Visiting Professor (24 page)

“Are we gonna go an’ bring the state police in on the arrest?” Norman wants to know.

“No way. Their Bureau of Criminal Investigation has done diddly on these murders. We went’n solved em. We get to get the credit.”
The sheriff hikes his gun belt up on his stomach. “I want you to hold the fort, Wallace,” he tells the deputy who has been
shining boots. “Bobby, Bubba, long with me’n Norman here, we’re gonna pick up uh signed’n sealed arrest warrant, after which
we’re gonna go’n get our pictures in the newspapers. You’re welcome to tag along, Mr. Falk. You went’n earned it.”

Lemuel can barely keep his voice reined in. “I need to get back to Backwater. … I have important computer business to attend
to.”

“Come on, Lem,” Norman coaxes. “The least you can do is get yourself on the tube again.”

“Hey, no, really—”

“Maybe you oughta keep us company,” the sheriff decides. “What with you bein’ the one who went’n risked his life on the nuclear-dump
deal, we got us uh better chance of hittin’ network prime time with you on board.”

I can say you, when it comes to watching someone being arrested, I am, if only it could be otherwise, not a vestal virgin.
I have already described the young lady I fell wildly, eternally, achingly in love with as she was being dragged by her hair
across the cobblestones in front of the Smolny Institute. Also how I was hauled in for questioning when the second of my two
signatures turned up on a petition. I did not look forward to witnessing the arrest of what the sheriff, with the bureaucrat’s
genius for dehumanized jargon, called the perpetrator. (I suppose it is easier to arrest people, easier, in the end, to execute
them, if they do not come equipped with a handle.) The trouble was I could not worm out of it without alerting Norman to the
possibility he had been overheard making arrangements to bust Rain.

So now I’ll do the arrest of the alleged perpetrator.

I will start with the weather. In the great scheme of things, April showers are supposed to lead inexorably to May flowers,
but someone had not gotten the word. It was a raw, soggy May evening, the result, no doubt, of trivial turbulence created
by a night moth flailing its wings in a
reach of Siberia. Swollen teardrops of rain were exploding against the windshield faster than the wipers working at breakneck
speed could clear them away. Which is why what I witnessed was blurred, first by the rain, later by the teardrops which spilled
from my eyes, I will tell you why eventually.

I was in the backseat of the sheriff’s cruiser as we eased into Purchase Honeycut’s Used-Car Bazaar on the edge of Hornell.
The other cruiser, with Bobby and Bubba in it, drove up the ramp across the lot, blocking that entrance. The four headlights
illuminated the one-story, all-glass building.

Norman picked up the car microphone. “Seen hide nor hair of the TV boys yet?” he asked Bubba over the radio.

I was jotting down “hide nor hair” on the back of an envelope when static erupted on the radio:

“—Jus’ ‘rivin’ now—”

A white truck with “Channel 8 News” printed on the side pulled up to the curb outside the lot. A man leaped out and started
filming with a shoulder-mounted camera that also bore the “Channel 8 News” logo.

“Here’s where we earn our paychecks,” the sheriff said, climbing out of the car.

He was wearing a yellow fireman’s raincoat and carrying a battery-powered bullhorn and a revolver, which he kept out of sight
behind his back. He gestured for me to wind down my window.

“Go’n stay put,” he told me, “in case the perpetrator decides to resist gettin’ hisself arrested.” He raised the possibility
of a shootout with a gleam in his eye, as if he was measuring the size of the headlines to come.

The sheriff checked to make sure the TV people were filming, then waved the bullhorn in the direction of Bubba and Bobby,
who drew pistols and started forward. Walking in lockstep, he and Norman began wading through an enormous puddle toward the
glass building with the neon “Purchase from Purchase” sign sizzling over the front door as if it was electrocuting horseflies.

A figure loomed in the open glass door.

The sheriff and his three deputies froze in their tracks. The sheriff raised the bullhorn to his lips. “I’m Chester Combes,
the county—”

He was drowned out by an ear-splitting squeal from the bullhorn. “Like I was sayin’, I’m Chester Combes, the county sheriff?
I was sorta countin’ on havin’ uh word with you, Word.”

“ ’Bout what?” the man at the door shouted into the rain.

“ ’Bout the demise of Purchase Honeycut an’ nineteen other serial-murder victims.”

