Stephen L. Carter

by New England White

  “Just what it sounds like. Tempting me with earthly authority. What the fuck am I supposed to do with earthly authority? I’m doing important work, Ma. Using the blue horizontal branch stars to study Lyman alpha absorption in quasar spectra.” But he was mocking her, and they both knew it. “Please don’t come by without calling again. It’s not polite.”

  He shut the door.

  (III)

  VEAZIE WOMEN NEVER CRIED, so Julia blundered along the snowy streets, forcing her mind to work the data, because she had gotten everything from Preston that he would ever give. It was Kellen who wanted her to hear it. That was what she reminded herself. Kellen wanted her to hear Preston’s tale, and if she lacked the details, at least she had the outline. Every Empyreal was supposed to groom a young successor, and Lemaster had tried to recruit his elder son. But Preston had rejected his blandishments. The disagreement was not the source of the hatred her son so carefully nurtured toward his father; it was the result. Had Lemmie then moved on to Aaron? But Julia had pressed him on the way up to Exeter, and was sure he knew nothing.

  Rejected by Preston, Lemaster would have tried somebody outside the family.

  A young black man. A student? A former law clerk? She shook her head. The possibilities were too scattered, and her information was too limited.

  Dark matter. The hidden power in the universe. Lemmie insisted that Empyreals were no more than an insignificant Harlem men’s club. Aurie implied that they were more, and now so did Preston—with Kellen’s implicit endorsement.

  Tempting me with earthly authority.

  Authority over what? What on earth could the Empyreals have to do with Kellen’s surplus? The research about Gina Joule?

  We can’t find it, but we know it has to be there.

  You know what, Preston? I feel exactly the same way.

  She had overshot the car by two blocks, probably on purpose, and now, doubling back, she saw a woman who had been behind her turn just as suddenly, fumbling in her pocket for a cell phone. Maybe she was answering an unexpected call. Maybe she was following Julia’s utterly undisguised trail. Maybe Mary Mallard’s paranoia was playing with Julia’s mind. She hesitated. But the Escalade was in that direction, straight past her. She walked faster, toward the woman, who stood near a shop window, head down, chattering into the phone. Julia drew abreast. Panicky eyes met panicky eyes.

  Julia managed a plucky smile as she passed. “You’ll have to do better than that,” she said.

  Startled, the woman took a step away. Then her fear softened. She reached into her pocket once more and pulled out not a gun or a knife or the bill for the coach lamps on the driveway but a couple of crushed dollar bills.

  She handed them to Julia.

  “I hope this helps a little,” she said, and went back to her call.

  CHAPTER 42

  ANOTHER WALK ON THE BEACH

  (I)

  “ALL I TOLD HIM,” said Lemaster, puzzlement etched on his troubled face, “was that people like Byron Dennison could help him in his career. He laughed. I had never heard Preston laugh so hard. He said they couldn’t help him, because they knew nothing about science. When I tried to explain that this was not the point, he told me he didn’t have any interest in my kind of life. That’s what he called it. My kind of life. He didn’t explain what that was supposed to mean.”

  They were in the Mercedes, on their way home from another campus event: the opening dinner of a conference for out-of-power foreign-policy analysts. “You should have told me,” said Julia, eyes shut as she leaned into the leather. To her own ear she sounded timid. Back in the Landing, Julia was feeling less confident than she had led Mary Mallard to think; or perhaps it was that Mary buoyed her in a way that her husband did not. “So—what’s the plan now?” Sitting up. “Do you recruit Aaron?”

  A long Lemaster silence as the Mercedes purred through nasty winter rain. “Our traditions somewhat constrain me,” he said at last. “For the moment, I have no protégé.”

  She took a small shot. “But it doesn’t matter, does it? In a few years the Empyreals will have folded up, right?”

  “Sooner or later, Jules, we’re all folded up.”

  At the house, Vanessa was slaughtering her aunt in Scrabble, for Astrid had rallied round loyally in the crisis. Julia reminded her daughter that it was a school night, and Vanessa answered serenely that for-mal education was habit, not necessity. But she went up to her room anyway.

