What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  Escolme had set him up. He must have. He had given the woman his name. She had wanted to get some outside authority to confirm the identity of the play, someone who wouldn’t try to muscle in on her ownership of it as a way of making a name for himself as an academic, and Escolme had sent her to him. As a result she had been killed on his doorstep, and Escolme had hidden the fact that he knew she was dead, and that he had already implicated Thomas. Maybe he had hidden more than that, worse.

  “Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story, doesn’t it?” Escolme had said. “Locked rooms and missing papers. ‘The Naval Treaty.’ ”

  “ ‘Naval Treaty’ my ass,” Thomas muttered. The whole thing had been a shell game. He just had to find out why.

  He called the Drake.

  “I’d like to connect to a guest room,” he said. “David Escolme.”

  “Can you spell that please, sir?”

  Irritably, Thomas did, and waited for the ring of the room phone. What he got instead was the receptionist again.

  “I’m afraid we have no one of that name staying here,” he said.

  His irritation spiked, touched now with something like apprehension.

  He hung up, and forced himself to stop staring at the clock.

  None of this felt right. He put his coffee down, crossed the room quickly, and went out the front door.

  Polisnki and the other cop were nowhere to be seen, and whatever crime scene work had started in the small hours had apparently been completed. The patch of sidewalk up the block was still taped off, but no one was there now. Thomas fished in his pocket for Polinski’s card and went back into the house.

  She didn’t answer her phone, and he didn’t take the automated service up on being connected to another officer. Instead, he waited for the recording to start and said, “This is Thomas Knight from 1247 Sycamore. We spoke briefly this morning. I have something to say about the Blackstone murder. It’s probably not important, but please give me a call.”

  He left his number and hung up.

  It was, he knew, more backpedaling, more inadequacy. He was playing it down because he didn’t want to be involved, not because it would be somehow inconvenient to be caught up in a police investigation, but because he hated the idea that he or someone he had once taught could be responsible—however indirectly—for a woman’s death.

  He then called five different home-security companies and inquired about installation costs. He had never had an alarm system before, had never seen the need. Suddenly he wanted one, and soon.

  CHAPTER 11

  He was fractionally late getting to school, and his students were restless. He did his best to marshal his thoughts and their attention, but he couldn’t focus and found himself relying on the very teacher’s book that he usually referred to—rather pompously—as the “Antidote to Learning.” Okay, now that we’ve worked out some answers of our own, let us consult the Antidote to Learning . . . At the end of his first class he apologized for his distraction and promised the students to be his usual self the following day. They nodded solemnly and exchanged significant looks.

  They know you’ve been talking to the police. They may even know why.

  Sometimes Thomas wished that there were a national exam that would test the kids’ capacity to get to the heart of secrets and mysteries involving the faculty. They’d all ace it.

  At lunchtime he checked his phone for messages. There were three, two of them from alarm companies asking for details of his home and whether it was “prewired” for a security system. Thomas wasn’t sure what that meant but called them back and said it probably wasn’t. That would raise the costs, they said. He told them that was okay and set up an appointment for both companies to come by over the weekend.

  The third message was from Polinski requesting that he call her back. He did so and, this time, got her on the first ring.

  “This is Thomas Knight,” he said.

  “You have some information for me,” she said, businesslike.

  “I’m not really sure,” said Thomas. “It’s pretty flimsy. More of an odd coincidence really . . .”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  He told her everything: Escolme’s call, their meeting at the Drake, his panic at the lost Shakespeare play, and his claim that it had belonged to the novelist who had been killed at Thomas’s window. There was a momentary silence when he finished, and Thomas waited, half expecting a polite thanks and tacit dismissal.

  “Can you spell that name for me? Escolme?”

  He did so, and there was another pause.

  “A lost Shakespeare play?” she said. “Does that seem likely to you?”

  “Not really, no,” said Thomas. “I don’t know that much about it.”

  “Seems like he thinks otherwise,” she said. “Anything else?”

  “I think that’s everything.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” said Polinski, and then she was gone.

  In the teachers’ lounge, he unfolded his Tribune and stared at it. Periodically he turned the pages, looking vaguely for anything about the murder. His eye snagged on a single word in the headline for a small story in the Living section: SHAKESPEARE.

  His unease seemed to surge, then stilled as he focused. Seconds later, he relaxed. It was nothing. Apparently the National Shakespeare Conference was taking place right here in Chicago. Eight hundred or more Shakespeare professors from all over the world gathering to lecture and debate. Thomas grinned bleakly. He had attended this conference when it came to Boston in his graduate school days, and he had found it by turns impressive, daunting, and absurd.

  It was nonsense, of course, to think that the conference was in any way relevant to what had just happened. It would have been arranged months, even years before. Thomas hadn’t been a part of that world for more than a decade, had not, in fact, ever really been a part of it since he had abandoned his doctoral dissertation before it was a quarter complete. Yet, as an English teacher, he had never been able to let go of Shakespeare completely, though sometimes he felt as if it were Shakespeare who would not let go of him. Now the conference was arcing back into his city, into his life, and Thomas couldn’t help feeling that it was significant. Somehow.

