Ernst Malthus was a diamond trader, a Christian in a business dominated by Jews. He was rich and very well connected. He was a moving target. The Gestapo had certainly been watching him, but had left him alone at least enough to permit him to send money to a Jewish refugee in America. He’d even been to America in the middle of the war, according to Maude. Had the Gestapo been using him? Had he been using them for purposes of his own? Had he been hooked up with the American OSS, the agency that eventually became the CIA? What had happened to Ernst after 1943 was a mystery, and Sally was hoping to hell that the government records she’d requested through the Freedom of Information Act would provide some answers. But the government’s responses to FOIA requests were maddeningly slow and capricious. It could take anywhere from months to years to get the stuff, and there was of course no telling what records there might be. Ezra had said he’d put in a word with some of his friends in Washington to see if they couldn’t speed things up.
Then there was the matter of the diamonds. Hawk had made it clear to her that he planned to be out “in the field,” as the geologists said, a lot of the time. This time, he’d been on a field trip in the Mojave for three long weeks, and she’d had to wait all that time to show him the stones they ’d found in Meg Dunwoodie’s treasure closet. Now he was back at last, and that night they sat in Meg’s living room, enjoying a whiskey before dinner. She’d planned to lay out the whole amazing story of Meg Dunwoodie and Ernst Malthus and Ezra Sonnenschein and Maude Stark, then tell him about the closet, then show him the gems, but she decided she couldn’t wait. “I’ve got something to show you,” she’d said.
“Does it involve garter belts?” he asked hopefully, looking forward to an end to three frustrating weeks of celibacy, trailing his fingers up her leg.
“No,” she answered, half-wishing she’d thought of that, “but it might get you in the mood anyway.”
She’d brought out the velvet bag and taken out the little packets of paper, watched him open the complicated folds as if he knew what he was doing. And of course, he did. He’d worked diamond exploration in South America and Africa along with other exotic gigs, she thought, recalling the story about the Brazilian girlfriend in Houston with a grimace.
As the stones fell into his hand, Hawk whistled and took a big swallow of Jim Beam. Sally looked at him expectantly. He looked back. “Where’d you get these?”
“They were in the upstairs closet, along with a bunch of other stuff that should have been in a bank vault long ago. I’ll tell you all about it over dinner. What are they?”
“Well,” said Hawk, taking another swig, “in my moderately expert opinion, these are diamonds of various cuts and colors.”
“That much we figured out,” she said. “What else can you tell me about them?”
“I’d estimate the weights at anywhere from ten to thirty carats,” he said, “and I’d need a jeweler’s loupe to tell you anything about the quality.” He held the largest, a yellow oval, up to the light, carefully bracketing it between his thumb and forefinger. “Pretty.”
“Can you tell me anything about where they might have come from?”
“Not definitively. Could be lots of places. India, Brazil, Tanzania, and of course South Africa. The pink one,” he said, picking up a teardrop-shaped gem, one of the smaller ones, “might have come from Australia. But then again, it’s hard to tell, because they’ve probably been treated.”
“Treated?” Sally asked. “What do you mean?”
“Irradiation. You can get a colorless diamond to turn green or blue if you expose it to radiation. If you irradiate some diamonds and then heat them up, you can get yellow or orange or pink. Naturally colored stones are incredibly rare and unbelievably expensive, so most of the colored diamonds you see have been treated. That’s probably the case with these—they’re pretty big, Mustang. Untreated colored diamonds this size would probably be in a museum, not in a closet in Laramie.”
“Could you tell if they’d been treated?” she asked, feeling a little disappointed.
“Sure,” he answered, holding a blue square-cut gem up to the light, “with the right equipment. But people who really know diamonds could tell you just by looking at the color. Hell, Crawford could probably tell you exactly where and when they were mined.”
“But he’s in Arizona. Could anybody around here tell us that? Somebody in the geology department maybe?”
