by Ruth Edwards
‘Were there boos?’
‘And cheers. The Dictionary of Right-on Quotations that calls herself a Dean got very rattled at this stage and asked how I could say such a thing in Freeman, which was dedicated to diversity because it honoured everyone’s otherness, or some such garbage. I suggested she should look around the audience and the campus and see apartheid in front of her eyes. What she and people like her were doing, I said, was maximising difference when her job was to minimise it.
‘I brought in Tom Lehrer again. He has a line about how we all ought to love one another and adds “I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that.”’
‘Bad choice, I’d have thought. Americans don’t do irony much.’
‘It puzzled them, I felt. But I tried to get across the notion that enforced tolerance leads to greater intolerance. You have to go with the grain of human nature, I said to the Dean. In my college, people make friends with people they like; they’re not forcibly segregated so they hang about in black groups or white groups or Asian groups or gay groups. Unlike Freeman.
‘Rawlings then decided to help by shouting that Whitey had ruined the world with his so-called civilisation because so-called “primitive” societies were happy and peace-loving, so I said, “I see, so they never ate each other,” and he began to rave again about how I was a typical white imperialist and I pointed out that he was living in a fantasy land and that most primitive societies rarely took a day off from trying to rub each other out. So then he played the slavery card: no one should expect African-Americans to talk to Whitey considering what had been done to them, so I retorted that slavery had been practised by every race in the world, that the African slaves who ended up in America were first sold by Africans to Arabs, and that slavery in the U.S. was abolished 150 years ago and that it was about time blacks got over it.’
‘Was that popular?’
‘Very, in some quarters, but it caused a bit of an uproar in others, especially when I added that they’d be better turning their attention to doing something about Africans who were being enslaved today by Islamic Arabs in Mauritania and the Sudan. I added that American Muslims should confront their fanatics and denounce the people who were murdering Americans. Then the dean said I was undermining everything for which Freeman University stood by making such terrible and disrespectful accusations and that she was feeling the hurt, so I said that was too bad, but what else did she expect in a temple to freedom of speech. Some of the students started arguing with each other and then Rawlings got more wind in his sails and delivered himself of an outburst about why it was all an imperialist lie that Africans had sold each other and demanded that Whitey pay for slavery. He’s on the reparations bandwagon: every institution that ever had anything to do with slavery is to cough up billions forthwith.’ She laughed. ‘What’s more, he thinks Freeman should change its name. I quite like Rawlings. He adds to the general merriment.’
‘What do you mean he thinks Freeman should change its name?’
‘You’re very slow tonight, Mary Lou. Surely you grasp that it’s hurtful to remind the descendants of slaves that they once were not freemen. I did enquire how Rawlings viewed the history of white slavery, and asked from whom whites should be seeking reparation, but before he could answer the Dean completely lost her nerve and wrapped up the session double-quick in the interests of campus harmony….Oh, hang on. My mobile’s ringing.’
‘Oh, Mike, good. Did you get anything? Yes…yes…I can do that….Half-an-hour?…Fine. I’ll be waiting outside. Be on time. And bring Velda.’
‘An assignation with the shamuses?’ asked Mary Lou, when the baroness switched phones.
‘Yes. We’re going to a diner. I’m quite excited.’
‘Just spare me your complaints about the food. However, I’ve enjoyed the account of your afternoon. It sounds most entertaining. I hope the poor Dean has a good supply of smelling-salts.’
‘I certainly enjoyed myself and I think I really cut the silly cow to the quick. But I’m on a crusade now that I’ve seen the horrors of where diversity and affirmative action lead. You see the trouble is that when a moron like the Dean looks at a group of a hundred people, she doesn’t see a hundred people who agree about some things and argue about others and who benefit from exchanging ideas. Instead she searches for a hundred different agendas by encouraging people to develop grievances so they can form tiny groups and compete with the others for attention, status, and money—demanding unequal treatment in the name of equality.’ She sighed. ‘Wait a minute, Mary Lou. I have to relight my cigar.’