Word Perkins cackled wildly. “A nitwit like you couldn’t a figured it out all by himself. I’ll lay odds you hadda have help
from the visitin’ professor who don’t own what he knows—who went an’ loaned you the answer.”

I could see Word shielding his eyes with his hand and peering into the headlights. “I know yaw out there, huh, professor from
Petersboig,” he called.

Sinking down into the backseat, I watched the sheriff scratch the nape of his neck with the barrel of his revolver. “You wanna
be sure an’ edit out the part where he calls me a nitwit,” he told the TV reporters through the bullhorn. He turned back and
took a step in the direction of the sizzling neon sign. The other deputies closed in from different directions.

“Word Perkins,” the sheriff bellowed through the bullhorn, “you’re under arrest. It’s my duty to warn you anythin’ you say
may be used in evidence against you. …”

Through the drops of water streaming down the front window, I could see the perpetrator reach up and snatch the hearing aid
out of his ear. Then in one flowing motion he stepped back and slammed the glass door shut and stooped and turned the key
in the lock at the base of the door. The sheriff and his deputies charged up to the building. The sheriff kicked at the glass
door, but it did not give. He brought his revolver out from behind his back and pointed it at the man standing inside.

“I’m directin’ you to open up or I’ll open up,” he blustered through the bullhorn.

Word Perkins shrugged and shook his head to indicate he could not hear what the sheriff was saying. Backing away, he turned
and disappeared into an office with glass partitions. I could see him wrench open a metal filing cabinet and fling out several
fistfuls of paper before coming up with an object wrapped in a piece of cloth. Walking slowly,
lost, so it seemed from a distance, in the eerily silent world where you cannot hear your own footsteps, he made his way back
into the showroom and confronted the sheriff and his three deputies through the locked door. The television cameraman came
up behind the sheriff and filmed over his shoulder.

Word Perkins peeled the cloth away from the object as if he was skinning an orange. The object turned out to be a snub-nosed
revolver. The sheriff and the three deputies dropped into a tense crouch, their pistols thrust forward. Word Perkins calmly
removed a bullet from the folds of the cloth and rubbed its nose against what would later be identified as a clove of garlic.
Thumbing the bullet into the chamber, he brought the pistol up and jammed the barrel into his left ear.

“You don’t wanna go’n do that,” the sheriff cried over the bullhorn, but of course the perpetrator could not hear him.

I rolled my window all the way down and stuck my head out to get a better view, but the scene was still blurred. Tears over
which I had no control were flooding from my bloodshot eyes, I was crying like I had not cried since … since …

Through my tears I could see Norman whirl around and block the lens of the television camera with his hand, God bless him
for this delicacy, even a perpetrator is entitled to a certain amount of privacy when he blows his brains out. I also looked
away. In my mind’s ear, dear God, if only it had been a fiction I could slip into and out of like the sleeveless sweater my
mother knitted me when she got out of prison, in my mind’s ear I heard the muted, brittle explosion, it sounded like a sharp
dry cough coming from behind a closed door, I saw the faceless men who had been searching the apartment lunge toward the bathroom,
I saw one of them kick the door off its rusted hinges, I heard my mother emit a sound so inhuman it stabbed my eardrums. And
then I was pushing through the men standing around the bathtub and sinking to my knees next to their thick-soled, steel-toed
shoes and gaping at the syrupy fluid oozing from between the thick lips that had so often teasingly kissed me on my child’s
lips.

My father …

My father was clutching the German Luger he had brought back from the Great Patriotic War and had produced, along with the
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
, every time he told the story of how he had personally liberated Poland, as if the existence of these two trophies proved
he had been there. Tactful as always, he had climbed into the bathtub before shooting himself so as not to stain our precious
East German linoleum with blood. His unblinking eyes were riveted on mine, they contained, it seemed to me then, it seems
to me now, a melancholy reproach, an unspoken question. Why did you do it? his eyes asked. And then he was staring at me.
I do not know how at the age of six I knew such a thing, he was, this is a true detail, staring at me without seeing me. Which
was when I put two and two together and figured out what the word meant that my parents had refused to explain me.

The word was death.

I also figured out what had happened to my lost turtle and my lost goldfish and my mother’s youngest brother, my crazy uncle
Hippolyte who brought me striped candy canes every time he came over until one day he stopped coming over and my mother burned
all the snapshots of him in the family album. Maybe it was all that information clicking into place in such a short span of
time which overloaded my cerebral circuits; maybe it was the sight of one of the faceless men closing my father’s eyes with
his soiled, sausage-thick fingers—whatever the reason, my head started spinning from all the questions which suddenly had
inconvenient answers.

