Our budget provided for three clerical positions, which we filled, at the end of the spring semester, with a sophomore and two freshmen, all of them immune to influence by EH. Lora Means had been working her way through a business major as a secretary in Payroll. As she explained at the interview, she was processing forms with a dozen other women in a room with no windows and the expression on her face showed how much she liked it. Sexier than pretty, she had a big bosom, which she displayed generously but decently, and it shook when she laughed her deep, spontaneous laugh. Prettier than sexy, Deanna Roblez admitted that others probably needed the money more than she did, but the opportunity to help with the editing of a famous lady poet really appealed to her. Extra-curricular activities were a little "mesy-toosy." Guy Hallowburn, who had an English mother and an American father, received part of his earlier education in Birmingham, England, and part in Birmingham, Alabama. The worst schools in both Birminghams, he joked, but not every convincingly. His blush was as red as Lora's bosom was round, yet he expressed himself well and generated many eager ideas. All six of us had participated in the interviews and agreed on the three candidates. Despite the crowded conditions, a happy family formed at 327 Tree Shadow Mews. Our paterfamilias had to leave for China, but he took his portable computer with him, promising to exchange e-mail with us at least once a day.

I asked Lora to tell any older man trying to reach me on the phone that I was not available: "the chairman of the French Department!" I shrugged. Every time the phone rang, Murma lead my collaborators in repeating "the chairman of the French Department" with a caricature of my shrug. When the phone rang, it generated giggles, then laughter and finally gave Lora a laughing fit just as she was picking it up. It was the kind of fun families have for no better reason than the pleasure of having it together. An older man was trying to reach me and he left messages which I didn't bother to read. Hanging up again with tears in her eyes, Lora announced, between outbursts: "The chairman... of the... French Department... was so..."

"So?" I prompted.

"So?" the others echoed.

"Worried?"

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"Si never sounds worried. What was his voice like?"

Murma and I exchanged glances. "Wheelwright?" she wondered.

"Wheelwright," I confirmed. "Si wouldn't have called back like that."

Late in the afternoon, Angus Wheelwright's white Honda drove up and parked out front. Meeting him at the door, I saw just how worried he was and even more than usual, so I went downstairs with him and sat with him in his car. How accurate Lora's report had been! Years of worry had wrinkled his face and grayed his hair. He had always shouldered the troubles of our world, but he found those of my enemies heavier than mine and those of my friends. He shouldered theirs even more willingly with a patience and charity worthy of the medieval saints who directed the traffic in his special field. He told me that my ejection of a graduate student, whose ability and character everyone esteemed, from a seminar she needed to complete the requirements for the PhD had upset the entire department. I asked him how well he knew Corinne, who had vouched for her character and ability, whether they were the ones who were outraged and what he meant by the entire department. His answers, which were in good faith, confirmed all of my suspicions. He admitted that Si, Jerry, Harry and Millie had urged him to see me and he mentioned the measures they were considering in case I refused to readmit Corinne to my seminar: a departmental faculty meeting for a motion of censure -- Angus rolled his eyes in dismay -- an appeal to the Student-Faculty Relations Committee and another to the Board of Review. 

"You didn't mention Abigail," I remarked.

"She usually blows her trumpet where woman are involved."

"Unh hunh."

"Maybe... After the departmental faculty meeting and before the Student-Faculty Committee, wouldn't the Dean of Sciences and Humanities be in order?" 

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"They think she's biased against them."

"In other words, they know she will decide against them because they are wrong."

I gave him a Wilma smile.

"I already gave her another chance. I gave her several of them and she refused to take advantage of them. If she came to me and convinced me that she would behave as she always had before last Thursday..."

"No, as long as you don't repeat anything else I said."

"Hello, Gus, this is Wilma."

"Wilma! I was expecting to hear from you."

"I heard you had a little commemoration of 1968 in your Voltaire seminar."

"How did the news reach you?"

"EH must have pulled his string to Si and Si, his to Jerry. Even smart women do dumb things to please Jerry."

"I must have said something stupid."

"She denied the string from Si to Jerry, but she always disagrees with me, 'for my own good,' she says."

"Si to... Abigail?" 

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"Hooray!" She clapped her hands. She must have bought a hands-free telephone for that very purpose.

"How did you find out?"

"Next time I know something you don't..."

"Ummm... so the victim closed ranks with his persecutors and confirmed their lies, thus rendering justice impossible. Professors are swine."

