A Murder of Crows

by David Rotenberg

  “Yeah—that’s why I keep it. I don’t use it to decorate.”

  “Do you remember the last person who bought some?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Yslan looked at Decker.

  “Do you remember, Mr. Johnson?” Decker demanded.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you know the person’s name?”

  “No. This is a junkyard, not an antique shop.”

  Yslan looked at Decker. Squiggly lines on his retinal screen. He shook his head.

  “Mr. Johnson, I’m a federal agent. We are investigating the killing of hundreds of people.”

  “At the fancy college, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe they got what they deserved.”

  “That’s not the point, Mr. Johnson.”

  “Really?”

  “What did the guy look like who bought the scrap from you?”

  He spat on the ground again, this time much closer to Yslan’s foot than was necessary. “He looked like a girl is what he looked like. Tits and everything.”

  38

  A STATUE OF SCRAP—T MINUS 6 DAYS

  VALERY PALMER ADJUSTED HER BRA FOR THE HUNDREDTH TIME that day. Since she’d found that lump—even though they claimed it was benign—she’d been unable for some reason to wear a bra that didn’t pull or itch or just damned well hurt.

  After another effort she gave up, turned on the acetylene and lit her welding torch. The flame was instantly reflected in the hundreds of metal surfaces of the huge sculpture she was working on.

  Yslan approached with Mr. T behind her and Decker at her side. “Ms. Palmer?” she asked.

  Valery Palmer turned her whole body in the direction of the voice, which momentarily pointed the lit torch right at Yslan’s chest.

  Then she snapped it off and flipped up her welding mask, allowing her blond hair to fall to her strong shoulders. “Yes, I’m Valery Palmer—to my student, Professor Palmer.”

  Decker noted the use of the singular “student.”

  Yslan introduced herself then said, “You’re not all that easy to find.”

  “Well, I’m the only fine-arts faculty member of the only fine-arts department on this science campus, so they kinda hide me away.”

  “That must be—”

  “Nah. But I’m only here because they can’t legally get rid of me. Twenty years ago two graduates from the school set up a trust fund that had to be spent on a fine-arts faculty member. They wanted there to be at least some contact with the arts for these science nerds. Seems that they missed contact with what they called the ‘other world.’ So here I am—in the far-off corner.”

  Yslan nodded.

  “So, what can I do for you folks?”

  “Mr. Johnson from the junkyard said that you bought scrap metal from him.”

  Valery pointed at the sculpture and said, “Yep. By the carload.”

  “Did you use all the scrap you bought?”

  “Well, not all.”

  “Why not all?”

  Valery leaned down and picked up a few pieces of scrap from around the statue. “Cause I make mistakes sometimes. Or I change my mind. Or I make mistakes and I change my mind.”

  “You mentioned a student.”

  “My one and only student. Poor kid takes a razzing from his buds. The college doesn’t even credit it as an elective.”

  “Can we have his name?”

  “Sure.”

  39

  A STUDENT AFFAIR—T MINUS 6 DAYS

  AS YSLAN INTERROGATED THE YOUNG MAN, DECKER LOOKED AT the two large Dylan posters on either side of the kid’s closet. One before his Evangelical transformation, one after. Both had “Highway 61” marked in thick red felt pen across them. Decker opened the kid’s closet and was surprised to see a fine reproduction of an early Mark Rothko painting. In the back of the closet he found a large portfolio of the young man’s etchings, each one an effort to reach toward Rothko—just as Richard Dreyfuss’s sculptures in Close Encounters of the Third Kind reached toward what he had seen in his dream.

  Over his shoulder he heard Yslan demanding an answer to a question.

  “Am I a suspect or something? Do I need a lawyer?”

  Decker turned back to look at the art student. He wasn’t cowering, but he was clearly frightened.

  “Just answer this,” Decker said. “Did you ever take scrap metal from Valery Palmer’s studio?”

  “You mean Professor Palmer?”

  Decker looked at him oddly—there was something here.

  “Yes, Professor Palmer.”

  “I never took anything from her.”

  Decker closed his eyes. He felt a solid shot of cold then something metal in his hand and blood between his fingers. Random lines crossed his retinal screen. “That’s not a truth,” he said as he looked at his empty right hand.

  “What is this? Just because I took a class with her, I’m guilty of something?”

  Of something, Decker thought, then he signalled to Yslan that he wanted to ask another question and she nodded. “Are you having an affair with Professor Palmer?”

  “No. I mean, why’s that important? But no. No, I’m not.”

  Decker didn’t need to close his eyes to know that the young man was lying.

  Throwing her arms up in the air with a “what-the-fuck” gesture clear for all to see, Yslan turned and left the room.

  When Yslan was gone, Decker reopened the closet and pointed at the Rothko print. “Have you been to his chapel in Houston?”

  “No. Am I in trouble? I just—”

  “Yeah. No. I don’t think you’re in trouble. I think you’re looking for something.” He pointed to the Rothko a second time and said, “Houston—you might find it in Houston.”

  * * *

  Outside the dorm, Decker met up with Yslan, who was clearly upset.

