by Irwin Shaw
“Man,” Rollins said, “they sure bring in the heavy guns when somebody like him gets into trouble, don’t they?”
“I’m afraid we have to expect that,” Strand said. “There’s nothing much I can do.”
“I hear they put the bail at ten thousand dollars.”
Strand nodded.
“They sure laid it on him, didn’t they?” Rollins shook his head.
“The judge was an old man.” Strand didn’t know why he said that.
“One thing he should have learned—stay out of the white man’s court.” For the first time, Rollins let his bitterness show.
“I don’t think it would make any difference in this case.”
“That’s what you think.” There was a derisive twist on Rollins’s lips. “Him and me, we don’t read the same books as you folks.” Strand noticed that he had become increasingly ungrammatical, as though the stress of the moment had erased his education and uncovered a more primitive level of speech.
“As I said, I would like to help, but…” Strand shrugged.
“I understand,” Rollins said quickly. “There’s no way you’d have ten thousand dollars laying around loose.”
Strand refrained from smiling at Rollins’s assumption that all school teachers were impoverished.
“No, it happens that I don’t.”
“What I was thinking…Mr. Hazen…” Rollins said, glancing sideways at Strand as he brought out the name, testing. “He’s a nice man from what I’ve seen of him and what Romero has told me. And with that big Mercedes and the chauffeurs and all…”
“Rollins,” Strand said, thinking that at the moment, no matter how else he would describe Russell Hazen, he would hardly use the word “nice,” “if Romero tells you of any hopes he has in that direction, tell him to forget them.”
Rollins frowned, the lines creasing in his forehead. “You mean you talked to Mr. Hazen and he turned you down.”
“You could say that.”
“Well, then—” Rollins stood up. “No use talking here. We got to look somewhere else.” He paced up and down, the old boards creaking under his weight. “Would it be okay if I took the day off tomorrow? My schedule’s light on Tuesday and I’m up in all my courses. It’d be different if the football season was still on. The coach wouldn’t let you off of practice if you had raging pneumonia and a temperature of a hundred and five. Classes’re different.” He grinned and looked five years younger than when he had come into the room. “I’m not what you might call an absolute necessity in the classroom.”
“May I ask what you expect to accomplish in one day?”
Rollins’s expression changed. His face closed down. “I thought I’d take a little trip to my hometown, Waterbury, and look around a little. There’s folks I know have some experience in this kind of thing.”
“I don’t want you to get into any more trouble,” Strand said. “You’re in plenty of trouble as it is—after all it’s known the crap games took place in your room, too.”
“Mr. Strand, that ain’t even a pimple on my nose,” Rollins said. “There been crap games in this here school since the day it opened. Maybe they’ll put me in the kitchen doing the dishes for a week, maybe they won’t do nuthin’. Is it okay for the day?”
“I’ll tell the headmaster I gave you permission.”
Rollins put out his hand, and Strand shook it. “Mr. Strand, this place needs more people like you, that’s for sure. I never told this to any teacher before, but I enjoy your classes and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t learning something I think is important for me in them. A lot more important than blocking and tackling and you can tell the coach I said so.”
“I’ll tell that to the Board of Trustees the next time I come up for a promotion.”
“You tell them that,” Rollins said. “You tell them Rollins said so. And if you see Romero, you tell him he’s got friends. Now I better leave you alone. I took up enough of your time as it is. And don’t worry, there won’t be any more crap games in this house while you’re here.”
Strand walked him to the door, wished he could say something more to the boy, something to encourage him, a word to let him know that he admired his forthrightness and loyalty, but he felt it would embarrass Rollins, so he kept silent and closed the door behind him.
After a late breakfast the next morning, prepared for him by Mrs. Schiller, who was looking even more mournful than she had the day before, Strand heard the telephone ring.
It was Babcock. “Have you read the newspaper yet?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t.”
“That bad?”
“The news story was bad enough. The editorial was worse. The editor of the paper has always been on our back.” Babcock’s voice took on a nasal, back-country ring. “The idle scions of the rich in an anachronistic enclave of valuable town land, pampered by a low tax rate, encouraging the vices of a selected group of spoiled children, scouting the law, hostile to the tax-paying, hard-working citizens who make up the population of our town, a dangerous example to our high school students, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.” He returned to his own soft diction. “He has Romero’s picture on the front page, accompanied by his lawyer, on the school’s payroll, as the caption helpfully points out, being taken into a squad car by a policeman after the arraignment. The picture makes him look like a hit man for the Mafia, or at least the way they look in the movies. And next to it there’s one of us coming out of the courtroom. Somehow it seems as though we are smiling. Do you remember smiling?”
“No.”
“Did you see any cameramen outside the courthouse?”
“No.”
