The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  The Rebbe snatches a tabloid from a pile of newspapers he uses to line the garbage pail, flops into his chair, riffles angrily through the pages. “Under my roof even food for thought turns out to be kosher,” he mutters. Something in the newspaper catches his eye. “Oy vey,” he mumbles, his nose buried in the racing section, “there’s a mare named Messiah running in the fifth at Belmont. Whether she’ll win by an eyelash or limp in last has already been determined. But can I risk not betting on her?”

  Chapter Five

  “To lose one’s cherry” rings a bell. Lemuel wonders where he could have come across the expression. Certainly not in his lost Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual. Nor does it sound like the kind of thing King James would have come up with in 1611. Which narrows it down to Raymond Chandler and Playboy. Lemuel’s intuition tells him Playboy is the more likely suspect, which suggests that losing one’s cherry has sexual implications. But what exactly did the Rebbe lose when he lost his cherry while Ravel’s “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales” was playing on the radio? Having lost this cherry of his, did the Rebbe then replace it with another cherry? In America the Beautiful people cried over spilt milk (an expression Lemuel picked up from Dwayne when they were touring the E-Z Mart one day and discovered a puddle of milk near the refrigerated-food section), but was it appropriate to cry over lost cherries? He makes a mental note to look up the idiom in the Dictionary of American Slang and add it to his repertoire. He can picture Rain’s face when she hears him respond to her “Z’up” with, “I went and lost my cherry.”

  Sinking wearily into a desk chair, Lemuel forces himself to concentrate on the sheriff’s serial-murder files. Details pile up like slag on a heap. Many come equipped with a riddle.

  Item: A handkerchief bearing someone else’s embroidered initials jutting from the breast pocket of the serial killer’s first victim.

  Item: Corrective contact lenses in the pocket of a victim with twenty-twenty vision.

  Item: A ring, filled with keys that did not fit any known door in the victim’s life, clutched in a dead woman’s hand.

  Item: A tiny battery-powered hearing aid in the pocket of a victim who was not deaf.

  Item: A seven-inch cesarean scar on the stomach of a woman with no history of pregnancy.

  Item: A package of undated, unsigned, explicitly heterosexual love letters hidden under the garbage pail liner of a victim who detested women and was thought to be celibate.

  Item: Seventeen gold coins buried in ice cubes in the freezer of a victim who qualified for food stamps.

  Item: A vial of heart stimulants in the pocket of a victim with no record of a cardiac ailment.

  Then there are fragments of fetishes: drawers filled with unwashed socks, closets filled with unshined shoes, cartons filled with women’s underwear, shoeboxes filled with false teeth or ivory dildos or fingernail and toenail clippings, a valise brimming with faded pornographic photographs of consenting adults engaged in impolite oral sex.

  What does it all mean? Are the killings really chaos-related, as Lemuel suspects? Will the elusive threads of fool’s randomness lead him to the chaotic origin of the crimes? Will they lead him to the single detail that will solve the puzzle and expose the criminal? Persuaded he is on the right track, he plows on, rummaging in the lives of the victims with the single-mindedness of someone plunging through the decimal expansion of pi toward infinity.

  Well past midnight, Lemuel begins to have difficulty focusing on the print in the files. He strolls into the kitchen, lets the water run for a minute before filling a glass and drinking. (Old habits die hard: In Petersburg, you had to let the water run for four or five minutes to get past the rust.) Returning to the living room, he swallows a yawn, flicks on the Sony, catches the tail end of the WHIM news bulletin.

  “Weather in the tri-county on this next-to-last day of April is gonna be out a sight. If you’re tuned in, Charlene, honey, you wanna go and inflate the boat and put it in the water. Blue skies up above, everyone’s in love, up a lay-zee river with meeeee. Oh-oh. They’re going ballistic in the control booth, which means we got us a hot phone call from one of our regulars. Hallo.”

  “Like I happened to have the radio on, right? which is how come I caught you telling Charlene to go and put the boat in the water.”

  “Hey, where you been hanging out? We haven’t heard from you in weeks.”