"One of these days, I'm going to spank you."

"Ha! Ha! Ha! How are you going to snip the string at the other end?"

"We don't like standing in line."

"Is that all you have to do?" 

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"She knows that a pregnant secret is no more secret than a secret pregnancy."

"Ha! Ha! Ha! You are too much fun for a dean. I don't know why we take you seriously."

Si had started holding faculty meetings in the Distinguished Alumnae and Alumni Room. The grinning portraits of every one who had been anyone covered the walls, yet a long table down the middle mandated solemn deliberation. Always anxious to short-circuit ridicule, Si explained with an ironical smile and sweep of his hand: "I thought the French Department could use a little grandeur." A few years later, we met on another Friday afternoon to discuss the ejection of Corinne Verneuil from my seminar and only one of us was absent, a record. The scowls along the other side of the table all the way up to Si at the head tickled George: "It looks like Cemetery Ridge." Indeed, the laughs in Pickett's ranks spent themselves on this unbroken brow. Then Sinkovitch stood up to lead the counterattack and blasted me with the propaganda I had heard from Wheelwright. Mumpet and Barnes followed, but not Abigail Emerson who was sitting on our side at the other end of the table. Each expressed the common outrage in his own style and with his own emphasis. Thus Sinkovitch lavished his anger on the injustice of throwing an innocent student out of class; Mumpet, his sarcasm on the intelligence of the student and the ignorance of the professor, and Barnes, her histronics on the mistreatment of a young woman by a(n old) man. All three demanded an apology and the readmission of Corinne to my seminar. Goldstein, who had orchestrated this score, agreed and turned to me solicitously.

"No," I replied.

George laughed: "So much for the thunder: where's the lightning?"
"Indeed," agreed Julie-Anne to everybody's surprise. "What are the facts? The young woman rewarded the old man's kindness by disrupting his class. The student used her ignorance of Voltaire to prevent six other students from diminishing theirs. The professor asked her politely to leave only after she had broken her promise to remain silent and silence, mes amis, was the only wisdom within her reach... How silent you are!" 

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Julie-Anne Bechetôt, whose learning overawed everybody on the other side of the table, seldom stooped to the expression of an opinion in a faculty meeting and, in fact, seldom bothered to attend them. Maybe the South was going to win after all. It might have indeed if Wheelwright hadn't seen a golden opportunity to use his saintly talent. To the relief of the other side and the irritation of ours, he reviewed the conflicting positions with a diplomacy that erased their disadvantage and our advantage, thus achieving an delicate equilibrium. He then proposed a compromise that, despite the refinement of the details, amounted to essentially the same one I had already offered Corinne: I would readmit her to the seminar and she would promise to cooperate with me. Julie-Anne protested:

"The young woman has already made and broken this promise. She applied to this university because she had failed in France. She failed in France because she took a greater interest in ideology than her studies. She used the tactics that she had learned in France to disrupt the seminar of Augustus. She took him for an ideological enemy: how could she have made so absurd a mistake?" A glance pinned the implication on Abigail, who was trying to appear uninvolved.

After a tense silence, Wheelwright objected that, if anyone had persuaded Corinne to behave a little strangely, she bore less responsibility for the incident than expulsion from class implied. Barnes insisted that students had a right to a second chance; Mumpet, that such an incident had never occurred before and Sinkovitch, that Wheelwright's compromise was the best solution for the problem. Looking around the table, Goldstein gave his voice the tone of authority and recommended that the department approve this solution. The implication escaped nobody in line for tenure or promotion, so a majority of the faculty gave him the satisfaction he wanted.

"I reject your recommendation," I said.

Calling our chairman the next morning, the dean told him to send her the dossier. She had Gretchkow interview the seven students in the seminar. 

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The student whom Corinne had been whispering to testified that she had tried to enlist her in her revolt. Given a pledge of secrecy, she added that Corinne had hinted at Professor Emerson's involvement. Everybody on the seventh floor of Murkington began to notice that Abigail was drawn and withdrawn. EH asked Si to let the case die in the dean's office, but Millie, Jerry and Harry insisted on appealing to the Student-Faculty Relations Committee, although they kept Harry's name out of it. When Wilma discussed the matter with me, however, I alerted her to Harry's stake in it. She asked a member of the committee favorable to such appeals to replace her as the speaker at a meeting of the Mapleton alumni on the afternoon when the committee met. Since he loved to make these speeches and pocket a little extra, he accepted eagerly. The rules of the committe typically required a member from a department concerned by a case to abstain and a member involved in the submission of an appeal to withdraw from the room during the proceedings. The majority of the committee resulting from the absence contrived by Wilma had found one of her yellow stick-ons on the inside of the cover of his copy of the dossier. Their request that he withdraw afflicted him with a consternation that delighted the cocktail party that Friday.