“Sally, the minute you show those things to anybody, the whole world will know they’re here. Even if they’re treated diamonds and every one of them is seriously flawed, they’re worth money—some ignorant rich bimbo like Nattie Langham would pay a fortune just to flash a big fancy rock in the face of the girls at the Realtors’ convention in Miami. If by some miracle they’re the real thing”—he looked down at the gems glinting in his hand—“they could be worth millions.”
“Shit,” said Sally.
“Right,” said Hawk, clearing his throat and taking a drink of whiskey. “I’d really like to show these to my dad. He’d know what he was looking at, and he’s so antisocial, you could be sure he wouldn’t blab.”
She held out her hand, and he poured the diamonds into her palm. They seemed to tingle on her skin, like freezing fire. They made her shiver. “Could he come up here? I’ve got to get these things to the bank as soon as possible.”
Hawk shook his head. “Not any time soon. He hates cold weather, and you know how hard it is to get him out of Jumping Cholla. He and Maria are planning to come up here for a visit in May. You could get them out of the vault for a day and show them to him then.”
“Great,” she said, handing him back the diamonds to fold back into the packets and put into the bag. “Another delay. Let’s see, this is February. Only four more months of winter, and I can sit around here and listen to the wind howl and wait for the government to process my FOIA request and wait for your father to show up. By June I ought to be completely frigging nuts.”
Hawk ignored her raving and looked at the velvet bag in his hand. “You know, Sally, it makes me jittery having these things in the house. If we were in Brazil, I’d put ’em under my pillow and sleep with a loaded gun.”
She rose, went to get the Jim Beam bottle, and poured them more whiskey. “So big diamonds make you nervous?” she asked, putting down the bottle, taking the bag from him and tucking it down the front of her V-neck sweater, into her bra. “Maybe just a little edgy?” She sat down and put her legs in his lap. “Kind of off-balance and excitable?” He put down his whiskey and his fingers crept back to garter belt country.
So much for one source of frustration, anyway.
Part Four
Chapter 27
March Madness
Springtime in the Rockies. Forget those Sierra Club calendar pictures of alpine fields riotous with wildflowers amid snowy peaks and improbably blue skies. Most people in Laramie referred to this particular time of year as “Mud Season.” The skiing was sloppy, the roads impassable, and the wind, well. One dark gray day stretched into the next and the next. Going outside for even a minute meant bundling up from head to toe, leaning at a forty-fivedegree angle into a headwind, freezing half your face in a crosswind, or flying on a tailwind. Everybody started using the term “cabin fever” and calling their travel agent.
Edna did not believe in driving to her office. She arrived home in the six o’clock darkness that Friday afternoon in late March, nearly defeated by a very long week and the eight-block war with nature. She was ready for a glass of wine, a pleasant dinner with friends. Or at least that was what she told herself. Another part of her wanted to sit in the bathtub for two hours, drink a good bottle of California red, scramble up a couple of eggs, and fall into bed.
Not possible. Company was coming—Sally and Hawk, Virginia Minor, the University lawyer, and Minor’s partner, Dr. Helen Singer, Laramie’s hilarious orthodontist. Edna got out the osso buco she’d made last night, started it warming gently, and shuffled through the mail on the kitchen coun
ter. Thank God, their plane tickets for Cabo San Lucas had arrived. It hadn’t been easy talking Tom into a spring break vacation that would feature lots of lying around instead of daily mortal risk and cardiovascular exertion. She’d had to make all the damn reservations and promise him many margaritas and torrid sex under slowly revolving ceiling fans. She could hear him getting in the shower upstairs, could envision his sweaty gym clothes in a heap on the floor where he always left them following his Friday afternoon basketball game. He redeemed himself every week, however, by making sure to have a bottle of wine breathing when she got home. Ravenswood zinfandel, special ordered from Napa. He’d read her mind.
