LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

in my stomach, the frustration at all the kinds of violence that are covered up, pushed away, and that I was powerless to do anything about.

      I turned my chair and gazed for a moment out the window at the same view that Ah-seong had focused on such a short while ago. Grey stone. Lots of very depressing grey stone. Bad choice for buildings in a metropolis nicknamed “The Grey City” for its constant leaden skies. Here it was October and what we had was pale yellow leaves and overcast skies instead of the brilliant hues of the trees and the blue skies of my native New England. Why did I stay in this walk-in refrigerator of a city with all its bad weather and bad memories?

      I gave myself a little shake and turned to my computer. I opened a file and started summarizing the conversations I’d had that afternoon.

      Then I stopped. It was no good. I needed more distance. I saved the few sentences I’d written and sent it to myself to work on later at home.

      Besides distance, I realized, I would need to write this up using whatever was the university’s recommended format. I logged on to the section on University Policies and Procedures. I started to read about the published procedures for filing a complaint on sexual misconduct. There was an additional link for faculty, but when I clicked on it, I realized I needed an additional password.

      I also needed more time to process my emotions before I wrote anything that would become part of an official complaint.

      I looked out the window again, not seeing the grey this time, but other experiences with administrative duck and cover on Chicago’s police force and their endless, deliberate refusal to deal justly with police misconduct that only sent a clear signal to cops that they could continue to do what they wanted to whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted.

      Until some lawsuit caught up with a few. No wonder Chicago was so broke, having to pay out millions and millions of dollars to victims of cops who should have been kicked off the force years before—shooting unarmed civilians, making false arrests, torturing suspects, raping and battering women, and persecuting whistleblowers on the bad cops.

      Law and order. That’s what I’d wanted when I’d chosen the police academy. Law and order that would stand for the victims of injustice. Right out of the academy at twenty-four, I’d married a detective, Marco Ginelli, who believed the same as I did. Marco was as Italian as his name with thick, full dark hair always in need of a haircut, framing a face with deep brown eyes, a face full of passion and mischief and intelligence. A face that was fortunately reproduced in our twin boys, Sam and Mike, now aged six.

      All that warmth and passion had entered my cold Scandinavian bloodstream and thawed my ice-queen defenses erected against the lovelessness of my childhood and the isolation from peers that my height had caused. When I’d been nearly six feet tall at age fourteen, my parents had actually taken me to a doctor to see if ‘something could be done about it’. Unconditional acceptance was not my parents’ strong suit. Besides, it was their families’ genes that made me so tall. But they’d made me feel like the ugly duckling come to life.

      A huge bear of a man, Marco had enveloped my height and my defenses and I had started to melt into a human being. And yes, I was still in love with Marco, only he had been dead five years now, killed when he’d stopped a car containing suspected drug dealers on this same south side of Chicago, shot in the line of duty because his partner hadn’t gotten out of the car to give him back-up. Nobody really investigated. The failure of police procedure, if that was all it was, was brushed under the carpet with the old administrative two-step. Marco’s death only gave me the final excuse for leaving the force.

      My own disillusionment with so-called law enforcement had begun much earlier, when I was still a rookie. Getting along, going along, doing what it took to get by and being punished, not even too subtly, by colleagues threatened by anyone who cared too much, who tried too hard or who wouldn’t look the other way when a few bucks changed hands, and most of all by men who were threatened by a blond Viking.

      It was not whether I’d been sexually harassed by my fellow officers, it had only been how much and how often. It isn’t the sex. It’s about controlling women. It’s about power. It’s about letting women know you don’t belong here.

      But the unwritten rule about police work was never, ever complain about another officer. I had finally complained—about the guy who was assigned to be Marco’s temporary partner the day he’d been killed.

      Was it deliberate, a set up to send a message to both Marco and me? A set up that had gone lethally wrong, or was it meant to be lethal all along? I’d always believed the latter, but even the lawyer I’d hired hadn’t been able to make a case that stuck. My grief at Marco’s death and my leaden despair over my inability to do anything about it pushed me nearly to the brink. If I hadn’t had my baby boys to think about, I don’t honestly know what I would have done.

      Put up. Shut up. No law and order here.

      And now I was finding that my attempt to find refuge in academics was a joke. This was no refuge at all. It was the same human violence met with the same inadequate, even corrupt, tools of bureaucracy.

      The grey stone came back into focus. I had to shake this off and do right by Ah-seong Kim. And, I realized with a jolt, actually do my academic job.

      I was late for a faculty meeting. I didn’t exactly jump up and rush to the meeting, however.

      You’d think at $50,000 per student for tuition that there would be enough money to hire faculty. Wasn’t that the point of a university, teaching students?

      If you thought so you were decades out of date.

      Universities and colleges are engaged in an orgy of budget cutting. But only in faculty positions and faculty salaries. Administrator’s salaries and huge outlays for new and fancier buildings just keep growing like some hideous cancer.

      Humanities departments, like my own, were especially vulnerable. We had no huge grants like the sciences. We had no wealthy alumni like the economics department and business school. We were, in short, budget canon-fodder.

      I shut down my computer and rose. There was no need to rush to a meeting where so little would be said so slowly and repeated so often.

      I grabbed my coat. I’d leave right after the faculty meeting. I passed the divider that separated my part of this shared office from my officemate, Henry Haruchi.

      Henry was Japanese on his father’s side and Welch on his mother’s side. He taught Buddhism, though also comparative religion and he had an interest in religion and science. He was a terrifically interesting guy and when we were in the office together we often talked to the detriment of actually getting work done, though as I thought about it he’d been gone from the office a lot this fall quarter. I wished he were around. I assumed he was at the meeting. I’d have loved to run my conversation with Ah-seong by him.

      I had to just shelve this onslaught of feelings and get on with it. Just get on with it. I opened the door to my office.

      Directly across the hall, Mary Frost, the departmental secretary, was rooting around in her desk. I wondered why. She should have been taking notes at the meeting.

      She glanced up and frowned deeply at me. The students called that ‘being Frosted.’ Too bad. I asked her for the password to the faculty link to Policies and Procedures.

      She just continued to glare at me without responding.

      Just perfect.

      2

      When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life. I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or grade, but to something that might be an end in itself.

      Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

      I turned and stomped down the hall. The flagstone floor of these fake gothic buildings made a satisfyingly loud sound as I trudged on down the long hall

Скачать книгу