Styx & Stone (9 page)

Presiding over the drinks was a brawny bartender in a starched shirt—short sleeves—and black tie, one of those ruddy-faced Irishmen with an icy, inscrutable glare and jet-black hair pasted on his head. He looked lonely, so I took pity on him and ordered a double Dewar’s on the rocks. He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. It wasn’t his place to comment on a customer’s choice of drink, even if it was a small, brown-haired girl of twenty-three doing the boozing. I chatted with him—Sean McDunnough of Bensonhurst—and watched the people arrive.

It was a pitiful gathering. By the time I’d finished my second drink, I counted only eleven people, including the bartender and myself, all from the Italian Department. The faculty and administrators who had made appearances at Saint Paul’s Chapel evidently felt relieved of any further obligations to the untenured Ruggero Ercolano.

The roll of the mourners included Chalmers, his wife and daughter, Hildy Jaspers, Gigi Lucchesi, Bernie Sanger, and a tall young man introduced to me as Roger Purdy.

I instantly pegged Purdy for a snot. He stood there slouching, his face screwed into a petulant scowl. He was sweating an oil slick, and I feared his highball glass would slide from his greasy hand and crash to the floor.

“Hello,” he said, his voice oozing bother at having to speak to me. “Sorry about your father,” he said.

“Do you know him well?” I asked.

“I’m sorry about your father,” he repeated. “It wouldn’t be proper to say anything more.”

“My mother used to say if you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything at all.”

“Mine too,” said Purdy, and he migrated to the other side of the room.

“What’s his story?” I asked Bernie Sanger, who had just finished chatting with Ruth Chalmers.

“Hates your father,” he said, chewing on the roast beef. “Hates me, hates everyone. Hated Ercolano.”

“Why does he hate my father?”

Sanger shrugged, swallowed once, then again, clearing the remains of his last mouthful. “You won’t believe why.”

“Try me.”

Sanger smiled. “Your dad gave him a B two years ago, the only B on his transcript. Roger is the worst grade-grubber I’ve ever seen. Terminal case,” and he popped another forkful of food into his mouth.

“Would you say he hates my father more than he hates others?”

Sanger shrugged again. “Probably about the same. He’s a miserable sort. Say, Ellie, what are you driving at?” He seemed amused. “You’re not thinking that Roger Purdy attacked your father, are you?”

“He’s not exactly Gorgeous George, but big enough to do the job,” I said, watching him wipe his nose into a moist and crumpled handkerchief.

“I don’t see it,” said Sanger. “What would he stand to gain by robbing your father? He’s the youngest son of Wilbur Purdy, of Purdy and Marchol Adding Machines.”

“Really? We’ve got lots of those at the paper where I work.”

“They’ve made millions on those things,” said Sanger, eyeing the heir jealously. “So he has no motive for stealing odds and ends from your dad. It seems pretty clear to me that it was just a run-of-the-mill robbery.”

“Not to me,” I said, sipping my drink.

Sanger stopped chewing and gaped at me. “What do you mean?”

I looked at him pointedly. “You know, Bernie, I’ve been waiting for you to ask me about my father’s manuscript.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Hadn’t you expected to get it from my father yesterday?”

“Of course, but I met you yesterday, and I already knew about the attack.”

“Don’t you want it now?”

“Of course I do,” he huffed, putting down his plate to defend himself. “What are you driving at? What’s
Daughters of Eve
have to do with this?”

“Did you work on it Friday night?” I asked, avoiding his question for the time being.

“No, we had dinner at a Spanish restaurant over on Perry Street, then I walked him back to his place to get the manuscript.”

“Did you see the manuscript, or did you just assume it was there?”

I’d provoked him. Bernie was nervous or guilty or annoyed by my line of questioning. “Just say what you want to say. What’s the big deal about the manuscript?”

I drained my glass. “Someone stole it Friday night.”

The bartender poured Bernie some wine from a fiasco of Chianti. He took the glass and digested the information I’d just fed him.

“Why?” he asked finally. “Why would anyone want to steal a scholarly text?”

