"I've met Lillian," I said.
"Okay," Robinson said, and smiled, "a pop quiz: why would you guess she is in this long,term relationship with Bass Maitland?"
"Because he reminds her of Lionel Trilling," I said. '
"Or Walter Pater," Robinson said. "You've got the idea.
Now, for extra credit, why was she sleeping with me?"
"White woman's burden;' I said.
"Yes." Robinson's face was suddenly animated. "And
why did she stop?"
"You weren't black enough.."
"Wow," Robinson said. "You're good."
"I've met several Lillians," I said. "If she transferred her passions to Amir she could be supporting the aspirations of her black brothers and sisters and still stay faithful to Bass."
"Yes, and I'm sure that's what happened because that was
what she thought she was doing. But she'll be unfaithful to
Bass again."
"Because what she really liked was the sex?" I said.
"As long as she could disguise it under a mound of high-mindedness."
"My guess is that Bass is not Lionel Trilling."
"No," Robinson said. "He's just your standard academic opportunist blessed with a good voice and nice carriage."
"We might have saved a lot of time and aggravation," I
said, "if you'd told me all this at the beginning."
"Or if you'd asked;' Robinson said.
I nodded. "Both had the same reasons, I guess. Can you
prove you had a relationship with her?"
/'-/v,Ik IxA O'/?ff 239
"Obviously I can't prove I, ah, penetrated her. I've got some pictures of us together." "I'd like the best one of you both," I said. "You meet anyplace where there'd be a witness?" "Witness?" "Did you check into a motel, have drinks together in Club Cafe? Spend the night at a friend's house on the Cape?" "We spent several nights together at a little place in Rock- port that is hospitable to black people." "What's the name?" · "Sea Mist Inn," Robinson said. "When's the last time?" "We went up there last Labor Day weekend. Last time we went out." "Thank you." "I don't want to cause her trofible' Robinson said. "Me either." We were quiet then. The old fat black woman had shuffled out and we were alone in the empty dining room. "You know," Robinson said after a while. "Myfather named me after Jackie Robinson." "No one better," I said. "I know. I guess I've always felt I never lived up to it." "Nobody's Jackie Robinson," I said. "You're doing pretty well." "I wish you were right," he said. "I'm always right," I said. "I have a smart girlfriend."
me, and I got to the window in time to see some of the ments land on Marlborough Street. Aside from the post-explosion fire, there was no activity on the street. I looked at my watch, 3:35 in the morning. I%ouldn't think of anything to do about my car. I didn't see a felon fleeing the scene. But I was too wide awake to go back to bed, so-I stood and watched. In about ten minutes a police cruiser pulleO up Marlborough and hal'ted near the now declining tabers where once my car had been. I got dressed and went down, and announced myself as the owner. While I was talking with the cops, the fire department arrived and then a couple of arson investigators, and my night was shot.
When I got to my office about ten in the morning, less rested than I was used to, there was a message on my machine to call Captain Healy at State Police Headquarters.
"Plane you were asking about," Healy said when I got him. "Private plane owned by an outfit called Last Stand Systems, Inc. Flew from Logan to Bangor, Maine."
"Do you know anything about Last Stand Systems?"
"Got an address for Last Stand Systems, Inc.?" I said.
242 PetY--/. srr
"Beecham, Maine."
"That's it?"
"That's it," Healy said. "You ever heard of Beecham?" "No."
"Me either."
"It's a wonder you got promoted to captain," I said. "No wonder at all," Healy said and hung up.
I got out my atlas and looked up Beecham. It was on the coast, southeast of Bangor. I called the office of the Maine Secretary of State in Augusta and, after a while, learned that Last Stand Systems, Inc. was a not-for-profit corporation. After another while, I got the names of the principal officers, and the members of the board. According to their incorporation papers Last Stand Systems w,as committed to social and political preservation. After I hung up I looked at the list of names. None of them meant anything to me. The CEO was somebody named Milo Quant.
I called information and asked for Last Stand Systems, Inc. and got it. I called them and asked for literature. They asked my name and address. I told them I was Henry Cimoli and gave them the address of the Harbor Health Club.
Then I called Henry and told him to look for the literature and asked him to have Hawk stop by. Which Hawk did in about an hour. There was always something lustrous about Hawk. His shaved head gleamed. He moved as if he were spring loaded. And there was about him a kind of genial absence of affect that made him seem almost otherworldly.
"I think we might have buzzed somebody's button," I
said. "My car blew up last night."
"Trying for you?" Hawk said.
"I don't think so.'It went off at three thirty-five in the morning, a guy who could have rigged that device wouldn't
have gotten the timer so far off."
"Want to kill you he ties it to the starter anyway," Hawk
said.
"Yes. But there's no way to know what I'm being warned about, yet."
"So they going to have to follow up," Hawk said. "Un huh. Call me, write me, come and visit me." "They'll come calling," Hawk said. "Show you they can
reach you whenever they want."
"Yes," I said, "and see how I take the warning." "You talk to anyone since we sat with Amir?" "No."