  “I been busy putting patches on my see-through shirts.”

  With a pang, Lemuel recognizes the voice of the caller, crouches in front of the radio, turns up the volume.

  “So what’s bugging you tonight?”

  “Nothing’s what’s bugging me. It’s just the word boat made me nostalgic.”

  “Did you use to own a boat when you were a kid?”

  Rain can be heard snickering. “Me? Own a boat? You need a clue or two. I can’t even swim.”

  “I don’t dig how you can be nostalgic for a boat if you never owned a boat.”

  “Hey, if you can be passionate about someone who doesn’t exist, why can’t you be nostalgic for something you never had? Which explains why some dudes are nostalgic for group sex or incest or hot pastrami sandwiches on pumpernickel. Me, I happen to be nostalgic for boats. I always wanted to own one and sail off to the horizon.”

  “What’s holding you back?”

  “What’s the use? I had this friend who happens to be an expert on horizons, he knows more about them than you and me put together. He says when you reach the horizon, he was speaking from personal experience, right? there’s always another horizon on the horizon.”

  “The trip could be a chuckle even if you never reached the horizon. Isn’t that so, Charlene?”

  “Not. If you buy into America, you buy into the idea that it’s the getting there that counts.”

  “You sound kinda down in the mouth.”

  Lemuel, crouching, grabs a pencil and scratches “down in the mouth” on the back of an envelope.

  “I go with the flow. Sometimes the flow turns out to be upstream.”

  “Can you play that back for me slow like? Pay attention, Charlene, honey. Rain’s got herself what the heavy hitters call a worldview which is definitely not mainstream. She goes with the flow even if it’s upstream. Ha ha. Hey, you still with us, Rain? Rain? Well, what’d’ya know? She must a been phoning from a booth and run out of quarters. Well, if you’ve just joined us, you’re listening to WHIM Elmira, the station where consenting insomniacs listen to sleepers describe their X-rated dreams. I’ll take another call …”

  Gazing into the Sony, trying to conjure up an image of Rain in the phone booth, Lemuel feels himself being sucked into a frightening fiction. Medium shot of Rain in the booth, the phone cradled between her neck and shoulder blade, rummaging in her pockets for a quarter, then hanging up in disgust when she can’t find one. Close in on Rain as she discovers the phone booth is jammed shut by a coiled boa constrictor. She starts to pound on the sides with her small fists. Her breath fogs the glass, obscuring her face. Lemuel could swear he hears her muffled cries: “Hey, Mayday, Mayday. I’m trapped in the goddamn booth, right? I want out.”

  Lemuel’s mind’s eye zooms out for a long shot. The telephone booth is lost in the heart of the heart of a lush garden. “I’m trapped outside the Garden of God,” he hears himself moan. “I want in.”

  On the radio, a caller with a vaguely familiar rasp to his voice is on the phone. “I couldn’t help overhearing your previous interlocutor mention incest,” he says. “If God was really against incest, He would maybe have created two couples instead of one in the Garden of Eden. Or better still, two Edens situated within commuting distance of each other, each garden with one biologically unique couple in it. If He didn’t do this, we can assume it wasn’t because of a shortage of clay—I’m talking Genesis 2:7, ‘And the Lord God formed man of the clay of the ground.’ We can likewise assume it wasn’t because He couldn’t come up with a spare rib.”

  “You don’t want to go and miss th
is, Charlene, honey. I got a live one on the line making the case incest is best.”

  “I’m not arguing it’s best. I’m only suggesting that God may have been sending a coded signal to the resident shlimazels and visiting shlepps of the planet Earth when He created one couple in one garden—”

  The host cuts off the caller. “So I’ll bite: What coded signal was God sending when He created one couple in one garden?”

  The man on the phone can be heard blowing his nose a nostril at a time. “Like Moses,” he finally says, “I can maybe climb a mountain and catch a whiff of the Promised Land, I know it’s right over the horizon, I feel it in my gut, I feel it in my groin, but I will never actually get to kiss the ground. …”

  “I must’ve missed something: What’s kissing the ground of the Promised Land got to do with incest and one couple in one garden?”