“My father once told me a joke about a scholar who calculated the worth of a sheet of writing paper. For the sake of an argument, let’s say half a cent.”

Bernie nodded, indicating he was following me.

“Write a poem on that same piece of paper, and it loses all its value.”

Bernie chuckled.

“The same can be said of scholarly work,” I continued. “In a sense, it’s worth less than the paper it’s printed on.”

“Then why would a burglar take it?”

“Because this wasn’t just any burglar. I think my father made a formidable enemy of someone in academe.”

“What?” Bernie spilled some wine on his white shirt. “Are you saying that someone from the Italian Department—this department—attacked your father and stole his manuscript?”

I shrugged.

“You’re saying one of your father’s colleagues tried to kill him? Just on the basis of a few missing pages?”

“Four hundred missing pages.”

“That’s absurd! Do the police share your suspicions?”

I shook my head.

“You can’t run around saying things like that,” he said in a tense whisper, grabbing me by the arm. “What if someone hears you? They’ll think I agree with you. Chalmers would end my career before it gets started. As it is, I don’t think he appreciated my talking to his daughter.”

I felt a hand on my other arm—a softer grip and a better-looking interlocutor attached.

“Mr. Lucchesi,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

“How’s your father today, Miss Stone?” The pain in his eyes may have been an act, but in that moment I didn’t care. I was just happy he had come to speak to me. Not that I could tell for sure what his motivation was; maybe he was indifferent and didn’t want to show it, or maybe he was trying to impress me.

“No change,” I said.

“Does Mr. Sanger make you thirsty?” asked Gigi, winking adorably at Bernie. “May I offer you a drink?”

“Now that’s a gentleman, Bernie,” I said.

“Geez, I would have asked,” he said, waved a hand in the air, and walked away.

Then Hildy Jaspers appeared. She was a gin drinker. She confessed that her Achilles’s heel was martinis.

“Let’s make it a gin-tonic,” Gigi said to the bartender. “She has to be careful not to get drunk in front of the profs.”

Sean McDunnough mixed the drink, heavy on gin. He watched me as he poured, his red-iron face immobile except when he winked at me.

“So you’re a chandelier swinger?” I asked Hildy.

“No,” she said, sipping the drink the bartender had handed her, “I’m more likely to say something stupid.” She paused. “Or take off all my clothes.”

“Eleonora,” called a strong voice from behind me. “I thought it was you.”

“Professor Saettano,” I said, holding out a hand. He had to switch his cane to the left hand to shake. Hildy and Gigi drifted away. Franco Saettano was the doyen of Columbia’s Italian Department, a legendary Dante scholar, and the man who had hired my father in 1933. I knew him best of all the Columbia faculty. “How are you?”

He attempted a shrug, which came off more like a quiver. “I’m all right.”

“I didn’t see you at the service,” I said.

Saettano drew some saliva off his lips with a quick swig of air. “I don’t like such ceremonies,” he said. “Reminds me of my mortality. And I hate listening to Victor Chalmers’s oratories. He can’t say hello without injecting a pedantic metaphor.”

Unlike Bernie Sanger, Franco Saettano didn’t have to worry about others overhearing his opinions on the department or its chairman.

“But how is Abraham?” he asked, his voice suddenly soft.

I didn’t mind giving him the details; I knew he cared. He said he would try to visit my father in the coming days.

“I live in Riverside Drive,” he said. “The Village is far for me.”

Professor Saettano eased himself into a chair against the wall, taking the ponderous weight of eighty-six years off his tired legs, and we talked about Ruggero Ercolano.

“He was an able scholar,” said Saettano. “Not brilliant, but qualified. A pleasant young man.”

“I hear he liked the ladies.”

“There was that, yes, but he was good. He’ll spend some time among the lustful in purgatory before passing to paradise.”

“What about my father?”

Saettano frowned. “Abraham has time still here on Earth. But his sins are of pride, not of the appetites.” His eyes smiled gently.

“How are the arrogant punished in Dante?” I asked.

