The Novels of William Goldman

by William Goldman

  The black was returning quickly now. “Sign’s still there.”

  The engineer looked up at the janitor.

  “Oh, that paper thing,” Scylla said. “Thass not a sign, what did it say?”

  “That these facilities are busted,” the engineer answered. “And to use the ones downstairs.”

  Scylla almost laughed then at his own genius—“no one said facilities, you developed a sense for things after a while.” Oh, he was smart, all right, all right. They were looking at each other still, and Scylla knew they were wondering whether to let him go or not. “Here lies Scylla, undone the first time he ran into a decent vocabulary.” He stood very still, drunkenly bracing himself on the sink, not remotely tempted to move until they told him to go. He was sure they would, because he was not on their agenda; they had their job and they had done it and he was none of their affair. And he certainly would never mix with them, since he had his own work to take care of. There was no possibility of more violence; it did not exist, Scylla knew that, so when the violence came, he was surprised, even more so by the fact that he was the one to start it.

  Because it was then that he saw Ape’s pathetic toupee in a toilet-stall corner.

  The bastards had taken the little man with the troublesome lower intestine at the least dignified of times—they had wasted a legend with his pants down. “You should have waited, Jesus Christ!” and as they looked away from each other and toward him, Scylla went first for the engineer, not because he was nearest but because he carried a heavy wrench, and that had probably been the weapon.

  He rammed up with his fingertips forced together and lifted the engineer off his feet with a blow beneath the chin, and the black was easy, because he didn’t know then whom he was dealing with, so he went into a quick guard position for another right-hand assault, so Scylla took him easily with his left, clubbing the hard edge of his hand down at the janitor’s shoulder near the neck, and there was the sound of bone cracking as the black sprawled near the engineer.

  “Why didn’t you wait?”

  The engineer was trying to gasp, and probably he would never speak quite the same again, while the black blinked up, dazed, trying to hold his shoulder in place, looking for some way to make his brain order the correct words.

  Scylla started softly. “I think I’ll take your pants down, would you like that? And then I’ll put you on the squat, would you like that? And kill you. And kill you! Would you like that?”

  “Orders,” the black managed. “There was nothing about you. Don’t kill us.”

  “You know who I am?”

  “I do now,” the black said. “Scylla.”

  Scylla looked at them, genuinely undecided as to whether to finish them. Rage still had him, so the doing would be no problem. And he would risk the getaway.

  “Don’t,” the black said again.

  The engineer continued to gasp.

  Then the black saved their lives: “They never said he was your friend.”

  “Well, he was,” Scylla said. “Yes.” But now the rage was lowering. “For many years,” Scylla went on, trying to keep it high. But there was no way of doing that. For Ape had been no friend. Not friend nor acquaintance nor cohort nor any other thing. They shared an occupation. What was that?

  He knelt suddenly over them then, his hands in killing position. He wanted their fear, and got it. It was in their eyes and in their minds that they were going to die. “You remember this now,” Scylla said, and even though his rage was going, his voice still trembled. “Always leave a person something. Do you understand me? Some little thing, leave them that. A shred will do, but there must be that shred. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” the black said.

  Scylla brought his hands lower.

  “I understand!” the black cried out, but he knew it was over for him then. The engineer knew he was done, too.

  When he had them convinced of their extinction, Scylla rose in silence and left them there, returning to the bar, finishing his Scotch, ordering another.

  What a stupid performance! Word would get back. These two would report to their headquarters, and their headquarters would contact Division very loudly that Scylla had misbehaved. Worse—Scylla had interfered. And of course, Division would do their best to deny the allegations.

  But they would never be quite so confident of Scylla again. Oh, they would use him, certainly; he was much too valuable still to discard. But they would watch him too. Much more carefully than in the past, wondering why he had misbehaved, what was wrong with him to do a thing like that, could you trust Scylla any more or was he past it. And at the next sign ...

  There must not be a next sign, Scylla decided.