  Over the radio, the hum of the phone line is replaced by the shrill pitch of a dial tone.

  Lemuel senses the sheriff come to life on the other end of the phone line. “You went’n what?”

  “I went and solved the serial murders,” Lemuel says again. “I spent the last three nights combing though the files. I know who the killer is.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “In Backwater. On South Main. In the apartment over the Rebbe.”

  “Lock the door,” the sheriff orders excitedly. “Don’t open it for no one except my man Norman. He’ll be ‘round to fetch you ‘fore you can skin uh cat.”

  “Fetch,” Lemuel repeats with interest. “Skin a cat.”

  Twenty minutes later a blue-and-white cruiser with a yellow light pulsating on the roof pulls into the driveway under Lemuel’s French doors. A moment later there is the pounding of boots on wood. Lemuel hears the Rebbe’s voice calling up the stairs, “Where’s the fire, Norman? You’re knocking over stacks of books with the name of God in them.” There is an insistent knock on the door. Lemuel unlatches the chain and opens it.

  Norman touches two fingers to the brim of his hat. “Sheriff sent me over,” he explains. “Told me to bring you in dead or alive.” Flashing a sheepish grin, he flexes his knees to adjust his testicles. “Don’t get nervex—he specified alive was his first choice.”

  “I will fetch the file folders and be with you before you can skin a cat.

  Downstairs, Norman holds open the rear door of the car. Ducking, Lemuel slides in. He is surprised to discover two men sitting in the car, one in front, one in back. The one in front, square-shouldered, square-jawed, unsmiling, twists in his seat.

  “Mitchell, with two l’s,” he announces. “FBI.”

  The pale man sitting next to Lemuel regards him through tinted eyeglasses as he offers a soft, pudgy hand. “Doolittle,” he introduces himself. “I work for A.D.V.A., which is a subdivision of PROD, which is a division of N.S.A.”

  “Hey, you definitely have an eye for initials,” Lemuel says uneasily.

  Norman slips into the driver’s seat, turns the key in the ignition, switches on the headlights and the overhead pulsating light, flicks the compass attached to the dashboard with the nail of his third finger, then starts down the driveway toward the street. “Sheriff figured as how you’d want to have a private word with these here gents while I was driving you in,” he says over his shoulder.

  “Let me fill you in real quick-like,” Doolittle tells Lemuel. “ ‘N.S.A.’ stands for the United States National Security Agency, which is in the business of cryptoanalysis and traffic analysis. TROD’ is short for the Office of Production, which is in the business of signal intercept. A.D.V.A., which I happen to run, is so secret I can’t tell you what the initials stand for. We’re in the business of taking the intercepts provided by PROD and breaking Russian-language cipher systems.”

  With an effort Mitchell twists in his seat again. “I pulled down a C-minus in my college math survey course,” he tells Lemuel. “What you do for a living is Greek to me. Doolittle here informs me that you do it better than anyone else in the world. What we want, what would give us pleasure is for you to come in from the cold and do if for the good guys.”

  “Funny you should talk about the good guys,” Lemuel says. “My whole life I have been waiting for that piece of information to rattle around in my brain. So I will bite: Who are the good guys?”

  Mitchell does not look as if he appreciates Lemuel’s sense of humor. “We’re the good guys, sport,” he says with a tight smile. “The bad guys are no longer players. We deported the Russian woman with the washed-out brassiere, we deported the Oriental man who chats folks up with a stiff upper lip, we deported the Syrian exchange student who tried to talk you into relocating to a mosquito-infested metropolis on the Euphrates, we have taken the two spaghetti types from Reno into custody for doing sixty in a fifty-five-mile-an-hour zone and resisting arrest when we tried to show them the error of their ways. You will not be hearing again from any of them in the foreseeable future.”

