Visiting Professor (20 page)

Two figures materialize out of the shadows on the landing.

“Falk, Lemuel?”

Startled, Lemuel shrinks back. “What do you want?”

“Your money
and
your life.”

Lemuel gasps. The second shadow, taller, leaner, meaner than the first shadow, so it appears to Lemuel, laughs under its breath.
“You oughtn’t to go and say things like that, Frank. It could scare him shitless. The last thing in the world we want to do
is scare him shitless.”

“It was probably a joke,” Frank announces solemnly.

“Ha ha,” Lemuel says weakly. “Like who are you? How did you get into the building?”

The second shadow says, “Mr. Word Perkins let us in after he got a look at our credentials.”

“What credentials?”

“We are both armed with pistols,” Frank says. “The pistols are equipped with silencers.”

Lemuel’s palate goes chalk dry. In the dark, he can feel the two men looking at him in the peculiar way people who are armed
look at people who aren’t. “Hey, you are making another joke, right?”

“We have come all the way from Reno, Nevada, to have a discussion with you,” says the shadow named Frank.

“About what?” Lemuel tries to keep the fear out of his voice. “What about?”

“About your future,” Frank replies. “Isn’t that what we want to talk to him about, Fast Eddie?”

“It is,” Fast Eddie agrees. “We have come all this way to make sure he has a future.”

“You are not here about the random murders?”

“Do we look like we are here about random murders?”

Fast Eddie strikes a match and holds the flame to the tip of a thin cigar. Lemuel notices that both men are wearing fedoras.
“The handful of murders we have personal knowledge of,” Fast Eddie explains, his words filtering through a cloud of cigar
smoke, “have not been random.”

Lemuel yells into the stairwell, “Yo, Word!”

A faint echo spirals back up from the ground floor. “Yo, Word!”

Sucked into an agitated fiction that fills his head like a disjointed nightmare, Lemuel hears a voice spiral up from his lost
childhood.
Tell us where your father hides his code book
. Backpedaling until his back is flat against a wall, mopping perspiration from his forehead with a sleeve, he cries out,
“For God’s sake, Word, where the hell are you? You are going to get yourself in deep excrement if you let an unauthorized
person or persons monkey with the Institute’s chaos.”

“We are not interested in the Institute’s chaos,” the shadow named Fast Eddie says quietly. “We are interested in
your
chaos.”

“Lots of people we know have been telling lots of people we know about you.”

“About me?”

“Sometimes it seems as if all anybody upstate New York wants to talk about is you.”

“All roads lead to Backwater,” Fast Eddie says with a laugh.

“What are people saying about me?”

Frank takes a step in Lemuel’s direction. “That you can make numbers dance.”

“It turns out you can read other people’s mail,” Fast Eddie remarks.

“There are certain people—federal prosecutors, FBI lawyers, CIA agents—who write things about the organization we work for.”

“We got no problem getting our hands on what they write,” purrs Fast Eddie. “The trouble is it’s always in gibberish. A-x-n-t-v,
r-1-q-t-u, z-b-b-m-o. You get the drift?”

“Random five-letter groups,” Lemuel says weakly, “mean that the original was enciphered.” He is sure the two men in the shadows
are wearing steel-toed shoes.

“We hear on the grapevine you can read gibberish.”

“We hear on the grapevine the gibberish in question uses a U.S. government code system known as the Data Encryption Standard.
The people who encode messages they do not want us to read use a secret number, called the key, to garble the message. The
people who decode the messages use the same secret number to ungarble the message.”

“We figure if you could figure out the key, we could ungarble the message and read the gibberish.”

“What kind of name is Falk, Lemuel?”

“Russian.” Lemuel swallows hard. “Jewish.”

“We are an equal-opportunity employer, isn’t that the situation, Frank?”

“You do not by any coincidence happen to have Italian blood? You do not by an coincidence happen to
parlare Italiano?”

“I told you it does not matter if he speaks Italian,” Fast Eddie informs his colleague. “The gibberish we want him to read
is in English.”

“I was only trying to get a fix on his qualifications,” Frank says defensively.

“Let us put cards on the table,” says Fast Eddie. “The organization we work for would like to employ you. You could have a
title—something along the lines of ‘officer in charge of reading gibberish.’ Now, we got branch offices all over the country.
As for deciding where you want to work, you can pick your poison. Reno, Nevada, has a dry climate which is supposed to be
very good for people with asthma and bronchial problems. Florida is sunny all year around, people who live
there swear by it. Sure, New England gets cold in the winter, but the autumn is supposed to be very colorful.”

“You need an apartment, you got an apartment. You need sharpened pencils, you got sharpened pencils. You need a secretary—I
am talking young, I am talking good-looking, I am talking long legs and short skirt—you got a secretary.”