Where would EH strike next? Despite Cary's absence, the overcrowding at 327 Tree Shadow Mews would have caused tensions if we hadn't enjoyed each other's company and found continuous amusements to lighten the work load. Everybody took a turn reading the daily e-mail message from Cary in China, which never failed to bring the house down, and the collective dictation of the daily reply occasioned a merry crescendo. As Edie played Jamma's records and made comments that interested the "older guys," the polite tolerance of the "younger guys," from whom we borrowed these terms, satisfied us, until I caught Lora rolling her eyes over a prank in "Till Eulenspiegel." I suggested that we play one side of a relief record every morning and the other in the afternoon. Since none of the younger guys had 33 1/3 rpm equipment, I squeezed some money out of office expenses to buy second-hand records. The ZU School of Music ensured customers for two local dealers, to whom I sent Lora, Deanna and Guy. They returned from their first shopping expedition with an album by the Beetholes, whom they knew only by their parents' fond remembrance. It made such a hit with the older as well as the younger guys that we agreed to listen to both sides at once. In view of our cramped and yet congenial 

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workspace, Lora christened 327 Tree Shadow Mews "the submarine."

The Beetholes serenaded a budding romance between Deanna and Guy that Ombre had been the first to detect. Half annoyed and half intrigued one day, Deanna exclaimed: "Why is he always sitting there looking at us like a sphinx?" We saw him between their side-by-side computers eying them. Visible only in the corners of our eyes, handholding escalated to furtive kisses, but Murma inadvertently gave them public approval by surprising them behind their computers: "When are you guys going to stop hunting and pecking, and get some touch typing done?" Guy blushed and the laughter was all the louder because it had nowhere to go. Even Deanna blushed as if Murma had caught them in some pre-Beetholes antiquity. Henceforth we found ourselves sitting on the eggs in our nest. Meanwhile, Solomon, who claimed the status of in-between guys for himself, Edie and Emily, indulged in some noisy "sexual harrassment" by chasing them around the table, although Lora accused Edie of bolting before she was chased. Dr. Wise Guy ceremoniously refrained from harrassing Lora, whose dignity, he claimed, deterred him. "What do you mean," she objected, "my dignity?" 

You are going to ask me how, with all this horseplay, we got any work done. Well, we did, we got loads of work done and I think it was because all of us loved Jamma and her poetry, we had that in common. We even worked on weekends, though shorter hours, and I occasionally told the younger guys: "Enough! This is the only youth you will ever have. Go live it up." Surprisingly enough, they sometimes invited us to join them and we tried our best, although, for instance, we enjoyed watching them dance more than dancing with them. How elastic their bodies were! Once we organized a picnic at the Tree Shadow Mews Recreation Center, roasting hotdogs and marshmellows, drinking wine and coke, pushing each other into the pool. How could somebody as noticeable as Lora sneak up on us so often? The first thing we knew, we were in the air and the next thing, in the water. Once, when Deanna and Guy had eyes only for each other, she dragged them into the pool with her. In the next e-mail message to Cary, Lora inserted the statement that she had missed him at the picnic. She told the Skullthorps the same thing. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, we gathered around the speaker phone to ask them our latest questions. The 

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ensuing conversation, which lasted up to twenty minutes, often stimulated memories of Jamma that her parents might otherwise have forgotten.

We were beginning to feel that we knew her better than anybody else ever had and even her parents, yet a double irony nagged us: on one hand, Jamma had never enjoyed the sympathy we had for her; on the other, we constantly discovered assertions to the effect that she didn't want or even feared the kind of attention we were giving her. The first consideration made us feel as if we were perpetrating an injustice and the second, as if we were compounding it. At lunch or our departure in the evening, we sometimes worried about our guilt. When her grandmom had died, Deanna testified, her parents had tried to persuade her that she was alive in heaven. Although she dared not contradict them, she didn't believe them. She had loved GrandMom even more than Mom and Dad, and she had had a nervous breakdown and dropped out of school for a semester. She had seen skeletons in museums: nobody could persuade her that anything remained of GrandMom except a skeleton in the ground. A skeleton couldn't love or hate any more than a rock. Moved, Guy reminded her: "But you still love her, don't you?"
 

