An Imperfect Spy

by Amanda Cross

  Kate found Blair at her side. “Who on earth …?” she whispered.

  “The dean, our leader,” Blair whispered back. “You should have met him when you were hired, but he was busy fund-raising. Frankly, I rather pushed you through before his return. He doesn’t believe in law and literature, or in law and anything else whatsoever, including justice.” The dean droned on praising his law school for “maintaining standards too easily abandoned by institutions considered more elite, who had sold out to the demands of those marginal to our great culture, who had no hand in writing our laws or defending them against their enemies. I drink to the wise makers of our Constitution.”

  “Does he consider the Bill of Rights part of the Constitution?” Kate asked.

  “I doubt it,” Blair said. “He would certainly not be in favor of them, were they up for a vote today. He thinks the Second Amendment guarantees his and every American’s right to carry an unlicensed handgun.”

  “My god, Blair, what have we got into, me and Reed? How did you ever decide to join this mob in the first place?”

  “I wanted to be in New York, a city I love. Of course, as you realize, I had no idea what I was getting into. So, instead of leaving, I decided to bore from within. Hence you and Reed.”

  The dean was concluding his remarks to enthusiastic applause. All raised their glasses to drink to their fine school. Kate thought there was a distinct danger that she might be ill; she and Blair made their way out of the room and, eventually, out of the building. Kate took large breaths of air.

  “And to think I might have drunk with them,” she said. “I’m particular about whom I drink with, and it doesn’t include this amazing faculty. Slade actually told me that one of his noble colleagues was shot by his wife when he was sleeping. Is that true? Slade said she shot her husband like a gang executioner.”

  “Gangs execute in the back of the head; she shot him in the chest,” Blair said. “A few times. And yes, of course I know about it and it is true. He does seem to have been a monster, but as far as the faculty here is concerned, he was the innocent victim of a woman’s wrath.”

  “I begin to think I know nothing about crime,” Kate said. “And she didn’t try to hide the gun or pretend there had been a burglary, nothing like that?”

  “Nothing like that. She called for help. They found her still holding the gun. She never denied killing him; he died before the medics could get there.”

  “Did you know her at all?” Kate asked.

  “No. I’m afraid I rather avoided my colleagues after hours; certainly I didn’t know their wives. Nellie Rosenbusch knew her, though. Said she often had bruises, and cried all the time. Nellie told me she never guessed Betty would have the nerve; she certainly didn’t have the nerve to leave. There were children, of course.”

  Kate sighed. Reed, coming up to them at that moment, suggested to Kate that they proceed uptown. Like her, he seemed eager to place some distance between the party scene and himself. “Will you come with us?” he asked Blair.

  But Blair felt he should return to the party. “I am on the faculty,” he said. “I can’t flit in and out like you two. See you in class anyway,” he told Kate. She and Reed set out toward the subway.

  “Shall we walk to the next stop?” he asked.

  “I’m always ready to walk,” Kate said. “Tell me more about your prospective battered-women clients who killed their husbands. No,” she said, stopping in her tracks. “I think I’ll go back and have a word with Harriet, who is supposedly to be found in the secretarial room, or whatever they call it. I want to get my impressions clear about the members of this creepy faculty before I forget which is which. Do you mind going on alone?”

  “I will always mind going on alone,” Reed said, “but I can handle it for a few hours.”

  After some exploration and the opening of a number of wrong doors, Kate found Harriet seated in a large room at the first desk she encountered upon entering. Behind her were other desks occupied by young women, sitting before computers; what Kate took to be copying machines were grouped together at the very back, as though for protection.

  “You look surprised,” Harriet said by way of a greeting.

  “I am. Mere professors of literature do not get this kind of service. There are two sad and overworked women for the whole department. I type my own letters, simultaneously acquiring nobility for myself and accuracy for my letters.”

