The Big Dig (25 page)

“Yes.”

“Damn.” He worried his lips some more and seemed at a loss as to how to continue. He had faint lines at the corners of his drooping eyes. I placed him at forty to forty-five, give or take a couple years.

“Are you ready to tell me your name?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

A clatter of dishes and silverware penetrated the soundproofing, reminded me that people were finishing up lunch not fifteen feet away. Sounded like a hapless waiter had dropped a tray in the kitchen.

I said, “Often prospective clients consult me about hypothetical matters. Or they might talk about something that's happened to a friend.”

“I have a friend,” he said, leaning forward eagerly, “who is being blackmailed. He is—he doesn't know what to do.”

“Your friend could pay up,” I said sharply. Then I took a deep breath and decided I wasn't behaving in a manner likely to produce paid employment. I was behaving more like a pissed-off woman who didn't enjoy being followed around. “Sorry. I was thinking that your ‘friend' could have made an appointment to see me.”

“I was—I should have—I didn't mean to alarm you.”

“You
didn't
alarm me. Go on.”

“About the blackmail. My friend
has
paid. He thought it was over, but … it's more than that … It's the threat. I find—my friend finds he can no longer live with the constant threat of exposure.”

I don't know what I'd expected—police harassment, a missing friend, an unfaithful wife—but blackmail took me by surprise. Blackmail is an unusual complaint. Blackmail isn't what it used to be. Secrets aren't what they used to be. What with confessional TV, and talk-radio jocks hosting gay cross-dressers and their second wives, and internet chat rooms devoted to perversion, it takes a certain type of deed to provoke modern blackmail, and more importantly, a certain type of person to attract it.

“Tell me more about your friend,” I said.

“He is in a position of trust.”

“Working with money?”

“Working with young people.”

“Very young people, or people the age you might encounter at Harvard?”

The mention of Harvard was enough to make his hands clench. “Do you know how few tenured faculty positions exist? Tenured positions at fine universities?”

“I can see where your friend might want to keep his job.”

“He does, believe me. He does.”

The man probably looked familiar because I'd seen him around the Square. A Harvard professor. Not one of the famous ones, not a local celebrity like Henry Louis Gates. Still, the quality of my prospective clientele was on the rise.

“Was your friend's action illegal?” I asked.

“What action?”

“I assume your friend is being blackmailed for a reason.”

A fine sheen of sweat was visible on the man's forehead and I wondered if he was going to balk at detailing his imaginary friend's offense.

“No, not illegal. I—my friend, upon consideration, would call it immoral—although considerations of morality—I don't know, times changed, didn't they? The rules changed, somewhere along the line. Sex was—is—always about power, but we—we deluded ourselves, told ourselves how irresistible we were, told ourselves bullshit stories. I deluded myself. I thought of myself as an individual, a man, myself, not some powerful god-like professor.”

I didn't interrupt, but I didn't like the way the conversation was going.

“She was of age, and in fact, she initiated the, er, contact.” He looked me directly in the eye. “I should say, the affair, the relationship. What the hell do you call it without sounding like an idiot or a cad? Understand that my friend is not proud of his behavior.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “Your friend, is he the Master of a House?”

“No.”

“Is he some whoop-de-do professor of Ethics?”

“No.”

“What I hear, his behavior is absolutely normal, par for the course, unexceptional.” I was understating the case; from what I'd heard, Harvard profs could sleep with assorted students of both sexes, not to mention barnyard animals, pay for prostitutes, call it research, and get away with a polite slap on the wrist if caught with their pants around their ankles.

“Times have changed,” he said. “And my own particular circumstances make me vulnerable.”

“Tell me about them. Beginning with your name.”

“Please try to understand. I find myself unable to concentrate, unable to contemplate the future. I had everything, but I didn't know I had it, and now that I could lose it, I find myself behaving irrationally.”

Irrational was right. A Harvard professor chasing an ex-cop through the Square.