‘I’m surprised you’re allowed to smoke,’ said Mary Lou, when the baroness returned.
‘The fascists have banned it almost everywhere. All this passive-smoking bilge. But Stefano reclassified this as a smoking suite. Where was I?’
‘Splitting up your hundred people into competing groups.’
The baroness sighed. ‘Do you remember those simple days back when we first met and the dykes were trying to take over St. Martha’s? They were only a pressure group. In this university—and, I gather, most of American academia—all the PC crap’s so embedded it’s beyond questioning. Diversity is bigger than General Motors and has become more embedded than a fly in amber.
‘You take your hundred people. First you separate them according to race—broadly white, black, Asian, and Hispanic—then by whether they’re American or foreign. Then, Marjorie tells me, if they’re black, you have to distinguish between immigrant and colonised minorities.’
‘Huh?’
‘A Nigerian is an immigrant and obviously deserves special treatment as a black, but although he was once colonised and still is, apparently, by the oil companies, he’s not to be lumped together as a recipient of special favours with Americans of African descent because they have all manner of extra grievances and hang-ups and so get extra privileges, so now you’ve got black against black in the grant or promotion stakes.
‘Then you’ve got the gender complication. It used to be simple, but now you’re dividing people into male, female, transsexual, and transvestite, which produces competition over such great issues as lavatories. It’s a hot debate at Freeman, whether a transvestite should be in the lavatory dictated by his or her clothes or his or her genitalia. They solved the problem partly by having uni-sex lavatories, which Betsy tells me a lot of girls hate, but there’s a male transvestite who’s insisting on his right to use every lavatory on the campus regardless of designation. He also wants a gender-blind dormitory. A sub-committee is chewing anxiously over the matter as we speak.’
‘Have they considered what to do with hermaphrodites?’
‘I’ll put it to them. Now you throw in sexual orientation: straight man, straight woman, homosexual, lesbian, bisexual. Then there are the extra permutations offered by religion and disability. Oh, and of course no one can say anything critical to anyone else for fear of hurting their feelings. Unless they’re white males. Or Jewish. In which case they’re always in the wrong.’
‘You’ve depressed me enough, Jack. I’m signing off now. Ellis has just come in. His tales of the criminal world will come as light relief.’
***
‘Just how I pictured a diner,’ said the baroness. ‘It’s encouraging that old traditions persist.’
‘It’s actually new,’ said Vera. ‘There weren’t any diners left anywhere within reach of New Paddington, but now retro’s fashionable, they’re recreating the 1950s.’
‘Good,’ said the baroness. ‘A much-maligned decade. Though not without its drawbacks, I have to admit. British restaurants were not good then.’
She looked around her benignly. ‘I like the booths. And even more, I like those attractive skating waitresses. I expect the food will be terrible, but I’m resigned.’
Within five minutes, the baroness had flirted with a giggly blonde who declared herself a novice skater and struggled gamely not to fall over, she had ordered st
eak and chips without fuss, and she was uncomplainingly sipping an indifferent California wine. ‘Now take it from the top, Mike.’
‘I’m not a guy that takes any crap, Jack.’
‘I can see that,’ she responded solemnly. She turned her head slightly towards Vera, winked out of Robinson’s line of sight, and received a conspiratorial grin. ‘And was there a lot of crap being thrown at you?’
‘Well, this guy—Stan Donnelly—was one tough-looking punk and I thought for a while he wasn’t going to come clean.’
‘How did you find him in the first place?’
Robinson looked embarrassed.
‘You come clean, Maurice-Mike,’ said Vera.
‘The internet.’
The baroness laughed. ‘The typewriter’s just a prop, I presume.’
‘Saw it on eBay and couldn’t resist it.’
‘OK. Your guilty secret is out. I won’t hold it against you that you’re technologically literate.’
‘Actually Mike’s a whiz on the net, Jack,’ said Vera. ‘Better than me. That’s why I gave him a job.’
The baroness raised an eyebrow. ‘You can tell me about that later. What about Donnelly. How did you locate him?’
