Brown-Eyed Girl (27 page)

The last remark had the desired effect. Saying nothing, Dickie got up and left. He walked out to his car, wrestled the wind for the car door and won a narrow victory, nearly decapitating himself in the process. He sat for a minute, gritting his teeth, then drove over to the Dunwoodie house, where he found Sally buried among books about the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany, and Brit working through a stack of what looked like bank statements, typing notes into a computer. He asked if he could borrow Sally's assistant for an hour, getting a distracted wave from the boss, who didn't even look up from her books. Brit got into the cruiser and they drove down to El Conquistador, where Dickie ordered an afternoon snack of a large combo plate and a Coke and Brit asked for coffee.

He dipped a chip in the flaming salsa, ate it, beat around the bush. “So how's the work going?”

“Fine,” she said. Dickie did actually seem to have some interest in Meg Dunwoodie's life, but he wasn't spending taxpayers' time to talk about history or poetry with her, as Brit was aware. “Sally's onto some interesting stuff, and she's given me a couple of projects she considers too tedious to be worth her time. Okay by me, as long as she keeps paying.” Brit shrugged, taking a swig of coffee and bumming a forbidden cigarette from her father. “What's on your mind, Daddy?”

“You seeing anybody in particular these days?” Another shrug—she could drive Dickie crazier with shrugging than any human being he'd ever met.

“Nobody particular,” she said. “Why?”

Dickie stared at her, trying to work up a subtle way to ask her, and failing. “What about that Casper lawyer friend of Sam Branch's?”

Brit did not like this line of questioning from her father. She had a plan of her own for helping out Sally Alder while getting a couple of steak dinners out of a cute sleazebag she intended, eventually, to stomp upon. She'd vowed to
get
him after their night on the dance floor, when she'd found out that he was the lawyer suing to get Sally fired. Bobby had no idea that Brit was involved with Sally in any other way than her parents' friendship, a pretty meaningless thing. Brit had told Sally he'd called her, and that she was going to go out with him to see what she could learn. Sally had been against it at first, but Brit insisted that there was absolutely no risk involved, and Sally finally gave in.

Brit had almost been out to dinner and dancing with Bobby once, but he'd had to break the date. They'd talked on the phone some. He had never bothered asking about her work. She was sure he thought she was extremely dumb, a great cover. If she asked the right kinds of questions, she thought he'd let slip some piece of information Sally could use against the lawsuit, some night while he was bragging about how great he was. Brit found it frustrating that her dad might stick his nose in and screw up everything. “I might go out with him, Dad. No big deal,” she said smoothly. “He's good for a filet mignon and a bottle of wine. Got some moves on the dance floor.”

Dickie could tell that she was up to something. “You know he's the one handling the Dunwoodie lawsuit, honey,” he said, searching her face. “Don't you feel a little strange going out with the enemy?” She shrugged again, goddamn it. “Does Sally know?”

“Yeah, she knows. She says that since there are only, like, eleven good-looking, reasonably intelligent single men in Wyoming anyway, she understands why going out with him is better than picking up morons at the Wrangler. She gave me a can of Mace and told me if he tries anything I should Mace his ass.”

Dickie laughed. “That sounds like Sally.” His food came, and he dug in. “Gotta say I really wish you wouldn't see this guy,” he said through a big mouthful of enchilada ranchera. “I can't believe you'd actually go out with a Republican. Next thing you know, you'll be blaming all the problems of the world on welfare mothers and subscribing to the
Wall Street Journal.
If I had my way, the next time he calls, you'd tell him your dad won't let you go out with him.”

Her dad was way too interested in this, Brit realized, much to her frustration. She figured that if he'd just leave her alone, she might be able to make her plan work. But Dickie wouldn't, and it pissed her off. “I wasn't aware I'd asked your permission, Dad. I'm not fifteen anymore,” she sulked, snagging a tortilla chip and dunking it into his refried beans. “Why don't you, like, just put him in jail and get it over with?”