  He looked up, frowning, and decided. He would leave school as early as his classes would permit and head over to the conference. He looked back to the paper to see where the meeting was being held and caught his breath.

  The conference was at the Drake.

  Naturally . . .

  CHAPTER 12

  Thomas arrived at the hotel having heard from neither the police nor Escolme, but he had barely thought about either since lunch. The idea of attending the Shakespeare conference had filled him with an excited curiosity. There would surely be people he knew there, by name if not by face, though the latter wasn’t out of the question. There would be the dinosaurs still plugging away at scholarship everyone else had abandoned thirty years ago, the hotshot theory heads with their jargon, the Bardolators (often stray actors) and those who treated them as unthinking fans. More to the point, he would be immersed again in all that old energy, the crackle of intelligent debate, the thrill of discovery, but also the nitpicking and bluster, the intellectual outrageousness and pedantry, the stupefying political correctness worn like zealotry, and the oppressive careerism, everyone poised like vultures for someone to say something unutterably stupid. It would be like dropping in on his own funeral.

  And being glad to be dead, he thought with a grim smile.

  If that was what being out of academia meant, perhaps so.

  The Drake felt different this time, and though he had no clear idea what he hoped to discover there, Thomas entered confidently, as if he belonged. One of the ballrooms had been given over to the book exhibit, another to registration. He made for the latter.

  A couple of dozen academics were lining up at three alphabetized tables, picking up conference programs and name tags. He needed one or the other to be able to come and go as he felt. He approac
hed the nearest table and made a study of the letters—P-Z, in this case—as if unsure what his name came under, resting his hand casually on one of the clear plastic name tags. He palmed it and made a beeline for the nearest bathroom.

  In one of the stalls, he filled his name in on a piece of notepaper and slid it into the plastic sleeve, then walked purposefully back to the reception area, chose the A-K table, and sidled up to the front, looking apologetic.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to the harried graduate student at the front. “I seem to have mislaid my program. Do you mind if . . . ?”

  “Help yourself,” said the girl, gesturing to the pile of parchment-colored booklets.

  Thomas walked away, thumbing through the program to see what session he might catch before the day ended and feeling pleased with himself.

  “Knight? Thomas Knight?”

  Thomas turned quickly. Standing a few paces away was a man in his sixties with a face like a bloodhound and large wet eyes. He had a laptop case slung over his shoulder and he was dressed in professorial mode—a heather-colored tweed suit—that might have been de rigueur fifty years earlier. He was a large man, rounded off at the corners but otherwise quite square, with linebacker shoulders despite his silvered hair. He was looking shrewdly at Thomas with something like disbelief. Thomas knew him at once.

  “Professor Dagenhart,” he said, smothering the sense of panic that he had been so quickly found out, but glad that it was Dagenhart. “How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” said the older man, smiling, but still looking quizzical. “What about you? I never thought I’d see you here again,” he said, taking Thomas’s hand and shaking it firmly.

  Here doesn’t mean Chicago or the Drake, thought Thomas. He means at the National Shakespeare Conference.

  The location didn’t matter. The conference would be largely the same whatever city it happened to be in, and most of the delegates would see little beyond the hotel walls.

  “My hometown,” said Thomas, lamely. “Thought I’d check it out.”

  Check it out? He was reverting to graduate school mode, talking like his students.

  “Not presenting then?” said Dagenhart.

  “God, no,” he said, with a frankness he instantly regretted. “Just wanted to see what’s hot in Shakespeare studies these days.”

  Dagenhart smiled at the phrase, though it was a dry smile, amused, and Thomas rushed to close up the silence.

  “Are you presenting, Professor?” he said.

  “I’m not reading a paper, if that’s what you mean,” said Dagenhart. “I’m in a seminar on gender in the early comedies.”

  “Right,” said Thomas, nodding as if nothing could be more fascinating, trying to think of something intelligent to say, trying to impress as he once might have in class.

  “And you’re still teaching high school?” said Dagenhart, with that same slightly disbelieving smile, as if Thomas had said he was a steeplejack or a lion tamer.

  “For my sins,” Thomas smiled.

  “And no plans to finish the doctorate?”

  “God no,” he said, with too much gusto. “I mean, I love teaching at this level. I feel like . . .”

  “You’re making a difference?” said Dagenhart, still wry.

  “Well, yes,” said Thomas, trying to keep the defensiveness out of his voice. “A bit. You know.”

  “Well, I guess someone has to be in the front-line trenches,” said Dagenhart. “Better you than most. Still, I don’t know how you put up with it.”

  “With what?”

  “The laziness. The institutionalized mediocrity. All that damned testing to prove the opposite of what we all know: that they aren’t really learning and nobody cares.”

  “Well,” said Thomas, “it’s not all that bad. I mean, I’m at a good school. And if you really care about your subject and the kids . . .”

