Irish Gilt (6 page)

“How about later?”

“You're serious.”

He was. It wasn't his day to run, but he was serious. He didn't want to leave her at her dorm and then wait for Tenet's next class. That would be next week.

An hour later, they were running together on the lake path. Josh kept it slow. She made it around the first lake and then cried, “Help.” They sat on a bench and were soon surrounded by ducks.

“How often do you do this?”

“Every other day.”

“You're not even breathing hard.”

“I'm used to it.”

“I didn't realize how out of shape I am.” She paused and laughed.

“What?”

“Wait till you see Roger Knight.”

He saw him the next day. Knight looked like he could float over the stadium on game days, a real blimp. Rebecca took him up to the huge professor and said that Josh wanted to sit in. “He lives in Zahm Hall.” “Ah.”

“You can ask him about the Treaty of Westphalia.”

She had to explain that. Knight seemed amused. By the look of him, Josh would have expected him to be as disorganized as Tenet, but then he began talking—and that's what it was, talking, not lecturing. Even better, Josh had no trouble following.

Knight was talking about the summer lecture circuits Zahm used to take part in. “Anyone ever heard of chautauquas?”

“An Indian tribe?” It was a guess from the back of the room.

Knight laughed. Josh raised his hand and explained what the chautauqua circuit was. Rebecca beamed at him.

Knight took up where Josh left off. Then he was on to Zahm's interest in evolution and the trouble it had gotten him into. He quoted the great man to the effect that we now—Zahm's “now,” that is—knew the earth was at least ten thousand years old. “You have to remember how long ago this was. Even so, it sounded like a dangerous position to many.”

The period went by like a breeze, and Josh was wishing he had known about this course when he signed up for Continental epistemology. When the time was up, no one wanted to leave, so it went on for another half hour informally. Finally, Knight got to his feet, everyone pulling for him. He made it.

They all escorted him out to his golf cart. Clambering in, he announced, “I'm having an open house Saturday afternoon. You're all invited.” Then he was off, scattering pedestrians as he zoomed along the walk.

Rebecca said, “You have to come.”

“You're going?”

“Of course. It's better than a class.”

The class had met in Brownson Hall, behind Sacred Heart. Once it had been a convent; now it had been remodeled to contain a few classrooms and faculty offices, including Knight's. They were passing Washington Hall when someone called Rebecca's name. A middle-aged guy. She ran up to him and gave him a hug, and then she was introducing Josh to her Uncle X.

“How's the research going?” Rebecca asked.

“Slowly.”

She reached out and patted her uncle's tummy. “Don't let yourself go.”

He backed away from her, embarrassed. “It comes with age.”

“Age! You're younger than Mom.”

Although he had initiated the encounter, Kittock seemed eager to leave them. Rebecca stopped babbling about the class they were coming from and let him go with the suggestion that they get together soon for dinner at Papa Vino's. He nodded and then turned and marched away, out of place among the young.

“The black sheep,” Rebecca whispered.

“How so?”

“I'll tell you sometime.”

That was okay with Josh. He preferred having her bright-eyed curiosity directed at himself.

11

Ricardo Esperanza—Bernice always insisted on calling him Ricardo—had emigrated from Argentina, where he might have led another sort of life, one of bourgeois poverty. His father had taught courses at several universities in Buenos Aires and spent his days in a private institute funded by CONICET, the rough Argentine equivalent of the National Endowment for the Humanities. None of this brought in enough money for a family of five children, and the Argentine economy offered little basis for future hope for those children. Ricardo had attended the Catholic University of Buenos Aires, which offered little more than a passport to the kind of hand-to-mouth existence his father could provide. For all that, his memories of his homeland were pleasant. He had spent long evenings strolling the Via Florida, flirting with girls. It was a matter of honor as well as habit to stay up half the night. Everyone did. When he went to the opera and emerged at midnight, all the restaurants were going full blast and the night was young. After Bernice divorced him, he thought of returning, but how could he explain to his family what had happened to his marriage? He couldn't explain it to himself.

