The Grasshopper King (25 page)

It was five rings before he answered, and it took a little while after that for me to impress upon him who I was.

“Sammy,” he said. He sounded groggy and a little incredulous. “Of course. What's going on?”

“You told me to call you sometime—remember?”

“Yeah,” he said cautiously.

“I need your help with something. It's very important. I wouldn't ask you if we weren't old friends.”

“How much do you need?”

He had grown suddenly more alert.

“I don't need any money. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Well, good goddamn,” he said, evidently relieved, “I guess I'm always good for a favor.”

“Fine. Meet me at the corner of Ovid and East Main in fifteen minutes.”

“Urr. Can it wait?”

“Actually, no.”

“Fifteen minutes,” he said. He made it sound like a sum of cash. “
OK
. But what's so urgent?”

Over the top of the telephone box I could see the scowling Greek sandwich-maker, half-obscured by the reflection of dawn in his plate glass storefront. He maneuvered himself deliberately about the space behind the counter, turning his machines on, dipping below my sightline to indecipherable tasks.

“Let's just say,” I told him, “I need you to talk to someone for me.”

Charlie arrived ten minutes late, unevenly shaven, wearing a too-small
T
-shirt with “
STONED AGAIN
” decaled across the front. The street was empty except for a rangy old man sweeping the sidewalk in front of a jewelry store. A phalanx of low, squarish clouds was marching up from the east side of town.

“This had better be good,” Charlie said. “I had to get my father to take care of the store. I'm in very big trouble if a certain parcel comes in before I get back.”

“You'll be back before lunch,” I told him.

Rising before us, shadowing the streetcorner, was the desultory concrete parallelepiped of the college repository. I led Charlie inside. The security desk was manned by a surly-looking undergraduate, bent ferociously over a paperback. At our appearance, he jerked upward, startled and resentful.

“See some
ID
?” he said.

I displayed my card. He directed an interrogative grunt at Charlie.

“Dr. Hascomb is with me,” I said. “He's a visiting scholar from Tunisia. He's consulting with us on the degradation of storage media.”

“Tunisia.”

I chastised myself: keep it simple. “Dust storms,” I said. “Dry heat. The scirocco. There's no more inhospitable environment for information.”

“I'll bet,” the undergraduate said without interest, and waved us through. Triumphantly I led Charlie through the low portal into the dim realm of the stacks.

The shelves crowded our shoulders on either side; we proceeded through the corridors of Italian periodicals, botanical drawings, endless minutes of forgotten societies. The floor was wire mesh and beneath us one could see the shelves descending three stories into the earth, if one cared to look. Charlie did; I didn't. I was cultivating an atmosphere of perfect assurance. I'd need it. We stepped into the rickety elevator and I pushed the button for the bottommost floor.

“This isn't exactly how I expected we'd see each other again,” Charlie said, as we emerged.

“Chance is a funny trick player,” I replied.

We had come out into a vast, cold room, one of whose walls was lined floor to ceiling with wooden drawers, of a flat antique kind that suggested pinned butterflies or Latin-labeled beakers; we used them for lecture tapes. I wheeled the stepladder into position, climbed up almost to the top (above me, through three layers of mesh, I could just make out the surface world) and came down again, huffing, with Higgs's tape. I slid it into the machine, leaned down on
PLAY
, and beckoned Charlie silent as the familiar recording began. “Henderson between the wars was a figure of solitude and an object, when his solitude was interrupted, of derision and contempt . . .” When the waterlogged screeching began, I shut off the tape.

“Well,” Charlie said, “you were right. Your storage medium's degraded.”

“Come on,” I said impatiently, “can you do him?”

“Do what?”

“Can you
do
him. Higgs. Do his voice.”

“Play it again.”

I did so; and afterwards Charlie scratched his forehead, leaned back, coughed, and Higgs began to speak. “Henderson between the wars,” Charlie said, “was a figure of . . . isolation? An object of scatological skulduggery on the part of his peers, held fast in a perfect balance between his Roman Catholic faith and his carnal appetite for his teenaged relatives . . .”

It was not perfect; but it was very, very good.

“Charlie,” I said, “I'm going to make you a star.”

He grinned uncomplicatedly. “I always knew,” he said.

When we emerged from the stacks, the surly-looking undergraduate turned his eyes up wearily. He had shut his paperback. Strange to think that for him, nothing of any interest was happening that day.
From the look of him, nothing of any interest might
ever
have happened. Camaraderie overtook me. I wanted to warn him that one day, through no fault of his own, he might do something important.

But of course he wouldn't have believed me.

“Looks pretty bad,” I told the undergraduate. “This place is an information catastrophe waiting to happen.”

“Really?”

“Salaam,” said Charlie. We pushed out onto the wakening street.

It must be obvious by now what I was up to. If Higgs would not speak, then Charlie would have to speak for him. But what should he say? I had to keep it brief. The longer the speech I asked Charlie to fabricate, the greater the chance of some betraying error. After a little thought I decided he need say no more than “Red whistle.” Having Higgs refer to “Sudetenland, My Mother” would be the most potent endorsement possible of my own work, and I thought it was not too selfish, considering that I was saving Higgs's life, to give myself a boost up in the process.

Ellen had been right about the rain. When Charlie and I came out of the repository, the first huge drops were splattering against the windshields and store windows, and a startling cold wind was toying with the limp flags of the auto dealership. By the time we got to Higgs's house the rain was falling in sheets. Mud boiled up from the cracks in the front walk, expelling earthworms onto the flagstone where they lay pink and dazed, ready for the end.

Ellen and Julia were waiting for us on the stoop, as I'd called ahead and asked them to.

