What Time Devours (7 page)

“I’m fine,” said the older man, smiling, but still looking quizzical. “What about you? I never thought I’d see you here again,” he said, taking Thomas’s hand and shaking it firmly.

Here
doesn’t mean Chicago or the Drake
, thought Thomas.
He means at the National Shakespeare Conference.

The location didn’t matter. The conference would be largely the same whatever city it happened to be in, and most of the delegates would see little beyond the hotel walls.

“My hometown,” said Thomas, lamely. “Thought I’d check it out.”

Check it out?
He was reverting to graduate school mode, talking like his students.

“Not presenting then?” said Dagenhart.

“God, no,” he said, with a frankness he instantly regretted. “Just wanted to see what’s hot in Shakespeare studies these days.”

Dagenhart smiled at the phrase, though it was a dry smile, amused, and Thomas rushed to close up the silence.

“Are you presenting, Professor?” he said.

“I’m not reading a paper, if that’s what you mean,” said Dagenhart. “I’m in a seminar on gender in the early comedies.”

“Right,” said Thomas, nodding as if nothing could be more fascinating, trying to think of something intelligent to say, trying to impress as he once might have in class.

“And you’re still teaching high school?” said Dagenhart, with that same slightly disbelieving smile, as if Thomas had said he was a steeplejack or a lion tamer.

“For my sins,” Thomas smiled.

“And no plans to finish the doctorate?”

“God no,” he said, with too much gusto. “I mean, I love teaching at this level. I feel like . . .”

“You’re making a difference?” said Dagenhart, still wry.

“Well, yes,” said Thomas, trying to keep the defensiveness out of his voice. “A bit. You know.”

“Well, I guess someone has to be in the front-line trenches,” said Dagenhart. “Better you than most. Still, I don’t know how you put up with it.”

“With what?”

“The laziness. The institutionalized mediocrity. All that damned testing to prove the opposite of what we all know: that they aren’t really learning and nobody cares.”

“Well,” said Thomas, “it’s not all that bad. I mean, I’m at a good school. And if you really care about your subject and the kids . . .”

A woman tapped Dagenhart on the shoulder and he turned. She was also in her sixties, tall, and vaguely regal in her bearing. She somehow managed not to see Thomas at all.

“We’re heading in,” she said in a bored, British voice.

“Yes,” said Dagenhart, “I’ll be right there.” As an afterthought he said, “This is Tom Knight. Former student of mine. Teaches high school now.”

“Do you, indeed?” said the empress. “How public-spirited of you.”

Thomas smiled and nodded, checking the name badge she wore on her lapel: Katrina Barker.

His mouth fell open.

“Miss Barker,” he said, “I loved your book. Really . . . great.”

“The new one?” she said.

“Probably not,” said Thomas. “The one on city comedy.”

“Oh God,” she said, “that was a former life. Not really doing that anymore. But I’m glad you liked it.”

“I thought it was wonderful. Your treatment of religion in Jonson and Middleton . . .”

Dagenhart checked his watch, then turned his moist, shrewd eyes back onto Thomas. “Well, good to see you again, Knight. All the best.”

Barker framed an apologetic smile, and her eyes were kind. Thomas opened his hands and shook his head: he understood, the gesture said. She was busy and important, while he was neither . . .

Then she was following Dagenhart, who was moving into the crowd easing through double doors into the conference hall, leaving Thomas standing there, checking his program as if he knew what he was doing, as if he had a right to be there.

He had enough dignity not to sit near Dagenhart for the three papers that followed, though his eyes constantly strayed to where he was sitting, as if expecting him to turn and smile, suggest they get together in the bar to catch up and meet his cronies properly. But the damage was done, and the papers that followed served only to reinforce to Thomas how the world of academia had forgotten him and moved on, that far from him rejecting it for its arcane pettiness and navel-gazing, academia had rejected him.

