The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

  On the other hand, he remembered the publisher that had been planning to bring out Wieder’s book: it was a press from Maryland named Allman and Limpkin. He confirmed that the board had had discussions on the subject. Wieder was accused of using the university’s resources to gather data that he was going to publish strictly in his own interest.

  He told me that he had no idea why the book hadn’t come out. Maybe Wieder hadn’t finished it or maybe the publisher had asked him to make changes he didn’t agree with. Monroe explained that in general such things were contracted via what was called a “proposal,” a document in which the author provides the publisher with all the necessary information about his project, ranging from content to target audience. Such a document usually contains no more than two or three chapters of the actual book project, with the rest of the manuscript to be delivered at a later date, agreed on by the two parties. The final contract would be signed only after the finished manuscript had been submitted and revised in accordance with the publisher’s suggestions.

  He hadn’t heard of Laura Baines, but he said that Wieder was a notorious womanizer and had had countless affairs, including some with students. The board hadn’t been intending to renew his contract the following year. Everybody knew that Wieder was going to leave Princeton in the summer of 1988, and the Department of Psychology had already started looking for a replacement professor.

  I invited Susanne Johnson to have lunch with me at a restaurant named Agnanti, in Queens. I arrived earlier than the time we’d agreed on, and I sat down at the table and ordered a coffee. When Mrs. Johnson arrived, ten minutes later, I was surprised to see that she was in a wheelchair. As she later explained, she was paralyzed from the waist down. She was accompanied by a young woman, who she introduced as Violet, her daughter. Violet left after checking that everything was fine, telling us that she’d return to pick her mother up an hour later.

  Mrs. Johnson proved to be a breath of fresh air, an optimistic woman, despite her condition. She told me that ten years ago, during a trip to Normandy, France, on the trail of her father, who’d fought on D-Day as a marine, she’d had a terrible accident in the car she’d rented in Paris. Fortunately, her husband, Mike, who was in the passenger seat, had escaped almost unharmed.

  She told me that she had been not only Wieder’s assistant but also his confidante. The professor, Mrs. Johnson said, had been a true genius. He’d happened to choose psychology as his area of research, but she was convinced that he’d have shone in any field. And like any authentic genius, he’d been a magnet for the hatred of the mediocre, who were unable to rise to the same level. He’d had only a few friends at the university and had constantly been harassed under various pretexts. The same enemies periodically spread all kinds of baseless rumors, such as that Wieder was a drunk and a womanizer.

  Susanne Johnson had met Laura Baines many times, she’d known that Laura was the professor’s protégée, but she was certain that they hadn’t been involved in an affair. She confirmed that the professor had just finished a book during that period, something about memory. As she was the one who’d typed up the manuscript, because Wieder used neither a typewriter nor a word processor, she knew for certain that the manuscript had been ready for weeks before his death, and up until now she’d never asked herself whether it had been submitted to the publisher before his death or why the book hadn’t been released.

  Over dessert, I asked her whether she knew anything about a secret project that Wieder was supposed to have been involved in. She hesitated for a few moments before answering, but eventually she admitted that she’d known.

  “I know he was involved in a project that had to do with therapy for soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress, but that’s all I can remember. I majored in economics, not psychology or psychiatry, so I transcribed the documents mechanically, without thinking much about their content. I won’t conceal from you the fact that I believed that Dr. Wieder’s mental state was shaky toward the end of those experiments, whatever they might have been.”

  “So, do you think there might have been a connection between his death and the project he was working on?”

  “I’d thought about it at that time, to be honest. Obviously, I know about these things only from what I’ve read in mysteries or from what I’ve seen in movies, but I think that if his death had been planned as a result of his work, they’d have tried to cover their tracks, making it look like a burglary or even an accident. I think he was murdered by an amateur, someone who was lucky enough to get away with it. But I guess there must have been tensions between the professor and the men he was working for. For about two months before his death, he didn’t give me any more documents to type up. He’d probably stopped working with those people.”

  She was silent for a few moments, and then said, “I was in love with Professor Wieder, Mr. Keller. I was married and, although it might seem paradoxical to you, I loved my husband and children. I never told him, and I don’t think he ever realized it. Probably to him I was just an assistant who was ready to help him even outside office hours. I hoped that one day he’d see me differently, but that never happened. I was overcome by grief when he died, and for a long time I had the feeling that my world had come to an end. He was probably the most wonderful man I’ve ever met in my entire life.”

  Violet Johnson arrived exactly at that point in our conversation, and she accepted my invitation to stay with us for a few minutes. She’d majored in anthropology, but she was working as a real estate agent, and she told me that the market was beginning to recover after the financial crisis of the last few years. She bore an uncannily close resemblance to her mom—when I looked at them, I got the feeling that I was seeing the same person at different stages in her life. I walked them to the parking lot, where Violet had left her car, and we parted after Susanne insisted on hugging me and wished me success.

  I called the Allman and Limpkin switchboard the very next morning.