The more Sally read, the less it seemed she knew about Meg Dunwoodie and Ernst Malthus. She was learning a lot about the Germans who fought Nazi domination in various ways. There were cells of resistance among the Communists, and certain groups in the churches, as well as in the army and civil service. A number of influential men in and around the famous Kreisau Circle had evidently managed to travel to other countries throughout the war, that is, until the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, when virtually all of them were tortured and executed. Rainer Malthus, who turned up in virtually every account of the conspiracy, had been a military man who was considered an expert in foreign policy, and he'd been one of those who showed up in places like Stockholm and London, making contact with British and American intelligence agents. The problem was that anti-Nazi Germans who stayed in the Fatherland, holding important government jobs or military posts or positions in business, could never quite convince potential foreign allies that they weren't double agents. No matter how passionately they insisted that they were determined to bring Hitler down, and no matter how much the Allies wanted to encourage the German fifth column, the British, especially, remained suspicious.

You couldn't entirely blame the Allies for leaving the Black Orchestra to its tragic fate. History was full of plots, counterplots, deep undercover agents, and opportunists playing both ends against the middle. The more she read about the people who had lived through Europe's hell, the more she understood that their choices were unbelievably complicated. Sure, there were plenty of people of all kinds who signed on to the Nazi program and cheered it to the end, but they weren't always easy to distinguish from the ones who informed on their neighbors because they didn't want the next midnight knock on the door to be at their house. There were people who spent most of the war as “good Germans” who committed isolated heroic acts of sabotage or mercy.

Ernst Malthus was a diamond trader, a Christian in a business dominated by Jews. He was rich and very well connected. He was a moving target. The Gestapo had certainly been watching him, but had left him alone at least enough to permit him to send money to a Jewish refugee in America. He'd even
been
to America in the middle of the war, according to Maude. Had the Gestapo been using him? Had he been using them for purposes of his own? Had he been hooked up with the American OSS, the agency that eventually became the CIA? What had happened to Ernst after 1943 was a mystery, and Sally was hoping to hell that the government records she'd requested through the Freedom of Information Act would provide some answers. But the government's responses to FOIA requests were maddeningly slow and capricious. It could take anywhere from months to years to get the stuff, and there was of course no telling what records there might be. Ezra had said he'd put in a word with some of his friends in Washington to see if they couldn't speed things up.

Then there was the matter of the diamonds. Hawk had made it clear to her that he planned to be out “in the field,” as the geologists said, a lot of the time. This time, he'd been on a field trip in the Mojave for three long weeks, and she'd had to wait all that time to show him the stones they 'd found in Meg Dunwoodie's treasure closet. Now he was back at last, and that night they sat in Meg's living room, enjoying a whiskey before dinner. She'd planned to lay out the whole amazing story of Meg Dunwoodie and Ernst Malthus and Ezra Sonnenschein and Maude Stark, then tell him about the closet, then show him the gems, but she decided she couldn't wait. “I've got something to show you,” she'd said.

“Does it involve garter belts?” he asked hopefully, looking forward to an end to three frustrating weeks of celibacy, trailing his fingers up her leg.

“No,” she answered, half-wishing she'd thought of that, “but it might get you in the mood anyway.”

She'd brought out the velvet bag and taken out the little packets of paper, watched him open the complicated folds as if he knew what he was doing. And of course, he did. He'd worked diamond exploration in South America and Africa along with other exotic gigs, she thought, recalling the story about the Brazilian girlfriend in Houston with a grimace.

As the stones fell into his hand, Hawk whistled and took a big swallow of Jim Beam. Sally looked at him expectantly. He looked back. “Where'd you get these?”

“They were in the upstairs closet, along with a bunch of other stuff that should have been in a bank vault long ago. I'll tell you all about it over dinner. What are they?”

“Well,” said Hawk, taking another swig, “in my moderately expert opinion, these are diamonds of various cuts and colors.”

“That much we figured out,” she said. “What else can you tell me about them?”

“I'd estimate the weights at anywhere from ten to thirty carats,” he said, “and I'd need a jeweler's loupe to tell you anything about the quality.” He held the largest, a yellow oval, up to the light, carefully bracketing it between his thumb and forefinger. “Pretty.”

“Can you tell me anything about where they might have come from?”

“Not definitively. Could be lots of places. India, Brazil, Tanzania, and of course South Africa. The pink one,” he said, picking up a teardrop-shaped gem, one of the smaller ones, “might have come from Australia. But then again, it's hard to tell, because they've probably been treated.”

“Treated?” Sally asked. “What do you mean?”

