My ten postgrads look sober. So they should.
“Art feasts upon its maker,” I tell them.
THE FACULTY STAFF room is empty but for Claude Mo (medievalist, not tenured) and Hilary Zakrewska (linguistics, not tenured either), who are engrossed in the fireside witticisms of Christina Pym-Lavit (head of political science, chair of the Tenure Committee). If their tenure track at Blithewood ends in failure, no other Ivy League college will be offering them a career. Christina Pym-Lavit waves me over. “Pull up a pew, Crispin, I was telling Hilary and Claude about the time I blew a tire while driving John Updike and Aphra Booth to the Iowa workshop, both of whom you knew, I believe?”
“Only ever so slightly,” I say.
“Don’t be coy,” says the Tenured One, but I’m not. I interviewed Updike for The New Yorkerback when I was the Wild Child and shifted units in the U.S.A. I haven’t seen Aphra Booth since she threatened me with legal action in Perth, whenever that was. That pile of undergrad assignments back in my office suddenly doesn’t strike me as such an awful prospect, so I make my excuses. “Grading, on the last day of the semester?” exclaims Christina Pym-Lavit. “Would that all the staff were as conscientious, Crispin.” We agree to meet at the Christmas party later, and I head off down the corridor. As a guest lecturer I’m excused the cow’s arse of campus politics, but if I’m offered a full-time position next year, I’ll be burrowing so deep that only my shoes’ll be showing. I’ll need the salary, there’s no doubt about it. Thanks to the “recoupment arrangement” ex-agent Hal negotiated, 75 percent of my ever-dwindling book royalties go to my ex-publishers to repay money I owe. I need a job with accommodation attached, too. I’ve kept the Hampstead house, just, but it’s in the hands of a letting agent. I use the rent to pay alimony to Zoл. Alimony that Zoл refused point-blank to renegotiate: “Just because you got a Spanish girlfriend pregnant? Seriously, Crispin—why wouldI?” Carmen hasn’t gone all legal on me, but child care costs an arm and a couple of legs even in Spain.
“Who da’ man?” Inigo Wilderhoff clatters down the stairs with a mighty suitcase and his anchorman teeth flashing white. “I directed your friend to your office, just a minute ago.”
I stop. “My friend?”
“Your friend from England.”
“Did he give a name?”
Inigo strokes his professorial beard. “Do you know, I don’tbelieve he did. Fiftyish. Tall. An eye patch. My taxi’s waiting outside, I gotta fly. Enjoy tonight’s party for me. Au revoir till January.” I manage a “Take care,” but Inigo Wilderhoff’s suitcase is already thwack-thwack-thwacking down the steps.
An eye patch? A one-eyed man.
Calm down. Calm down.
MY OFFICE DOOR is ajar. Our secretary is nowhere to be seen—security is lax at Blithewood College, two miles from the nearest town. In I peer … Nobody. Probably a mature student with corrective glasses who sounded a bit British to Wilderhoff, wanting a book signed for eBay. He’ll have seen I’m out and gone for a tactful wander until my surgery hour at three P.M. Much relieved, I walk over to my desk.
“The door was open, Crispin.”
I yelp, twist, knocking clutter from my desk onto the floor. A man is standing by my bookshelves. With an eye patch.
Richard Cheeseman stands still. “Quite an entrance.”
“Richard! You scared the sodding shitout of me.”
“Well, pardon me for scaring the sodding shit out of you.”
We ought to be clapping each other’s back, but I just gape. Richard Cheeseman’s flab had melted away after a month of Latin American prison diet, but his civilian clothes accentuate how hard, gnarled, and leathered he’s become. That eye patch—when did thathappen?—gives him the air of an Israeli general. “I—I was all set to see you in Bradford after Christmas. I’ve arranged it with Maggie.”
“Then it looks like I’ve saved you a trip.”
“If I’d known you were coming here, I’d have …”
“Laid on champagne, a brass band? Not my style.”
“So”—I try to smile—“to what doI owe this pleasure?”
Richard Cheeseman sighs and bites at a hangnail. “Back in the Penitenciarнa, one method of slaying minutes was to plan my first trip to New York as a free man. The tinier the details, the more minutes my reverie would kill, you see. I used to refine my plans, night after night. So, when I found myself unable to face a family Christmas at Maggie’s, full of jollity, pity, Christmas TV specials, then, naturally, New York was where I fled. And once there, what could be more appropriate than a ride up the Hudson Line to see the leading light, the chiefest friend of the Friends of Richard Cheeseman, Crispin Hershey?”
“The Friends of Richard Cheeseman was the least I could do.”
His stare says, The very fucking least you could do.
I try to delay what I dread is coming. “Did you damage your eye in a fight, Richard?”
“No, no, not a knife fight, nothing so Shawshank Redemption. It was a spark from a welding torch on my very last day as a prisoner in Yorkshire. The doctor says the patch can come off in a week.”
“Good.” The framed photo of Gabriel is on the floor. I pick it up, and my visitor remarks, with sinister levity, “That’s your son?”
“Yes. Gabriel Joseph. After Garcia Marquйz and Conrad.”
“May your son be blessed with friends as true as mine.”
He knows. He’s worked it out. He’s here for payback.
“Must be tough,” remarks Cheeseman. “You here, him in Spain.”
“It’s less than ideal,” I try to sound casual, “but Carmen has family in Madrid, so she’s not alone. She’d been told she couldn’t have children, you see, so for her, Gabriel was a minor miracle. Well, a major one. We were no longer an item by that point, but she was determined to go through with the pregnancy and”—I reposition Gabriel next to my sticky-tape dispenser—“he’s the fruit of her labor. Won’t you sit down? I could scare up a shot of brandy to celebrate …”
“What—to celebrate my four wasted years in prison?”
I can’t look at him and I can’t look away.
“You seem antsy, Crispin. I seem to be unnerving you.”
“Seem” x 2 = textual mumble squared, I think, and notice that Richard Cheeseman’s coat pocket is bulging and sagging. I can guess what heavy lethal object it may contain. He reads my thoughts. “Working out who put the cocaine in my suitcase, Crispin, and when, and even why—it didn’t take me long.”
Hot. Strange. My insides are being decanted out of me.
“I made up my mind not to confront my betrayer until I was out. After all, he was doing his damnedest to get me repatriated and released. Wasn’t he?”
I can’t trust my voice so I just nod, once.
“ No, Crispin! He fucking well wasn’tdoing his best to get me out! If he’d confessed, I’d have been out in days. He let me rot.”
Snow is falling again, I notice. The second hand on the clock lurches in tiny arcs. Nothing else moves. Nothing.
“As I lay in my cell in Bogotб, it wasn’t only New York I dreamt of. I also dreamt of what I’d do to him. To the slug-fuck who came to see me, to gloat, who cared, but not enough to change places. Never that. I planned how I’d drug him, bind him, and kill him with a screwdriver over forty days. No script was ever polished as lovingly. Then I realized I was being silly. Teenage. Why take all that risk? Why not just meet him in America, buy a gun, and blow the fucker away in some out-of-the-way locale?”
I wish Betty the secretary or Inigo Wilderhoff was still pottering around. “Your tormentor,” I try to keep my voice steady, “has been tortured by remorse.”
Cheeseman’s voice turns into barbed wire: “Tortured? Swanning around the globe? Fathering children? While I, I, was caged in Colombia with killers, drug addicts with HIV, and rusty razors. Which of these fates is torture?”