  “What?” Decker prompted.

  “This whole thing! Rich, entitled students. Destitute townies serving them. Older women having affairs with students! Jeez! You taught in a university for a while, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a bit and then up in Toronto at York.”

  “And did shit like this go on there?”

  Decker took a breath. “I didn’t fit in well at universities, so my opinion of them is jaundiced. Look, did you go to college, Special Agent Hicks?” Decker asked.

  “State school.”

  “Well, this isn’t a state school. This is an elite institution for the elite in this country. This country is wealthy because of the brain power that schools like this produce.”

  “You went to an elite institution like this, didn’t you, Mr. Roberts?”

  “For grad school, yes. You know I did.”

  “So you know more about how they work than we do.”

  “By the end of his or her first semester any freshman knows more about how these places work than you and the NSA do. There’s bound to be an old codger in the town who can fill in some details for you. These places usually have an amateur historian—often he was the local newspaper’s editor, and since he doesn’t teach he wouldn’t have been at the graduation.”

  Yslan nodded and checked her BlackBerry. After a bit of scrolling she said, “Yvgeny Smukler.”

  40

  A SMUGNESS OF SMALL MINDS—T MINUS 6 DAYS TO T MINUS 5 DAYS

  YVGENY SMUKLER SAT BEHIND HIS PAPER-LITTERED DESK IN AN old office in a converted industrial building. There was no computer in evidence and not a single empty space on his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

  “I am the living history of this place, Special Agent. A fossil that refuses to sink into the mud.”

  As Yslan made nice-nice, Decker took in the man. He was not an old academic, although he emulated one. He didn’t have a pipe, corduroy slacks and leather patches on a well-worn tweed jacket, but he might as well have. Decker had always found such people either the very best that Calvinist America could produce or the very worst. In thi
s case he withheld judgement, although he was surprised that the man was not as distraught as one would expect him to be over the killing of so many of his fellow residents of this small town.

  Yslan had just expressed her disgust with the sculptor and her affair, and Yvgeny Smukler nodded sagely—everything about him was sagely. Then he said, “How very unfortunate.”

  For a moment Decker thought he was going to launch into a discussion of the mistake that Ancaster College made when it went co-ed in the early 1970s. But he didn’t.

  “You must understand that institutions, like Ancaster College, are stuck in aspic.”

  Yslan looked to Decker for clarification.

  Decker enjoyed not offering any.

  Finally Yslan asked, “Aspic? Can you explain that?”

  “Certainly.”

  Unfortunately for Yslan, Yvgeny Smukler was enjoying his momentary notoriety.

  Like the old woman who lied in Twelve Angry Men, Decker thought.

  Yvgeny Smukler shifted his long body and grimaced. With a smile he explained, “A disk in my back.”

  “Aspic, Mr. Smukler?” Yslan prompted.

  “Yes. These institutions are hermetically sealed. A tenured professor has to be caught in flagrante with a pregnant Chihuahua selling term papers in a stolen car before he or she can even be considered for dismissal.” The man smiled, crinkling the already crinkly skin of his face—he was clearly pleased with his turn of phrase. “But, and here’s the big but, they’re not paid well. They often have in excess of nine or ten years of postsecondary education but they make less than an autoworker makes, in some cases less than a kindergarten teacher. The only happy ones are the professors who make more money outside the college than in.”

  “As so many did.”

  “They were the fortunate ones who the military found to be of value.”

  Substantial understatement there. Professors at Ancaster College had been called on as experts in things ranging from the nuclear threat in Iran to the actual functioning of drone aircraft, which they in private called sneakers. Well, they could call them whatever they wanted because they’d invented much of the technology that allowed the things to do their deadly work.

  “And was there much jealously over their successes?”

  Yvgeny Smukler smiled. “Does the pope wear a dress? Yes—some of their less successful colleagues were not pleased.”

  “More anticapitalist nonsense?”

  The older man shrugged his sloping shoulders. “I’d prefer to keep politics out of our conversation, but I think it true to say that many of those at places like Ancaster College who can’t get outside work turn inward. To them perks become everything.”

  “And sleeping with students is a perk?”

  “To some of them. To others it’s the vacation time—better than fighting over closet space.”

  Decker saw that Yslan was losing patience and asked, “Could you elaborate?”

  “Certainly. When there’s nowhere up to grow, stupid things like having a closet in your office—or a window overlooking a courtyard—become the be-all and end-all.”

  “Things become that trite?” Yslan asked.

  “And of course, academia can also become self-protective and incestuous.”

  “Swell,” she said.

  “Despite all that, Special Agent Yslan Hicks, they also sometimes manage to produce the most important of all resources.”

  “And what are those?”

  “You know what they are. Special people. Gifted people. Folks with the brainpower to keep this country strong—and in a science and math place like this, to keep the country’s military might such that the homeland is safe.”

  * * *

  Back on the campus, Yslan turned to Decker and said, “So tell me what else I don’t know about places like this.”

  “Let me count the ways.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Have you read le Carré’s book A Murder of Quality?”

  “The one you bought at the Johannesburg airport?”