  “Lawyers are rich and catered to,” Harriet said. “Blair Whitson told me that one of the things that used to infuriate Nellie Rosenbusch was that if she came in here to get something copied, any male professor in the room would assume she was a secretary and ask her to ‘take care of this’ for him.”

  “I can’t help feeling, fresh as I am from the reception downstairs, that there ought to be one redeeming character in this place.”

  “One honest man, as the angel said before destroying Sodom. Or was it Gomorrah? We have Blair; that’s miracle enough.”

  They were interrupted by a man, apparently liberated from the reception, asking for a clean copy of this and eighteen copies of that. Kate stood by while Harriet dealt with him.

  “You seem good at this,” Kate said.

  “Of course I’m good at it; anyone with a modicum of intelligence and the patience of Griselda would be. We take all the hassle out of these men’s lives; it’s brought me to a new principle of leadership. No rich men should be leaders because they do not experience hassle, which is the major lot of most lives. Is there anything I can do for you, by the way, besides chatter on? Do you want something typed for your seminar?”

  “What I want is some inside dope, bluntly put,” Kate said. “Can you take a tea break or something?”

  “Actually, we’re just about done here.” And Kate looked up to see the women turning off their computers and retrieving their purses from desk drawers. “Make it a scotch break, and I’m with you.”

  “Sold,” Kate said. “Your place or mine?”

  “Yours. You have better scotch. Also, as someone said of George Smiley, ‘There has always been that certain kind of guilt about passing on his whereabouts—I still don’t know why.’ ”

  They arrived at Kate’s house, where she was amused to see Harriet greet the doorman as an old acquaintance. Reed had left a note saying he had gone over to his office to get his mail.

  “The truth is,” Kate said when they were seated, scotch in hand and the bottle on the table, “I wanted to find out if you’d picked up a good bit of gossip while reigning over the secretarial room.”

  “But of course. To quote yet another of le Carré’s characters, not dear George Smiley: ‘Men are no good at it. Only women are capable of such passionate espousal of the destiny of others.’ ”

  “It doesn’t sound altogether a compliment,” Kate said.

  “It’s still true. And what man is there who wouldn’t talk to you with a little encouragement, or even with none? That being established, what sort of gossip were you after?”

  “Professor Slade told me at the reception that one of the law professors there had been shot by his wife; she’s in prison on Staten Island, where Reed’s clinic will have its clients. I thought if you knew anything about it, he might be persuaded to look into the matter further. If she really was a battered wife, that is.”

  “She was battered all right,” Harriet said. “Any number of the secretaries saw the evidence; so did Nellie. They all say he was such a bastard you could hardly believe.”

  “But beloved by his colleagues at Schuyler no doubt.”

  “No doubt. I’m told they testified on his behalf at her trial. They’re a tight little bunch there. Isn’t it wonderful how mediocrities support one another? I can never understand whether they’re afraid of nonmediocrities or can’t tell the difference.”

  “Most people can’t tell the difference,” Kate said.

  “I can,” Harriet snorted, “because, after all, I’m a gutsy aging woman. And as Donald Hall put it in his recen
t book of poems, Timidity encourages death and never prevents dying.’ My motto; well put.”

  “It may be a fine motto for an older person,” Kate said. “I don’t think it’s very good advice for an adolescent boy living in an inner city.”

  “I hate people who are always ready with a comeback,” Harriet said, reaching for the bottle. “The only problem with you, Kate, is that you’ve never come up against a group of bonded males swollen with mediocrity enjoying power and set upon defending their turf. Maybe you’ve read about them in the newspapers; they’re in the navy, they’re in the Senate, they’re in IBM and every other business. Did you happen to read about the dead feminist lawyer whom the Law Review boys at Harvard thought it so amusing to parody, with great cruelty, after her murder; they parodied Nellie at Schuyler in much the same way, doing their damnedest against individual women, dead or alive, and against feminism. I’m accused of exaggerating; but these men are so defensive they can’t see where they’re wrong, or even admit they might be mistaken. I don’t know how much damage they did in my long-abandoned English department, but I think I can guess how much damage they can do in a law school.”