‘Easy. I tracked Gonzales and Fortier-Pritchardson to the same Ohio school ten years ago. He was a student and she was Dean of Students. My hunch was that if he’s tall and really dumb he’d have got to college on a basketball scholarship, so that’s what I went there to investigate.’
‘I surmise from your happy grin that your hunch was right.’
‘Sure was. I spun a cock-and-bull story to a secretary about a long-lost uncle I was trying to trace and she showed me photo albums and then I had Gonzales and the names of the guys on his team. Stan Donnelly was the first one I found on the net because he’d become a professional player who was a coach at a small Christian college only fifty miles down the highway. I saw him this morning.’
‘Good lad.’
‘Donnelly was pretending he couldn’t remember Gonzales, but finally I broke him.’
‘By pressing the muzzle of your gun to his right temple, no doubt?’
Robinson laughed. ‘Not quite. He looked hard-up, so I told him I’d give him a hundred bills if he told me something that was worth it. He coughed for one hundred and fifty. I didn’t think you’d mind.’
‘My dear Mike, as I told you, what I want are results. And I’m not a cheapskate.’
‘I have your results, doll.’ He stopped. ‘Sorry, I got carried away.’
‘It takes a lot to offend me, Mike,’ said the baroness. ‘And you, as they say here, are not in that ballpark. Get on with the story.’
Heidi came skating over with a tray of dishes, lurched as she reached the table, cannoned into the edge of the booth and fell to the floor with an enormous crash. It took several minutes for the baroness and her guests to calm her down and for the broken crockery and salad to be swept up and the trio’s main dishes delivered safely.
‘You need to eat up, Mike. You’ve had a long day. Give us the gist in a couple of sentences and we can have the full story when you’ve cleared your plate.’
‘Gonzales was violent and mean, he was chucked off the team because of his behaviour, he got crap grades, and he’d have been thrown out of college if Fortier-Pritchardson hadn’t saved him by finding that he’d suffered from racial harrassment. Donnelly said he must have been screwing the bitch senseless. When I told him Gonzales had a Ph.D. he nearly choked from laughing.’ And Robinson bent thankfully to his vast plate of corned beef.
***
At that precise moment, the Provost was wailing to the President. ‘She’s crazy. Diane says what she said was certifiably crazy. And she holds her responsible for firing up Jimmy Rawlings. Supposedly he’s organising a march through the campus tomorrow morning protesting our hiring an Islamophobe who insulted Allah by saying Islam was a primitive religion. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’
‘You don’t know what you’re fucking going to do,’ said the President. ‘It’s your sorry ass that’s on the line, not mine. I’m in New York and none of this is my fault. You chose Lady fucking Troutbeck. And Diane carries the can for choosing Jimmy Fucking Rawlings. And so do you for accepting her recommendation.’
‘I’d had several refusals when I met Troutbeck. How was I to know she was a mad right-winger? You expect senior academics to be liberals. Why’s she doing this?’
‘Sounds like wilful cuntishness to me. You should have checked her out.’
‘I told Marjorie to, and she passed her. Said she was a radical. But didn’t say anything about her being a radical reactionary.’
‘You shouldn’t have trusted Marjorie. Don’t you remember why we got rid of her?’
‘I don’t trust Marjorie, but Ethan wasn’t around and I trusted her enough just to run a check,’ shouted the Provost. ‘I was busy and in England and I didn’t think there was a problem. And Rawlings would have been OK if she hadn’t been here. What am I to do now?’
‘It’s obvious. Get some reliable students mobilised to complain about Troutbeck. If things are made difficult for her and we offer her a good package, we can get her on a plane out of Indiana double-quick.’
‘Ethan’s already having her trailed to see if we can get anything on her.’
‘Tell him to do a bit of intimidating if necessary.’
‘I’m not sure that would work,’ said the Provost.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘You don’t know her like I do.’
‘Nonsense. Ethan could intimidate Donald Rumsfeld.’
‘What about Rawlings?’