  “Astrid and I have some business,” said Lemaster in a warning tone, and Julia said she had planned to turn in early anyway. She checked on Jeannie, then padded into the master suite.

  From the bathroom mirror, a haggard countenance glared. Fresh lines had been graven into her oval face, or maybe she was noticing for the first time. Her eyes were wide and waiflike. Her formerly smooth lips were bruised from nibbling and twisted from frowning, just the way her mother used to warn they would be if her Jewel didn’t smile. She supposed the worry was aging her fast, because she felt drained of energy. The only time she could remember a face like this looking back at her had been the night she took that bottle of pills; and in those days Julia had been just twenty, immature enough to be certain that pain of a particular depth constituted a unique feature of her existence, never experienced by anyone else, and thus incomprehensible beyond her own mind.

  Yesterday, at Kepler, Julia had snapped at an astonished Iris Feynman for no good reason. Iris had remarked after a budget meeting that Julia seemed exhausted, and Julia replied that she was tired of being the one everyone else counted on for smiles. When Clay Maxwell dropped by an hour later to tell stories, as he often did, about what the div school had been like in its golden age, Julia told him she was too busy, not troubling to mention what had mainly kept her busy so far that morning had been berating herself for being rude to Iris. And then the dean had called to ask whether Julia had made her peace with Tony Tice—

  The voices from downstairs were louder.

  Astrid was yelling. Well, she did that.

  “Starting next week,” her husband murmured sleepily, later, “Mr. Flew will be here pretty much full-time.”

  “Here?” Clinging to him, more wakeful than she wanted to be. “You mean, in the house?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why, Lemmie?”

  “Rearranging things in my office. Lots of papers to go through. Just for a few weeks.”

  “Well, we can all look forward to that,” she said, and lay, worrying, awake.

  (II)

  IN THE MORNING, Julia returned to the beach to walk with her husband’s cousin. She carefully did not stop on Main Street. Since her unnerving experience after her tea with Trevor Land, she had stayed away from the village proper, doing her shopping, to her family’s surprise, among the hoi polloi at the strip malls along Route 48. The trouble was, she could not look at the façade of Cookie’s or Old Landing or the bookstore without wondering what the proprietors had talked about at Vera’s house that afternoon, and if the secretary of the university had gone with them. She had come to view the winter as a fastness protecting the Landing and its secrets against outsiders like herself. The chill seeped into your bones, slowed you down, and finally stopped you altogether—unless, of course, you left town. She had considered that option, going so far as to ask Lemmie whether the work on the presidential mansion could somehow be sped up.

  “If you don’t mind the roof falling in.”

  The truth was, much as the Landing had come to unsettle her, the campus, too, had stopped feeling like home. She was taking yet another day off from work. Iris Feynman had warned her that some people around Kepler were beginning to mutter that Julia, as first lady of the university, was taking liberties. Claire Alvarez assured anyone who inquired—said Iris—that a divinity school should not be a place where people were punished for tending to the needs of their families. But Clay Maxwell called to remind her that when the dean poured it on thickest she was at her most disingenuous. Julia told him that if
somebody else wanted the job she would willingly give it up.

  This time when Julia and her cousin-in-law reached the gate, nobody stopped them, the guard hardly looking up from his comic book, perhaps because everybody in town had heard about how not even the wife of the president of the university, who lived in the Landing, could get onto the beach. Kwame Kennerly had talked about the incident on his radio show for a month. Of course he never said who his source was, and though some in town suspected Julia, she would never have done so underhanded a thing, even though she had been more than happy to spread the word among the Sister Ladies. If a couple of them had chosen to pass it on, well, that was not Julia’s doing: Ladybugs were, after all, against gossip.

  Astrid, now in the Washington office of a New York law firm, teased Julia that she should make her husband earn some money—because Lemaster, whose salary as university president was just shy of a million dollars, was the family pauper.

  Julia changed the subject.

  Yes, said Astrid. Her original source had been Kellen Zant.