This was going to be one of those dinner parties that ended up all shoptalk if she wasn’t careful. She hadn’t seen much of Sally or Virginia Minor in the past few weeks, but the Dunwoodie lawsuit had started gobbling up more and more of everyone’s time. Lawyers from both sides had been taking endless depositions and requesting mountains of documents. The Faculty for Academic Freedom, as Bosworth’s group called itself, was clearly flirting with the idea of adding a discrimination suit to the mix. FAF (a.k.a. Byron Bosworth) had contacted the University’s equal employment opportunity officer, who’d then called Edna and asked her for records indicating that the Dunwoodie Chair hiring procedure had conformed to federal affirmative action guidelines. And of course, it didn’t. The Dunwoodie Foundation (i.e., Maude and Ezra) had only one candidate for the Chair, Sally Alder, and that was that. No search, no oversight, no paper trail to fall back on.
And so, ironically, Edna had spent the past couple of weeks, on top of her regular duties as dean, figuring out how to get around affirmative action procedures in defense of feminist scholarship. Sheesh. Loathing herself, she’d called Virginia Minor and told her to see how California’s recent abolition of affirmative action (and the push to do the same thing in Texas) might be useful. “Ick,” Minor said, and Edna had to agree.
Edna, meanwhile, decided to do a little research of her own. As she well knew, a place like the University of Wyoming hadn’t had uniform hiring procedures until, really, the 1980s. When she’d finally been hired for a tenuretrack job in 1982, with years of teaching, several books, and an international reputation, the anthropology department’s idea of an open search had been to make her compete against the wife of the new basketball coach, a woman who made her own arrowheads. The guys in FAF (a list of the membership revealed that all eighteen members were, coincidentally, white males) had for the most part been hired long before, according to the practices of the old boy network. A department chair would call up one of his buddies from graduate school, ask if he had any students who needed a job, and that was usually that. Edna was willing to bet that most of Boz’s pals had never even had to interview for their positions before they signed the contracts that had made them UW’s for life.
Edna liked to be sure. She’d gone after their personnel records, found pretty much nothing documenting the hiring procedures on any of them, and then called in the lawyers. By the time Virginia Minor’s crew got done interviewing the FAF members about their own experiences going to work for the University, they’d decided not to file an EEO complaint. The University’s employment officer, an MBA who thought affirmative action was a bunch of bullshit anyway, was relieved not to have to pursue the matter.
Stuff like this made Edna wonder why she’d been crazy enough to become an administrator. Ick, indeed. Long ago, she’d resolved to focus on the satisfying things in her life. You usually had to put up with a lot of crap to get what you wanted. She poured herself a glass of wine, asked herself the question, “If you could be doing anything at all right now, what would it be?” Standing on a hill in Katmandu? Bodysurfing at Cabo? Soon enough. She took a sip of lovely zinfandel, smiled, then set her glass aside. She didn’t have time for a bath, but if she hurried, she could catch Tom in the shower.
Within fifteen minutes of the guests’ arrival, Edna, Sally, and Virginia Minor had gone into the kitchen to talk shop, while Tom, Helen Singer, and Hawk sat in the living room shoveling tapénade onto crackers and arguing about who would win the NCAA basketball tournament. Helen, as an orthodontist, felt compelled to defend the idea that the team with the best-fitting mouth guards had an overwhelming advantage, supporting her claims with the kind of detailed description of athletes’ oral habits that listeners other than Tom and Hawk might not have found such a screamingly funny accompaniment to tapénade.
This was Sally’s first social encounter with Virginia Minor, who arrived, amazingly, in jeans artfully torn out at the knees, a lime green angora sweater, and Doc Martens. Virginia refused the zinfandel in favor of a vodka martini and collapsed onto a stool to watch while Sally washed spinach leaves and Edna got a poire bruleé ready to pop in the oven to be done just in time for dessert.