“Normally I work with a computer. …”

“You need a computer, you got a computer.”

“Whatever they are paying you here, we will triple it.”

“There are no deductions for medical care and retirement.”

“We personally look after your health. You never retire.”

In the dark, Lemuel clears his throat. “Like it is not that I do not appreciate the offer, right? It is more a question of
having a lot of irons in a lot of fires.”

“You want to be extremely careful you do not get burned by none of them,” warns Fast Eddie.

“Concerning our offer,” says Frank, “I would like to have the opportunity to persuade you.”

Lemuel is astonished to hear the A. Nevsky in him say, “You think you have a big enough vocabulary?”

Frank takes Lemuel’s insolence in stride. “In my line of work,” he says pleasantly, “we got a saying: ‘One bullet is worth
a thousand words.’ “

“He is probably making another one of his jokes,” Fast Eddie assures Lemuel.

“Look, this is an important decision,” Frank says. “Do not feel you have to give us an answer right away.”

Fast Eddie reaches out of a cloud of cigar smoke and punches Lemuel playfully in his upper arm. “Yeah, take your sweet time.
Think about it a minute or two before you say yes.”

Territory, you haven’t forgotten my rule of thumb, right? has got to be defended at the goddamn frontier. Which is why I wasn’t
about to let L. Falk get away with a remark like that.

“Where do you come off saying I planned the whole thing?” I shot back. “You’re listed on the masthead as a consenting adult.”

Talk about a feeble defense. “I consented to try your dope,” is what he mumbled. “I did not consent to what came after.”

“You didn’t say not, neither. You didn’t push her away.”

“I did not want to be rude. I did not want to hurt her feelings.”

I was, I openly admit it, getting hot under the collar even though I wasn’t wearing a collar. I was bare-assed, as they say
in Backwater, nude, as they say in movie land. In the bathtub. Having a morning-after-the-night-before conference. With the
Homo chaoticus
in my life.

“What a chuckle,” I said in a tone which made it clear I was not in a chuckling mood. “You pass out doing dope.
When you wake up, Shirley’s going down on you and you don’t want to be rude? Hey, test-fly another one.”

To tell the God-honest truth, you could have knocked me over with a feather when L. Falk agreed, the night before, to join
us, us being Dwayne and Shirley and yours truly, Backwater’s legendary Tender To. L. Falk saw my hollowed-out
Hite Report
open on the table when he came back from the office, my cardinal New Year’s resolution about never doing your own dope doesn’t
apply to Fridays, it was around midnight, the three of us were pretty mellow, we’d been smoking and yakking for hours. He
watched Dwayne, who has talent in the tips of his fingers, I am speaking from first-hand knowledge, hand-rolling thick Thai
truffles. Shirley lit a new one from what was left of an old one, took a long drag and held it out to L. Falk.

Like this was not the first joint he’d been offered, right? but he had up to then always found an excuse to say no, he was
too tired, he was too busy following erotic bands of randomness to their psychotic origins, lah-di-dah, he had to be up and
out to deliver a guest lecture on apple pie at the crack of eleven, whichever. But that night he seemed more … frustrated
than usual, probably because of the altercation—hey,
altercation
has to be in the same league with
averted
and
menstruate
, right?

Where was I? Altercation. I was saying as how L. Falk was pretty strung out from this fight he went and had with What’s-His-Face,
the führer at the Chaos Institute. In my head I have this picture of L. Falk staring at the joint very intently, the way Eve
might’ve eyeballed the first Golden Delicious, he wanted to try it but he was afraid there was a worm in it. He glanced over
at me. I shrugged one of my curvaceous shoulders. He shrugged one of his heavy shoulders. He reached out and took the joint.

“So what do I do?” he asked me.

“Tell Lem what to do, babe,” Dwayne told Shirley.

Shirley plunked herself down on the couch next to L. Falk, draped a leg over his thigh and an arm over his shoulders and gave
him the beginner’s course in dope-smoking. “You insert A into B,” she said. “A is the joint. B is your mouth.”

I got to admit we thought it was hype, Dwayne and Shirley and me, watching him inhale and hold the smoke in
until his eyes watered. Even Mayday seemed to have a smile on her face. L. Falk batted the smoke away with the back of a hand
and told us the dope wasn’t having any effect on him, he didn’t feel different, he suspected my world-famous Thai truffle
might have come from someone’s backyard in the heart of the heart of Brooklyn. Then he started in giggling. When I asked him
what he was giggling at, he said something about how he was gonna take his sweet time before saying yes. Shirley pressed one
of her tiny tits into his arm and asked him what he was saying yes to. Slurring his words, L. Falk explained he was saying
yes to Yahweh-made randomness, which implied a not to man-made randomness. He started rambling on about how he could kick
himself for not seeing it before, it was exactly the kind of information he needed rattling around in his brain.