‘We’ll pander to his ego by making Troutbeck his sacrificial victim. Then we’ll bribe him to shut the fuck up.’
***
‘So what’s a nice couple like you doing in a job like this?’
‘My dad was a P.I.,’ said Vera, ‘and I joined him when I finished high school. I’d still be there in Chicago if I hadn’t met Mike, who had just graduated and was moving to New Paddington to go to graduate school. He wanted me, I wanted him, and he needed work so we set up M and V.’
‘What made you want to go to Freeman, Mike?’ asked the baroness.
‘I wanted to do film studies and my college was crap at it. Freeman had a good reputation.’
‘You amaze me.’
Robinson sighed, and swallowed more coffee. ‘There was a really great two-year course in noir P.I. films.’
‘Was? You mean you’ve finished it.’
‘It’s more like it finished me. I loved the first year, but then our prof was pushed out and a moron took over. This past year we’ve being going almost still by still through great movies and the books they’re based on looking for racism and sexism. Can you imagine?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Philip Marlowe uses words like negro and mocks Indians, Sam Spade turns a woman in even though she’ll get the electric chair, all the heroes are violent, they all see women as sex-objects and are substance abusers, Sidney Greenstreet’s fatness was portrayed negatively, and Peter Lorre was always being ridiculed for being short.’
‘I see. So you decided to ape Mike Hammer just to wind the moron up?’
‘You got it. Do you remember the end of I,The Jury?’
‘No.’
‘“How c-could you?” she gasped. I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. ‘It was easy,’ I said.”’
‘Not a sentimentalist, Mickey Spillane.’
‘When I said that showed the integrity and innate justice and moral sense of Hammer, I thought Dr. Pappas-Lott would explode.’
‘Pappas-Lott? What was she doing teaching you? She’s the Dean.’
‘She took over the course to use it for what she called a series of master classes. There are always instructors there being shown how to teach.’
‘Can she teach?’
‘If you think grading students by how many unacceptable words or
actions they can ferret out of a book or a film is teaching, then she sure can.’
Vera took his hand and patted it. ‘Never mind, Maurice-Mike, what good would a master’s be to you anyway?’
‘Didn’t you finish?’ asked the baroness.
‘I was disqualified for inappropriate behaviour and language and I couldn’t be bothered appealing. Freeman means nothing to me: I just went to classes. And who wants to be an academic anyway? Through Vera-Velda I’ve found a job I love. We’ll move out of New Paddington soon and go somewhere there’ll be work.’
***
Before settling into her own office the following morning, the baroness called in next door and gave Marjorie a pithy account of what she had learned from Mike Robinson.
‘You mean you just walked off the street and hired these children? Are they even licensed?’
‘They are. It turns out that Velda-Vera is twenty-five and had five years’ experience as a gumshoe in Chicago before she met Mike, moved to New Paddington, and took him on as an employee. He’s been there for more than two years and has just qualified for a license.’
‘So what’s with this fedora/trenchcoat rubbish?’
‘It’s just fun, Marjorie. He’s a bit bored, and he was really just putting two fingers up at Pappas-Lott and her ilk. And he and Vera-Velda seem perfectly competent and really rather sweet. I’m enjoying them. Don’t be a spoil-sport.
‘What’s more, we now have independent evidence that Gonzales is a thoroughly bad piece of work and that the Provost is his willing accomplice. My mind is clarified. They’re obviously not fit to be in their jobs and we must see what we can do to get them out. The children will be digging for more dirt on them, and also having a look again at the death of Provost Haringey.’
‘What can they do that hasn’t been done?’
‘I don’t know, Marjorie, but I’m giving them a chance. Mike Robinson has flair, and from what I learned last night, Vera is excellent at screwing information out of unlikely sources.’
‘I’d be easier if it was Mike Hammer himself going after those rattlesnakes.’
The baroness yawned. ‘Stop worrying, Marjorie. Everything will be fine. Besides, they’re armed. Now, may I borrow some money off you? I had my wallet stolen after yesterday’s punch-up.’
