Long Knives

by Charles Rosenberg

  “You wouldn’t know it from the way you present yourself.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “You know, if we’re truthful about it, the problem isn’t really that either one of us is totally emotionally unavailable. For some reason, we’re just not available to one another. Or at least not most of the time. I mean, you’re friendly and kind and funny, and so am I. Well, at least I’m friendly and kind. But that’s not the same thing as being mutually open.”

  “I think we are. Do you remember when we lay together on the bed in the bedroom of that small château in France and read Keats out loud to each another?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s what I think of as an emotional connection.”

  I didn’t respond to that because I didn’t see it the same way. Reading poetry together was warm and fuzzy, but it wasn’t what I thought of as a true emotional connection. But he was trying. He was. And so was I.

  We drove the rest of the way to the UCLA parking lot in silence. When we arrived I opened the door and started to get out of the car. Before I could say “thank you,” Aldous said, “Jenna, I know we’ve got a long way to go to work this out, but are you willing to try? I don’t want to lose you.”

  There was a part of me that wanted to say it was hopeless. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was worth going another round.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m willing to try. But the idea of your living somewhere else is going to make it doubly hard.”

  “I know,” he said. “And I suppose this isn’t the best time to tell you, but I’ve had an offer to interview for a job at a brand-new law school that will require every student to get both a law degree and a graduate business degree. It’s just the kind of place I’ve always wanted to teach, so I’ve got to go for it. I’m leaving for the interview the day after tomorrow. I’ll probably be gone for at least three or four days, because there might also be a deanship involved.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In Buffalo.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I was back at my condo by seven thirty. Tommy still seemed to be asleep, or at least the door to his bedroom was closed.

  I poured myself a third cup of coffee—safely ground the afternoon before from a bag of Starbucks dark-roast beans I’d had around for at least a week—showered and got dressed for class in my standard law professor outfit: black wool jacket, creased jeans, a cream-colored blouse and practical heels, black. If it had been a cold day, I would have added a dark red V-necked sweater, but it didn’t seem cold enough to bother.

  Then I pinned up my hair. After I left M&M, I had let my hair grow back, and it was almost down to my waist. But the uptight part of me didn’t think long hair appropriate for a law professor, so I always put it up. Doing that also made it harder to see the roots, which revealed that although my hair looks jet black, it’s actually dyed, because I’m naturally a blonde. I can’t explain why I’ve never wanted to be a blonde; I just don’t.

  As I passed through the living room on my way to the study, I glanced out of the sliding glass doors onto the balcony and noticed that the plant into which I had poured the coffee the day before looked distinctly wilted. I slid open the balcony door and looked more closely. The plant was indeed looking sickly, its leaves droopy. Worse, the bottom leaves, onto which some of the coffee had splashed when I poured it into the plant, had what looked like small burn holes in them, with charring around the edges of the holes.

  I stood there for a moment, staring at the plant. There was no way to continue denying that there was something deadly about the coffee, and it was probably not a weird coffee bean fungus. I didn’t know a lot about fungi, but it seemed unlikely there was one that could burn holes in plant leaves overnight. The coffee must have been poisoned, and since the coffee had been brewed in my office, the poison must have been aimed at me, put there by whoever left the door open. It wasn’t just my hands shaking now. My whole body shook. I went to sit down on the couch for a moment and waited for it to pass.

  The shaking finally stopped. I needed to get a grip to figure this out. I needed to be the steely girl that Aldous saw.

  The first question was, Why would anyone want to kill me? I couldn’t come up with a remotely plausible answer. I would need, as my father liked to say, to “think on it.” I also needed to talk to the police about it.

  The threat I felt was another excuse to cancel my class if I wanted to take it. I decided to teach it anyway. If someone wanted to kill me, canceling the class wasn’t going to help. They’d just do it after class. I needed a broader strategy than just hiding.

  I called down to the valet for my car, then went into the study and printed out my class notes for the day. I put them in the thin cloth briefcase I usually carry and took the elevator down to the lobby. My car was waiting out front, and the valet was holding the door open for me.

  “Good morning, Hector,” I said as I started to get in.

  “Good morning, Professor. Have a great day.”

  “You, too.”

  Hector had not yet closed the car door when a man wearing blue running gear jogged off the sidewalk into the driveway, stopped right next to me and reached into the broad pocket that ran across the front of his sweatshirt. I knew in a heartbeat that he was going for a gun. I looked around in a panic, trying to see if there was a way to clamber out the other door.

  “Are you Jenna James?” he asked.

  As soon as he asked the question, I knew that what was about to happen had nothing to do with guns. Assassins didn’t check your name before shooting. Process servers did.

  “Yes, I’m Jenna James,” I said, as I took a large gulp of air and my heartbeat started to return to normal.

  The man handed me an 8½ x 11 manila envelope. “You’ve been served.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Will you sign a receipt?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, “have a wonderful day,” and jogged off.

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” Hector said. “I didn’t see him coming.”