"So maybe talking with Amir was the buzzer."
"Maybe. Or maybe busting Louis Vincent was the buzzer,
and they just got around to following up."
"Nope," Hawk said, "this a warning. Woo late to warn us
off Vincent."
"Yeah," I said. "You're right."
"Who that plane belong to?" Hawk said.
"Last Stand Systems, Inc.," I said. "Out of Beecham,.
"Beecham, Maine?"
"I never heard of it either," I said.
The door to my office was open so that Hawk and I could an eye on Lila in the design office across the hall. Six in close formation came through the open door like a team. Two moved to the left of the door, two to the
and two marched straight up to my desk.
"Maybe these guys know," Hawk said.
"You guys know where Beecham, Maine, is?" I said.
They looked like Secret Service men or IBM executives.
were all in dark suits and white shirts. They all wore
They all had short hair. They all were of northern Euro-
pean descent. When everyone was in place the suit closest to the door pushed it shut.
One of the two men in front of my desk said, "SpenserT'
He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses, which made him
look smart, probably why he was the designated speaker. "Yes," I said. "Is it on the coast?" "Is what on the coast?" "Beecham."
Horn Rims shook his head in dismissive annoyance.
"You've been put on notice," he said. "As of this morning at three thirty-five."
I looked at Hawk.
"Did you take those library books back like I told you?" I said.
Hawk was leaning againstny file cabinet as if he might fall asleep. He smiled softly.
"Can't be librarians," Hawk said. "Librarians would know where Beecham is."
Horn Rims didn't change expression.
"You are to stay entirely away from Amir Abdullah. Repeat, entirely. If you fail to comply you will be incinerated as was your car."
"How come," I said.
"You've been informed," Horn Rims said. "Your Negro friend as well."
"You guys associated with L
ast Stand Systems?" I said. One of the guys in the back opened my door, and four of them marched out. Horn Rims and his partner marched out after them. At the door, Horn Rims' partner turned and aimed a semiautomatic pistol with a silencer. He squeezed off three rounds; each shot broke one of the three coffee cups that were lined up on the file cabinet about a foot from Hawk. Hawk never moved. The gun disappeared. The door
fvq/ t 245
closed. We were left with the silence and the smell of the gunfire.
Hawk looked at the remains of the coffee cups.
"Guy can shoot;' Hawk said.
"Yes, my Negro friend, but is he a nice ,person?" I said.
office by FedEx: I took them with me when I drove up to the Sea Mist Inn and talked with the homey-looking woman at the desk. She remembered them clearly enough, a black man and a white woman. Thffy had registered as Mr. & Mrs. Robinson Nevins on the Friday before last Labor Day, and, yes, that was Mrs. Nevins in the picture I drove back to Boston and over to the university and took the information and the pictures with me. I fell.ln beside Lillian Temple as she came down the steps of the library carrying her briefcase. She appeared to recognize me, but she didn't appear to take any pleasure in it. "Hi," I said. "I'd prefer that you did not bother me while I'm at work," she said. "Don't blame you;' I said. "You know anything about the Sea Mist Inn?" "Excuse me?" · "Sea Mist Inn, place up in Rockport where you and Robinson Nevins spent last Labor Day weekend." She stopped dead in the middle of the quadrangle. "Labor Day?"
248 POW/. r.O' I took the photographs from my inside pocket. "I showed these pictures of you and Robinson," I said. "And the woman on the desk recognized you." She stared at the photographs. "This came on you kind of sudden," I said. "Should we sit on this bench, while you think about it?" Without comment, she plopped down on a bench beside some evergreen bushes near the entrance to the administration building. She was staring at the pictures I still held for her. "Those pictures don't prove anything," she said finally. I put them back into my inside pocket. "No, but they're suggestive, coupled with what the Sea Mist lady told us, and what Robinson Nevins said." Again she was silent, staring at the place where the pictures had been. She let of a long breath. "Well," she said, "you seem to have invaded my whole life." "Just doing my job, ma'am." Lillian looked at me somberly. "Not a job one can admire," she said. If Lillian had a sense of humor, I had no idea how to access it. "So," I said. "Since we can assume you know Robinson Nevins was heterosexual, a question presents itself." Lillian continued to look at me with blank sobriety, which might have been her attempt to look stem. Lillian's mind didn't seem to move very quickly, even for a professor. While the question had come upon her rather suddenly, it was a pretty obvious question. I waited. Finally she said without affect, "What question?" "Why you reported to the tenure committee a story about Robinson Nevins that you had considerable reason to doubt."