  “On the off chance someone is interested,” Norman calls over his shoulder, “the straight stretch of Interstate right after the next bend is pointing like an arrow toward Jerusalem.” He taps the compass with a fingernail. “Six degrees south of east, magnetic, as opposed to true. The sheriff and me, we went and calculated it on a Mercator map a the world in the office atlas just in case the Rebbe gets himself rearrested again.”

  Doolittle and Mitchell exchange puzzled looks. Doolittle turns back to Lemuel. “All this foreign hustle and bustle in Backwater came across as a seven on the Richter scale located in the FBI’s Rochester office, which Mr. Mitchell here heads,” he explains. “That’s how we discovered you were in the country.”

  “We know who you are, sport,” Mitchell says.

  “You know more than I do,” Lemuel remarks under his breath.

  “We also have a pretty good idea,” Doolittle says, “thanks to an MIT alumnus who is a key player in a major Middle East franchise, exactly what it is you do.” He extracts a three-by-five file card from the breast pocket of his tweed jacket and reads aloud: “Falk, Lemuel, forty-six, member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, divorced, Jewish, atheist—”

  “Hey, I am no longer an atheist. Studying chaos, I found traces of randomness, which could be footprints of God. …”

  Doolittle looks up, nods once, then goes back to the card. “Divorced, Jewish, we’ll skip atheist, it doesn’t influence the situation one way or the other. Tenured professor of pure randomness and theoretical chaos at the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Leningrad.”

  Lemuel mumbles, “There is no Leningrad anymore,” but Doolittle cranks up his voice a notch and plows on as if he has not heard him.

  “Falk,” he says, consulting the card, “appears to have devised a computer program that dips with near-perfect randomness into three billion, three hundred and thirty million, two hundred and twenty-seven thousand, seven hundred and fifty-three decimal places of pi in order to extract a random three-number key, which is then used to encipher and decipher secret messages.”

  With a screech of wheels, Norman swings the cruiser off the Interstate, past a sprawling trailer park, past a drive-in movie with The Ten Commandments flickering on the screen, onto a narrow, winding dirt road. “I’m taking a long cut,” he calls over his shoulder, “so you gents can finish your conference before we get where we’re going.”

  “I have given a lot of thought to the relationship between the going and the getting there,” Lemuel mutters. “It is within the realm that the going without a getting there is the ultimate trip.”

  “How’s that again?” Mitchell inquires.

  “We want you to come on board the A.D.V.A. flagship as a senior researcher,” Doolittle is saying. “We want you to break the military and diplomatic ciphers you created for the Russkies. What’s in it for you? This is the question you could and should be asking.”

  “So what is in it for me?”

  “I’m glad you asked. A new identity so the bad guys from Reno can’t find you
; a six-figure salary; a rent-free three-bedroom ranch-style house within commuting distance of our base, which is situated at Fort George Meade, Maryland; a Mercedes sedan with tinted windows; a permanent visa; a green card; eventual American citizenship are part and parcel of the offer.”

  “Part and parcel,” Lemuel repeats with interest.

  “A free one-way steerage-class ticket back to Russia,” Mitchell pipes up from the front seat, “is part and parcel of the offer if you turn us down.” Doolittle starts to interrupt, but Mitchell waves him off. “It’s better for everyone concerned if we don’t mince words—”

  “Mince words,” Lemuel repeats with interest.

  “If you decide not to accept our generous offer,” Mitchell continues, “we send you packing with a note addressed To Whom It May Concern’ stapled to your forehead which reads: This is to certify that Falk, Lemuel, forty-six, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, divorced, Jewish, atheist, was extremely helpful in aiding a secret United States government agency break Russian-language ciphers.’ “ Mitchell drapes a mean smile over his face. “You can lay money on it, sport, they won’t make the mistake of letting you out of the country a second time. You’ll spend the rest of your natural life queuing for recycled toilet paper and swiping sausages made of sawdust and cat meat from the V. A. Steklov Institute canteen.”

  “We have almost got to where we was going,” Norman calls. He bounces the cruiser over railroad tracks, deftly maneuvers it into a back alley and brakes to a stop next to a back door. A naked bulb over the lintel illuminates a wooden sign that reads: “County Sheriff.”