"Of course!"

"Then she's still alive in your mind."

Deanna rolled her eyes at him like Liberty guiding the People: "But that's just a part of me."

"I don't know. I loved her voice, I loved her smile, I loved her hug. Nobody hugged me like she did." She giggled and nudged Guy: "Maybe you'll get there."

Guy blushed.

Once the women's cheers subsided, I asked him: "Did you mean that her grandmother lives on in the minds of everybody who knew her?"

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Everybody agreed and said so. "Then our problem," I concluded, "is to decide whether we should honor Jamma's stated wishes for the sake of our memory of her. I doubt that we can come to any definitive conclusions."

"There's another aspect," I said the next day at lunch.

"Of Jamma's posthumous wishes?" asked Solomon.

Emily: "If we don't mess with Jamma's biography, others will make a mess of it. Despite what she wrote, we can honor her wishes best by producing as thorough and profound a biography as we can."

Edie: "Few composers mind if their listeners know who they are and what sort of life they lead. I shouldn't think poets would have an entirely different attitude."

Me: "I agree, but we will have to address the problem in our introduction and explain our position, however inconclusive it may seem."

Murma: "This comes at the right time: I expect to begin the study of Jamma's correspondence with her lover tommorrow. Fortunately, she kept his messages as well as her own, so I will be able to follow the correspondence back and forth without having to extrapolate the contents of unknown messages. That's a luxury." 

Jamma's earliest poems, which she had signed "Cicada," appeared in obscure journals where "Firefly" discovered them. He sent her both enthusiastic praise and severe criticism with detailed analysis and explanations. Few of the other readers who wrote her took such pains and most of them either paid her some compliments, a minority, or criticized her poetry, a majority. Yet the number of responses to each of these poems varied between 25 and 50, which seemed significant for journals with circulations in the low hundreds. If any of these early correspondents had perceived the originality of Cicada's poetry, none except Firefly gave the slightest hint of it in his message. In fact, some objected to Cicada's anonymity as if it detracted from her poetry. Firefly, who said nothing of this, 

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recognized her talent and even foresaw some of the possibilities of her vision, which, in his opinion, had extraordinary promise. He admired her courage in selecting subjects from mathematics and experimental science where few poets dared to venture. Far from contaminating her poetry, these subjects enriched it immeasurably. His criticism mostly concerned the rudiments of composition such as accents, rhymes, rhythm, euphony, semantics as well as accuracy and precision, between which he distinguished. He also emphasized logic and metaphorical restraint, to which Cicada hadn't given much thought. This early correspondence associated a tutor and a pupil, each of whom played his role with generosity, zeal and enthusiasm. Cicada wondered at the quantity and diversity of the poetry Firefly had read and the power of his memory which enabled him to quote and quote, yet always appropriately. Without the slightest hint of envy, he admired the ease with which she learned and assimilated his teaching. He spoke of "your poetry" and she, of "our poetry;" he congratulated her and she expressed her gratitude while they rejoiced in a mutual fervor. Their messages were flashing back and forth at the rate of one or two a day... between where and where? Neither said and neither asked, although each, judging by the other's language, assumed that the other lived somewhere in North America. Each had guessed the other's sex, but neither knew the other's age, occupation, background or environment. Both nonetheless perceived that they had in common a relative isolation from the society in which they lived and a profound affliction due to loneliness. Yet their affliction never withered to resentment.

As Murma revealed her discoveries, the rest of us confirmed and commented so that discussions followed and we encouraged the younger guys to join in. We were having our own little utopia, as I told them. Our understanding of the initial period in the correspondence, characterized by the relationship between tutor and pupil, increased to the point where we knew them better intellectually than they knew each other. I took the precaution, nonetheless, of noting that intellectual knowledge of fellow human beings can't even begin to exhaust the subject. Then one day, Murma reported wonderings and conjectures that suggested a new curiosity in each about the extra-poetic identity of the other. Thus the signs of transition to another period in the correspondence stirred excitement in us. Cicada confided for instance in Firefly about her impulsive affection for little children, then Firefly, in Cicada about his sympathy with pre-adolescents. 