41/,v tx4j 249
"He could have been bisexual." "Yes he could have. Did you think he.was?" "I didn't know he wasn't." "Did you ask him?" "Of course not." She was, maybe genuinely, outraged. "One's sexuality is neither my business nor yours." I looked at her for a while, aware of my breath going in · and out. "It's breathtaking;' I said. "You have ruined a man's career by repeating a slanderous allegation you know to be false, and you still find a way to mouth moralistic platitudes when you're caught." "I'm sorry you think the right to privacy is a moralistic platitude." "I am also not sure if you know that you keep diverting the topic or not. I don't think you% smart enough, but now and then I'm fooled." She stood, holding her briefcase with both arms, as if I'd tried to cop a feel. "I do not have to sit here and allow you to berate me'she said. "No you don't," I said. "And neither will the Dean of Liberal Art. s, when I discuss it with him." She sat back down again, hugging her briefcase a little closer. "You'd go to the clean?" "Yep. Probably go to Bass Maitland, too. And probably student newspaper." She was horrified. The look of haughty incomprehension ; had been replaced by wide-eyed staring fear. "I want a lawyer," she said. "Sure," I said. "Go get one. I'm not a cop. You're not arrest. But I now know that Robinson Nevins got
jobbed in his tenure hearing, and I know by whom, and I can prove it, and I wilL.What I don't know yet is why, but I'm not sure why matters." The class break had ended and the next period had begun. The quadrangle was relatively empty. Some students sat on the library steps smoking, and listening to headphones, and talking and thinking about sex. In the small plot of dirt where the evergreens grew by the steps of the administration building, some tough-looking city birds, starlings mostly, and a few sparrows, pecked industriously for whatever birds peck after. In front of the university, MBTA trains stopped and let people out and took people on before they tunneled back underground. Finally in a voice that sounded almost girlish Lillian said, "You wouldn't understanD." "Probably not," I said. She took her left hand off her briefcase and began to play with the hair at the back of her neck. "A university faculty is special. It is a place, maybe the only place, where the ideal of a civil society still flourishes." "I can see that," I said. If she heard me she didn't show it. "Robinson is a decent man, but he... he has no place on a university faculty. He is not.., how to say this.., he is not consistent with the current best thinking on racial matters." "How is he at teaching English?" I said. 'qat's a fallacy. A university faculty is not simply about teaching, it is about creating and passing on culture. The university is a place where the best minds must be allowed freedom to contemplate the most basic human issues. A university faculty is the progenitor and propagator of culture." I was certainly glad I had said "by whom" a while ago. "Would you say Robinson is out of step with current
,k M.,.J 251
racial thinking in the sense that he does not see it as genocidal to teach dead white men in his classes.'?" "That's part of it, though of course you would put it in a way that makes it sound puerile." "So you felt obligated to lie about him to the tenure committee because he was not the right kind of black guy," I said. "Again you have demeaned my point,' she said. "Someone ought to," I said. "I'm glad I could be the one." "I did what I thought best in the larger context." "Let me get one thing clear[' I said. "This bastion of civility you've been speaking of, is Amir Abdullah a tenured member of itT' "Yes." "I refute it thus," I said. She came out of her abstraction trance enough to look
"Is that a quote?" she said. I couldn't stand her anymore. I stood. "Samuel Johnson[' I said. "Look it up." I left.
paper in the morning while I drink coffee. If I'm away I read whatever morning paper is local. When I'm home I read the Boston Globe. So when Henry dropped off the literature from Last Stand Systems on big way to work on Tuesday morning, I put it aside until I had drunk my third cup of coffee and finished the comic section. Then I folded the paper back up and put it aside in case I wanted to consult it later. Sometimes "Doonesbury" was too hard for me the fi.if time through and I had to reread it later.
The stuff from Last Stand Systems was obviously com-puter-generated, though it was pretty professional-looking with colors and right-justified margins and typefaces that someone had thought about. It was also dreck. The centerpiece of their promotional literature was a newsletter titled Alert! which warned against the encroaching mongrelization, of the white race, the feminization of the American male, the homosexual assault on marriage, the debasement of American Christianity, and the arrival of the Antichrist. There was a thoughtful discussion, complete with footnotes and bibliography, of a secret plot which festered deep within the power centers of the federal government, abetted by Zion-
ism, whereby this country would be handed over to the One Worlders at the UN. The author signed himself Octavio Smith, Ph.D. The writing was grammatical and wooden.
I put Alert.t down and picked up the other stuff. There was a letter from the CEO, Milo Quant, explaining that Last Stand's mission was to restore the America our fathers had founded. There was also an application for membership, and a calendar of upcoming Last Stand events. I filed the applicati
on which required a $100 fee and looked at the. calendar. It was mostly a list of Quant's public appearances. The closest one was at the state college in Fitchburg, Mass., Friday night,, sponsored by a student group. A don't-miss opportunity.
Last Stand Systems, Inc., seemed the most unlikely organization to be flyng a black homosexual radical activist named Amir Abdullah up to Maine for the weekend. But they had, and there was no plausible explanation that I was able to come up with. It was also possible that they had sent out a squad of well-scrubbed shooters to chase us away from him. Again I couldn't think why. Maybe they were using him as a recruiting ploy. Enough exposure to Amir Abdullah would make anyone a racist homophobe.
Robert B Parker - Spenser 26 - Hush Money Page 16