Red White and Black and Blue - Stevenson Richard - Страница 14

I stuck it in the black shoulder bag I carried when traveling in Europe and Asia. The gun nestled in there nicely with my map of Istanbul and my Imodium.

I phoned the SUNY economics department. A secretary said Dr. Paul Podolski might be able to see me after his two-hour nine o'clock summer-school class. SUNY was on the way to Rotterdam, more or less, so I went out and was about to climb into the Toyota when I thought, oh shit, car bomb.

With effort, I got down and checked the wheel wells—

nothing amiss—and then popped the hood and examined the engine. Nothing wrong there either, other than some corroded battery terminals. I thought, this is nuts. What the hell am I thinking? The Serbians warned me to get off the Louderbush investigation, and they don't even know that I'm still on it, so why would they try to blow me up? Several people—two of them other Crow Street denizens I knew vaguely—strolled by while I was inspecting the car. None seemed to be watching me or showing any interest at all in what I was doing.

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I got in and turned the key and was not blown to bits. I pulled out onto Crow, then turned up Hudson. I checked the rearview mirror periodically and headed out Lark and then left on Washington Avenue toward the SUNY main campus. Some fair-weather clouds drifted across a pale early summer sky, and I opened the car windows and sucked in air that felt unusually clean and fresh. I thought, I hurt but I am inhaling and exhaling like a pro. Nice.

The State University of New York Albany main campus—

which cost hundreds of millions of dollars when it was strewn across a field by Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s but by now looked only a little more alluring than a hot-sheet motel in Fort Lee—was sparsely populated during its summer semihiatus, and those few students and others out and about were in no big hurry. I parked and soon located Quad Four, the classroom tower from which Greg Stiver had plunged to his death. I thought I figured out the spot where he had landed. There were no aftereffects, no memorial plaque. I paused for a minute, then moved on.

Paul Podolski had a third-floor office in a nearby building, another cement and glass upended shoe box, the public architecture of a society wary of overspending in an area it was ambivalent about, such as learning.

I was told by the department secretary to knock on the door of room 318, but when I found 318 the door was open and a man looked up from a computer terminal.

"Yep? What's up?"

He looked like one of the Smith Brothers on the cough drop box, skinny, shiny on top and black beard from upper lip 74

Red White and Black and Blue

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to midsection I introduced myself and said I understood he had been Gregory Stiver's thesis adviser, and I asked if I might talk to him about Greg for a few minutes.

"Maybe. Who are you working for, may I ask?"

"I can't really say who my client is at this point. But I can tell you it's somebody entirely sympathetic to Greg, someone who is very sorry about Greg's death and the circumstances leading up to it."

He sat there sizing me up. Who was I, and what was I up to? "What circumstances are you referring to? What circumstances leading up to Greg's suicide? That is, if it was suicide."

I helped myself to a seat in the chair across Podolski's desk from him. "I'm talking about Greg's unhappiness in the weeks before he died. The police and press reports both refer to Greg's supposed despondency. What do you mean, if it was suicide? You have doubts?"

"All I'm saying is, I didn't expect Greg to do such a thing.

It was shocking to me."

"He hadn't been depressed that you were aware of? Two friends say he was. Janie Insinger and Virgil Jackman were neighbors of Greg's and rode with him from his place on Allen Street out here to the campus a couple of times a week."

"It's true," Podolski said, "that I didn't see as much of Greg after his thesis was accepted as I did in the previous months.

Which I was actually sorry about. I always enjoyed talking with Greg. He was quite bright, and I always thought somebody that smart could be led away from his rather simplistic ideas about the vaunted glories of laissez faire 75

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capitalism. And he loved to explain to me how my supposedly socialist ideas—I'm actually a kind of Jack Kennedy accomodationist Democrat—were a form of the very tyranny the founders of the republic had rebelled against.

"Greg and I spent a lot of time poking and jabbing at each other on these matters, without either of us ever giving an inch. But we respected each other, and Greg's thesis on the half-century erosion of the work ethic in the German Democratic Republic was a well-written and nicely argued piece of work. I had encouraged Greg to turn the thesis into an article for, say, the National Review—I know an editor there—and he seemed quite eager to do that. I know he had just about finished a draft when he died, and he was planning on showing it to me. So, really, I was just stunned when he fell off Quad Four and was killed, and pretty soon out came an official verdict of suicide, of all things."

Was this the Greg Stiver Insinger and Jackman had described to me? Could there somehow be two Greg Stivers?

I said, "Wasn't he anxious about getting a teaching job? His friends said he was, and he'd been turned down by two colleges."

"I think there were a couple of things that didn't pan out, yes, but one of those institutions—someplace out near Rochester—Hall Creek Community College, I think I recall—

had a spot that opened up unexpectedly. Greg knew somebody out there who tipped him off to the opening and was lobbying for him. So the job situation wasn't all that bleak, in my estimation. And then suddenly Greg died. It was 76

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appalling, really. One of those deaths that, when it happens, is just incomprehensible."

"Did you attend the funeral?"

"I did. It was depressing too. No acknowledgement of the absurdity of Greg's death at all. But then I do understand that that isn't what funerals are for. For absurdity we go to Beckett or Sartre, not Calvin."

"Who attended the funeral? Did you know the people there?"

Podolski fidgeted. "You know, I'm really curious about who is asking questions about Greg's death five years after it happened. So does this mean that someone besides me is suspicious of the suicide verdict?"

"Yes, someone is," I said, and I wasn't lying because I knew as soon as I said it that I meant myself. "There's no evidence of foul play. At this point it just has to do with someone Greg was involved with. May I ask what you knew about his personal life?"

"Not much. I knew Greg was gay. He was active with the Log Cabin Republicans. Or had been. I know during his second year in the graduate program he cut back on most of the extracurricular stuff so he could concentrate on course work and on his thesis. And of course on playing rugby supposedly."

"Greg played rugby? This is the first I've heard that."

"That's what he told me. Though I sometimes wondered.

He'd come to see me all banged up—bruised, a split lip, a shiner one time. It happened every so often, and he'd shrug it off and say rugby was just something he needed to do to 77