He wished he’d been able to say something intelligent to Katrina Barker, who was, he thought, genuinely brilliant: the kind of scholar whose work transforms the way you thought about a play or the context that produced it. He wanted to rush out and buy her new book, just so he could come back and talk to her about it, but he knew he would do no such thing.

The paper session was a plenary, and the hall was almost full. The three presenters, two men and a woman, were all in their later thirties or early forties, and all looked like they could be powerful executives at some slightly offbeat West Coast corporation. Thomas understood little of what they said. He got glimmers of salient points from time to time, and it was only occasionally that the vocabulary itself derailed him—so he couldn’t blame theoretical jargon—but he just didn’t understand what they were talking about. Shakespeare himself barely entered the papers (a couple of references to
Lear
in one, some lines from
Twelfth Night
and
As You Like It
in another), as if the plays themselves were taken as read. What dominated instead was historical detail about obscure people and events or, more accurately,
conditions
, all of which the audience seemed to see as relevant, because they applauded enthusiastically and gave each other sage nods and whispers as the moderator opened the floor to questions.

“All this is very well,” said a young man in black, leaping to his feet, “but it’s all based on the idea that these plays were written by William Shakespeare, a man of no breeding, little education, no travel or courtly experience . . .”

People were groaning and rolling their eyes.

“I would remind you,” said the moderator, “that this is a Shakespeare conference, and that for our purposes
Shakespeare
was a man from Stratford-upon-Avon . . .”

There was a pattering of applause and a few cheers. The questioner continued to babble, dropping references to the Earl of Oxford and the impossibility that the son of a Stratford glove maker could have produced poetry of such delicacy and worldly experience . . .

Thomas fled.

Leaving the conference entirely felt like admitting defeat or, worse, failure in larger terms, but he hated the idea of just loitering, hoping to get attached to some group of clever people who had known each other for years and treated conferences like this as a species of reunion. He went to the bar. At least with a drink in his hand he’d look like he was doing something.

The Coq d’Or was darkly paneled, with red leather chairs. He fancied a gin martini, but didn’t feel like spending what he’d usually lay out for dinner, so he ordered a Honker’s Ale. He had taken no more than two swallows when he looked up, sure he was being watched. Standing by the main entrance was Polinski. She was quite still, her eyes on him as if she had been there for some time, considering him. In her face Thomas saw something like skepticism, even hostility, and his half wave stalled in the air.

She hesitated a second more, then sauntered over, her gaze steady.

“Mr. Knight,” she said. “What brings you here?”

“Shakespeare conference,” he said, tapping the program by his beer glass. “It’s kind of what I used to do. Almost. I thought I’d stop by, see if there was anyone here I knew.”

“Like David Escolme?”

She was still standing.

“He checked out this morning,” said Thomas. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“No,” she said.

“So you came here to see him? I’m sorry. I could have saved you the trip.”

“It’s not a problem.”

She was still giving him that level, considering look. Thomas moved the opposite chair away from the table for her, and she sat slowly, a strange, studied motion as if she were cradling something fragile and expensive. She put her hands on the table. They were big, strong hands, the skin rough, the nails untended.

“So you were studying Shakespeare at Boston University,” she said, “when you were in graduate school.”

Thomas started to nod and then caught himself.

“You’ve been reading up on me.”

“Let’s say you’ve left quite the paper trail over the years,” she said. It could have been a wry observation, almost a joke, but her eyes said otherwise.

“Man’s got to speak his mind,” Thomas said, taking a sip of his beer. He had once had a habit of holding forth on everything he thought wrong with the city and the school system to whoever would listen, particularly to journalists. They were impolitic rants, often fueled by other kinds of disappointment and failure, and one of them had finally cost him his job. For a year or so.

“You didn’t make the papers last year for speaking your mind,” she said.