  Yes, she said again, to the next question, she had seen Kellen shortly before he died, but not, Astrid emphasized, that night.

  As a matter of fact, Julia prompted, Astrid had seen him often: “Those were your cosmetics in his house, weren’t they?”—for Bruce Vallely had shared a few tidbits from his investigation, in an effort to win her cooperation.

  “Unless they belonged to one of his other women.”

  “You came to town to see him? And didn’t tell us you were here?”

  Astrid snorted. “So that you could do what?”

  Julia, astonishment and jealousy warring, let that one go.

  It was possible, said Astrid, that someone could have seen them together. They were careful, but everyone makes mistakes. Still, she had not been in Elm Harbor that night, and, in any case, she did not understand how some racist little white boy would be unable to distinguish a Barbadian from a British accent.

  And, yes, she said—Julia feeding her one softball after another, to make it easier—yes, Kellen had contacted her, not the other way around.

  “It started maybe six months ago. He said he had material that could affect the outcome of the election. Naturally, I’d be interested. Any right-thinking American would be. To get rid of this crowd, I would use any means necessary. I had to be in New York on business; he took the train down. We had tea at the Stanhope, where everybody whispers anyway, and the bastard pulled a fast one. Number one, he told me he wanted money. He was not about to let me capture the surplus value of his labor, he said, which I took to be some kind of silly economics joke. I told him it would not be fitting to pay for opposition research, and it would look bad in the papers. He was a greedy little prick, wasn’t he? He said in that case he would keep it to himself.”

  Astrid was smoking, and Julia stayed upwind. Gulls looked interested, as if a cigarette might be a type of food about to be discarded.

  “Number two, he refused to tell me which side would be hurt by the evidence. He said my side was going to lose anyway, so it wasn’t that big a deal. He stood there and said if I begged him, if I said pretty please, maybe he’d tell me. What made him so evil?”

  “Did you beg him?”

  “I slapped him in the face.”

  “In the middle of the Stanhope?”

  “On the sidewalk.”

  “Well, he brought that out in people.”

  Astrid glanced at her as if suspecting an insult, then smiled wanly and tossed her cigarette into the water. Julia, revolted, turned her head.

  “Number three, he told me that there was more to the story. Then he offered to buy me dinner. Well, he could be a charmer. I guess you know that.” She shook herself physically, as if throwing off the memory. “One thing led to another.”

  “Your relationship—”

  “It wasn’t a relationship. Don’t put some formal construction on it. We slept together now and then. That was all. I’m sure Kellen saw other women, the bastard.” A moment’s uncertainty, but when Astrid spoke again she was perfectly calm. “I didn’t know, Julia. About the two of you. Kellen kept your secrets, just in case you wondered. We had fun together, Julia. I won’t deny that. But now, looking back—I wasn’t his type. He liked them white and clingy. I think sleeping with me was just a way for Kellen to get one up on you. I think he hoped you’d find out.”

  But I’m not white, Julia almost protested—although Kellen had always said he loved the honeyed skin she often hated. On the other hand, I sure was clingy.

  “It only lasted a couple of months,” Astrid was saying. “It was over by, oh, September. Then he called me in November to ask if I was still interested. This was the Wednesday before he died. I thought he meant interested in him, but Kellen was talking about the information. He wanted to meet in New York. Well, I was through with all my crying by then, and I didn’t want to start over. I told him to say what he had to say. That made him uncomfortable—he said his phone might be tapped—but finally he said if I wanted the material I had to put in a bid, fast. He said he planned to sell it within a day or two. He was setting up an auction, and I’d have to get in my bid right away. And he said—well, he said if anything happened to him I might get a chance at the material anyway.” She took a new cigarette from her pocket, then changed her mind and shoved it back. She snorted. “I told him I’d think about it. Two nights later, he got his head shot off.”

  Sell it within a day or two. Walking back to the car, Julia turned the phrase over and over in her mind. Sell it within a day or two. He was supposed to have breakfast Saturday morning with Cameron Knowland, she remembered. But they had not met yet, and therefore he could not be confident that a deal would be reached.

