LITMIR.BIZ

      ONE

      It was a strange sound.

      Not a scream, not a shout, not the squealing of brakes, neither obviously human nor clearly mechanical, at least not to Tom Stall’s ear.

      At three o’clock on an August afternoon, the sound drifted through the open window of Stall’s University of Florida office as he sat preparing his recommendations to the English Department chairman for September’s graduate assistantships. He sat waiting, thinking the closest thing to that sound he had ever heard was the climactic cry of the French girl he had slept with in Paris, in 1945, his only wartime indiscretion. Such a similarity—the two sounds so much alike, the first imprinted on his memory forever, the second a mystery—struck him as not just strange but ill-omened. The sound resembled love, or if not that, at least passion, and later this seemed to Stall the supreme irony of a day that would change his life forever.

      Then a girl screamed and Stall left the stuffy, cluttered office he had inherited when the department had made him assistant chairman and headed down the hall at a pace that would look determined but not hurried to anyone who noticed him. As he passed the offices whose doors were open to catch any breeze that might stir the ancient water oaks that lined both sides of Anderson Hall, he glimpsed the forms of his colleagues (those not traveling during the final days of summer) bent over the articles and books they hoped would get them tenure, or promotion, or the scholarly fame that had thus far fled them like the maiden on Keats’s Grecian urn. No one looked up from books, yellow legal pads, clacking typewriters. Apparently, no one but Stall had heard the strange sound. He was moving fast when he passed the office of Sophie Green, the new medievalist, the English graduate faculty’s first female professor. In a blue cotton skirt and a white blouse, she stood with her back to Stall, her slender fingers running along the spines of the books he had helped her carry up from a battered DeSoto with New York plates. She was pretty in the dark, intense way of actresses in movies who take off their glasses and shake out their hair declaring themselves not mere vessels of ideas, but human—human. She was Jewish, and she was brilliant. (Stall had read her work with what he had to admit was envy.) He considered stopping to ask her if she had heard anything, knew anything, but thought better of it. Better to keep moving.

      * * *

      The girl who had screamed had also vomited. Stall carefully placed his new blazer over the face of the man who lay dead on the sidewalk in front of Murphree Hall and went to the girl. He stood blocking her view of what she had already seen and looked down at the boxwood hedge behind her where her lunch of grilled cheese and french fries steamed into the hot afternoon. The smell of vomit and blood made Stall’s own stomach writhe. He patted the girl’s shoulder. She wore a sorority pin and seemed to him average for the type, in saddle oxfords, bobby socks, a short-sleeved white blouse, and a tartan skirt that covered her knees. A small crowd had gathered, and Stall thanked his stars for the thin summer-school enrollment. If Jack Leaf had fallen or jumped to his death from a third-floor classroom window a few weeks from now, fifty students might have seen him hit the pavement and a hundred more would have surrounded his broken body before anything could be done to keep them away.

      A boy in the crowd looked older than most undergraduates. He wore a light sport coat with leathered elbows and was smoking a pipe. The boy’s flattop haircut and erect bearing told Stall he was probably a veteran. Stall guided the sobbing girl to the older boy and whispered, “Would you please take care of her. I’ve got to . . .” He wasn’t sure exactly what he had to do, but he was the only university official here now and had to do something. The boy slipped the pipe into the breast pocket of his sport coat and put his arm around the girl’s shoulders.

      Tom Stall looked at the shocked faces of the students who had gathered and asked quietly, “Did any of you see him . . . fall?”

      Two boys in khakis and button-down shirts shook their heads, unable to take their eyes from the pool of blood that spread from under the canopy of Stall’s blazer. Looking at the coat and the growing puddle and hearing the first fly buzz to the smell of blood, Stall thought, The coat should cover his hands. God, I wish it were big enough to cover his hands. There was something unbearably sad about Jack Leaf’s naked hands lying palms-up on the sidewalk. They were better cared for than most men’s hands; save for traces of white chalk dust, they were immaculate. On the third finger of his right hand was a gold ring with a black-and-white insignia. Because he and Jack Leaf had talked about the ring, Stall knew the insignia was the screaming

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