Of course, he had lied about his job; he just told them he was employed by the University of Notre Dame. He earned more on the maintenance crew than his father had ever earned as a professor of classics. The drop in social status had spelled economic security. Marrying Bernice had been another downward step, so it wounded him the more that she had left him. During his life with Bernice, he had more or less concealed his origins, determined to dwell on her level. Now that he was alone, he had renewed his earlier interests: the classics his father had taught him even before he went to school; music. He might have been rinsing his soul of the house filled with gaudy paperbacks and the constant thunder of rock. Still, he missed Bernice, and little Henry, more than he would have admitted. His visits on the days he was permitted time with his son were seasons in hell.

Now Bernice was working on campus! He had learned this from Marjorie when he ran into her at the supermarket.

“I suppose you got her the job?”

Well, there were women in maintenance, but it was pretty hard to think of Bernice as one of them.

“Notre Dame is the biggest local employer.”

“Maybe I'll apply.”

Marjorie was the kind of American woman he had imagined before he came here. One thing he had to give Bernice, she let him make the first move. When he left Marjorie he felt that he was escaping. Even if she had been a lot better looking, Ricardo still considered himself to be married to Bernice.

Bernice. What the hell was she doing at Notre Dame? Working as a waitress, it turned out. He had sat in his pickup in the parking lot of Grace and watched her come to work. Throughout that day, he went back, unable to believe it. He was more embarrassed about her new job than she was. When he had taunted her about getting a job, he hadn't meant it. His mother had never worked, no matter how tight things were. It was unmanly to let your wife work. A husband was supposed to support his wife and children, and in this country he could, so why the hell were all these women working?

Then one day he saw her sitting at an outside table with an older man. Bernice was all over the guy. She must have taken lessons from Marjorie. He tried to tell himself it was nothing, just some professor she wanted to tell about all her crazy ambitions. Sure. But he found out who the guy was.

Xavier Kittock. Like Xavier Cugat, from American movies he had seen in Buenos Aires.

The next day, Ricardo hopped out of his pickup and confronted the guy on a campus walk.

“I am Ricardo Esperanza.”

“Do I know you?”

“Bernice is my wife.”

He just nodded.

“You know Bernice?” Ricardo persisted.

“The girl who works in Grace.”

“Keep away from her. She's my wife.”

He stepped closer, and the man danced away. Several people stopped, wondering what the maintenance guy was up to.

“Just remember,” Ricardo growled, and went back to his pickup.

12

“Kittock? Eggs Kittock?” Boris Henry reacted to the mention of the man currently doing research in the archives with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. “We were roommates here. There were three of us together. Eggs, Paul Lohmam, and myself.” For a moment, Greg feared that Boris was going to drift into reminiscing about his student days, always a threat where alumni are concerned. “What the devil is Eggs Kittock doing in the archives?”

Greg assumed a pious look. It was not for him to divulge one person's research to another. This moral high ground had the added advantage of making his silence seem virtuous.

“How often does he come?”

“Often.”

Boris was led to the glassed-in workroom, and his attention was drawn immediately to the row of boxes on the table. He hardly glanced at them before asking why they were already out. “This is the stuff I wanted to look at. The correspondence.”

“There's more. It's catalogued by year.”

“Has Kittock been looking at this stuff?”

“Yes.”

With an effort, Henry let it go. There was no point in letting the archivist see how upset he was. But Eggs Kittock, for the love of God! Research? The workroom door closed after Walsh, and Henry opened the flip top of the first box, but then he just sat there. Someone was playing a trick on him. Someone had somehow got wind of his interest in Zahm, particularly the Latin American travels, and was using it to tweak him. Then he remembered. Of course. Eggs had come through Kansas City some months ago, and after a sumptuous dinner they sat up half the night talking. What hadn't they talked about? Like an idiot, he must have said enough about Zahm for Eggs to put two and two together, though how he managed to remember anything after all they had drunk was a wonder. He looked awful when Boris introduced him to Clare late the following morning. Clare, the wonder woman, said she immediately recognized Eggs from the photograph in Boris's office of the three roommates in their senior year. More important, she mixed him a bromo and restored him to more or less normal condition.