“Irradiation. You can get a colorless diamond to turn green or blue if you expose it to radiation. If you irradiate some diamonds and then heat them up, you can get yellow or orange or pink. Naturally colored stones are incredibly rare and unbelievably expensive, so most of the colored diamonds you see have been treated. That's probably the case with these—they're pretty big, Mustang. Untreated colored diamonds this size would probably be in a museum, not in a closet in Laramie.”

“Could you tell if they'd been treated?” she asked, feeling a little disappointed.

“Sure,” he answered, holding a blue square-cut gem up to the light, “with the right equipment. But people who really know diamonds could tell you just by looking at the color. Hell, Crawford could probably tell you exactly where and when they were mined.”

“But he's in Arizona. Could anybody around here tell us that? Somebody in the geology department maybe?”

“Sally, the minute you show those things to anybody, the whole world will know they're here. Even if they're treated diamonds and every one of them is seriously flawed, they're worth money—some ignorant rich bimbo like Nattie Langham would pay a fortune just to flash a big fancy rock in the face of the girls at the Realtors' convention in Miami. If by some miracle they're the real thing”—he looked down at the gems glinting in his hand—“they could be worth millions.”

“Shit,” said Sally.

“Right,” said Hawk, clearing his throat and taking a drink of whiskey. “I'd really like to show these to my dad. He'd know what he was looking at, and he's so antisocial, you could be sure he wouldn't blab.”

She held out her hand, and he poured the diamonds into her palm. They seemed to tingle on her skin, like freezing fire. They made her shiver. “Could he come up here? I've got to get these things to the bank as soon as possible.”

Hawk shook his head. “Not any time soon. He hates cold weather, and you know how hard it is to get him out of Jumping Cholla. He and Maria are planning to come up here for a visit in May. You could get them out of the vault for a day and show them to him then.”

“Great,” she said, handing him back the diamonds to fold back into the packets and put into the bag. “Another delay. Let's see, this is February. Only four more months of winter, and I can sit around here and listen to the wind howl and wait for the government to process my FOIA request and wait for your father to show up. By June I ought to be completely frigging nuts.”

Hawk ignored her raving and looked at the velvet bag in his hand. “You know, Sally, it makes me jittery having these things in the house. If we were in Brazil, I'd put 'em under my pillow and sleep with a loaded gun.”

She rose, went to get the Jim Beam bottle, and poured them more whiskey. “So big diamonds make you nervous?” she asked, putting down the bottle, taking the bag from him and tucking it down the front of her V-neck sweater, into her bra. “Maybe just a little edgy?” She sat down and put her legs in his lap. “Kind of off-balance and excitable?” He put down his whiskey and his fingers crept back to garter belt country.

So much for one source of frustration, anyway.

Part Four

Chapter 27
March Madness

Springtime in the Rockies. Forget those Sierra Club calendar pictures of alpine fields riotous with wildflowers amid snowy peaks and improbably blue skies. Most people in Laramie referred to this particular time of year as “Mud Season.” The skiing was sloppy, the roads impassable, and the wind, well. One dark gray day stretched into the next and the next. Going outside for even a minute meant bundling up from head to toe, leaning at a forty-fivedegree angle into a headwind, freezing half your face in a crosswind, or flying on a tailwind. Everybody started using the term “cabin fever” and calling their travel agent.

Edna did not believe in driving to her office. She arrived home in the six o'clock darkness that Friday afternoon in late March, nearly defeated by a very long week and the eight-block war with nature. She was ready for a glass of wine, a pleasant dinner with friends. Or at least that was what she told herself. Another part of her wanted to sit in the bathtub for two hours, drink a good bottle of California red, scramble up a couple of eggs, and fall into bed.

Not possible. Company was coming—Sally and Hawk, Virginia Minor, the University lawyer, and Minor's partner, Dr. Helen Singer, Laramie's hilarious orthodontist. Edna got out the osso buco she'd made last night, started it warming gently, and shuffled through the mail on the kitchen counter. Thank God, their plane tickets for Cabo San Lucas had arrived. It hadn't been easy talking Tom into a spring break vacation that would feature lots of lying around instead of daily mortal risk and cardiovascular exertion. She'd had to make all the damn reservations and promise him many margaritas and torrid sex under slowly revolving ceiling fans. She could hear him getting in the shower upstairs, could envision his sweaty gym clothes in a heap on the floor where he always left them following his Friday afternoon basketball game. He redeemed himself every week, however, by making sure to have a bottle of wine breathing when she got home. Ravenswood zinfandel, special ordered from Napa. He'd read her mind.