  Within a day or two.

  “Julia?” said Astrid.

  “Just thinking. Sorry.”

  “Do you notice that no reporters are digging into the President’s college years? I hate this kind of conspiracy of silence. You should call your old roommate. Tessa. Tell her to find the scandal.”

  “Call her yourself,” said Julia, more coldly than she intended. But a part of her was furious, for reasons she dared not contemplate.

  “I would.” Matter-of-factly. “But nobody takes my calls any more.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.” But she squeezed Astrid’s hand anyway, just in case it was.

  Kellen had called the Senator’s side on Wednesday and planned to see the President’s side on Saturday, which meant that whoever he was seeing on Friday was not on either side. Mary was right. Somebody else was interested.

  Somebody, maybe, Kellen met that night.

  The other bidder, who for some reason had turned on him and—

  Julia stopped.

  Sitting on the hood of the Escalade was Tony Tice.

  (III)

  “WOULD YOU MIND getting off my car?”

  His handsome head was tilted up toward the brilliant winter sun. He said, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your lovely friend?”

  “Tony Tice, Astrid Venable. Tony here was recently arrested for beating up his girlfriend. And if he doesn’t stop following me around, he’s going to be arrested again.”

  “I’m out on bail, and it was a setup. No way is it going to trial.”

  Julia summoned her coldest voice. “I’m sure.”

  “And, as far as arresting me again is concerned”—he hopped off the car and stood in the snow like a monument to his own permanence—“well, three years ago I sued the campus police and won. I’d love the chance to sue the Landing, too.”

  “Do you get some kind of kick out of following me? Because I think that was your shoe Mitch Huebner’s dog chewed up.”

  The lawyer did not bother to answer. He reached into his jacket, but the bulge was only a cell phone. He studied the screen. “I wanted to give you a last chance to cooperate with me. I’m afraid my clients are unhappy.”

  “Last chance before what?”

  “Before I file
suit against you.” Still smiling. But Julia sensed the desperation behind the words. “A replevin action. A suit to make the defendant return the plaintiff’s property that the defendant is unlawfully—”

  “I know what replevin means,” she lied. “What property?”

  “Whatever Zant left. It’s rightfully mine, Julia. Or, rather, it was sold to my clients first. So you don’t own it. My clients do. You can give it to me now, or you can wait for the court to order you.”

  His phone rang. He listened, then said, “No, she’s here. I’m talking to her now. Yes.” He put the phone away. “Sorry.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Do you really want to force me to sue you, Julia?” Spreading his hands. “Think about it. In the depositions the whole story would come out. The Black Lady, your prior relationship with Zant, Vanessa, everything. Do you really want your kids to read all that in the papers?”

  Astrid spoke for the first time. “Run him over,” she said.

  CHAPTER 43

  A SMALL REQUEST

  (I)

  BRUCE TOOK THE CALL from Gayle Gittelman as he sat at his desk perusing the personnel file for Jeremy Flew, which the reliable Turian had obtained under another pretext. Flew was thirty-two years old. He had come aboard last year with the new president. He possessed an undergraduate degree from Michigan State, a couple of years of graduate work at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, followed by eight years at the State Department, one year at a consulting firm of which Bruce had never heard, and now assistant to the president of the university. Bruce looked for a connection with the school and did not find one. He looked for a connection with Lemaster and did not find one. The file contained no letters of reference. The résumé listed a pair of retired foreign-service officers. Flew’s health and life insurance forms listed no dependents.

  What Bruce found most intriguing was the service at State. “Various foreign postings” was the entirety of the résumé description. Bruce Vallely was familiar with such gaps in the official record. Anyone obtaining Bruce Vallely’s own record would discover a similar gap, for much of the work he had done during his Army Special Forces service in Central America during the Reagan years remained forevermore undiscussable. He wondered what undiscussable work Jeremy Flew had been up to, and where; and whether, on the night Kellen Zant was shot, he might have initiated an undiscussable telephone call to Lemaster Carlyle—telling him, for example, where to have his “accident.”