  “The very one.”

  “No. Why?”

  “Well, he talks about discontent in small-town universities. In that case it led to a murder.”

  “In this case to a terrorist act? Are you out of your mind or are you just making a really bad joke?”

  “Fine. I thought you wanted me to—”

  “Okay—so tell me.”

  “There’s lot of discontent in places like this.”

  “Enough to—”

  “There are science labs here, aren’t there? So there are the chemicals in those labs—and certainly the know-how necessary to make a bomb. Right?”

  “Yes, so?”

  “Well, who has access to those chemicals?”

  Yslan nodded.

  “Check on lower-level faculty members. Places like this shamelessly use nontenured teachers. They hire them on what they call CLAs—contractually limited agreements. And they pay them peanuts. Year after year they dangle the possibility of turning their one- or two-year contracts into fully tenured positions. They seldom if ever come through. It keeps these folks on a string—it also allows this place to offer the education they do without breaking the bank.” Decker waited for a response but got none so he added, “That would piss me off; wouldn’t it piss you off?”

  “Not enough to do that,” she said, pointing in the vague direction of the blast site.

  “Yeah. Well, you have a future ahead of you. You don’t feel the world is using you. You don’t look around every day and see your peers quadrupling your year’s salary in a month or that almost all of the students you teach have trust funds greater than your potential lifetime earnings.”

  Yslan looked to Mr. T, who nodded and headed out of the room—to collect a list of the Ancaster College’s CLA workers, Decker presumed.

  “What else?” Yslan demanded.

  “The academic journals in which everyone has to publish are nests of vipers. The government in Kabul could learn things about corruption and kickbacks from these folks.”

  “How do you—”

  “Everyone has to publish, right?”

  “Yeah, publish or perish—yeah, I know that.”

  “And the only place to publish is in these journals—all of which are supposedly juried.”

  “What does ‘juried’ mean?”

  “A panel of your peers is supposed to read your submission and okay it for publication.”

  “So the folks on these juries have a lot of power.”

  “Literally over hiring and firing. No publish—no job.”

  “So who gets on these juries?”

  “They’re appointed.”

  “By whom?”

  “It’s where the corruption comes in. Academics get on the juries by doing favours for powerful academics—sometimes agreeing to nix an article of an enemy, sometimes agreeing to allow a friend’s article to go to publication when the work is dubious at best.”

  Yslan thought about that for a moment then asked, “Who juries the juries?”

  “Now there’s a good question. Who juries the juries? No one.”

  “Swell.”

  “See who on the senior faculty at Ancaster College sat on the juries. Who they’ve said no to. Who now hates them.”

  “Hates them enough to—”

  “Having someone stand in your way—blocking your progress—can be a powerful motive.”

  “But to kill all those people?”

  “Maybe to cover the fact that it’s only one of those people he was after.”

  Yslan looked at him, then turned to Ted Knight. The man nodded and headed out.

  Yslan’s cell phone buzzed and she flipped it open. “When?” She evidently heard the answer and then hung up.

  “When what?” Decker asked.

  “When can you and Ms. Tripping go to the blast site.”

  “And the answer is?”

  “Not tonight. Forensics isn’t anywhere near finished.”


  “Okay. I want to see Viola.”

  “You’ll see her when I say you see her. Understood?”

  “You speak a precise if oddly accented English—so, yeah, I understand.”

  * * *

  The marine shook him into waking. Decker rolled over and groaned, “Hey boss—what shakes?”

  The marine left the room.

  “Get up, Mr. Roberts.”

  Yslan.

  “What time is—”

  “Time to go to work.”

  She turned away from him to allow him some privacy as he dressed but didn’t leave the room.

  “Another field trip, Special Agent Hicks?”

  “Yeah, you could say that.”

  Outside the marine stepped aside to allow them out into the cold night air. She led Decker quickly across the campus to what looked like a classy cafeteria. It had the odd name of “Fred” emblazoned across the front portico.

  Decker assumed it was a donor’s last name, although he’d never heard of “Fred” as a last name. Nonetheless the students here were left with having to say “Let’s eat at Fred” or “I’ll meet you at Fred.” Sounded very odd to Decker’s ear, but then again, this whole place was odd.

  In the dimly lit cafeteria sat thirty or forty bleary-eyed people. Some were clearly in their late twenties or early thirties; many others were substantially older.

  “What the—”

  “Every CLA contract teacher who worked at Ancaster College in the last sixteen months.”

  Decker turned to her. “How the hell did you find them so fast?”

  “It took us three days.”

  “But I just told you about them yester—” He stopped himself. “You already knew before I told you, didn’t you?”

  “You really ought to stop underestimating us, Mr. Roberts. It’s really quite stupid on your part to think that we are dumb.”

  One of the oldest of the CLAs, dressed in a sixties-style peasant dress, began to complain loudly that they had rights.

  Decker watched as the others joined the chorus of complaint.

  Then without warning, the lights in the place were snapped off and the sound of high-powered hoses filled the air—along with a few “What the fucks,” “this is Americas” and a whole stack of “stop its.”