  I was put through to the acquisitions editor in charge of books on psychology, a very nice woman who listened to me carefully and then gave me the number of their archive department. Professor Wieder had been a famous figure in the academic world, she told me, so it was possible that his book proposal had been preserved in the archive, especially given that in those days e-mails hadn’t yet existed and correspondence with authors was by letter.

  But I didn’t have any luck with the archive department. The person I got through to hung up on me after telling me he wasn’t allowed to talk to the press without prior permission from management.

  I called the editor I’d spoken to earlier, explained what had happened, and listed once more the questions I was trying to answer: whether Wieder’s proposal really existed, whether he’d submitted the full manuscript, and why the book had never been published. I marshaled the full might of my personal charm, and it seemed to work—she promised to try to find the answers to my questions.

  I didn’t hold my breath, but two days later an e-mail from her arrived in my in-box, and she brought me up to date on what she’d found out.

  Wieder sent his editor the proposal in July 1987, with the first chapter of the book enclosed. He mentioned in the proposal that the manuscript was complete and ready for submission. The publisher sent him a contract a month later, in August. Among other things, it stipulated that in November, Wieder should start working with his editor on the revision of the text. But in November, the professor asked for another few weeks, saying he wanted to polish the manuscript one more time over the holidays. This request was granted, but then tragedy intervened. The full manuscript never reached the publisher.

  Attached to the e-mail was a copy of the proposal, a scan of the original typewritten document. It was almost fifty pages long. I set about printing it, watching as the pages were disgorged into the plastic tray one by one. Finally, I leafed through them, then fastened them together with a paper clip and laid them on my desk to read later.

  That evening, I tried to draw u
p a balance sheet of what I’d achieved in my investigation so far and what chances I had of reaching any eventual conclusion.

  Half an hour later, looking at the diagram I’d drawn, I realized that I was, in fact, lost in a kind of maze. I’d set out on the trail of Richard Flynn’s book, and not only had I not found it, but I was buried under a mound of details about people and events that refused to coalesce into a coherent picture. I got the feeling that I was groping in the dark, in an attic full of old junk, without being able to understand the real meaning of the objects that had been amassed there over the years by people I didn’t know and about whom I hadn’t been able to discover anything of real meaning.

  Many of the details I’d found were contradictory, an avalanche of formless information, as if the characters and events of that time were stubbornly refusing to reveal the truth to me. What was more, when I’d begun the investigation, the central character had been Richard Flynn, the author of the manuscript, but as it had progressed, he’d begun to fade from sight, relegated to the background. Instead, the patriarchal figure of Professor Joseph Wieder had stepped to the front of the stage, like the star he’d been throughout his entire career, shoving poor Flynn into a dark corner and reducing him almost to the size of a minor supporting role.

  I tried to make a connection between the character of Laura Baines in Flynn’s manuscript and the woman I’d met at Columbia University Medical Center, but I just couldn’t do it. It was as if there were two different images, one real, one imaginary, and it was impossible to superimpose one on the other.

  I tried to compare the Flynn I knew indirectly from the manuscript—a young Princeton student full of life who’d dreamed of becoming a writer and had already published his first short stories—with the reclusive, solitary man who had lived a dull life with Danna Olsen in a modest apartment, a misanthrope robbed of his dreams. And I tried to understand why that man, when he knew he was dying, had used up the last months of his life writing a manuscript that he’d eventually taken with him to the grave.

  I tried to picture Wieder, characterized by some as a genius, but by others as an impostor, locked up with his own ghosts in that huge, cold house, as if haunted by some unknown guilt. Wieder had left behind the mystery of a missing manuscript, and, in a twist of fate, that was exactly what had happened in the case of Richard Flynn, nearly three decades later. I’d set out seeking a missing manuscript, hadn’t found it, but had instead ended up stumbling onto the trail of yet another lost book.

  I tried to find some consistency among all the characters that my investigation had brought back from the past, but they were just shadows without any definite outline, flitting about within a story whose beginning, ending, and meaning I was unable to uncover. I had in front of me a puzzle, but none of the pieces fit with the others.

  Paradoxically, the more I’d delved into the past, driven by the abundant but contradictory information, the more important the present had become to me. It was as if I’d descended into a tunnel and the circle of light diminishing above my head was the vital element reminding me that I had to ascend back to the surface, because that was where I’d come from and where sooner or later I should return.

  I spoke to Sam on the phone almost every day, and she told me that she was getting better. I discovered that I missed her more than I’d have believed before starting the investigation and before her illness separated us. The more deceptive the shadows around me proved to be, the more real our relationship became, and it gained a consistency that it hadn’t possessed previously or that I’d perhaps refused to accept.

  That was why what happened next came as such a shock.

  I was just about to leave the house to meet Roy Freeman, one of the police detectives, now retired, who’d worked on the Wieder case, when my phone rang. It was Sam, and without any introduction, she told me straight out that she wanted us to break up. Furthermore, she pointed out, “break up” wasn’t even the right term, given that she’d never thought that we’d had a “serious” relationship—just, rather, a friendship without strings.

