The Memorial Hall Murder (21 page)

Mr. Crawley took the receiver away from his ear and looked at it. A high thin beep was coming over the line. It stopped, and there was silence. Then Mr. Maderna spoke up again, sounding agitated. “I'm sorry, Mr. Crawley, we've got an emergency situation in William James Hall. A pipe burst on the fifteenth floor, flooding the entire building. I'll have to get back to you later on.”

Mr. Crawley hung up the phone, then cocked his head, listening. There, now, wouldn't you know as soon as he hung up, the pipe would start up again? If only Buildings and Grounds could get a load of that.

bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing!

bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing!

Mr. Crawley picked up his hat and jammed it on his head and wandered out into the memorial transept, leaving the door of his office ajar. In Sanders Theatre a big class was going on. The rising tiers of seats were full of students. He crossed the hall and opened the door. Five hundred heads glanced up at him, then bent over notebooks again or looked back at the lecturer, who was reciting from Aeschylus, speaking for Orestes, who had come home to avenge his father's death.

In there! Inside! Does anyone hear me knocking at the gate? I will try again. Is anyone at home?

Mr. Crawley sat down on the nearest empty bench, put his feet up on the back of the bench in front of him, tipped his hat forward over his face, and went to sleep.

In the memorial transept, a tall man with a bald head was pushing a broom slowly along the floor. When Mr. Crawley disappeared inside Sanders Theatre, the man picked up his broom, walked to the open door of the custodian's office, and went inside. Closing the door softly behind him, he let his eyes rove inquisitively over the walls and furniture. Then he pulled open the top drawer of the desk and glanced at its contents. A pipe in one corner of the room was making a tremendous noise, as if there were some kind of air lock in the radiator.

bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing!

went the pipe.

bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing!

The intruder in Mr. Crawley's office pushed the drawer shut and lifted his head. The pipe was shaking and shuddering with great crashing jolts of thunderous sound.

bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing!

bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing!

Slowly the man turned around and stared at the clattering pipe that rose from floor to ceiling in the corner of the room.

Chapter Thirty

By Ham's reckoning it was the middle of the night, but he woke up sharply and lifted his head from the floor. He had been awakened by a sound. Perhaps he had dreamt it. He had heard things before in his dreams. But this was a loud thump. An honest-to-God thump.

There! There it was again. And then there was a skreeking noise, like heavy nails screaming out of the pith of a wooden board in the teeth of a wrecking bar. And now there were more of those reverberating thumps, like blows of a sledge hammer.

Someone was coming. They had found him at last. Ham drew himself up on his knees, his head high, listening.

The shrieking and banging stopped. There was a pause, and then another kind of noise. Footsteps. Footsteps slowly descending a staircase. Ham struggled to his feet and stared in the direction of the door, his heart pounding. He ran his fingers through his hair and clawed with shaking hands at his beard. He must look like a wild man. He blinked, as something smote his eyes. There was a yellow line along the top of his door.

Ham swallowed and tried to speak up. “Hello,” he said. “I'm here.” His voice was hoarse and weak. “Vick, is that you?”

The footsteps stopped. In his eagerness Ham stumbled over the wooden beam that lay between him and the door, and he fell with his whole weight against the lower half of the door panel, but he hardly felt it. He leaned up against the door and hammered on it with trembling fists. “Here I am. Right here. Vick? Are you out there?”

There was no reply. Only a peculiar silence. No one shouted back at him with joyful recognition. No one thumped on the door in reassurance and glad discovery. The light flickered again at the top of the door and dimmed and disappeared.

“Hey, hey, I'm right here,” cried Ham. “Open the door!”

But the steps had begun again on the stairs. Again he heard the light tread on one step after another. This time it was diminishing, going away.

And then the hammering began again.
Crash crash crash.
The vault was being sealed once again with heavy boards and long sharp nails. The coffin lid was again being fastened down. Ham could feel the blows of the hammer shivering into his own flesh.

The hammering stopped. The silence began again. This time it was unbearable. Ham began to sob. He reached his hand up toward the top of the door where he had seen a strip of light. His blood thundered in his head. He fainted, and slumped heavily to the floor.

Chapter Thirty-one

Class was over, but it took Homer twenty minutes to work his way through the students crowding around him. He was starved, but then someone came running down the aisle with a plate of Mrs. Esterhazy's pastry, and pretty soon Homer was trying to talk and eat at the same time.

Today's lecture had been altogether too successful. It was the second half of his Abraham Lincoln chapter. Homer suspected he had made the mistake of telling one too many of Lincoln's funny stories. And perhaps there had also been just a drop too much of awe and affection, in spite of the trouble he had taken to crush any remaining illusions his students might have had about the great emancipator. The students were an unsentimental lot, on the whole, hard-boiled in the cleansing water of historical cynicism, wary with disbelief. But today they had lapped up Homer's lecture. It was the martyrdom that had finished them off. Like everybody else, they were suckers for a good martyrdom. Lincoln had been another martyred saint, like the dead Union soldiers whose praises lined the walls in the memorial transept upstairs. Abraham Lincoln should have had a tablet to himself in that wooden Valhalla. Only, of course, that would have been impossible, because the poor soul had never been to Harvard. (There was going to be another memorial. Homer had heard the rumor. The President of Harvard was going to dedicate a bronze tablet in the memorial corridor to the memory of Hamilton Dow. But then Ham had been a genuine alumnus of Harvard University, so that was all right.)