“This is my friend Charlie Hascomb,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the rain.

“Charlie, you remember Julia. Charlie, Mrs. Higgs.”

“I'm
wet
,” Julia said. “Can we go inside now?”

“Not just yet. I need to explain something first.”

“That you can't explain inside?”

“The tape recorders—
the tape recorders
.” I felt a guilty excitement at my adopted air of mystery. I almost wished I could maintain it longer. But, as I've said, there was no time to dawdle. I nodded at Charlie.

“Sammy has a plan,” Higgs said. And Ellen gave a little gasp, glanced up at the thundering firmament, and fainted.

Julia moved to catch her, too late. Ellen dropped to her knees and then slumped backwards onto the path. A moment later she came to with the cold rain slapping her face. She glared up at me from the walk. Her dress was striped with mud and a gaping tear ran up one side of it. I saw now that I should have introduced my secret weapon in a less dramatic manner. But no second thoughts—I resolved against them. There would be no time. I helped Ellen to her feet and began to explain what came next.

I had read enough crime novels to know that when it came to a frame-up, every complication was an invitation to mishap. So I'd kept the plan as simple as I could. I would go down to the basement and make a “final plea” for Higgs to speak. Ellen, Julia, and Charlie would follow, all together so as to mask the sound of Charlie's footsteps. Charlie, standing behind Higgs, would say “Red whistle.” The four of us would rush up the stairs (together, always together) to call Treech. Finally, I would leave the house on the pretext of purchasing a celebratory bottle of champagne; in that manner, Charlie, too, could leave, without an unexplained opening and shutting of the door.

If all went as planned, there would be no evidence on the tape that anyone but Julia, Ellen, and I had been in the house that morning. It was imperative, I reminded my accomplices, that no one say anything contradicting that impression. If some contingency made it absolutely necessary to mention Charlie, he was to be referred to by his code name.

“What code name?” Charlie asked.

In fact, I hadn't thought of one; but something about the fierceness of the elements, the rain crashing to earth, put me in mind of the quiet moment I'd shared with Ellen, in the Higgses' kitchen. I thought of stillness, yellowness, the smell of something frying.

“Saucepan.”

“That's a terrible code name,” Ellen said. But Charlie was in favor.

“I'm a saucepan!” he proclaimed. “The secret saucepan! Operation Saucepan!” He drew his face close to mine; no more than six inches of water and wind between us. “This is so much better than being at work,” he said.

The four of us went over our respective parts until I was convinced that every possibility of error had been eliminated. We stood at the door, dripping from our sleeves and chins, wearing mad conspiratorial smiles.

“This is great,” Julia said. “I mean it. It's workable.” She put her hands on my shoulders. “I'm sort of shocked.” Her bangs dangled before her eyes like foliage and her nose was starting to run. She kissed me.

“Love is the downfall of all secret agents,” Charlie said.

“Shut up, saucepan,” I said. We went together into the house, Julia and Ellen first, Charlie and I behind, our shoes squelching quietly on the linoleum, synchronized. Charlie leaned toward me again, as if to whisper some last encouragement in my ear. But I put my finger to my lips. From here on in we were sticking to the script.

I went downstairs to deliver my supposed petition. The basement was crazy with grasshoppers; the whole local population must have been driven from their homes by the rain. They huddled in the corners and nestled among the artifacts, and at any moment dozens of them were in midleap, so that the room seemed held at a low green simmer. This, I thought, was for the best. The chattering of the grasshoppers, along with the steady tattoo of the rain on the windows, could only help obscure our trickery.

I sat down across from Higgs. The checkerboard lay between us, still in a drawn position from the last game Higgs had played with Julia. There was a grasshopper perched on one of his red kings. It was poised so motionlessly that I hadn't seen it for a moment; I had taken it for a part of the checker. It seemed a new kind of man entirely, a grasshopper king, part of some variant game that no one had gotten around to
teaching me. The grasshopper faced me, a strangely mottled green, its tiny limbs shoved forward like a supplicant's; but there was something defiant, I thought, in its pose, in the unforgiving set of its thorax. I waved my hands in its direction, trying to shoo it away. But the grasshopper ignored me. It seemed absorbed in a private contemplation.

“Fine, then,” I told it. Julia, waiting halfway up the stairs, gave me an anxious look; I was off the plan. I made a little grimace of apology.

“Fine, then, Professor,” I said, louder, and slid into my prepared remarks. “We can see you've made your mind up about this. We've tried to persuade you in every way we could that it was in your best interest, and in the best interest of the field, for you to speak; but you've decided otherwise, for reasons of your own. And we—I think I'm speaking for Julia and me, and of course Mrs. Higgs, and your colleagues here at the university—we respect that decision on your part, and on all of our behalf I just want to wish you good luck through whatever lies ahead.”

Julia upped her thumbs. Was I good: officious and up-front as a bank president! I felt ready to pull out a railroad watch. But I wasn't through yet. I took a long breath, and then—drawing up from my grottoed interior the memories of a lifetime of frustration, my thousand humblings, all the mistakes I'd made despite the clarity of the right course and the right courses I'd unaccountably veered from, my vanities, my uncharities, my prejudices, which had deformed my field of vision into something like the surface of a sphere (inalterably finite, I mean, but without even any boundary I could beat my fists against) and the concomitant unlikeliness that any of this would ever, in any way that counted, change—I started to cry.

“Oh, God, Professor Higgs, please speak! Don't you know what they're going to do to you? Can't you understand? I'm begging you! Speak, Professor! Please, Professor, speak! Speak!
Speak!
”