“No.” Jenks still had Sherman’s wallet. He flipped it open, looked at Sherman’s picture. He and Jenks were both very dark, same hair, same long nose and square chin. He was only a year older than Sherman. There was a Greyhound ticket folded into the wallet. Sherman had been on his way to the bus station. “Nigger was gonna be a poet.” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

“Fuck that,” Spoon said. “My cousin Jimmy busts rhymes at the Starlight Lounge Thursday nights. Don’t need no bullshit college for that. You sure you don’t want a Frosty or something?” He turned into the Wendy’s drive-thru.

Jenks put the wallet in his own pocket.

“You crazy?” Spoon asked. “Toss that out.”

“I got an idea.” The way Jenks said it frightened Spoon.

“Now hold on, Harold,” Spoon said. “You know that ain’t smart, keeping something like that. Cops hang a murder on you.”

“Nigger, I said I got an idea.”

And Spoon shut up. He ordered a triple with fries and shut his mouth.

three

Professor Morgan dismissed the class, stepped foot into the hall, and immediately saw Ginny the cub reporter waiting for him at the other end. She lifted her hand to wave, and Morgan turned, fast-walked around the opposite corner. He could hear her cloppity footfalls on the tile behind him.

Morgan zigzagged a labyrinth of office corridors, past a heretofore unseen set of rest rooms, a water fountain, some kind of tutoring room.

Where the hell am I?

The sound of Ginny’s blocky shoes pursued, dogged, relentless. Hath thou slain the jabberwock? Morgan scrambled. Looked side to side.

A stairwell.

He darted up and around, into the dark, dusty reaches of the third floor. The door was nailed shut, but the stairs kept going. Dry, wooden, creaking with each step.

He climbed.

A fourth floor. A fifth.

How many floors does this goddamn building have?

Morgan shoved open the fifth-floor door and found himself in a dim hall, murky with yellow light. Faded rectangles still remained where nameplates had been pried from office doors. He walked the hall, stale and silent like a ghost town. He stopped, cocked his ear down a cross hall. Listened.

What was that? He strained to hear. Music. He walked toward it. A smell. Sickly sweet.

He recognized the album now. Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School by Warren Zevon.

Who in God’s name is up here? This floor had obviously been abandoned, light fixtures empty, no blinds on the windows, dust.

Morgan glanced behind him. He’d shaken off Ginny. He could find another stairway down and go home if he wanted to, or find his own office and hide. But the smell and the music drew him on, the nagging tickle of curiosity.

He turned down a long hall. The music came from a door at the far end, and the smell grew stronger as Morgan approached. Yellowing pages had been taped to the door: news articles, poems, Far Side and Bloom County cartoons. Also a class schedule and office hours for fall semester 1983.

Morgan lifted his fist to knock, stopped, tried the knob. It turned. He very slowly pushed open the door and went in.

The office was long and dark, the music loud. The room was thick with smoke. Bookshelves lined with assorted tomes from floor to ceiling. Near the window sat a large brown globe of the world like it had fallen there from orbit, more books stacked around it like the edges of an impact crater.

A black-and-white poster of Freud on the wall. Some wag had drawn a penis head at the tip of his cigar with a red Magic Marker.

Morgan waved at the smoke, coughed. This smoke seemed familiar. He inhaled deeply, tried to remember.

Ganja.

The music stopped abruptly, and a voice from the dark recesses of the office said, “Close the damn door.”

Morgan jumped. “What?”

“You’re letting the smoke out.”

Morgan shut the door behind him, peered into the haze. “Who is that?”

Slowly, as if from a long way off, from the other side of a Scottish moor, a reedy, bearded man, round spectacles, pointed frame draped in threadbare tweed, emerged from the smoke like he was walking out of an Arthur Conan Doyle mystery.

In his gnarled hands he held a bong the size of a clarinet.

The old man exhaled as he spoke, eyes narrowed to dreamy slits. “I’m Professor Valentine.”

Morgan’s jaw dropped. “Valentine? Tad Valentine?”

“The same.”

“I thought you’d gone on sabbatical.” Valentine was the professor Morgan had been hired to replace for a year, but it was Morgan’s understanding the old Pulitzer Prize-winning poet had rented a studio in Prague. It seemed unlikely to find the man smoking weed from a giant bong in a remote office on an abandoned floor of Albatross Hall.

Perhaps this wasn’t Valentine. Maybe it was an old derelict junkie who’d wandered in from the cold. Morgan could think of no tactful way to ask.

“Please, please. Have a seat,” Valentine said. “Make yourself at home. I haven’t had visitors since… well, I don’t suppose I’ve ever had any. Not since moving up here.”

Morgan cast about the room. No chairs. He remained standing, hands folded demurely in front of him. “Uh…”

“Want a hit?” Valentine offered him the bong.

“Oh… uh…”

“You’re not a cop, are you?” Valentine pinned Morgan with wild eyes.

“No, no, I… Um…”

Valentine frowned. “Is there something wrong with you?”

“I’m Jay Morgan.”

“Well, that’s hardly your fault, is it?” Valentine mouthed the bong like he was in love.

“No,” Morgan said. “I mean, I’m the one-year-contract professor teaching your classes. Why aren’t you in Prague?”

“Ah, Prague.” Hazy nostalgia washed over Valentine. His eyes narrowed to slits, and he looked off into the dreamy distance. “Yes, I had a glorious few months there, and this wonderful studio apartment overlooking the Charles Bridge.” He shrugged. “I got kicked out.”

“Out of the apartment?”

“Out of the Czech Republic,” Valentine said. “Some leftover Iron Curtain nonsense. All ancient history really, but these chaps evidently have a long memory.”

“Does anyone know you’re here?” Morgan asked. “Whittaker never mentioned you’d returned.” Morgan worried he was out of a job. Would the old poet want his graduate workshop back?

Valentine lunged forward, took Morgan’s elbow into his bony fist, maneuvered Morgan into the smoke. The spindly professor’s grip was iron.

“Now listen, old sport,” Valentine said. “I’d really appreciate it if you could keep my presence here on the hush-hush side. Understand?”

“No.”

They arrived at a low leather couch, and Valentine dropped Morgan at one end. Valentine perched down at the other. “It’s just that I am still officially on sabbatical.” He sucked long on the bong. “I need rest. I couldn’t stomach a mob of ghastly students and their dreadful writing.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Valentine leaned forward, squeaking the sofa leather. Shaggy brows knotted with stress. “I can’t write anymore, Bill. My head is cluttered with student writing. Insipid, cliché, rhyming excrement.”

“My name’s not Bill.”

Valentine didn’t hear. “I sit down at my desk and nothing comes out. My pen is an impotent noodle.”

Morgan nodded, sunk into the vast, deep swallowing womb of the leather sofa. He’d just been making the same complaints. His mind drifted. If he’d had a chance to take a year off and write in Prague, he damn well would have made good use of it. He daydreamed himself to cobblestone streets. Perhaps the ganja smoke had gotten the better of him.

“I won’t tell anyone,” he told Valentine.

Valentine grinned, eyes brightening. He patted Morgan on the knee. “That’s a good fellow, Bill. I appreciate it. I really do. Let’s smoke on it, eh? Seal the deal.”