“Not most recently, no,” he conceded. The strange stories that had come out of the Philippines the previous Easter had made for screaming headlines, and though there was a lot people didn’t know, the story of what he had found as he worked to unravel his brother’s death had gotten a lot of attention. At school he had refused to discuss the bizarre blend of paramilitary fanatics and ancient archaeology that had led him from Italy to Japan, or the spectacular and bloody chaos of that Philippine beach where his brother had died and the whole business had finally ended, but the city would remember him for a while. Being at the center of such sensational events, it could hardly be otherwise.

Ironically, those very events had turned his life around. Without them, he would never have gotten his job back, would never have reconnected with Kumi. It didn’t make up for the loss of his brother, but it helped that good things had come out of all that death.

Thomas matched Polinski’s stare and shrugged.

“If you think I’m some publicity hound trying to relive last year’s fifteen minutes of fame, you’ve got me all wrong,” he said. “I went through a lot of stuff last year, as you know, and yes, it was all as overblown, as intense, as crazy as the papers made it sound. But I’ll tell you, I didn’t look for any of it, certainly not the tabloid response, and if I could trade it all in for the life of my brother and my friend, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

She listened, and then nodded, giving ground, but some of her reserve remained.

“Tell me about Escolme,” she said.

“He was a good student,” said Thomas. “This was ten years ago. Bright. Hardworking. Socially a little . . .
awkward
. Not the most popular kid in school. Unathletic. Pimply. But, as I said, very academic. Got great SATs. I wrote him a reference and he got into several good schools. He went to Boston University to do an English degree. Wrote to me once or twice: one of those thanks-for-inspiring-me kinds of letters teachers get from time to time, then . . . Nothing. I hadn’t heard from him in about eight years till he called yesterday and said he wanted to see me.”

“Did he give you an address?”

“Not a home address, no, but I have his business information.”

Thomas fished in his wallet and drew out the VFL card. Polinski glanced at it, but didn’t pick it up. She still seemed wary, like she was testing him.

“And he claims to have had a lost play by William Shakespeare that he got from Daniella Blackstone.”

“
Love’s Labour’s Won
, yes.”

“And you believed him?”

“I don’t know,” Thomas admitted. “He said that he and Blackstone had it and were going to get it printed so that they could hold copyright on the only modern edition. Copyright only lasts for a limited amount of time—seventy years, I think, in the United States—before the work becomes public domain. After that, it’s only the individual edition that can be copyrighted. Even if Shakespeare had living descendants, which he doesn’t, they wouldn’t make any money off his plays anymore.”

“So Blackstone was trying to get an edition published without the original leaking out? Is that possible?” said Polinski.

“I have no idea. Writers manage to keep their stories secret until publication, I guess. But in this case the value of the book would hinge on it being clearly by Shakespeare. She’d need outside confirmation of that by experts, which she couldn’t get without showing it to scholars, any one of whom could leak it. Once the original manuscript was out there, say photocopied and posted on someone’s website, then the play would become public domain, and any edition Blackstone released would have to compete with others by other people. I think. Escolme didn’t say she had any scholarly background as a Shakespearean, so you have to assume that her edition would have been basic, to say the least. If actual academics had been able to put together other editions, hers would be worthless. It had to be kept secret.”

“What about that outside confirmation?” said Polinski. “You can’t just
say
something’s by Shakespeare, right?”

“If the publisher felt it could make that claim in good faith, I don’t think they’d be prosecutable if it turned out not to be. I figure they were going to publish the play as Shakespeare’s quickly, let the scholars fight over its authenticity for a while, and rake the money in off the book sales while they did so. Unless it was blindingly obvious that it
wasn’t
Shakespeare, they’d make quite a profit for a while and then the whole thing would go away. But so long as there was a controversy over the text, they’d be coining it, and if enough scholars came out in favor of its authenticity, they’d make a mint, at least until better editions came out, which would probably take years.”

“For a high school teacher you seem to know a lot about this.”

“Most of this is from Escolme, so you can ask him yourself when you see him.”