“They must have used a telephoto lens. The wonders of modern photography.” Babcock laughed shortly. “I called the paper and told the editor Romero had already been expelled from the school, but it was just throwing a bone to the lions. The article promises that they will follow the case closely. Every boy at breakfast and every teacher had a copy of the paper. They had all the facts on Romero. The reporter interviewed Hitz. At length, obviously. That Romero was here on a scholarship. Free ride for criminals, they call it. The misguided sentimentality of New York bleeding hearts, exporting their problems to the innocent, old-fashioned countryside. They didn’t mention Hazen, but they spelled your name correctly. As a final blow to your reputation, they mentioned that you spent your summers in East Hampton, a haunt of wealth and dissipation. The editor must have gotten his degree in journalism from a correspondence school in Hollywood. It was on the Hartford morning TV news, too. A somewhat more sympathetic treatment, but still nothing to make parents rush to enroll their boys at Dunberry. Sometimes, I must admit, I regret the advances in our communications systems.”
Strand could imagine him sitting at his desk, struggling with his pipe and forgetting to keep it lit and pushing his glasses up and down distractedly.
“By the way,” Babcock said, “did you speak to Hazen?”
“Last night.”
“What did he say?”
“Romero is on his own.”
“No bail?”
“Not a penny.”
Babcock sighed. “That poor deluded boy. Another thing. The FBI in New Haven called my office. They want to interview you, they say. It can’t be about Romero. Whatever he did, it wasn’t a federal offense. Have you any idea why they want to talk to you?”
“Not until I hear what they have to say.”
There was a peculiar silence at the other end of the phone. Then Babcock said, “Well, we have to live through it. If you can stand it, Allen, I think you had better go back to your classes and make an appearance at meals. If you remain incommunicado it makes it seem as though you have something to hide.”
“I see what you mean.”
“If I may make a suggestion, try to avoid answering too many questions. The line that might be wise to take is that you consider it lucky that you arrived when you did, that it kept things from becoming more than a minor in
cident. The less you say about guilt and innocence, if I may presume to coach you, the better it will be for all concerned. In your place I would refrain from speculating about whether Hitz took the money or not.”
“Of course. I have no way of knowing, anyway. I’ll be at lunch today and will take my classes this afternoon.”
“That’s very good of you,” Babcock said, relieved. “I knew I could depend upon you. And if any newspaper people call you, I’d appreciate it if you just told them, No comment.”
“I hadn’t intended to make any speeches.”
“Forgive me for seeming anxious,” Babcock said. “My head is in such a muddle. You’ll be happy to know that Hitz won’t be at lunch or in any of the classes. His father called last night and said he wanted his son on the first plane to Washington. To see a real doctor, is the way he put it. We shipped him out before breakfast.”
“Thank God for small mercies,” Strand said.
“So I’ll see you at lunch?”
“At lunch,” Strand said. He hung up the phone.
The note was delivered in the middle of his last class by Babcock’s secretary. There were two gentlemen waiting in the headmaster’s office to see Mr. Strand. Would he please come to the office as soon as the class was over? Strand pocketed the note and went on lecturing about the expansionist policies of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Neither the lunch nor the afternoon classes had been as bad as he had feared. The boys had looked at him curiously and the teachers he had happened to meet murmured that they were sorry about what had happened. They had been warned, Strand was sure, not to discuss the case and not to bother Mr. Strand. If anything, Strand felt an undercurrent of sympathy. Although Romero undoubtedly had been the object of scorn by a certain clique in the school, Hitz he knew was universally disliked. The football coach, Johnson, even whispered as he passed Strand on the campus, “I wish Romero had gone just a little bit deeper.”
When the class was over, at four o’clock, Strand walked slowly over the bare, yellowed campus, the last dead leaves blowing in the cold November wind. Two gentlemen, he thought. The FBI must be wealthy in manpower if they sent two armed representatives of the bureau to question a fifty-year-old teacher of history who had never ever been issued a parking ticket in his life.
“They’re in with Mr. Babcock,” the secretary said when he entered the office. “You’re to go right in, Mr. Strand.”
All three men rose to greet him as he came through the door. The FBI men were youngish, one blond, one dark, neatly barbered and dressed in dark suits, unexceptional looking. He guessed they were young lawyers who had despaired of succeeding in private practice and who also liked to carry guns. Babcock mumbled their names, which Strand didn’t catch, and the two men shook hands gravely with him.
“These gentlemen,” Babcock said as they sat down, the two men facing Strand, “have been discussing the rise of juvenile delinquency with me.” He talked nervously. “It seems that in recent years the FBI has found that increasingly juveniles, or at least young men under eighteen, have been involved in crimes of great magnitude and violence that cross many state boundaries and therefore come under their jurisdiction.”
“We’ve read the papers this morning,” the blond young man said, with a smile that Strand took as meant to be reassuring, “and we know about the Romero case. Of course”—again the frosty tolerant smile—“that hardly rates as a crime of great magnitude or national concern. We were just answering some of the headmaster’s questions, waiting for you to be free. We’re here on a different matter.” Both men looked at Babcock, as though they were identical puppets on identical strings.
Babcock rose from his desk. “If you gentlemen will excuse me,” he said, looking at his watch, “I have a conference in the science department and I’m late already. I’ll tell my secretary you’re not to be disturbed.”
