Burning Down the House

by Lev Raphael

  maples, and dense, low yew hedges. It wasn’t remotely as picturesque as the kind of cloister you find at Oxford or even Harvard, given that the university was only 150 years old, but it was beautiful and contemplative enough any time of the year. A place to hide in.

  We closed the door and hung up our coats, and I sat on the well-padded rust-and-beige-striped love seat while Stefan put the first CD of Handel’s Julius Caesar on the portable CD

  player, turned it down low, and brought the bottle and two shot glasses out of his desk’s capacious bottom drawer. The Baroque music was very soothing. Across from us were

  framed some of Stefan’s favorite press pieces, features and reviews.

  “Here’s to chaos,” I toasted, abashed now that I had

  been enjoying the spectacle at the Campus Center, and trying to exorcize it with a joke.

  Stefan grimaced, but he toasted back. “This place is

  cursed. SUM. It has to be. It’s like some Greek tragedy.”

  “You need a tragic hero for a tragedy.”

  “Okay, then, it’s like the Peloponnesian Wars, where

  nobody wins.”

  “Listen, I bet there’s violence on other campuses, it’s just that we don’t read about it, we’re not there.”

  “How many other schools need their own emergency

  room?”

  Stefan was referring to a recent multimillion-dollar

  addition to SUM’s medical school, donated by a business school graduate who had made hundreds of dot-com millions.

  Remembering his days of drunken revelry at SUM—and a few broken bones—he wanted SUM students from now on to be as close to an ER as possible. It was a glamorous,

  embarrassing gift, showing off SUM at its best and its worst.

  “And we both go to conferences,” Stefan continued. “Do you ever trade forensic notes with people in your field? I don’t! Come on, Nick, have Edith Wharton scholars ever attacked each other physically? Of course not. But when the Wharton scholars meet here for a conference, it’s a disaster.”

  Sharon had recently said something similar about SUM, comparing it to that horrible doomed subdivision in Poltergeist that’s secretly built over a graveyard.

  “What’s the place in Arizona—Sedona, right? Where

  there’s supposed to be good energy? SUM is the opposite.”

  Stefan looked disgusted and drained. I couldn’t blame him.

  “Then somebody should study it, right? Maybe turn it

  into a weapon.”

  Stefan grudgingly smiled, but the word weapon made me think of the din at the center, in which I could have sworn I’d heard a gun.

  “Did it remind you of that spring—at the bridge?” Stefan asked with concern, stroking my hair.

  I nodded. I had been having lunch near the Administration Building bridge when a brawl turned lethal, and a former student of mine was killed.

  If I ever wanted to switch careers, I could probably lead a guided tour of SUM murder scenes, given my involvement in so many of them. Call it Playing the Zero SUM Game, perhaps.

  The image faded. “You’re right—this campus is like a

  fucking minefield. I should just never go anywhere,” I said.

  “Stay home and become one of those obese shut-ins Maury Povich or some other daytime idiot coaxes back to life.”

  “Why not skip all three stages of that fantasy and just leave things the way they are? Your students would miss you.

  I’d miss you.”

  “Why? I’d be safe—and I’d be home.”

  “Right, lost under three hundred pounds of self-pity.”

  “Sharon’s always said I have a comic vision of life. But it may be wearing thin. It’s hard to see the humor in all this. I mean, what’s going to happen next? An asteroid hits my car when I park at the mall? A herd of buffalo from northern Michigan breaks loose and stampedes through our house?”

  “They’d have a long trip.”

  “So would the asteroid!”

  Stefan laughed.

  “You put up with a lot,” I said.

  “We both do. Neither one of us is especially low—

  maintenance.”

  “That’s for sure.” I kissed him, and then suddenly

  recalled his flurried entrance to the Campus Center. “So, what was up with Peter de Jonge? What couldn’t you tell me before?”

  “You’re not going to believe this. He’s the son of

  Holocaust survivors.”

  I waited a moment for Stefan to amplify what was so

  upsetting about that, but he seemed lost in the conversation he’d had with Peter, whom I’d only met once.

  “I’m not tracking,” I said, trying to prompt him. “What’s the problem—?”

  Stefan said, “He came up here to do Ph.D. course work in EAR partly because of me, because of what happened to me and how I’ve written about it.”

  “Wait. He wants to write fiction?”

  “No. Maybe. It’s confusing. He’s also interested in the library, in one of their special collections. The hate groups.”

  “That’s right.” My cousin Sharon, who was an archivist at Columbia, had told me once that SUM was nationally known for its collection covering the Klan, the John Birch Society, and every other radical hate group, whether on the right or the left, dating back to the nineteenth century, when Christian Identity thinking took root in this state, a transplant from England. It was the lunacy that saw the British (or the people of your choice) as the true Jews descended from the Lost Ten Tribes, and the current Jews as poisonous frauds.

  Militias hadn’t taken off in Michigan in the twentieth century in a vacuum.

  The archives seemed an unsavory kind of fame, but there it was.

