LITMIR.BIZ

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boardroom. The man bowed when Stall sat down at the long table where the club’s leaders met to decide such weighty matters as whether or not a ball that came to rest on the far side of a sidewalk behind the ninth green entitled a player to a free drop. The Negro said, “May I serve you a drink, suh?”

      “I’ll wait and see.”

      “Yes suh. He’ll be heah in a moment. I just seen him in the locker room.”

      Connor strode in looking tired but happy after his round. His tan was golden and his step springy. He looked like he could still go ten rounds with Benny Leonard. Stall stood and they shook hands. “Mr. President, thank you for the new coat, but I don’t think I can—”

      “Ah, forget it, Tom. Comes out of petty cash. And it was the right thing for me to do. You wouldn’t dispute a man’s judgment in such a matter, would you?”

      What could Stall say to that? He placed the subpoena on the mahogany table. “Mrs. Leaf found this when they sent her husband’s clothes home from the morgue.”

      Connor read the document with the sharp eye of a country lawyer. When he finished, he shook his head. “The medical examiner decided not to keep this?”

      “That’s what Mrs. Leaf told me.”

      “Still a small town, this Gainesville of ours. You could call it shoddy work by a public official or compassion. More likely this was too hot for him to touch. In any case, fortunate for our cause.” Connor rubbed his tanned face and Stall heard the sound of whiskers scraped against the grain. “So now we know what happened. Those two goons went to Leaf’s classroom and served him.”

      Stall touched the subpoena on the table. “I meet with Jack’s class tomorrow afternoon. I can ask them what they saw.”

      “I wouldn’t do that. If they bring it up, of course you’ll listen. And let me know what they say.”

      “According to what I read in the paper yesterday, the Committee doesn’t always show that kind of mercy.”

      “No, they don’t,” Connor said. “They served Professor Margolis in his classroom, in front of his students. Big reputation in political science, did you know that?”

      Stall was obscurely embarrassed to say that he was not up on the scholarly reputations of the political science faculty. Whatever political scientists did, Stall was pretty sure it was not science. It seemed that more and more academic disciplines these days tried to confer legitimacy upon themselves by embracing numbers. Someday, perhaps, the Department of English Science, but thank God not yet.

      Stall put his hand on the subpoena again. “Mr. President, does having this help us?”

      “Call me Jim, Tom.” Connor reached out and moved the subpoena from Stall’s side of the table to his. “We’re up to our backsides in the same trouble, so we might as well drop the formalities.”

      Stall nodded, but it would be hard to comply. Connor was an imposing figure, a man who would have commanded respect in any walk of life.

      Connor said, “They’re developing their network of lackeys and informants. They wouldn’t know who’s teaching what or who’s been in a bus station if they hadn’t already talked to students or their parents. Some kid flunks a quiz and goes home to his tobacco-farming daddy in Sopchoppy, and shows him his copy of Das Kapital, and Daddy gets his humors all out of balance and calls his local representative, who gets in touch with our bootless Mr. Johns, and that’s how this kind of thing grows from maggot to full-blown blue bottle fly. Somebody knew Jack Leaf would be in that bus station.” Connor took a long breath and looked Stall in the eyes. “We can work that side of the street too, if you know what I mean, Tom.”

      “Mr. President, I think I do, approximately, but I don’t see how I fit into this.”

      “Call me Jim. That’s the second time I’ve asked. You’re an exceptional young man with a promising future at this university. And you know what’s at stake here as well as I do.”

      Jim Connor reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a manila envelope, passed it across the table to Stall. God, Stall thought, so many coats and so many envelopes. This is like Restoration drama. With something like dread, he opened the envelope. It contained a photo of two men who looked like father and son. They stood by a lakeside with boats and some sort of pergola in the background. The younger man whose father’s arm was slung across his shoulders looked vaguely familiar to Stall, a slender young man in a light-colored summer suit with the left sleeve folded over and sewn halfway down. An amputee. Connor waited while Stall examined the picture, his mind developing a memory in the same way that a photographer had made this image come into focus in a darkroom.

      A dark room. That was how Stall thought of that time. The field hospital in France, the nurses and doctors coming and going, the constant poking and prodding, the raging fever that made him mutter things that made no sense, and finally the needles, the blessed needles with their cargo of the new medicine known as penicillin, the magic potion that had saved Stall’s life, and then waking up, coming back to himself, coming out of the dark room and seeing the young man, no more than a boy, lying next to him in the field hospital, a kid with half his arm missing, shot off, Stall supposed, like the bits and pieces of so many men Stall had marched with and crouched in foxholes with for that brief time that was an eternity in the winter of 1945.

      And then the boy coming to himself too, and the two of them talking, shyly at first and then more openly, confident that they might both leave this place and go to Paris rather than to a snowy field where the corpses waited for the ground to thaw and the white crosses to multiply row upon row. They talked about their lives and the futures they now believed they would have.

      The boy in the photo Connor had given Stall was named Frank Vane. The door of the dark room opened wider and the light poured in and it all came back to Stall. The boy in the photo hailed from Jacksonville, the son of a prominent businessman, scion, as the novels said, of a wealthy family. Vast tracts of timber and pulp mills and shipping and more. The boy had told Stall, as they lay side by side in the field hospital, the story of his young life, speaking in the diffident, modest way of young men who have been reared to the noblesse oblige of the Southern aristocracy. Together, Stall and Frank Vane had caught a convoy of trucks to Paris, and they had stayed in a little pension not far from Sacré-Cœur, and they had drunk the wines and eaten the food of a delirious, liberated Paris, and then one night, out walking alone, Stall had met the young French girl with whom he had spent the first carnal night of his life.

      Stall looked up from the photo into the concentrated darkness of James Connor’s eyes. Stall said, “He lost the arm, half of it, in the Hürtgen Forest.”

      “A bad place, I heard.”

      “That’s what he told me.” Stall handed the photo back to Connor. “How do you know about it?”

      “I know the boy’s father. He’s a donor. That’s how I came by the photograph. The son, this Frank Vane, works for the Committee now. He’s one of their lawyers, and the blond goon who came to my office—his name is Cyrus Tate—says Vane told him he knows you and he thinks you’ll want to work with the Committee, help them look into the English Department, which, by the way, they think is the likeliest of all departments to harbor homosexuals and radicals.” At this, Connor smiled the smile of irony and said, “When I hear such things, I think of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane.”

      They didn’t teach it, Stall thought, they wrote it. He said, “Did you know, Jim, that the great poet Ben Jonson fought as the champion of the English army against the champion of the Spanish in Flanders and slew his man?” And he did teach it, off and on.

      “I did not know that,” Connor said, “but I was certain that you would add to my fund of knowledge. I thank you for that vital information.”

      There was a knock at the door and Connor said, “Enter.”

      The white-haired Negro in his white jacket with a white towel folded over his forearm said, “May I serve

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