He went on. “I find myself making foolish promises, going to church more often than I have since I was a child, begging forgiveness of some supreme being I'm not even certain I believe in. I feel out of control, in a way I can only compare to a mental illness—Excuse me. This is beside the point.”

“The point being—”

“Leonard Wells mentioned you.”

Ah. Leonard Wells is the FBI agent I'm dating. When I met him, he was calling himself Lee and I was pretending to be Carla, both of us working undercover on the Dig. “You asked Leon for help?”

“No, but he mentioned a connection to an investigator and I thought of it as a possibility, a place to begin. I was taken aback when—”

“What?”

“I assumed you would be a black woman. When I followed you—I—I suppose I was trying to decide whether it made a difference.”

“Does it?”

“Doesn't it always?”

His tone held me. It wasn't bitter, more flat and certain. Matter-of-fact. I let his words fade. It didn't seem there was anything I could say in response.

“Leon trusts you,” he said. “Could you find out who this blackmailer is? I need to find out who's doing this to—to my friend.”

“Then what? You planning to go to the police and have your blackmailer arrested?”

“Of course not. I'll talk to him, to her. I'll explain myself. Surely there must be some way I can stop this person from ruining my life.”

“I have a feeling blackmailers aren't big on chit-chat.”

“I'm an academic, a talker by profession. I'm a very persuasive man. Don't you think so?”

I almost smiled. I found his earnestness and naïveté touching, and I wondered how he'd come to know Leon. “You're telling me you have no idea who the blackmailer is?”

“I don't. I—my friend was discretion itself. He told no one, he never met the woman on campus.”

“Told, met. You're speaking in the past tense.”

“The affair is over.”

“Because of the blackmail.”

“It ended before the blackmail began.”

“If your friend was discretion itself, we have to assume that the woman—his student?”

“His student. Yes, but she seemed so much older, so mature for her years, so intriguing. I can't explain or excuse—” He studied his hands and adjusted his posture in the rickety chair. “My friend could never explain his infatuation satisfactorily to me.”

“If I took on the investigation, I'd start with the woman. Would she be doing this, as a kind of revenge? Was it a bad breakup?”

“The woman in question is dead.”

“Dead,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“How?”

He moistened his lips with his tongue and swallowed. “A fire. She was killed in a fire.”

“An accident? What kind of fire? What happened?”

“I was out of town, at a conference. I don't really—I have tried to avoid the details of the disaster.” He closed his eyes, his face a mask. “Understand that my friend had ended the affair with Denal—with the woman over a month before her death.”

He waited for me to say something. I waited for him. It's a trick I learned when I was a cop: Don't be eager to fill the silence. You learn more by listening than by talking.

The silence in the room was absolute. Outside, the clatter of dishes was interrupted by the hum of the espresso machine.

“Perhaps you would not be interested in representing my friend after all,” he said.

“Look, if the girl is dead, all you have to do is deny the story. Unless there are photographs.”

“There are no photos. I was careful—”

“Then why did you pay?”

“There are—were—letters. Are you interested in the case? If you don't agree to—I feel I've left my friend open to a new situation, a new peril—”

“I'm not a blackmailer.”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you were. Trusting people is not easy for me, and trusting a white person with this … It makes me uneasy to the depths of my soul. I'm not some showcase professor. I don't have a named chair or a university designation, not yet, anyway, but I am a Harvard professor, and if this gets out, my whole life, my career, everything I've worked for is held by a perilous thread. God, I wish he could have held off, that this complication could have held off for another six months, another year—”

“The blackmailer's been in touch again.”

“How did you know?”

“You wouldn't be talking to me if he hadn't been.”

He nodded and stared into his lap. “I thought it was a one-shot deal, that it would be over.”

“What does he want this time?”

“He's offering to sell me another of my letters.”

“How many did you write?”

“I don't—no more than ten.”

“Emails or actual letters?”