This was going to be one of those dinner parties that ended up all shoptalk if she wasn't careful. She hadn't seen much of Sally or Virginia Minor in the past few weeks, but the Dunwoodie lawsuit had started gobbling up more and more of everyone's time. Lawyers from both sides had been taking endless depositions and requesting mountains of documents. The Faculty for Academic Freedom, as Bosworth's group called itself, was clearly flirting with the idea of adding a discrimination suit to the mix. FAF (a.k.a. Byron Bosworth) had contacted the University's equal employment opportunity officer, who'd then called Edna and asked her for records indicating that the Dunwoodie Chair hiring procedure had conformed to federal affirmative action guidelines. And of course, it didn't. The Dunwoodie Foundation (i.e., Maude and Ezra) had only one candidate for the Chair, Sally Alder, and that was that. No search, no oversight, no paper trail to fall back on.

And so, ironically, Edna had spent the past couple of weeks, on top of her regular duties as dean, figuring out how to get around affirmative action procedures in defense of feminist scholarship. Sheesh. Loathing herself, she'd called Virginia Minor and told her to see how California's recent abolition of affirmative action (and the push to do the same thing in Texas) might be useful. “Ick,” Minor said, and Edna had to agree.

Edna, meanwhile, decided to do a little research of her own. As she well knew, a place like the University of Wyoming hadn't had uniform hiring procedures until, really, the 1980s. When she'd finally been hired for a tenuretrack job in 1982, with years of teaching, several books, and an international reputation, the anthropology department's idea of an open search had been to make her compete against the wife of the new basketball coach, a woman who made her own arrowheads. The guys in FAF (a list of the membership revealed that all eighteen members were, coincidentally, white males) had for the most part been hired long before, according to the practices of the old boy network. A department chair would call up one of his buddies from graduate school, ask if he had any students who needed a job, and that was usually that. Edna was willing to bet that most of Boz's pals had never even had to interview for their positions before they signed the contracts that had made them UW's for life.

Edna liked to be sure. She'd gone after their personnel records, found pretty much nothing documenting the hiring procedures on any of them, and then called in the lawyers. By the time Virginia Minor's crew got done interviewing the FAF members about their own experiences going to work for the University, they'd decided not to file an EEO complaint. The University's employment officer, an MBA who thought affirmative action was a bunch of bullshit anyway, was relieved not to have to pursue the matter.

Stuff like this made Edna wonder why she'd been crazy enough to become an administrator. Ick, indeed. Long ago, she'd resolved to focus on the satisfying things in her life. You usually had to put up with a lot of crap to get what you wanted. She poured herself a glass of wine, asked herself the question, “If you could be doing anything at all right now, what would it be?” Standing on a hill in Katmandu? Bodysurfing at Cabo? Soon enough. She took a sip of lovely zinfandel, smiled, then set her glass aside. She didn't have time for a bath, but if she hurried, she could catch Tom in the shower.

Within fifteen minutes of the guests' arrival, Edna, Sally, and Virginia Minor had gone into the kitchen to talk shop, while Tom, Helen Singer, and Hawk sat in the living room shoveling tapénade onto crackers and arguing about who would win the NCAA basketball tournament. Helen, as an orthodontist, felt compelled to defend the idea that the team with the best-fitting mouth guards had an overwhelming advantage, supporting her claims with the kind of detailed description of athletes' oral habits that listeners other than Tom and Hawk might not have found such a screamingly funny accompaniment to tapénade.

This was Sally's first social encounter with Virginia Minor, who arrived, amazingly, in jeans artfully torn out at the knees, a lime green angora sweater, and Doc Martens. Virginia refused the zinfandel in favor of a vodka martini and collapsed onto a stool to watch while Sally washed spinach leaves and Edna got a
poire bruleé
ready to pop in the oven to be done just in time for dessert.

“How in the world do you find the time and energy to cook, Edna?” Virginia asked. “By the time Helen and I get home we barely have the strength to argue about who has to pick up the phone to call Domino's. Last fall she decided we needed more home-cooked meals, and we still have the freezer full of Lean Cuisines. Neither one of us can manage to put the little plastic packets in the boiling water.”

“It must be hard work, saving my ass,” Sally commented. “After a day of your kind of heavy lifting, I'd settle for a bowl of cornflakes.”