  “It’s okay, Hector. Just some legal papers. Don’t worry about it.”

  “All right. Well, have a nice day anyway.” He closed my door.

  The engine was already running, but I sat there for a moment, tore open the envelope and scanned the document inside. It was a lawsuit. The plaintiffs were Quinto Giordano and something called Altamira Società Recupero, SPA, both represented by a sole-practitioner lawyer I’d never heard of whose office was on mid-Wilshire. There were two defendants, me and the Regents of the University of California. It had been filed in the Los Angeles Superior Court in Santa Monica.

  “Shit.” I said it out loud.

  The lawsuit wasn’t very long. Its essence seemed to be that I had stolen a valuable map that belonged to Quinto. It sought an injunction to make me and UCLA return it and asked for a million dollars in compensatory damages, plus another million in punitive damages.

  I saw Hector looking at me through the passenger window, worried. I rolled the window down as he said, “Are you really okay? You don’t look so good.”

  “Thanks for being concerned, but really, I’m just fine. I’m running late, though, so I need to go.” I slipped the lawsuit back into its envelope, tossed it onto the passenger seat and drove off. I tried really hard not to screech my way down the driveway. I mostly succeeded.

  By 8:45 I had parked in Lot 3 and was climbing the stairs to my office, carrying the envelope in one hand and my briefcase in the other. When I got to Aldous’s door, I knocked, but there was no answer. I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote a note on the face of the envelope: “Aldous—I’ve been sued. Please read and let’s talk later. J.” Then I crossed out the J and replaced it with “Love, Jenna.” I slid the envelope under the door and headed to the room where my Sunken Treasure seminar was scheduled to begin at 9:00.

  CHAPTER 19

  I arrived a few minutes early for the class, took my place at the podium and watched as the
remaining ten students, seven men and three women, filtered in and took their seats. The classroom was small and banked, with only four rows of seats rising upward in curved ranks toward the windows in the back. To keep the seminar enrollment low, I had employed two old tricks that are well known to all law professors. First, I made the full admiralty law course, which I taught only in the spring semester, a prerequisite for the seminar. Second, I arranged for the class to be scheduled to meet on Tuesdays and Fridays at 9:00 A.M. Most law students don’t like to get up that early, and they treasure three-day weekends with no classes.

  Lodged in the podium in front of me were controls for a veritable cornucopia of digital equipment, including a DVD player, a VHS tape deck and an opaque projector on which I could lay a book or document, as well as a PC linked to the Internet. With a touch on a control screen protruding from the console, I could project sound and images from any of the devices onto a large screen behind me.

  Usually when my students arrived for the seminar they found an image already being projected on the screen, often a picture or sketch of a famous ship that now lay broken on the bottom of the sea. But today the screen was dark, and I was sure the students sensed the reason. I had decided to start the class by talking about Primo.

  The class settled down and grew quiet as I stood there. I took a deep breath and began.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sure you all know by now the sad news that one of your classmates, and a member of this seminar, Primo Giordano, passed away yesterday at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. We don’t know yet what happened, although I assume that in time we’ll learn what it was, because an autopsy is going to be performed. The dean has shared with me that there will, at the appropriate time, be a memorial service here at the law school, according to the wishes of Primo’s family.”

  I looked out at the students and saw ten sets of eyes staring at me amid the kind of silence in which you could hear a pin drop. “I’d suggest that we bow our heads for a moment of silence in Primo’s memory, and then, if any of you would like to say anything, it would certainly be appropriate.”

  I bowed my head and stared down at the assorted electronics on the podium, where a tiny red light was blinking. I used its blink to count to sixty, then looked up and out at the class.

  “Would any of you like to say something?”

  Julie, the brunette who had asked about Primo the day before, and who was sitting in the front row, raised her hand and said, without waiting for me to acknowledge her, “He was a great guy. I’m going to miss him.” I thought I detected a small tear in the corner of her eye. The two other women in the seminar, who sat in the front row on either side of Julie, nodded their heads in apparent agreement but said nothing.

  Then Crawford Phillips, one of the guys in the back row—four of the seven men had chosen to sit together there—spoke up, saying, “He was a great guy. And a great pickup basketball player. We’ll all miss him, both here and on the court. I’m really sad.”

  After that there was an awkward silence as no one volunteered anything further. Which didn’t surprise me; Primo had said very little in the seminar, just as he had said very little in the admiralty law class the spring before. I had had the impression then that he didn’t have any close friends in that class, although that hadn’t struck me as unusual at the time. With more than three hundred students in each class year, and almost a thousand in the school overall, there are often students in my classes who have never before had a class with most of the others.

  I let a moment pass and then said, “Well, it’s a sad thing and we’re going to miss him. But I don’t know what else to say at this point. I should also mention that if you feel the need for counseling, contact the office of the associate dean for Student Affairs, and they’ll arrange for you to see someone.”