Shirley probably figured if she could keep him talking, she could keep him smoking. She passed the joint back to L. Falk and
asked what information he had in mind. Still giggling, he informed us he had just about solved the serial murders. He said
the lesson he had learned from the serial murders was applicable to randomness in general. He said the fact that you set out
to manufacture randomness, I think I’m getting this right, right? means the randomness you manufacture has not been selected
randomly. He got the hiccups, took another drag on the joint and held his breath until the hiccups went away. Giggling some
more, he said what was missing from man-made randomness was randomness. Which was another way of saying, this is still L.
Falk talking, not me, that randomness, like God, had to be discovered, as opposed to invented.

Shirley was hanging on his every word and nodding as if he was supplying her with information she couldn’t live without. Dwayne
caught my eye, nodded toward Shirley, then stuck his tongue out and wiggled it around suggestively.

You didn’t need to be a shrink to see what was rattling around in Shirley’s brain.

“Dwayne and me, we both saw Shirley had the hots for you,” I was explaining to L. Falk in the bathtub. I started running more
hot water, I like to sweat when I soak, when I
noticed L. Falk’s circumcised periscope peeking through the bubbles of the bubble bath.

Just thinking about what he was thinking about had turned him into a
Homo erectus
.

Watching my
Homo
turn
erectus
was turning me on. I stoked both our fires. “So you didn’t not like it, right?”

L. Falk seemed to wrestle with the question, I could see the wheels turning in his head, I could see the smoke coming out
of his ears.

“Come clean,” I urged.

“I can say you, at the time I did not not like it. Which I think means I liked it.”

“So describe it.”

“You want me to describe it? Out loud?”

“Yo,” I said. “Everything,” I said. “From E to Z.”

You would’ve thought I’d gone and ordered up periscope.

L. Falk’s lids drifted over his eyes, which I took to mean he wasn’t only remembering, he was reliving. Go with the flow.

“I was dreaming,” he said dreamily, “In my dream, I was hovering over Backwater like a cloud in trousers, that is a line from
a Mayakovsky poem, blocking out the sunlight, when I felt something warm and moist close over my you-know-what.”

“Hey, go ahead and say it.”

He took a deep breath. “Penis.”

I reached through the bubbles with my toes to fondle his periscope. His left foot floated toward me and docked against my
butterfly tattoo. I gave a good imitation of a bitch in heat.

“And then and then and then?”

“And then Shirley came up for air, ‘I’m not very good at this,’ she told me. ‘My mouth’s too small.’ “

“Shirley doing her fishing-for-compliments act. Rock ‘n’ roll.”

“I tried to reassure her. I told her she was doing great. ‘I’m not as good as the Tender To,’ she said with a sigh. ‘The Tender
To’s fantastic.’ I asked her how she knew how good you were. ‘From Dwayne. He says Rain gives incredible head. She has a big
mouth.’ ‘They have made love together, Dwayne and Rain?’ I asked her. ‘Geez, I thought
you knew or I wouldn’ta shot my mouth off. We all been into the occasional major merge. Dwayne and Rain. Me and Rain. Dwayne
and Rain and me,
à trois
, as the French fries say. Haven’t you ever made it
à trois?
’ ”

I slid the heel of my foot along L. Falk’s thigh. “Like have you?”

“À
deux
already strains my capacities.”

“You didn’t go and tell that to Shirley?”

“I can say you I did. ‘You’ll love it, Lem,’ Shirley promised me. Three’s a trip you want to take. You get confused. After
a while you lose track of who’s doing what to who. It gets very … busy, if you see what I mean.’ “

“I told her I saw what she meant,” L. Falk remarked in the tub, “but I did not really see what she meant.”

“Fast forward to the X-rated scenes,” I ordered impatiently.

“We ran out of conversation and she went back to what she had been doing. After a while I asked her if she was trying to bring
me off with her mouth. I heard the words ‘why’ and ‘not’ drift up through her naturally wavy hair.”

“Fucking Shirley,” I said in admiration. In jealousy, too. I honestly didn’t mind her making it with my squeeze, I just didn’t
feature her making it with him better than I make it with him. Besides which I happen to know, bear in mind I am a professional,
her hair is not naturally wavy.

“Afterward,” L. Falk went on, “I could not think of anything to say, so I said thank you. I told her I thought it was a very
elegant gesture to take a friend’s …”

“Hey?”

“… penis into your mouth. Shirley curled up alongside me and slid a stick of gum between her teeth and told me it was no big
deal, all she did was insert A into B, I should not give it a second thought, the pleasure was mostly hers, she liked sucking
the occasional unfamiliar cock, what with variety being the spice and all. Of life. Or words to that effect.”