“Actually,” said Virginia, snagging a slice of pear, “they're pretty good with water if you can't manage to get to the grocery store to buy milk. Low-fat, too.”

“So how's the ass-saving going, Vinnie?” Edna asked.

Virginia shrugged. “We're eating up a lot of staff time researching precedents and talking to people at Yale and the University of Washington. The Yalies haven't been all that much help. What with their problems in the past, Yale doesn't want any part of endowed chairs for the foreseeable future. When donors with big bucks call, the Yale development people try to steer them toward giving the money to the general fund or bankrolling capital improvements. The Washington people are standing by the UPS chair endowment, and they're betting the controversy will pass in a couple of years. Hey, they figure they'll be a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft any minute, if they're lucky and their legislature doesn't just abolish higher education.”

Sally sipped the excellent wine and looked disgusted. “I've never understood the argument that one person's freedom to do irrelevant research is suppressed if somebody they disagree with gets hired to do their own equally trivial research. Can't we just hit them with the Sly Stone Brief?”

“The Sly Stone Brief?” Edna asked, stirring the tantalizing stuff on the stove.

“Something about different strokes, for different folks,” Sally said.

“Sure, we can do that,” Virginia answered. “And we can also point out all the places where donors have endowed chairs at public institutions, specifying any old conditions they chose, and nobody made a peep. We can subpoena all kinds of university officials from all over the place, and holders of chairs, to testify to the fact that the positions they hold aren't keeping anybody from doing anything they please. We could even open up our own can of worms and start talking about one or two chairs that have been endowed here, say, by agribiz, with the express purpose of creating government-subsidized labs in which to research the cheapest way to turn an ordinary cow into unimpeded cash flow.” Virginia paused and got up to freshen her martini.

“The real problem, of course, is the principle of faculty governance,” Virginia explained to Sally, who didn't really need it all explained again but who was listening carefully. “The way you were hired breaks rules that were written to bust up the old boy networks in the first place, and give women and minorities a decent chance. And, of course, the idea that the faculty ought to have established procedures and a regular role in personnel matters is reasonable enough in theory. But in practice it gets a lot stickier when, as is always the case, half the faculty hate the other half's guts. And naturally it's a lot worse when you find out that the other side has somebody like Elroy Foote paying the legal fees. I feel like somebody who keeps a gun around as protection against prowlers, and then gets shot with it when some creep breaks in.”

The mention of break-ins twisted something in Sally's stomach. “What about
my
academic freedom?” she complained. “Here I am, working on a biography of Wyoming's most important writer, a project everybody in the state ought to be freaking begging me to get finished and out before a grateful public, and I've had to deal with everything from a homicidal skinhead to a neo-fascist gazillionaire who's willing to bankrupt the University to get me the hell out of town! And I used to think the Boz curling his lip at me was a problem.”

“Well, at least it looks like they've backed off the EEO complaint,” Edna said, deciding that a little gossip was in order to lighten things up. “I found out today how the Boz was hired.” Virginia and Sally looked up at her with interest. “I heard it from that secretary in the provost's office who's been here since the Civil War. You know how academics are always joking that the only way they know where the good jobs will be next year is to read the obituaries in the
New York Times
? Evidently, Bosworth spent about five years hanging around Columbia after he finished his dissertation, getting increasingly desperate because nobody would hire him. At the time, the UW history department had one famous member, a guy named Hilson Hobby-Orson, who'd written like sixty definitive books on the economic history of the Roman Empire.

“One day in the middle of the fall semester of 1964, Hobby-Orson was explaining to his ancient history class how the U.S. was going through its version of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and they had better all tell their parents to vote for Goldwater, and he evidently worked himself up to a myocardial infarction and expired before their very eyes. Bosworth saw Hobby-Orson's obit in the
Times,
but instead of waiting for the job to be advertised or even rumored, Boz got on the phone right away, called the history department, and told them he was a postdoc in ancient history at Columbia, and he could be on a plane the next day if they wanted him to take over Hobby-Orson's classes. I mean, the body was still warm. The department chair just said, yeah, okay, whatever. And Boz has been here ever since.”

“That's good. That's very very good. And the man wants to question the way I was hired,” Sally said, shaking her head.

“They say lawyers are ambulance-chasers,” Virginia commented. “First time I ever heard of anybody chasing a hearse.”