  And the Arabs who hired the black and the engineer—if indeed it had been the Arabs—they would be watching him too. You had to protect your people, and it would not be unfitting for them to try to take him when he was vulnerable, perhaps break his shoulder, destroy his voice. Or, if they were really angry, perhaps break his back at the spine base, let him try living crippled a decade or so.

  I must not become vulnerable, Scylla decided.

  Easy enough to decide, but why had he gone wild in the men’s room? Why had the sight of an illfitting wig in the corner of a toilet stall sent him into fury?

  Because ... Scylla realized—

  —because ... It was hard for him even to shape the thought—

  —because I want to die with someone who loves me.

  There. Out, admitted, done. And was it so terrible a wish? Was it so much to ask of life, a decent dying?

  Probably.

  “Check,” Scylla said, and he paid for his drinks, Ape’s too. On the way to the plane, he detoured briefly back to the men’s room. The piece of paper was down. Scylla opened the door, stepped inside briefly, glanced around. The toupee was gone.

  Scylla nodded, pleased. They hadn’t bolted after he’d left them. They’d stayed around, cleaned up whatever was necessary, made the proper final checks. They were probably good men.

  Good men?

  Scylla left the men’s room hurriedly, angry with himself for the thought. What’s happening to you? Five minutes ago you were near to a double closeout, and now you call them good men. He reached the Pan Am area, took his place in the check-in line. I want to die with someone who loves me.

  “Pardon?” the aged lady in front of him said.

  Omigod, I’m thinking out loud!

  Scylla smiled at her. He had a wonderful smile, unforced and reassuring. The woman bought it, smiled back, turned away. You keep this up, they’ll be sending you Coach soon, Scylla told himself.

  The possibility set him trembling.

  3

  THERE WERE FOUR OF them in the seminar room, waiting for Biesenthal. The other three knew one another, and talked quietly together in the front. From the rear of the room, Levy watched them. He had heard of them; even while he was doing his work at Oxford, news of these three had made the trans-Atlantic intellectual grapevine. The biggest of them was Chambers, black, with a shot, so they said, at being the first top-notch Negro historian. The other two were the Riordan twins, a boy and a girl, and at Yale the word was they had the best Catholic minds since Billy Buckley.

  From his position, Levy knew that from time to time he was the subject under discussion. If you had a really first-rate case of inferiority, you could tell when people were going on about you, and Levy inferred from various head movements and half-shrugs that although they certainly knew who they were—only the best got Biesenthal—the presence of the sweaty guy in the back was a puzzlement. I should never have run to school today, Levy told himself, pulling at his damp white shirt. It was stupid, on opening day; opening day you wanted to make an impression, not break records. Run home, jerk, he reminded himself. Sprint home if you want to, but don’t come to class all schwitzing. No one respects perspiration in the groves of academe.

  Biesenthal blazed in then. “Blazed” was the right word. His eyes—he couldn�
��t help it, they just were—seemed backlit, like a pretty Western. All you had to do was just peek at Biesenthal and you could tell he was brilliant. Levy had seen Oppenheimer once, and he was the same way. Oppenheimer’s shirts were too big in the collar, and his pants bagged, but stick him on the Bowery, you’d still know there was genius in the vicinity.

  Biesenthal was like that. Not that his shirts didn’t fit—he was totally fastidious. He could afford to be; he’d been rich going in, and his career had been, for an historian, incredibly successful. Two Pulitzers, three best sellers, numberless television appearances and interviews in The New York Times. Biesenthal was tireless, unflaggingly colorful, an intellectual Sammy Glick. The reason he got away with being rich, successful, and famous while at the same time maintaining his stronghold in the intellectual community was that he seemed to know every fact ever unearthed in the history of the world, which gave him an advantage over most people.

  “I hope you all flunk,” Biesenthal began.

  That caused a certain breath intake in the room.