This was definitely not the moment to educate L. Falk about dudes who thanked you afterwards, as if you were the Tender To
who serviced their goddamn yacht. “You guys sure were courteous,” I said, my voice dripping sarcasm. “Maybe you should collaborate
on a book of etiquette.
You could call it
The Greenhorn’s Guide to Polite Oral Sex.”

L. Falk was so caught up in reliving the scene he missed the sarcasm, but he wasn’t about to let some new slang slip past
his ear. “ ‘Greenhorn’ means what?”

“A greenhorn is a new immigrant who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow and thinks it’s physically possible to wear his heart
on his sleeve. In other words, it’s someone who’s innocent about anatomy. Which is why he needs a guide to oral sex, forget
polite.”

L. Falk shoe horned
greenhorn
into his vocabulary with one of those slow, solemn, pursed-lip nods that professors own the patent to.

“So where was I?” he asked himself. “Shirley said she really wanted to show me she could write her name backward. She made
it sound important. She said the human race was divided into those who could write their name backward and those who could
not. But by the time I came up with a pencil and some paper, she was snoring away. So I tiptoed into the living room.”

I stepped up the antisubmarine patrol in the general vicinity of his periscope. “You’re only up to the M in your E to Z.”

“Which is when I spotted the pile of clothes on the couch. The TV was on with the sound turned off, there was one of those
late-night shows where some girls go off with some men and then they talk dirty about each other and try to guess who said
what about who. I fingered the clothing—your miniskirt, your body-hugging ribbed sweater, your purple tights, your gray Calvin
Klein underpants. I think my hearts, the one in my chest, the one on my sleeve, skipped several beats when I saw Dwayne’s
pinstriped button-down shirt, his designer jeans, his silk boxer shorts.”

“Ooooooooh.”

“I started folding the clothing over the back of the couch, I live in a kind of permanent chaos, I go slumming in order when
I can find any, when I heard sounds coming from the bathroom. I padded down the hallway to the door.”

“Which is warped and never quite closes …”

“Through the crack I could see the two of you in the
tub. You were kneeling between his outstretched legs, which were pink and hairless. You were reaching over his shoulder to
wash his back. Your nipples were centimeters from his granny glasses. His left hand was cupping your right knocker. His right
hand was caressing your left hip.”

“You definitely have an eye for detail. So did you get off on seeing me bare-assed with another dude?”

“I could not believe it,” L. Falk murmured so softly I had to strain to catch his words. “It was extraordinarily beautiful
… I felt as if I was watching you with me. … At the same time I had trouble breathing.”

“I love it that you were looking,” I told him, and I meant every word. If you are what the French call a voyeur, you like
to be, pardon the conjugation, voyied.

“I went back to the bedroom and stretched out alongside Shirley. I lay there in the dark, contemplating the blackness of the
night, squaring circles, following elusive threads of randomness to their chaotic origins … most of all listening. I heard
Shirley exhale between snores, I heard the wind whistle past the window, I heard the wind harp hanging from a branch of the
tree tinkle, I heard the church bell toll the half hour.” L. Falk cleared his throat. “I heard the floorboards squeak. I heard
the couch in the next room open. I heard the soft gasps that escape from the back of your throat when you fuck. …”

“I love it you were listening,” I whispered.

“So now it is your turn to describe everything from E to Z.”

It will go on the credit side of my ledger when I’m nominated for sainthood that I didn’t leap at the opportunity. I told
L. Falk I wasn’t absolutely convinced he was ready to hear the dirty details; he might lose his cool, he might freak out.
He smiled a razor-thin smile which came across as one-third uncertain, two-thirds curious.

“I will freak out if you do not tell me the dirty details. Telling me everything from E to Z proves that the core conspiracy
is with me.”

Core conspiracy! Goddamn L. Falk! There were still parts of him I had not been to yet.

So I thought, What the hell, you want someone to act like a consenting adult, treat him like a consenting adult. “I wanted
to go back to the couch in the living room,” I began,
monitoring his vital signs, so far so good, “but Dwayne was worried you’d come barging in. He wasn’t sure how you’d take it,
seeing the two of us. In the act. So we went on into your office and pushed aside the Nordic skier and opened the couch—hey,
we really have to oil the hinges on it one of these days. Then we sort of hugged awhile, me looking out the window at the
light in the steeple of the Seventh-Day Baptist Church on North Main, him advertising his erection by pushing it into my butt.
Then Dwayne said something like, ‘We might as well do this Hollywood-style, huh, babe?’ Dwayne has this Rudolph Valentino
side to him. He lifted me up and carried me to the bed. Jesus, L. Falk, the goddamn bath’s getting cold. Anyhow, I don’t remember
all the details.”