Homer accepted another piece of cake and looked around at his teeming classroom. Who were all these people? Some of them were members of Vick's choir, Homer was sure of that. He recognized Jennifer Sullivan and Tim Swegle and Mrs. Esterhazy and Betsy Pickett, and that old guy who was the bass soloist—what was his name? Mr. Proctor. Mr. Proctor came down the aisle and tapped Homer's chest and began talking about all the cities and towns in the country that had been named after Abraham Lincoln, especially Lincoln, Nebraska, which was Mr. Proctor's home town.

At last Homer was able to excuse himself. He walked out of the lecture hall and around the outside of the building and then in again by the south door to pay his daily respects to the great draf ty vestibule, where he now felt so much at home. He never seemed to tire of wandering up and down the hall in the gloom, gazing up past the boarded windows at the wooden vaults rising dimly overhead. Today the memorial tablets on the walls invited reverie on the subject of martyred saints, and Homer remembered what Henry Thoreau had said about saints: that Christ was always crucified, and Copernicus and Luther forever excommunicated, human nature was so brutal and depraved.

Ham Dow was a case in point. Homer was beginning to get a sort of instinctive notion in his head, that the bombing in which Ham had lost his life had been a malicious intentional murder, rather than a random act of violence by a crowd of militant outsiders. The man had inspired too much affection for his own good. Homer looked up now at the golden shimmer of Latin words running around the high walls. They were noble sentiments, all of them. Everyone had believed in noble sentiments in those days. Nowadays if a noble sentiment stuck its head out of a foxhole, it was swiftly decapitated. That was what had happened to Ham. He had been a living, breathing noble sentiment, and maybe that was the whole trouble. He was another goddamned bleeding Messiah, cut down in the midst of his teaching.

And therefore the man from the FBI and the people at Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms could waste all the time they wanted to, tracking down rumors about the Nepalese Freedom Movement. The Nepalese didn't have anything to do with it. Homer was more interested in someone whose initials were J.C., someone Ham had expected to meet right here on this spot at eleven-thirty on the morning of October sixteenth. Who was J.C.? If Ham's death had been accidental, if he had merely happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time when some underground organization had exploded its Harvard bomb, what had happened to J.C.? Why had he not come forward? It looked to Homer as if someone had set the bomb to go off on Wednesday, October sixteenth, at eleven-thirty in the morning, right there in the middle of the high corridor running through the middle of Memorial Hall, and then had lured Ham to that place at that time under the pretext that J.C. would expect him there.

Query: How had the bomber known where in the basement to attach his explosive device? The basement was a rabbit warren, a complex labyrinth of little rooms and corridors. In order to determine what coincided with what, one would have to superimpose a plan of the first floor over a plan of the basement.

Who would have access to a set of plans? Where would the plans be?

Homer stood on the smooth cement that had been poured into the broken floor by Mr. Maderna's craftsmen, and listened to the bell in the tower chime a single stroke for one o'clock. Mr. Maderna would have a set of plans. Surely he would have plans for every building within his domain. Donald Maderna would know the place inside out, if anybody would.

Homer consulted his pocket map, and then he set out along Oxford Street in the direction of the Buildings and Grounds Department for the North Yard. The day was raw and cold, with a heavy mist lowering over the city of Cambridge. Halfway to his destination, Homer turned around and looked back at Memorial Hall. Shaggy clouds were dragging tattered shreds over the roof. This time Homer saw the building as a pathetic enormous beast, some fabulous ill-assorted creature crouched warily on its haunches. Its long backbone was knobby with vertebrae. The iron finials along the ridge were like birds picking fleas from the back of a rhinoceros. It was a behemoth, a camelopard, a vast griffin of a building. The fog pressed down on the tower and the building weighed down on its foundations and the foundations crushed down into the earth so heavily that it was a wonder to Homer that the entire planet was not lurched into a lopsided orbit. Ponderous as it was, Memorial Hall seemed threatened. In his imagination Homer saw it rising gently in the air, burst asunder in some final tremendous disaster, some dreadful last day, its monstrous fragments flying skyward, then pelting down again to bury Vick and all her musicians and Handel's entire
Messiah
and all the rabble in the basement and Homer Feeble-minded Kelly in one colossal mountain of rubble. Maybe Freddy Fulsom was right. Maybe the Time was at Hand.

Homer turned around again and loped along Oxford Street. As he ran, he amused himself by imagining all the massive blocks of science buildings left and right exploding too, catapulting into the air in enormous chunks of brick and masonry. The study of science at Harvard would go boom, all these practical buildings for biology and geology and physics that had cropped up since the time of Louis Agassiz. Agassiz had collected specimens for his University Museum of Comparative Zoology with the help of people like Henry Thoreau. And Asa Gray had started the Herbarium. But of course, they weren't the first scientists at Harvard. The study of natural philosophy had been an accepted discipline for years before that. And chemistry. There had been chemists here forever too, like young Charley Flynn, the buccaneer. Charley Flynn would know how to blow up a building.
BOOM BOOM,
so much for Mallinckrodt!
KABOOM KABAM,
farewell to the Science Center!
KABOOMITY BIM BOM BAM,
good-bye to the University Museum with its glass flowers! Oh, no, not the glass flowers! Oh, no, not
tinkety-klinkety-smashity-crash!
all those fragile botanical specimens of hand-blown glass, all blasted into a billion pieces by the mad bomber Charley Flynn! Hastily Homer glued all the billion pieces of the glass flowers together again in his mind and looked around for 42 Oxford Street.