  Biesenthal relished that. He sat on the desk at the front and crossed one well-creased leg over the other. “There is a shortage of natural resources worldwide,” he went on. “There is a shortage of breathable air. There is even, alas, a shortage of adequate claret. But there is no shortage of historians. We grind you out like link sausages, and you are every bit as bright. Well, I say, enough! I say, let you find harmless employment elsewhere. Use your backs. Shovel your way through life. The universities have processed you for financial purposes, and so long as you could afford to pay tuition, they could afford to pay me. Progress, they called it; manufacturing doctorates was progress. Well, I say, ‘Halt the ringing cry of progress’—that is a quote—who said it? Come, come, who said it?”

  Tennyson, Levy thought. Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. That’s right. I’m sure it’s right. But what if it’s not right? You don’t come in sweaty opening day, and you don’t make mistakes opening day. Probably it’s Yeats, anyway. What if I said Tennyson and Biesenthal said, “Wrong, wrong, it was William Butler Yeats, 1865 to 1939, DON’T YOU KNOW Irish poetry? How can you expect to be decent historians if you don’t know Irish poetry, and who are you, sir, and why are you perspiring in my presence? Sweat is no substitute for claret in my lexicon.”

  “Tennyson,” Biesenthal roared. “My God, Alfred Tennyson, how can you expect to compete on a doctoral level and not know Locksley Hall and Locksley Hall Sixty Years After?”

  The girl Riordan began making a neat note. Levy watched her, angry at the precise way she was undoubtedly writing down the titles along with a reminder to quickly become acquainted with the verses. “I knew,” he wanted to cry out. “Professor Biesenthal, I really did, I could have quoted you lines from it.” Levy shook his head. You are a jerk; you could have impressed the man.

  Biesenthal jumped lightly off the desk and began pacing. He was quiet for a time, as if letting them have a good look at him, letting it sink in that they really were in Biesenthal’s presence. His modern-history seminar was the most prestigious class at Columbia, with the possible exception of the Barzun-Trilling seminar in Lit, but Levy wasn’t even sure they gave it any more. “We shall meet on a bi-weekly basis. I shall be here promptly, and so shall you. I promise to be dazzling at least fifty per cent of the time. On occasion I am more than that, more often only brilliant. I apologize in advance for those occasions. I do not generally see much of my students, but I will undoubtedly be on your orals board, where I will do my best, which is really quite good, to delay your acquiring your degrees. Think of me as your own particular roadblock. I am also something of a snoop, and I can cause you more grief if I know your strong points so as not to bother inquiring after them. So please, briefly, describe the subjects of your dissertations. Chambers!”

  “The reality of the black experience in the South as it parallels the unreality of Faulkner’s fiction.”

  Biesenthal stopped pacing. “And if there’s no valid parallel?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping,” Chambers said. “I’d love a short dissertation.”

  Biesenthal smiled at that.

  Oh is that Chambers clever, Levy thought. Smooth, anyway. God, what I’d give to be smooth.

  “Miss Riordan? Miz Riordan, a thousand pardons.”

  “Nineteenth-century European power alliances—a critique of same.”

  “And you, sir?” This to the boy Riordan.

  “Carlyle’s humanism.” He stuttered. “Kuh-kuh-Car,” he said.

  “That’s really a dreadful notion, Riordan. No one your age should have any interest in something that dull. Intellectuals aren’t supposed to become insufferable until they’re twenty-five, that’s in our charter.” He turned to Levy now. “Mister ...?”

  “Tyranny, sir,” Levy managed, heart—Stop it!—pounding. “The uses of tyranny in American political life, such as maybe Coolidge breaking the Boston police strike and Roosevelt putting Japanese Americans into West Coast concentration camps on the West Coast in the forties.”

  Biesenthal looked straight at him. “You might consider the McCarthy business.”

  “Sir?” was all Levy could come out with. So, after all, Biesenthal knew.

  “Joseph. He was a senator from Wisconsin. He ran a series of tyrannical purges in the early fifties.”

  “I’d planned a chapter on him, sir.”

  Biesenthal sat behind the desk now. “All rise,” he said, “and depart swiftly. With one final admonition.” The group stopped. “Many students are afraid that when they contact their teachers they might be, somehow, bothering them. Let me assure you that in my case that is totally and one hundred per cent true, you will be bothering me, so please do it as infrequently as possible.” He almost smiled as he said it, and the others laughed. But uncertainly.