  I waited a few seconds to see if anyone else wanted to speak, then reached down and touched a button on the console. The screen behind me lit up with a black-and-white picture of a mammoth Great Lakes iron ore freighter. “Today I want to discuss the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald—the ship, not the Gordon Lightfoot song.” There was a short burst of laughter, which is what I had hoped for. Teaching is, after all, a performance art, and I wanted my opening to take us away from Primo.

  I looked toward the back row. “Crawford, that ship, which sank in Lake Superior during a huge storm in 1975, is in only 580 feet of water. Its exact location is well known, and it’s easily within reach of modern salvage robots. If we thought there was something valuable in the purser’s safe, could we go and get it?”

  “No, we couldn’t,” Crawford said. “It’s in Canadian waters and the Canadian Underwater Cultural Heritage Act precludes it from being salvaged.”

  Julie raised her hand. “Not exactly,” she said. “We could request a permit from the Canadian government to salvage it.”

  “Good luck with that!” one of the other students said. The comment triggered another burst of laughter, and we were off and running in a class that explored, as I had intended, the increasing conflict between treasure hunters and the marine archaeologists who want to keep the world’s hundreds of thousands of shipwrecks as their personal scientific playgrounds. Or at least that’s how I think of it.

  When the class ended over an hour later without further mention of Primo, I breathed a sigh of relief and went off to see if Aldous had returned to his office.

  CHAPTER 20

  The light was on under Aldous’s door. As I raised my hand to knock, a voice behind me said, “So I heard some poor student died in your office.”

  I knew who it was without looking. I would have recognized the deep, raspy voice of Professor Greta Broontz anywhere. Greta is one of the other civil procedure professors, and she hates me.

  I considered opening Aldous’s door without knocking and going inside without even acknowledging her, but it seemed the wrong thing to do. I sighed and turned around. And there she was: about my height but butt ugly, with stringy red hair cut in a pageboy, one brown eye and one blue, a squashed nose and deep acne scars. The students called her the Pineapple.

  “Greta, he didn’t die in my office. He died at the UCLA Medical Center. Of as yet unknown causes.”

  “Well, I heard he was poisoned by your coffee.”

  “And where did you hear that absurd story?”

  “A little bird told me.”

  “What was the bird’s name?”

  “I’m sorry, I was told in confidence, and unlike some people, I do keep my confidences.”

  I knew she was referring to her suspicion that I was the one who, during my first year at the law school, had leaked to the UCLA student newspaper, the Daily Bruin, that she was moonlighting more or less full-time with a downtown law firm, pulling in at least two times her law-school salary. She had apparently assumed I was the paper’s source because I had just arrived from a downtown law firm, albeit a different one.

  “Greta, I didn’t poison anyone.”

  “I didn’t say you did, dear. I said he was poisoned by your coffee. Passive voice. Guilty conscience?” She grinned, exposing brilliant white teeth, which I had always assumed were dentures.

  “Greta, please excuse me. I have an appointment with Aldous.” I turned around, performed a perfunctory knock, opened the door and walked in without waiting. I closed the door behind me and collapsed against it.

  Aldous was sitting in his desk chair, looking at me. “Wow. I didn’t even get a chance to say ‘come in.’”

  “Sorry. The Pineapple just appeared out of nowhere and accused me of poisoning Primo.”

  “What?”

  “Actually, she said he was poisoned by my coffee and then suggested she wasn’t accusing me of personally poisoning him. Somehow it was just my coffee.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “It’s particularly not good that it’s Greta.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s a member of your confidential Ad Hoc
Tenure Committee.”

  I wasn’t surprised. She was a faculty member who taught civil procedure, as I did. And she was very senior. So it made sense. I had been hoping against hope that if there was going to be a professor who taught civil procedure on the committee, it would be someone else. Now my hopes had been dashed. “That woman is the curse of my life, Aldous. She has the office next door to me, lives in my condo building and now you’re telling me she’s on my tenure committee.”

  “Do you get along better as neighbors than you do here?”

  “No. She has the apartment beneath mine and is always playing her classical music at full volume in the middle of the night.”

  “Do you complain to her about it?”

  “No. I just pound on the floor with a big wooden pole until she turns it down. I guess I’ve avoided mentioning that to you.”

  “For fear it would make me not want to stay overnight at your place?”

  “You never have.”

  “I know. It was a joke, Jenna.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess my joke receptors are off today.”

  “Well, Greta does sound like a curse on you. Maybe you need to consult someone in Haiti about her.”

  “Not a bad idea. But wait a minute: How did you learn she’s on my committee? That’s supposed to be confidential.”

  “You don’t really want to know.”

  “No, I do want to know.”

  “I developed some special computer skills back when I was a quant on Wall Street.”

  “You hacked into the UCLA computer?”

  “Not exactly, and why don’t we just leave it be? I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “Well, however you found out, it’s bad news because she hates my guts. But she’s clever enough to cover it up and find some supposedly legitimate problem with my scholarship. And if she’s a no, all I need is one more no, or one yes with reservations, and I’m sunk.”