  She told me she wanted to get married and have kids, and a guy she knew had been pursuing her for quite a while. He looked, she said, like he might be a suitable lifelong partner for her.

  She told me all of this in a tone of voice that made her sound like she was a casting executive informing an unsuccessful candidate that another actor was more suitable for a role.

  I wondered whether she could have cheated on me with that colleague of hers, but then I realized that it was an idle question: Sam wasn’t the kind of person who didn’t thoroughly explore all her options before making a decision.

  As she explained that she’d used the days she’d spent ill in bed thinking about what it was she really wanted, I understood that most likely her relationship with that guy had been going on for quite a while.

  “It was you who said you wanted a light relationship, with no strings attached,” I pointed out. “I respected your wishes, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t want something more.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me till now? What stopped you?”

  “Maybe I was just about to.”

  “John, we know each other too well. You’re just like all other men—you only realize how much a woman means to you the instant you lose her. Did you know that while we were together I was afraid that one day you’d meet a younger woman and run off with her? Did you know how much it hurt me that you never invited me to meet your friends or that you never introduced me to your parents, as if you wanted to keep our relationship a secret? I said to myself that I’m nothing more than an older lady who you occasionally liked to have sex with.”

  “My folks are in Florida, Sam. As for my friends, I don’t think you’d like them very much: some guys from the Post, and two or three pals I knew at college who are now overweight and tell me, after a couple of shots, stories about how they cheat on their wives.”

  “I was talking about as a matter of principle.”

  “And I was talking about how things really are.”

  “I don’t think there’s any point in us starting the blame game. That’s the ugliest part of the end of a relationship, when you remember all your frustrations and start slinging mud.”

  “I wasn’t blaming you for anything, really.”

  “All right, I’m sorry, I just—”

  I heard her coughing.

  “You okay?”

  “They told me that I’ll be rid of this cough in two or three more weeks. I have to hang up now—perhaps we’ll keep in touch. Please take care of yourself.”

  I wanted to ask her whether she was sure she wouldn’t rather meet up right away, to talk face-to-face, but I didn’t get the chance. She hung up, and after I stared at the phone for a few moments, as if I couldn’t understand what it was doing in my hand, I did the same.

  As I was walking to my meeting with Roy Freeman, I realized that I wanted to get the whole investigation over with as quickly as possible.

  I knew that if I hadn’t allowed myself to get caught up in it and tried to play detective, maybe I’d have been attentive enough to see the signs of the approaching storm in my relationship with Sam. Her decision to break up with me was the last straw, even though I wasn’t able to explain why.

  I wasn’t superstitious, but I got the distinct feeling that Richard Flynn’s story concealed some kind of spell, something like the curse of the mummy’s tomb. I was determined to call Peter and tell him I wanted out, because it was clear to me that I wasn’t ever going to get to the bottom of what happened that night with Professor Joseph Wieder, Laura Baines, and Richard Flynn.

  SEVEN

  Roy Freeman lived in Bergen County, over the bridge, but he’d said he had some business to take care of in the city, so I’d made a reservation at a restaurant on West Thirty-Sixth Street.

  He was tall and skinny, with the look of an actor cast in supporting roles, the kind of aging cop who unostentatiously backs up the alpha hero in his fi
ght against the bad guys, and who gives you the impression—although you don’t know why, because he has only one or two lines in the movie—that you can rely on him.

  His hair was almost completely white, as was his carefully trimmed beard, which covered the entire lower half of his face. He introduced himself, and we started talking. He told me he’d been married to a woman named Diana for almost twenty years. They had a son, Tony, who’d just turned thirty-eight, but whom he hardly ever saw. His ex and their son had moved to Seattle after the divorce, in the late 1980s. His son had graduated from college and was a news anchor at a local radio station.

  Freeman didn’t hesitate to tell me that he was 100 percent to blame for the breakup, as he’d been too caught up in his work and used to drink too much. He was one of the first police detectives in New Jersey to join the force straight out of college, back in 1969, and some of the other guys in the department had had it in for him because of that, especially given that he was also an African American. And whoever claimed that by the mid-1970s racism had almost been eradicated from the force, especially in small-town departments, was a liar, he stressed. Of course, even before then they’d started making movies with black actors cast as judges, prosecutors, college professors, and chiefs of police, but the reality was different. Still, the pay was good—an officer on patrol got almost twenty thousand a year back then—and he’d dreamed of becoming a cop since childhood.

  The West Windsor Township Police Department, he told me, had around fifteen officers in the early 1980s, most of them around forty years old. There was just one woman in the agency, a recent recruit, and apart from a Hispanic officer, José Mendez, all the others were white. It was a grim period for New Jersey and New York: the crack epidemic had begun, and even if Princeton wasn’t in the thick of the wave, it didn’t mean that the cops had an easy life there. Freeman worked in the Princeton PD for a decade, and in 1979 he was transferred to West Windsor, Mercer County, to an agency that had been set up just a couple of years before.