Act of Darkness (34 page)

Gregor Demarkian came downstairs without the book, but with the letter, waving it in the air as if it were wet.

“You and I,” he told Tibor, “are going to have to talk.”

N
OW IT WAS THE
twenty-ninth of October, just days before Halloween, and Tibor was sitting in the high-ceilinged, long-windowed office he had been assigned in Liberty Hall, trying to work out the particulars of a lecture he was supposed to give on the theological foundations of
The Federalist Papers
and their relationship to the Greek Schism. As it turned out, he had not been hired to teach philosophy in the ordinary sense, but to take part in something called an “interdisciplinary program.” Like all the rest of the faculty in Liberty Hall—Donegal Steele, Alice Elkinson, Katherine Branch, Kenneth Crockett—he worked exclusively with students “pursuing a major” called The American Idea. He even liked it. American university jargon drove him crazy. American university structure bewildered him completely. Tibor didn’t think he’d ever get used to “majors” and “core courses” and “remedial education.” Still, this place, Independence College, was a good one. In the two months he had been here, he had been almost perfectly happy.

Except for one thing.

His desk was pushed up against one of the windows looking out of the back of the building, across Minuteman Field to the tall gray upthrust of mottled granite called King George’s Scaffold. Back in the fall of 1776, the students at this college had decided to do two things to show their solidarity with the signers of the Declaration of Independence. First they had forced the faculty to change the college’s name from Queen Anne’s to Independence. (From what Tibor could figure out, force had not been strictly necessary.) Then they had burned the mad old king himself in effigy, against that outcrop of rock. They had gone on burning him every year since, on bonfires that got higher and higher, in effigies that got more and more wild. The effigy Tibor could see—a straw man with clothes from the Drama Department, a head made from a jack-o’-lantern, and a gold foil crown—sat on a gold-painted plywood throne that had been built on stilts so tall the throne’s seat was two-thirds of the way up the Scaffold. Around those stilts, for the past month, students had been piling kindling and firewood. Three days ago, the pile had reached the effigy’s feet. Today, it reached its knees. By full dark on Halloween—when one of the students would douse the pile with kerosene and throw a match on it, making the whole thing go up like an exploding oil well—the straw man would probably have firewood in his lap.

Tibor looked down at his papers again, then up and out the window again, and sighed. His door was open—he liked visitors—but it was four o’clock in the afternoon. There was nobody in the building but old Miss Maryanne Veer in the office, and Miss Veer wasn’t likely to leave her post beside the chairman’s desk just to have a talk with him. Tibor wondered if she would leave it once there was a chairman at the desk. The old chairman had been diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of cancer just before the start of the semester, and taken himself off to Houston. The program had been deadlocked over the choice of a new chairman ever since—but that was in the realm of what Tibor thought of as “academic politics,” and he preferred to keep out of politics of any kind. He’d had enough of that in his former life.

What he could never get enough of, maybe because it had been nonexistent, even unthinkable, in his early life, were pets. That was what he was really doing here, so very late in the afternoon, when he had a perfectly good suite with a fireplace in Constitution House. Independence College was full of pets, and not just the dogs that faculty kept for company or the cats students kept in their rooms. There was a chipmunk who lived near Minuteman Field and came out to eat from the hands of the students lunching there. There was a family of deer so tame they would allow anyone who offered them salt to pet them. Mostly, there was Lenore, a great black raven who had turned up out of nowhere two years before, checked them all out, and decided to move in. She would fly into open windows—or tap on ones that were closed, asking to be let in—and eat whatever you fed her.

Tibor and Lenore had an understanding, a bargain entered into on the second or third day Tibor had been in this office. Lenore showed up every day except Sunday at four o’clock, and Tibor fed her crumbs from the pastries he brought up from Philadelphia every week after he’d gone down to say the Liturgy in Holy Trinity Church. Lida Arkmanian and Hannah Krekorian—and all the other good ladies on Cavanaugh Street, grandmotherly or otherwise—were thoroughly convinced that, in spite of a full college dining program and a campus snack bar that operated twenty-four hours a day, he had to be starving.

Tibor didn’t wear a watch—every time he tried, the watch in question went missing—but he could see the clock face on Declaration Tower, and it said ten minutes after four. He rapped his fingers against his desk and strained to see as far across the field beyond his window as was possible. For some reason, Lenore wasn’t going to come to him today, and that was worrisome.

What was even more worrisome was the fact that he was sitting here, minute after minute, putting himself in danger of being burst in on by the one faculty member likely to turn up in this building at this time of day: the Great Doctor Donegal Steele. The Great Doctor Donegal Steele was the single fly in the otherwise perfect ointment of Tibor Kasparian’s happiness at Independence College.

Actually, the Great Doctor Donegal Steele was the major fly in the ointment of the happiness of everybody who had anything to do with Liberty Hall, but because that knowledge was part of what Tibor called “academic politics,” he didn’t know it.

He only knew that the Great Doctor Donegal Steele was an unalloyed, dyed-in-the-wool, world-class son of a bitch.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1991 by Orania Papazoglou

cover design by Heather Kern

ISBN 978-1-4532-9309-6

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