  “Life must be brutal in that secretarial room, to make you so angry. I’m afraid I just find them pitiful rather than dangerous. And not all conservative men are mediocre,” Kate added, although she would have been hard put to understand why she was arguing with Harriet, whose lightness was eerily recognizable.

  “Well, I do get carried away,” Harriet said, smiling. “Protectors of the honored past may not be mediocre, but they are threatened, and threatened men are dangerous. They have had power for so long, they have been on the top of the hierarchy for so long, they can’t believe that any justice can be involved in their loss of that cozy, high place.”

  “How and where,” Kate asked, “do you read Donald Hall’s latest book of poems?” She really wanted to know.

  “In the public library. You can sit there and read and no one bothers you. It takes a while to get the books, of course, but I make lists and wait. I can’t take them out; you need a card for that, and I’m determined to have used my phony name and documents only once. Anyway, I like reading in libraries, even the impoverished libraries New Yorkers are stuck with. I also read A. N. Wilson’s biography of C. S. Lewis, about how his colleagues at Oxford hated him because he was both brilliant and wrote popular books, so that even he, a man, frightened them in their comfortable niches. I made a note of it.”

  Kate smiled as Harriet rummaged in her bag for her notebook. She found herself overcome with affection for Harriet, not least, she thought, because it was such fun arguing with the woman. Harriet retrieved her notebook with a satisfied yell, and flipped its pages. “Here we are,” she said. “Wilson remarks that Lewis’s works ‘were far more interesting and distinguished than anything which his rivals for the job had produced. They, however, were safe men, worthy dullards, and this is usually the sort of man that dons will promote.’ Dons and American professors, law or literature, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Does that make Blair a dullard?” Kate asked.

  “Good question,” Harriet said. “I don’t know. Sometimes when they hire young men, they make mistakes, and think because he has the right color, religion, sexual orientation, and education, he’ll fit in. Ninety times out of a hundred, maybe more than that, he does. It pays, you see. Blair may just possibly be in the ten percent. After all, he was a friend of Nellie’s, and he did get Reed to run a clinic; he is teaching with you, a renowned woman of perversity, and a course called Law and Literature at that. But he could, at any time, decide not to risk too much. Remember A. N. Wilson’s words: ‘Where mediocrity is the norm, it is not long before mediocrity becomes the ideal.’ ”

  * * *

  And so the semester got under way. Reed, it seemed to Kate, worked considerably harder at his clinic than she did on her course. Preparation for only one course a week was child’s play, compared with her usual schedule, but the truth was that the class itself presented far more difficulty than Kate was used to. Blair explained it concisely: “We’ve given them permission to speak of their experiences, in and out of law school, which no other class has done. So, naturally, they take out their angers on us. Rather like parents with adolescent children, or so I would imagine. And rather like parents, we would dearly like to kick them from time to time.”

  Kate’s reaction to the class, however, was less that of agonized parent than despairing academic. At least, she wryly thought, the old boys who run Schuyler Law classes by the Socratic method don’t find their students arguing with every second sentence uttered.

  It was not long after that something ominous happened.

  Blair and Kate had finished teaching their class. Many of the students stayed on to talk to one another, or to the professors, but there were always a few who hurried to the door at the earliest possible moment. Today, however, the door was locked, and could not be opened Nor did banging upon it produce any response whatever.

  The room in the basement of the building had only one door and recessed windows, below grade and behind bars. The men who had tried to leave banged on the door, and soon began to kick it. Blair and Kate tried the handle themselves, recognized the uselessness of trying to force it open, and suggested, not without a certain pleasure, that everyone go on screaming as loudly as possible. Kate turned to Blair.

  “Aren’t there cleaners who come in the evening?”

  “I think so; I’ve never really clocked them. And who knows if they penetrate to the basement.” Looking around, he could see that the students were beginning to look alternately angry and afraid, a dangerous combination.