  “Levy,” Biesenthal said when Levy was almost out the door.

  “Sir?”

  Biesenthal pointed to the door. “Close,” he said. He beckoned with his finger. “Come,” he said. He pointed to a chair in the front row. “Sit,” he said.

  Levy did as he was told. They were alone in the room.

  Quiet.

  Levy tried not to fidget.

  Biesenthal’s eyes blazed down on him.

  “I knew your father,” he said finally.

  Levy nodded.

  “Rather well, in point of fact. He was my mentor.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I was just a brat when he found me, dancing along, using just enough brains to avoid the precipice.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, sir.”

  Biesenthal would not stop examining him; the eyes would not stop blazing. “T. B. Levy,” Biesenthal said finally. “I assume, since your father was a Macaulay man, that you are Thomas Babington,”

  “Yes sir, only I try to keep the Babington part of it as quiet as possible.”

  “As I recall, there was another of you; who was he named after?”

  “Thoreau. His name’s Henry David.” That was true, only Levy never called him that when they were alone. “Doc” he called him then. It was their great and very only secret. In all the world, nobody else called him that, “Doc.” Just like in all the world nobody but Doc ever referred to him as “Babe.”

  “Is he also a blossoming intellectual?”

  “No sir, he’s a hotshot businessman, he makes pots of money, and it used to be all right but lately he’s showed signs of becoming a world-class dilettante in his Brooks Brothers clothes. He raves about French restaurants, and all he ever drinks is Burgundy wine. You could fall asleep listening to him tell about this one’s ‘finish’ and that one’s ‘nose.’ I think my father would have disowned him.”

  Biesenthal smiled. “Your father had great faith in precision—your names reflect that.”

  “How so, sir?”

  “They died the same year, Thoreau and Macaulay.”

  “No,” Levy was about to correct. Macaulay went in 1859, Thoreau lasted
till three years later. Levy’s hands went across his stomach. What to do, what to do? Three years was almost the same as the same year, although probably Tom Macaulay would have given you an argument on that if you’d asked him on his deathbed. “Hey Babington, you wanna live three more years or not, it’s up to you, speak your pleasure, what’ll it be?”

  “I wasn’t ...” Levy began.

  Biesenthal and those damn eyes were watching him still.

  “I mean, I didn’t quite realize ... I suppose I always thought one of them died in 1859 and the other in 1862, it just shows you how wrong you can be, thanks for setting me straight.”

  Biesenthal hesitated a moment. “No—no, of course, you’re quite correct, I was in error, they did die three years apart. I misspoke, forgive me. What I meant was, of course, that they were born in the same year; the same month, to be perfectly precise.”

  Levy could not stop kneading his stomach. They were born seventeen years apart, but you couldn’t correct a man like Biesenthal twice. Not twice in one day, anyway. Twice in one lifetime, sure, but that was it, unless you wanted to major in wrath-risking. “Yes sir,” Levy said.

  “Do not,” Biesenthal began, his voice low but constantly building, “do not, ever again, humor me!”

  “I would never do a thing like that, sir.”

  “When was Macaulay born?”

  “1800.”

  “And H.D.Thoreau?”

  “Practically 1800.”

  “When?”

  “Seventeen years later.”

  “Correct me, sir! How else am I to fathom your mind? I do not like nodders. Everyone agrees with me all the time, and it bores me, sir, it bores me. I am on the lookout for minds. Your father’s I venerated. I worshipped at it. Is yours so fine?”

  “Oh, no, no sir.”

  “That is my judgment to make, but I can make it only if you show it to me. If you continue to hide it, I can only assume you are a drone, and I shall put you down in quality with the boy Riordan. ‘Young Levy? Very sad. His father had a mind one would have killed for, but the child, alas, never grasped anything more convoluted than a game of pick-up-sticks.’ Would that please you?”