“Thank you, sir,” the blond man said.
Babcock went out and the dark agent produced a package of cigarettes and offered them to Strand. Strand said, “No, thank you, I don’t smoke.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all.”
The dark man lit up.
“Please put your mind at rest from the beginning,” the blond agent said. “We’re just looking for a little information that you may or may not be able to provide. We understand you know Mr. Russell Hazen.”
“He’s a friend of mine.”
“You occasionally spend time at his house in East Hampton and you occasionally see each other in New York?”
“That is correct.”
“He came to visit you on the third Saturday in September with your wife and your daughter and one of his secretaries?”
“He came to see a football game.”
“You had lunch with him in the school dining hall?”
“I sat at the table with my boys. He was at the visitors’ table.”
“With Mrs. Strand and your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Were they sitting on either side of him?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You then sat next to him at the football game and were accompanied at the game by your daughter?”
“Yes.” The FBI must teach their agents the art of asking useless questions, Strand thought. He hid his irritation with the two men.
Now it was the dark man who took up the line of questions. If Strand had closed his eyes he couldn’t have distinguished one voice from the other.
“You saw him in conversation with a Mr. Hitz, from Washington?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“At the visitors’ table.”
“Did you recognize Mr. Hitz?”
“Only later. His son, as you know, is in my house, and the father came over to me briefly after the game and introduced himself and asked me how his boy was doing.”
“Did you overhear any of the conversation between Mr. Hazen and Mr. Hitz at lunch?”
“They were twenty yards away and there was a great deal of noise in the hall.” Now he showed that he was annoyed. “What could I have heard?”
“But Mrs. Strand conceivably could have heard what the conversation was about?”
“Conceivably.”
“Is Mrs. Strand with you?” The blond man took the relief.
“She’s in Europe.”
“May we ask what she’s doing in Europe?”
“Smuggling dope.” Strand was sorry he had made the joke as soon as he saw the expression on the faces of the two men. “I’m sorry. I was being frivolous. I’m not used to police interrogations. She’s on a holiday.”
“When will she be back?” The blond man’s tone did not change.
“Two weeks, three weeks. I’m not sure.”
“Is she in the habit of taking two or three weeks vacation in the middle of the school term, leaving her classes?”
“This is the first time.” Strand resolved to hold his temper.
“Isn’t it expensive—holidays like that?”
“Terribly.”
“Have you any outside income?”
“A small pension from the New York City school system. Do I have to answer questions like that?”
“Not today,” the blond man said. “Perhaps later. Under oath. Does your wife have any other income aside from what she earns here at Dunberry?”
“She teaches piano one day a week in the city. And occasionally her parents send small gifts of money.”
“Small? How small?”
“Small.” Suddenly he decided to be stubborn. “Very small.”
“Would you venture a figure?”
“No.”
“Does she also receive gifts from Mr. Hazen?”
“He loaned her a car. A 1972 Volkswagen station wagon to go in and out of the city and do her shopping in town.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing.”
“Mr. Hazen is not financing this particular holiday in Europe?”
“No.”
“Are you paying for it?” The other man jumped in as though he had discovered a sudden light in the darkness.
“No.”
“Who is?”
“When she gets back you can ask her yourself.”
“Would you be kind enough to let us know where she’s staying in Europe? We have agents there who would save her the trouble of hurrying home to talk to us.”
“I’m not going to spoil her holiday over something that has nothing to do with her. I told you she was in Europe. I’ll say no more.”
The two men looked at each other as though they had scored a point and were congratulating themselves. “Let us go back a little, Mr. Strand,” the blond man said calmly. “Mrs. Strand was at the table at lunch, presumably next to Mr. Hazen. You all ate dinner together in the Red Top Inn. Am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“Was Mr. Hitz present?”
“No.”
“Could you say with certainty that you did not overhear Mr. Hazen and Mr. Hitz discussing a business deal while you were with him that day?”
“Yes.”
“Would you hazard a guess about whether Mrs. Strand or your daughter overheard anything of that nature or heard from Mr. Hazen directly about such a conversation?”
“There again, you will have to ask Mrs. Strand, and my daughter. Now, if you’ll tell me what this is all about, perhaps I can be more useful to you.”
“If you buy The New York Times tomorrow morning”—the blond man smiled in advance of what he was about to say—“I presume it reaches this outlying center of culture—”
“We get three copies every day in the library.”
“Read it and it will enlighten you somewhat.” He started to get up and then sat down again. “One more question. In your opinion, is there any possibility that the Hitz boy’s stabbing by a protégé of Mr. Hazen’s might have had anything to do with presumed conversations of a criminal nature between Mr. Hazen and Mr. Hitz senior?”
“That’s the most asinine thing I’ve heard in years,” Strand said angrily.
“We are instructed to ask asinine questions, Mr. Strand,” the blond man said smoothly. “That’s what we’re paid for.” He and then the dark man stood up. “Thank you for your time. And read the Times tomorrow morning,” he said as they went out.