  A woman tapped Dagenhart on the shoulder and he turned. She was also in her sixties, tall, and vaguely regal in her bearing. She somehow managed not to see Thomas at all.

  “We’re heading in,” she said in a bored, British voice.

  “Yes,” said Dagenhart, “I’ll be right there.” As an afterthought he said, “This is Tom Knight. Former student of mine. Teaches high school now.”

  “Do you, indeed?” said the empress. “How public-spirited of you.”

  Thomas smiled and nodded, checking the name badge she wore on her lapel: Katrina Barker.

  His mouth fell open.

  “Miss Barker,” he said, “I loved your book. Really . . . great.”

  “The new one?” she said.

  “Probably not,” said Thomas. “The one on city comedy.”

  “Oh God,” she said, “that was a former life. Not really doing that anymore. But I’m glad you liked it.”

  “I thought it was wonderful. Your treatment of religion in Jonson and Middleton . . .”

  Dagenhart checked his watch, then turned his moist, shrewd eyes back onto Thomas. “Well, good to see you again, Knight. All the best.”

  Barker framed an apologetic smile, and her eyes were kind. Thomas opened his hands and shook his head: he understood, the gesture said. She was busy and important, while he was neither . . .

  Then she was following Dagenhart, who was moving into the crowd easing through double doors into the conference hall, leaving Thomas standing there, checking his program as if he knew what he was doing, as if he had a right to be there.

  He had enough dignity not to sit near Dagenhart for the three papers that followed, though his eyes constantly strayed to where he was sitting, as if expecting him to turn and smile, suggest they get together in the bar to catch up and meet his cronies properly. But the damage was done, and the papers that followed served only to reinforce to Thomas how the world of academia had forgotten him and moved on, that far from him rejecting it for its arcane pettiness and navel-gazing, academia had rejected him.

  He wished he’d been able to say something intelligent to Katrina Barker, who was, he thought, genuinely brilliant: the kind of scholar whose work transforms the way you thought about a play or the context that produced it. He wanted to rush out and buy her new book, just so he could come back and talk to her about it, but he knew he would do no such thing.

  The paper session was a plenary, and the hall was almost full. The three presenters, two men and a woman, were all in their later thirties or early forties, and all looked like they could be powerful executives at some slightly offbeat West Coast corporation. Thomas understood little of what they said. He got glimmers of salient points from time to time, and it was only occasionally that the vocabulary itself derailed him—so he couldn’t blame theoretical jargon—but he just didn’t understand what they were talking about. Shakespeare himself barely entered the papers (a couple of references to Lear in one, some lines from Twelfth Night and As You Like It in another), as if the plays themselves were taken as read. What dominated instead was historical detail about obscure people and events or, more accurately, conditions, all of which the audience seemed to see as relevant, because they applauded enthusiastically and gave each other sage nods and whispers as the moderator opened the floor to questions.

  “All this is very well,” said a young man in black, leaping to his feet, “but it’s all based on the idea that these plays were written by William Shakespeare, a man of no breeding, little education, no travel or courtly experience . . .”

  People were groaning and rolling their eyes.

  “I would remind you,” said the moderator, “that this is a Shakespeare conference, and that for our purposes Shakespeare was a man from Stratford-upon-Avon . . .”

  There was a pattering of applause and a few cheers. The questioner continued to babble, dropping references to the Earl of Oxford and the impossibility that the son of a Stratford glove maker could have produced poetry of such delicacy and worldly experience . . .

  Thomas fled.

  Leaving the conference entirely felt like admitting defeat or
, worse, failure in larger terms, but he hated the idea of just loitering, hoping to get attached to some group of clever people who had known each other for years and treated conferences like this as a species of reunion. He went to the bar. At least with a drink in his hand he’d look like he was doing something.

  The Coq d’Or was darkly paneled, with red leather chairs. He fancied a gin martini, but didn’t feel like spending what he’d usually lay out for dinner, so he ordered a Honker’s Ale. He had taken no more than two swallows when he looked up, sure he was being watched. Standing by the main entrance was Polinski. She was quite still, her eyes on him as if she had been there for some time, considering him. In her face Thomas saw something like skepticism, even hostility, and his half wave stalled in the air.

  She hesitated a second more, then sauntered over, her gaze steady.

  “Mr. Knight,” she said. “What brings you here?”

  “Shakespeare conference,” he said, tapping the program by his beer glass. “It’s kind of what I used to do. Almost. I thought I’d stop by, see if there was anyone here I knew.”

  “Like David Escolme?”

  She was still standing.

  “He checked out this morning,” said Thomas. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “So you came here to see him? I’m sorry. I could have saved you the trip.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  She was still giving him that level, considering look. Thomas moved the opposite chair away from the table for her, and she sat slowly, a strange, studied motion as if she were cradling something fragile and expensive. She put her hands on the table. They were big, strong hands, the skin rough, the nails untended.

  “So you were studying Shakespeare at Boston University,” she said, “when you were in graduate school.”