“Of course, there are many arrogant souls in the
Inferno
and
Purgatorio
,” he said. “Some are seared by a fiery rain, while others are burdened with heavy stones around their necks. The punishment, you see, is rooted in a kind of divine irony: the horrors of each soul’s damnation—or time passed in purgatory, as the case may be—are somehow fit for the sins of the lifetime. For the arrogant, who hold their heads so high in pride, the weighty stones force them to bow before God.”

“Stones around their necks?” I asked. “Fitting for a prideful professor named Stone, wouldn’t you say?”

Saettano smiled.

“Have you heard a rumor about my father challenging Chalmers for the department chair?”

“Of course,” he said. “There was talk. Ruggero approached me to know how I would vote. I said Abraham would have my support if he wanted it. But in the end he decided to leave administration to Victor. For all his faults, he is nevertheless a good administrator.”

“Don’t you think it strange that Chalmers was the one who found Ercolano’s body?”

The old man shrugged.

“After midnight on a Saturday?”

“That is unusual, yes,” he said, bouncing his cane lightly on the linoleum floor. “But these things always have an explanation. The tragedy, of course, is that Victor did not arrive sooner.”

“Well, the shepherd returns to his flock,” said Chalmers, arriving before us. Saettano threw me a glance to make sure I’d caught the metaphor. “I was worried when I didn’t see you at the service.”

“Worried I was dead?” asked the old man.

The chairman’s face dropped for a moment, his eyes flashing terror: Had he been humiliated? But just as quickly, his iceman face broke into a grin, as if he were suddenly in on the joke. Maybe.

“Poor Ruggero,” he said, sipping a glass of Moscato.

“I didn’t know him,” I said. “How is it the radio fell into the bathtub?”

Chalmers shook his head. “Who knows? It’s such a waste, dying so young and so pointlessly.”

“Eleonora, here, was wondering,” said Saettano in his strongest voice, “how it was that you were the one who found Ruggero in the tub.”

Chalmers gulped—and it wasn’t Moscato—then looked at me. He fidgeted, took a sip from his glass, and looked at me again. “I was in the neighborhood,” he said, his eyes avoiding mine. “I often stopped by to see Ruggero. We were close friends as well as colleagues.”

Chalmers cleared his throat and excused himself. He crossed the room and joined his wife, daughter, and a new arrival: a handsome young man with a mop of sandy hair. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Who’s that with Chalmers?” I asked Saettano.

The old professor leaned on his cane, squinted through the smoke, then sat back. “His son, Billy.”

God, how he’d changed, I thought, watching him from my seat. The last time I’d seen Billy Chalmers, he was in short pants running around Morningside Park ten years earlier. Now, about twenty-two, he had grown into a tall, angular kid, easy in his navy blue blazer, button-down shirt, and loafers. He looked like he belonged in a sculling clubhouse on the Schuylkill or trading chuckles at a fraternity mixer at Harvard. His vacant eyes suggested a lofty sense of superiority or perhaps a profound lack of interest.

His sister, Ruth, younger by about two years, was seated next to him. She was fair-skinned, with fine, light-brown hair and hazel eyes. Unlike her brother, she would never be mistaken for a prep. She was apparently a sensitive soul, too, as she seemed more upset than I would have expected.

I noticed Gualtieri Bruchner sitting in a corner by himself, plate balanced daintily on his knees as he broke apart some salmon with his fork. There were no knives. He was drinking water. Roger Purdy approached him in toadying fashion, no doubt to ask him which boot he wanted licked. Bruchner listened patiently, nodding from time to time and posturing as if about to speak, but I don’t believe any words ever left his mouth.

Hildy Jaspers returned to join Saettano and me, bending from her standing position to speak to the venerable professor. He got a better view down her blouse than I did. A martini glass teetered in her right hand. She seemed oblivious to Bruchner across the room. Those rumors couldn’t be true. Gigi Lucchesi was more her type than the austere professor.

“May I have a word, Miss Stone?” asked Hildy once she’d finished fawning over Saettano.