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Each insisted that corruption began after the innocence of the age that interested him, hence a friendly argument resulting in an admission by both that he taught his favorite age in a public school. Both deplored the subsequent contagion of greed and cruelty, yet neither hinted at the society in which he had observed it, as if the subject were taboo. We began to wonder if Firefly suffered from a secret handicap like Cicada's obesity or, on the contrary, had guessed that she had one and didn't want to embarrass her or simply -- why not? -- shared her desire to ensure the serenity of their friendship. Thus friendship defined this second period and, while it tended to greater intimacy, it avoided greater contact. Neither correspondent mentioned postal mail or even the telephone. Yet they did explore their opinions and feelings, exposing, explaining, comparing and appreciating. How could a couple come to know each other so well while ignoring the physical traits that usually led to the spiritual ones?

Firefly could help us if anybody could. Murma had sent him two e-mail messages and neither had come back because of an invalid address, but he hadn't replied. Then she sent a third and it did come back with the explanation "invalid address." What had happened? Had he changed his address or abandoned his e-mail account? Had his wish to remain anonymous motivated the change? He might have fallen ill or even died. Maybe a handicap similar to Jamma's had affected his health or morale. The olders and in-betweeners tended to credit the wish for anonymity and the youngers, illness or death, yet both sides conceded that the other might be right.

Lora: "We may never know."

During the second period, Firefly found less to criticize and more to praise. Cicada was publishing poems in less obscure journals, but she was composing Friends, her first collection. She distinguished between association, collaboration and affection, the three stages of friendship on which she wished to found her plan. Firefly suggested that she also consider the reconciliation of enemies and the friendship of former lovers. We wondered whether he had deliberately omitted the kind of friendship that generates love. How had she interpreted this omission? She admitted 

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that she had never witnessed a poetic reconciliation of enemies and doubted that lovers could become friends. What did he think? An interesting discussion followed, but no poems on these subjects by Jamma. She had already begun to send him drafts of certain poems, either because she thought they would interest him or because she had problems he could help her with. Neither seemed aware that their friendship had progressed from association to inclination, as if Cicada had set an itinerary for their relationship to each other. Murma and Emily compared each draft with the other drafts of the same poem and the definitive version, a comparison that inspired discussions among us. Afterthoughts sometimes arrived the next morning after a night of sleep or insomnia. The enthusiasm that enlivened our discussions surprized us all and we noticed, indeed we reminded each other that we were living the second stage of friendship together. From "freshwoman" Deanna Roblez at seventeen to distinguished scholar Cary O'Sullivan at sixty-nine, our dedication to a common purpose had made a family of us.

Cary's e-mail presence tended to offset his absence, because he participated in our discussions, made suggestions and gave advice, teased our women and added irresistible observations of life in China. A bug that kept him in his hotel room for two days unleashed an avalanche of messages that slowed our progress, but no one complained. He returned in the middle of a heat wave. Once he had recovered from jetlag, we threw a party around the pool at the Recreation Center, to which we invited Kit, Handy, Cary's sister Meg, Wilma and Sheila Wilcox. Lora fulfilled a secret vow to push Prof Cary in the pool and he threw water on Deanna who had been sunning herself voluptuously. As trim in her swimsuit as the younger women, Wilma swam gracefully up and down the side of the pool, while Solomon taught Edie to somersalt off the board. Sheila recited three of Jamma's poems which she had memorized. Keeping his distance from the water, Ombre prowled around on the grass sniffing everything along his path. Whenever he saw a dry, bare, female calf, he headed for it and brushed himself back and forth against it. Sheila received this attention in the middle of a poem, but, after a pause between verses and a dignified downward glance, she continued as if nothing had happened.

We hadn't even considered giving the party in the submarine where nine 

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people and a cat now crowded joyfully together. "Nine people and a cat!" I fretted.

"Including Cary," murmured Murma.

"Hey!" he objected.

"I used to go to parties in places like this all the time," testified Emily. "There must have been twenty of us and all of us dancing."

Lora: "I still go to parties like that."

Deanna: "So do we!"

Edie: "All we have to do is keep the windows open."

Solomon: "At least until it gets cold in the fall."