“Letters. Handwritten. I know, it seems old fashioned, stupid somehow. I never—I believed she had destroyed them.”

“Does he want the same amount?”

“More. Five times what he asked before.”

The blackmailer was a quick learner, I thought. And a greedy son of a bitch. A phone rang in the hallway, three times, five times, six.

I said, “You—your friend has a couple of options.”

“What are they?”

“I already mentioned one: paying up. If you do, you're in it for the long haul. Don't kid yourself that it's one more time and you're out of the woods.”

“There must be something I—he can do.”

“I would suggest your pal tell all, to his department chair and anyone else at the university with power over him, his wife as well, if he has one—”

“His wife would not be understanding.”

“Limit it to people at the university then. Tell them that he has a regrettable incident in his past that he would like to divulge in the hope that it will inspire other members of the faculty to err in other ways and not his own.”

“Hah,” he said. “Understand that this was an undergraduate with whom my friend had an affair, and a light-skinned one at that. My department chair would have my friend's head on a plate.”

“No love lost.”

“None.”

“Could he be the blackmailer?”

“Frankly, I can't imagine it.”

“Well, then, you could hire me to retrieve your indiscreet letters. Technically, it wouldn't be stealing. Letters belong to the recipient. In the event of the recipient's death, the sender has as strong a claim as anyone. I might be able to bargain with the blackmailer, convince him he ought to take what he's gotten so far and leave well enough alone.”

“But you said you thought a blackmailer wouldn't listen to reason.”

“Put it like this: Everyone has something to lose. You could hire me to find out how to blackmail your blackmailer.”

A slow-spreading smile widened his mouth and lit his eyes. It wiped the creases off his forehead and took years off his age. “I like that. My friend would—I like the idea of that, the symmetry. You would find something in his life to hold over his head.”

“I charge by the hour, plus expenses. I usually get a retainer. You'd need to sign a contract.”

“But—”

“It wouldn't have to specify precise details. I'd need to know your name.”

He opened his mouth and sucked in a shallow breath. His hands were clenched so hard his knuckles stood out like shards of white bone. “I think I—I need to think it over.”

I got to my feet. “You're not ready.” The action moved him off the dime.

“I am ready. Dammit, my life is intolerable.” He stood too, and then he stared into my eyes like it was a contest of wills, like he was memorizing their color and shape, trying to see behind them into my mind.

After five seconds that felt like five minutes, he extended his right hand. “My name is Wilson Chaney, Professor Wilson Chaney.”

Considering what I knew about him, I could have discovered his name in no time. I didn't tell him that. I accepted his declaration as a leap of faith and shook his hand.

Don't get me wrong: Profs who boff students are not perched at the top of my favorites list. But I doubted this guy's livelihood was imperiled due to an amorous misstep. My demon curiosity had been aroused, not allayed by his tale.

The Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel project is real and currently slated for completion circa 2005 at a cost that will probably exceed $15 billion. This novel, however, is a work of fiction. There is no Site A1520, no Horgan Construction Company, and none of the characters invented for these pages exists in real life.

I would like to thank the men and women of the Dig who answered my questions, among them, Ann Davis, Andy Paven, and Tony Brown. Thanks to Richard Dimino of the Artery Business Committee. The Boston
Globe
and the Boston
Herald
have devoted columns of informative print to the subject of the Dig, and so has
Boston Magazine
. I'd also like to credit the Big Dig's Web site, one of the finest on the Internet, and three books: Dan McNichol's
The Big Dig
, with photographs by Andy Ryan;
The Big Dig: Reshaping an American City
, by Peter Vanderwarker; and
Building Big
, by David Macaulay, for helping me grasp a few of the complex building techniques used in the project. Thanks also to Eddie Jacobs, Nancy Hawthorne, Luis Tovar, Jennifer Magnolfi, Monica Tovar, Steve Appelblatt, Richard Barnes, Brian DeFiore, Michael Denneny, Kelley Ragland, and Gina Maccoby.