  “Neptune College is pretty racist, isn’t it? Down there they must think SUM is Babylon or worse, so what the hell is Peter de Jonge doing at Neptune College anyway?”

  “His wife was born there—her family owns the town,

  almost. Peter told me he met her at Columbia when he was doing a psychology degree, and they moved back because she wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

  “Wait a minute—Peter de Jonge was at Columbia?”

  “Around the same time we were. Pretty strange.”

  “So Peter de Jonge is our age, right? And he’s Jewish in a place like Neptune. That must be tough.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  But Stefan wasn’t done, I could tell that, and I asked, “There’s something else, isn’t there? Is he gay? Bi?”

  “No, not at all. I didn’t pick that up at all.”

  “What did you pick up?”

  Stefan poured us another set of shots and then leaned back, eyes half-closed, as if he’d been asked by the police to describe an assailant and was trying as hard as possible to capture every detail.

  “He was hiding something else.”

  “God, what else could he have to hide? He’s a

  pyromaniac? A CIA agent? A registered Democrat?”

  “It was something. I could sense him coming around to it, avoiding it, coming back. He seems tormented. Like he wanted to tell me, tell someone.”

  “A tormented psychologist. That’s new.”

  “He’s definitely anxious, and paranoid. He didn’t want to go near the windows.”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s like that thing you quoted to me about Sherlock Holmes, about the dog that didn’t bark. Everyone who comes to my office comments on the view, sooner or later. But it was almost as if he didn’t want to be seen.”

  “By whom?”

  Stefan shrugged. “Like someone was following him.”

  “Great, Juno’s being harassed, and a grad student is

  being stalked. What’s next?” I tried picturing Peter de Jonge.

  “Tell me something—does he look Jewish to you?”

  Stefan shrugged. “What’s Jewish look like? We’ve both been to Israel. All those Jews from ar
ound the world, and they look like everybody.”

  “Yeah, but there are Jewish types.” My parents had

  always noted who among my friends and acquaintances

  looked or didn’t look Jewish with the same kind of attention that some black people focus on “good hair” and “bad hair.”

  Growing up, I had come to think that not looking Jewish—or like what people generally thought was Jewish—was a definite advantage.

  “Peter looks sort of like you, actually.”

  “Well, that settles it, because my folks always said I didn’t look Jewish.”

  “Wait a minute—”

  Before we could pursue Peter de Jonge’s looks or mine, there was an impatient knock on the tall, solid-core door, and when Stefan opened it, we were both surprised to see

  Detective Valley there, surveying us with his typical sour expression.

  The campus police had complete legal authority at SUM, which in effect was like a small town, though in emergencies like postgame riots they could call in cops from local jurisdictions for backup. The campus cops were recruited from Michigan’s state police and various municipal police forces, and it was a plum job, but you wouldn’t know that from Valley’s perpetual dissatisfaction. He viewed the students and faculty as nothing more than potential or actual miscreants, and he definitely didn’t like me or Stefan, based on five years of acquaintance and several criminal

  investigations we had unavoidably been involved in. I strongly suspected homophobia and anti-Semitism as well.

  “Where’s your bullwhip, detective?”

  Valley glowered in the doorway, lamppost-thin and

  dressed in the kind of suit you saw on Mormon missionaries.

  As always, Stefan spoke with far more cool. “Can we

  help you?”

  Valley took that as an invitation and walked in, drifting over to one of the windows. “Nice view,” he said

  suspiciously, as if Stefan had acquired it in some underhanded way.

  “Is that the small talk before you zap us with tough

  questions?”

  He rounded on me. “You think you’re pretty clever,

  don’t you?”

  “I am clever. I come from a long line of clever people.”

  Valley breathed in, and seemed to be counting. He came out with, “What do you know about the incident that took place this afternoon at the Campus Center?” He leaned back against the thick old window frame and sat down. The ledge was almost as deep as a window seat would have been.

  “We were there for a faculty reception,” Stefan said. “It got weird, so we left.”

  Valley nodded. “Weird.”

  “Weird,” Stefan repeated, and I burst out, “If you two are going to repeat everything, this’ll take forever.”

  “Okay,” Valley said. “What happened? What did you

  see?”

  “Was someone hurt? Why are you asking us?” Valley

  almost always made me antagonistic.

  He frowned. “I was assigned to EAR because I know

  what you people are like.” He couldn’t have been more disdainful if he were scraping dead bugs off his windshield. I wasn’t ready to declare EAR a haven of sanity, but I sure didn’t care for his outsider’s contempt.

  Stefan tried placating Valley by offering him some

  Seagram’s, but Valley declined, so Stefan offered a brief narrative instead. “What happened? The provost gave a speech. Lots of people objected because she was an hour late and didn’t even make a legitimate excuse. There was

  shouting. The table that had plaques honoring the faculty members for their published books was overturned. That’s when we left.”

  I noticed that Stefan avoided mentioning Summerscale’s vandalism at the back of the room. I would have done the same, feeling oddly protective of him. Besides, so many people had been there, including the one guard; why would we be needed as witnesses?