“What a night,” he moaned.

“I don't want to hear about it.”

Clare sounded almost flirty, and Boris looked at her in surprise.

Maybe she thought she could jolly visiting firemen without complications. For a fleeting moment, Boris recalled their own near thing. He wouldn't say he was jealous, but, hey, who was the boss here anyway?

“You want a bromo, too?” Clare asked him.

“What for?” At the moment, he would have heatedly denied feeling queasy. Drinking too much almost seemed meritorious, since he never felt the impulse to gamble then. The casinos demanded an absolutely clear head.

Of course, he and Eggs would have talked of Paul. Their own lives, his and Paul's, seemed obscenely successful compared with poor Eggs's. On the basis of some patents used in communication satellites, Paul had made his pile and now had all the time in the world to devote himself to reading and music.

“You should have married,” Boris had said to Eggs.

“It's too late for that,” He glanced at Clare when he said it, though.

“Oh, come on.”

“Or I'm too selfish. You're in no rush to escape the single state, I notice.”

“There's plenty of time.”

“Clare is a very beautiful woman,” Eggs said later.

“Is she? I don't even notice anymore.”

So that was a possibility, Boris thought as he sat in the workroom of the archives at Notre Dame. It would be like Eggs to plan an elaborate leg pull, but would old Paul have gone along with it? Then again, the three of them had played two-on-one jokes as undergraduates. Lots of fun, except when you were the one on the receiving end.

What he couldn't comprehend was the thought of Eggs Kittock sitting here in the archives doing research, and on Zahm. It made no sense. His impression was that Eggs spent most of his time on the golf course down in Sarasota, where he had settled. Eggs had been a mediocre student and would have floundered after graduation if he hadn't gone into the service. He had been a twenty-year man in the navy, maybe a few years more. That had been his element. He had been through a good share of the hell of recent years and had survived to claim his pension. Then he had embarked on a number of quixotic schemes. The sunken treasure expedition! Once Boris remembered that, Eggs working in the archives no longer seemed a joke.

The Three Musketeers had kept in touch by way of e-mail since Eggs got out of the navy, but the only time they had all gotten together was at a class reunion three years ago. It had been wonderful. Eggs had seemed bemused by the fact that Boris was in the rare books business.

“Does it pay?”

Boris made a noncommital noise. Both Eggs and Paul knew he had come into a fortune when he lost his wife and father-in-law in that plane crash. Maybe they thought dealing in rare books was just a hobby. At the time of the reunion, Boris had not yet become fascinated with John Zahm, but he had mentioned the lucrative Notre Dame facet of his business. Eggs's visit to Kansas City had come after that, and Boris was suddenly sure he had told Eggs of the Zahm diary. Of course, anyone who got interested in Zahm could have come up with the same hunch Boris had, but given Eggs's interest in buried treasure it seemed a certainty that he had. The fact was that no one during all the years since Zahm died had put two and two together. But Eggs, for crying out loud. Did the guy read anything? Now that he thought of it, Boris remembered Eggs asking if there was a copy of Richard Sullivan's book on Notre Dame among his holdings.

“Check the Web site. I'm sure we have it.”

“I've been reading Ed Fisher and Tom Stritch.”

Two professors who had published their memoirs, which concentrated on Notre Dame. Suddenly, it no longer seemed implausible that Eggs had hit on the same idea Boris had. His hand went out to the archival box, filled with Zahm letters. They were on the table because Eggs had asked for them.

He was no longer in a mood to pursue the spoor that had brought him back to campus. First, he had to talk with Eggs.

13

Seven students showed up on Saturday afternoon at the Knights' apartment, where Roger treated them to huge bowls of popcorn and the drink of their choice. Most of them followed his example and had soft drinks, but there was Phil's beer for those who wanted it. It was when he was talking with Rebecca that Roger learned that her uncle was on campus, working in the archives. Greg had mentioned Xavier Kittock, the man who was looking through Zahm materials, but it was a surprise to learn he was Rebecca's uncle.