faceless men looks Lemuel’s father in the eye. “Talking while the flat is being searched is not permitted,” he says coldly. Lemuel’s father lowers his gaze.

  When the armoire is empty, the faceless men begin to dismantle it, stacking the pieces against a wall. Lemuel feels bile mount to his mouth, starts toward the kitchen to spit it into the sink. Someone grabs his arm.

  “Let him go,” his mother pleads. “He is only six.”

  When Lemuel slips back into the bedroom, the faceless men are lifting the back of the armoire away from the frame. One of them notices a loose flap of wallpaper above the floorboards. He squats, peels the paper away from the plasterboard, reaches into a crack and comes out with a book. Lemuel’s father glances quickly at the boy, who is barely able to breathe.

  The agent in charge leafs through the pages, which are dog-eared and full of underlined words and phrases. “It is in English,” he notes. He reads an underlined phrase aloud. “ ‘Stretching abdominal muscles in this manner fifteen minutes a day …’ “ He turns to the title page. “ ‘The Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual.’ “ He looks up. “This is clearly a code book, used for enciphering and deciphering secret messages,” he announces. He adds the book to the letters and photograph albums in a barrel with the words EVIDENCE and THIS SIDE UP stenciled on the wood.

  Lemuel’s father shakes his head in frustration. “You don’t understand. I brought the book back from the Great War. A Canadian pilot I liberated from a prisoner-of-war camp gave it to me. I shared the book with my son, Lemuel. I use it for exercises. He uses it to study English.”

  “If the book had not been hidden in the wall, your story might ring true,” says the agent in charge.

  Lemuel’s mother whispers urgently to Lemuel’s father, who says, “We made the mistake of telling the boy that English books were not permitted. When he saw you searching the living room, he must have crawled under the armoire and hidden it in the wall so he could continue his study of English.” His father smiles tensely across the room at the boy. “The Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual is his most prized possession.”

  Suddenly everyone in the room is staring at Lemuel, who is cowering in the corner. “Is it true you study English from this book?” one of the faceless men demands.

  Lemuel, trembling like a leaf, shakes his head. Choking on sobs that block his respiration, he whimpers over and over, again and again, “It was not me who hid the code book.”

  Lemuel’s mother begins to weep. The back of his father’s hand brushes against the back of his mother’s hand. “With your permission,” his father tells the faceless men, “I will collect my toilet articles in the bathroom.”

  “It is my book!” Lemuel hears himself blurt out—dear God, he has been wandering in a wilderness for forty years, but better late than never.

  Suddenly everyone in the house is staring at Lemuel. “What book are we talking about, sport?” Mitchell asks.

  Lemuel pulls the hollowed-out Hite Report from the pile of books and offers it to Mitchell. Doolittle and Mitchell exchange triumphant glances. The Rebbe starts to climb the stairs, but one of the clones bars the way. Mitchell takes the book, opens it, touches the vials and paper satchels inside with a fingertip.

  “It’s a drug stash,” he decides, clearly surprised.

  “I recognize that b—” the Rebbe starts to say, but Lemuel cuts him off.

  “You want to let me deal with this in my own way, Asher. I beg your pardon for abusing your hospitality. I needed a place to hide it.”

  “Why are you telling these crazies the book is yours?”

  “Because in deep ways it is true.”

  “I thought we came here to arrest an Israeli agent,” one of the clones gripes.

  “We have nothing against landing a big fish,” Doolittle says.

  “Consider the possibility,” the Rebbe, insulted, r
eprimands Doolittle, “that calling an alleged Israeli agent a small fish can be construed as anti-Semitism.”

  Lemuel aims one of his half-smiles at the Rebbe. “Do not worry your head about me, Asher. I can say you I have become a consenting Homo chaoticus. The chaos that accompanies me like a shadow, sometimes it is behind, sometimes in front, I still do not love it, but I think I am ready to live with it.”

  “You are in deep shit,” Mitchell warns Lemuel. “Drug dealers have been known to rot in jail for years.”

  “In jail,” Lemuel points out, “I would not be able to map intricate statistical variations in large samples of data, which is the weak link in even near-randomness. I would not be able to break any cipher being used in the world today.”

  “Sounds to me like we’re in a negotiation,” Mitchell tells Doolittle.

  “I think we have the makings of a deal here,” Doolittle says carefully.

  “Let’s get it straight,” Mitchell recapitulates. “If we were to forget about The Hite Report, you’d come in out of the cold and work for the good guys?”

  Doolittle nails down the fine print. “You’d break ciphers for A.D.V.A., which is a subdivision of PROD, which is a division of N.S.A.?”

  “There is a condition,” Lemuel says. “Get off the Rebbe’s case.”

  “Don’t take the fall for me,” the Rebbe implores Lemuel. “I have friends in high places.”

  “Name one, sport,” Mitchell sneers.

  The Rebbe draws himself up to his full five feet, two inches. “Yah-weh.”

  Mitchell doesn’t seem impressed. “What agency does he work for?”

  Lemuel asks with a straight face, “Yo! You never heard of Occasional Yahweh? The Dude is out to lunch most of the time, which explains a lot of things in the back pages of The New York Times like the Holocaust, but He is definitely a mover and a shaker. There is not much that goes on in the corridors of power He does not know about.”

  The Rebbe’s sideburns cavort in the air. “Glory be to God,” he proclaims. “You have made the leap.” His wrists shoot from his starched cuffs as he thrusts his arms heavenward and addresses Yahweh one-on-One. “ ‘Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers,’ “ he exults. “ ‘The snare is broken, and we are escaped.’ “