“How in the world do you find the time and energy to cook, Edna?” Virginia asked. “By the time Helen and I get home we barely have the strength to argue about who has to pick up the phone to call Domino’s. Last fall she decided we needed more home-cooked meals, and we still have the freezer full of Lean Cuisines. Neither one of us can manage to put the little plastic packets in the boiling water.”
“It must be hard work, saving my ass,” Sally commented. “After a day of your kind of heavy lifting, I’d settle for a bowl of cornflakes.”
“Actually,” said Virginia, snagging a slice of pear, “they’re pretty good with water if you can’t manage to get to the grocery store to buy milk. Low-fat, too.”
“So how’s the ass-saving going, Vinnie?” Edna asked.
Virginia shrugged. “We’re eating up a lot of staff time researching precedents and talking to people at Yale and the University of Washington. The Yalies haven’t been all that much help. What with their problems in the past, Yale doesn’t want any part of endowed chairs for the foreseeable future. When donors with big bucks call, the Yale development people try to steer them toward giving the money to the general fund or bankrolling capital improvements. The Washington people are standing by the UPS chair endowment, and they’re betting the controversy will pass in a couple of years. Hey, they figure they’ll be a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft any minute, if they’re lucky and their legislature doesn’t just abolish higher education.”
Sally sipped the excellent wine and looked disgusted. “I’ve never understood the argument that one person’s freedom to do irrelevant research is suppressed if somebody they disagree with gets hired to do their own equally trivial research. Can’t we just hit them with the Sly Stone Brief?”
“The Sly Stone Brief?” Edna asked, stirring the tantalizing stuff on the stove.
“Something about different strokes, for different folks,” Sally said.
“Sure, we can do that,” Virginia answered. “And we can also point out all the places where donors have endowed chairs at public institutions, specifying any old conditions they chose, and nobody made a peep. We can subpoena all kinds of university officials from all over the place, and holders of chairs, to testify to the fact that the positions they hold aren’t keeping anybody from doing anything they please. We could even open up our own can of worms and start talking about one or two chairs that have been endowed here, say, by agribiz, with the express purpose of creating government-subsidized labs in which to research the cheapest way to turn an ordinary cow into unimpeded cash flow.” Virginia paused and got up to freshen her martini.
“The real problem, of course, is the principle of faculty governance,” Virginia explained to Sally, who didn’t really need it all explained again but who was listening carefully. “The way you were hired breaks rules that were written to bust up the old boy networks in the first place, and give women and minorities a decent chance. And, of course, the idea that the faculty ought to have established procedures and a regular role in personnel matters is reasonable enough in theory. But in practice it gets a lot stickier when, as is always the case, half the faculty hate the other half’s guts. And naturally it
’s a lot worse when you find out that the other side has somebody like Elroy Foote paying the legal fees. I feel like somebody who keeps a gun around as protection against prowlers, and then gets shot with it when some creep breaks in.”
The mention of break-ins twisted something in Sally’s stomach. “What about my academic freedom?” she complained. “Here I am, working on a biography of Wyoming’s most important writer, a project everybody in the state ought to be freaking begging me to get finished and out before a grateful public, and I’ve had to deal with everything from a homicidal skinhead to a neo-fascist gazillionaire who’s willing to bankrupt the University to get me the hell out of town! And I used to think the Boz curling his lip at me was a problem.”
“Well, at least it looks like they’ve backed off the EEO complaint,” Edna said, deciding that a little gossip was in order to lighten things up. “I found out today how the Boz was hired.” Virginia and Sally looked up at her with interest. “I heard it from that secretary in the provost’s office who’s been here since the Civil War. You know how academics are always joking that the only way they know where the good jobs will be next year is to read the obituaries in the New York Times? Evidently, Bosworth spent about five years hanging around Columbia after he finished his dissertation, getting increasingly desperate because nobody would hire him. At the time, the UW history department had one famous member, a guy named Hilson Hobby-Orson, who’d written like sixty definitive books on the economic history of the Roman Empire.
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