  “That campus cop who was trying to eject Byron

  Summerscale,” I said. “Was he the one who—”

  “That professor is a troublemaker,” Valley said with

  conviction. “He tried disrupting a party last month at Dean Bullerschmidt’s house, and now this.”

  “All he did last month was get drunk and tell the truth. If that’s a disruption—” I shrugged. Dean Bullerschmidt was a petty autocrat who could stand some disruption. He was currently off on a junket (aka “conference”) in Beijing with other American university administrators, no doubt learning the finer points of handling unruly crowds.

  “But was it the cop?” I asked.

  “Was what the cop?”

  “Did he fire the gun—and who was he aiming at—and

  did anyone get hurt?”

  “What gun? Nobody fired a gun. What the hell are you

  talking about? There wasn’t any report of a gun at the scene,”

  Valley assured me with all the charm of Lily Tomlin’s Phone Lady. He asked Stefan, “Did you hear a gun?”

  Stefan shook his head but, obviously embarrassed for

  me, said, “I didn’t hear any gun—we were getting the hell out of there before it turned into a riot.”

  “You wouldn’t call what was going on already a riot?”

  Valley asked, squinting at Stefan. “You’re a writer, aren’t you? Don’t you pick words carefully?”

  Stefan squirmed. “Okay, it was a riot, but—”

  “You called it an incident before,” I pointed out to Valley.

  “That’s true. I did. I’m not a writer. So you think

  someone brought a gun? You know faculty members who are in the habit of bringing weapons onto campus?” He looked as if he was on the edge of exploding. This was clearly beyond the pale even for him, a man who loathed the faculty.

  “No,” I said, “absolutely not.” It wasn’t exactly the truth, and it wasn’t exactly a lie, either. It was convincing enough, anyway, because Valley nodded and seemed to dismiss my story. He turned back to Stefan. “Did you know things were going to escalate the way they did?”

  Now Stefan was angry. “How could we know? Are you

  nuts? You think that chaos was planned? It was a conspiracy? The faculty on this campus couldn’t even get themselves together enough to join a union, and they’ve tried three times. The only thing the average professor at SUM can pull off is himself.”

  “Huh,” Valley said, reluctantly agreeing. Before he could go on with his peculiar interrogation, I heard loud footsteps down the hall, and Juno suddenly came to a halt outside Stefan’s office door.

  “You!” she bawled, entering the office like a trireme at ramming speed and heading right for Valley. She jabbed him in the chest, and he reared back. “Someone tried to kill me at the Campus Center, and not a single one of your shit-for-brains dimwitted lickspittle morons with their toy badges believed me!” Juno pulled down the zipper of her black top to reveal red marks at her throat, incidentally exposing the northern reaches of her cleavage. “Someone tried to strangle me when the lights went out. They pushed me down and got on top of me.”

  Valley might have gulped a little at the image.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter!” Juno bellowed at him.

  “Did you see the perpetrator?”

  “In the dark?” she snapped. “With people pushing and

  shoving like The Day of the Locust? Of course not! I don’t have X-ray eyes. Now, what are you going to do to find who was responsible?”

  Valley surprised me by apologizing for any campus

  policemen who hadn’t taken her seriously. “The situation was very confused.”

  So now it was a “situation.”

  “I’ll be happy to take your statement when I’m done

  here,” Valley told her.

  Juno nodded fiercely. “Good. My office is at the end of the hall—you can’t miss it. And don’t keep me waiting long, or I’ll sue your ass till there’s nothing left but your butthole gaspi
ng for breath.”

  It may have been a strangely mixed metaphor, but it sure had force. Juno whirled around, adjuring Valley not to be late, and marched herself out the door, but she popped back in and said to Stefan, “Put some window shades up in here—it’s like a fucking fish bowl,” and then she tromped out and down the hall.

  Valley watched her go, cleared his throat, then renewed questioning us with even less bonhomie than before. This time he was more direct.

  “Do you know anyone who brought a gun to the Campus

  Center?”

  Trying not to hesitate, I must have paused too long, and Valley pounced: “Well, do you?”

  “So there was a gun,” I said to Stefan, stalling. “See?

  Isn’t that what you’re saying, detective?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Stefan said. “All that noise—it could have been anything. Car backfire, I don’t know—”

  Valley studied both of us, not revealing a thing.

  “I don’t know of anyone bringing a gun to the Campus

  Center,” I said briskly, as if the question was stupid and I hadn’t raised the whole subject myself. Of course this was technically true. Juno may have had a gun, but she hadn’t mentioned bringing it to Parker Hall or anywhere else, though I supposed she must, since what good would it do protecting her if it stayed at home?

  Stefan nodded, and neither one of us looked at the door that Juno had recently stalked through.

  Clearly dissatisfied, Valley said he would want to talk to us again and started to leave. But he clearly had something more to say—to me. “This investigation isn’t a joke, you know.”

  “We do.”

  “You’re always around when there’s trouble,” Valley

  observed, as if trying to goad me.

  “There were three hundred other people in that room.”

  “Three hundred and twenty-six. But none of them have