I do not usually have an eye for detail, but in this case I am able to reconstruct the scene as clearly as if the whole episode
took place yesterday. By the age of six I had already developed the lifelong habit of avoiding the chaos of the moment by
slipping into fictions. I remember holding my breath, hoping against hope this was a fiction I could slip out of.

I lost all hope when the faceless men stuffed my father’s body into a bloodstained burlap sack and dragged it down the stairs,
the elevator as usual was out of order, and pitched it into the back of an open truck. Gazing down from my apartment window
through the tears streaming from my eyes, they turned bloodshot from crying so much,
they would stay that way for the rest of my interminable life, I could see the burlap sack rolling from side to side as the
truck pulled away from the building.

With the advantage of hindsight, I can identify this as the precise moment my childhood ended. After the suicide of my father,
I was never young again. Emotionally speaking, I froze in my tracks. The emotions I experienced that day are the emotions
which dominate my life today. If I loathe and fear chaos, it does not come from nowhere.

For some people it is always too late to have a childhood, forget happy.

Where was I?

Another brittle explosion reached my ears. I wheeled around in time to see the sheriff kick away the lock he had shot off
and push through the glass door. Inside, a rag doll of a body lay motionless on the floor. Overhead, the “Purchase from Purchase”
sign sizzled irritably. Automobiles roared up to the curb. Tires squealed. Journalists brandishing cameras and microphones
and klieg lights and tape recorders crowded up to the door, elbowing each other to get a better look at the late unlamented
perpetrator. Exploding flashbulbs strobe-lit the scene. The sheriff, his pistol and bullhorn dangling along the gold stripes
of his trousers, emerged from the glass building. He walked with a jerky gait, as if every second frame was missing from the
film. He answered a few questions, shook his head, gestured with his chin toward me.

The next thing I knew the cruiser with me huddled in the backseat was adrift in a sea of reporters. Flashbulbs detonated in
my face, a long television camera snaked into the car through the open window, its lens whirring in and out as it tried to
focus on my tear-streaked face.

“Can you tell us how you figured out the identity of the serial killer?”

“I can say you I used game theory, also the theory of randomness, to prove the perpetrator was trying to make his crimes look
random. This discovery led directly to the serial killer.”

“What’d he say?”

“Come again?”

“Would you run that past us once more looking straight into the camera?”

“It is as plain as the nose on your face. The conscious effort to produce randomness negates randomness.”

“What is it about randomness that grabs you?”

“Whether the universe is random or determined shapes up as the ultimate philosophic question. Our view of the structure of
the universe, of why we are passengers on the planet Earth, depends on the answer. The quest for a single example of pure,
unadulterated randomness can thus be seen as the search for God.”

“What are you, some kind of religious nut?”

“Say, aren’t you the visiting professor at the Institute for Chaos-Related Studies who stopped the bulldozer at the nuclear-waste
site?”

“Could you comment on how it feels to solve a crime that stumped the police?”

Before I could open my mouth, a journalist called, “Could you tell us how it feels to be responsible for someone’s suicide?”

“Would you say whether you ever killed anyone before?”

A cry burst from my heart of hearts: “For God’s sake, I was only six. I wasn’t even a consenting adolescent, forget adult.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was only sixty.”

“He doesn’t look a day over fifty.”

“Would you share with us your secret to looking younger than you are?”

“Do you follow a special diet?”

“Do you exercise regularly?”

“Did you have plastic surgery?”

“What about hair implants?”

“Is there any truth to the rumor that you lied about your age to avoid the draft in the Soviet Union?”

“There is no Soviet Union anymore,” I started to explain, but my words were drowned out by a barrage of questions.

“Would you give us your views on a common European currency?”

“Would you give us your views on the European Common Market?”

“Would you give us your views on euthanasia?”

I wanted to say them I was more familiar with the predicament
of youth in Europe, but it was obvious nobody would have paid the slightest attention to my answer.

“What do you think of American crime?”

“What do you think of American criminals?”

“What do you think of America?

“Can you tell us if you’ve learned anything from your visit here?”

I managed to slip a word in. “I learned to wear my heart on my sleeve. I learned how a city on the Euphrates can be more Florida
than Miami.”