  “Aren’t the cleaning materials kept in the basement?” Kate asked.

  “No,” one of the students answered. “They’re kept outside the entrance to the library. I’ve noticed them there when I was going out of the library for a smoke. For all we know, they may only clean the basement once a week, if then.”

  “Or once a month,” another student said.

  Kate, who was aware of a certain rising panic in herself, easily enough disguised and repressed, worried about the same response in the others, perhaps stronger and less easily restrained. She caught Blair’s eye and could see that he was equally, and similarly, worried.

  And then, as suddenly as it had started, the situation righted itself. One of the women students removed a cellular phone from the huge bag she carried about with her. “Who shall I phone?” she asked.

  “Nine-one-one,” came a chorus of voices.

  After that they waited for the police, watching through the dirty windows and the bars. The police arrived and tried with a crowbar to force open the door; that failing, they removed the hinges. It occurred to Kate that they might have called a locksmith, which would have been more seemly. But no doubt the police were better for preventing panic. They had a bullhorn.

  “All of you get to the back of the room, as far away from the door as you can get. Who’s in charge of this class?”

  “I am,” Blair said, after exchanging a glance with Kate. After all, Kate thought, he does belong here; he is, rightfully, in charge. She appreciated Blair’s consideration of his answer rather than his natural assumption of leadership. She looked at him so steadily, she momentarily forgot about the locked doors.

  “Okay,” the bullhorn continued. “You, the one in charge, get everybody, I mean everybody, up against the wall farthest from the door. You got that?” Blair yelled back that yes, they got it, but it was doubtful if they could hear him.

  They couldn’t all fit against the wall, so they made two rows, the outer one pressing back against the inner one in a way that clearly added a certain spice to the whole adventure, which had, by now, with the arrival of the police, taken on the appeal of a lark.

  “Ready?” the bullhorn thundered.

  “Ready,” Blair shouted, whether audibly to the police or not they could not tell. It certainly sounded loud enough to Kate to be heard in S
taten Island. There was a moment of absolute silence, no one seemed to breathe, and then, in a wholly anticlimactic way, the door fell away. The police triumphantly entered, and the adventure was over.

  But not entirely over, it soon appeared. The students left hastily, and with good humor—“always has been a class full of surprises,” one of them said—and then the police entered the room. Again they asked who was in charge.

  “We are,” Blair said this time, pointing to himself and Kate. “We are.”

  When the police finally left, having taken their names with much other tedious information, Blair and Kate found themselves in a hilarious mood. “Come on up to my office,” Blair said. “I haven’t yet told you, but I keep a bottle there for moments exactly like this. Although,” he added as they moved toward the stairs, “most of the moments requiring strong liquors are usually not as amusing as this, or as easily resolved.”

  “I wonder if it’s really resolved,” Kate said, when they had each got a drink and laughingly clinked their glasses. “Somebody locked that door. Perhaps we had better be careful they don’t lock this one,” she added, getting up to open it.

  “Don’t,” Blair said, catching her hand and stopping her. “Don’t open it just yet. Let’s enjoy our lucky escape.” He pulled her to him, gently, it might almost have been by accident.

  “I’m going,” Kate said, and went. Then of course she had to come back to collect her coat and her briefcase.

  Blair smiled amiably. “Okay,” he said. “Not to worry.”

  But Kate was worried. And not about locked doors. Well, she assured herself, about that, too. Naturally.

  Spying is eternal.… For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy.

  —JOHN LE CARRÉ

  THE SECRET PILGRIM

  Five

  REED, meanwhile, having written up the directions for the students taking the clinic, had found himself an assistant. She was a third-year student at Reed’s law school, on her way to an associate’s job at a Wall Street law firm and happy to spend the intervening time, while her law studies dwindled to a close, assisting Reed with his clinic. She had told him that she was assuaging her conscience by working with women in prison, and Reed told Kate that whatever her motives, she was a godsend: smart, organized, able to keep the students to their schedules without insulting anyone.