Organizing shifts so that no more than six people would be in the apartment at any time would disrupt our habits and cramp our style. Taking turns in the exile of Cary's vacation trailor, which he offered to park out front, inspired more gratitude than enthusiasm. Distant space such as Room 27 in the Mayview Library, where Solomon had obtained permission to store our backup archives, appealed to nobody. Then Guy and Deanna came to work one morning -- when had they started coming together? -- with an idea that had cost him (alone?) an hour of sleep. Followed by Ombre, he ushered four of us out on the balcony in back while the other four watched from the patio door. The balcony overlooked a woods crisscrossed by birds and animals which interested Ombre. Guy and Deanna had an eight-foot ladder which we could keep on the balcony. If an inspector from the Fire Department drove up in front, Guy would open the ladder and lower it to the ground so that the younger guys could climb down. Then Guy would fold the ladder and hide it under the balcony where they could enter Kit and Handy's apartment. The couple had offered them a spare key in case they weren't at home.

"I will have to wear my jeans," said Lora, who wore skirts advantageously.

"Jeans?" protested Dr. Wise Guy 

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Cary: "We can't have that!"

Guy: "Oh, I'll look the other way."

"Guy!" Deanna scolded and Guy blushed.

So much for the fire inspector, I thought, but EH was probably up to worse. Wilma was keeping him busy with an exploratory mission to East Mammoth, which she had asked him to organize and lead before classes started again in Concordia. Since he had acquired his influence by preaching social justice, he could hardly refuse an opportunity to prove that he meant what he had been saying and especially when paid for his efforts. Even his admirers understood, however, that he would find East Mammoth more useful for certification of his credentials than realization of his ambitions, which required an established university. The report of the delegation, we guessed, would recommend a profile for recruiting pioneers to found a branch of ZU that would attract no attention to his own curriculum vitae. Nor would this expedition keep him from eventually striking his next blow, which he had no doubt already conceived. Cary said that Wilma had enabled us to inflict greater frustration on him than anyone else had dared. Unlike other academics, EH was capable of resorting to worse than words, so we worried about security at the submarine. ZU Security had installed deadbolt locks on the doors and the windows as well as an alarm system that would alert the campus police if a thief tried to force them. In Room 27 at the Mayview, we had stored copies of all our inventories, photos of all the notations in Jamma's books, backups of all the data on her disks and ours, and xeroxes of all the papers and cards in her files. Yet damage to or destruction of the originals would cost our museum dearly, so we worried about fire. ZU Security was ready to add smoke and heat detectors to our burgler alarm, but Abe called it the straw that would break the camel's back and humped his own back, reminding us of his resemblance to this animal. Seeing nonetheless that he would eventually let us have the money, we began to consider other ways in which EH might sabotage our project. What if one or more of us were mugged or if... but he wouldn't go that far... or would he? He had probably been much further in Vietnam. While fear or disdain kept most academics from resorting to physical violence, EH was no ordinary academic. 

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When I raised the issue at the submarine, Deanna giggled and elbowed Guy:

"Here's your chance to show us what a he-man you are."

He blushed.

Solomon: "There are four empty seats in my car."

Lora: "Only three on the back seat."

Him: "The one next to me is more comfortable."

Her: "I will get a ride with my boyfriend."

Him: "Which one?"

She sighed: "There are so many to choose from!"

Emily: "I rent an efficiency and take the bus. Solomon and Edie give me rides, but I don't want to inconvenience them. My husband and I alternate weekends flying back and forth."

Edie: "I have my own apartment and drive my own car, like Jamma."

Solomon: "Not entirely."

Edie: "... "

Me: "Let's keep a continuous schedule of when and where everybody might be vulnerable. It will cost you some privacy, but we have become a family and, if any of us were mugged, all of us would regret it."

Everybody agreed, so I gave Lora the job of keeping the schedule. Despite Edie's love of independence and the complications of Emily's situation, the plan seemed to be working and I turned to other worries.

A week after EH's return from East Mammoth, Lora saw a white car, with Concordia Fire Department in red letters on the door, drive up to 326-329 Tree Shadow Mews. She and the younger guys executed Guy's evacuation plan, hiding the stepladder under the balcony and entering 326 downstairs. The inspector, a thin little man, kept looking around and behind himself as if to catch anybody who might try to fool him. After a thorough inspection, 

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however, he seemed satisfied, taking no further precaution than the remark that six was the maximum number allowed in the space we occupied. Leaning over to pat Ombre, who had been brushing himself up against his leg, he said: "If it catches on fire in here, you just meow as loud as you can." While the younger guys came back up the ladder teasing and laughing, Cary doubted that the inspection had just happened when nine people and a cat were in the submarine. Had anyone seen anyone watching the apartment? None had, but, when Kit and Handy returned from the supermarket, she ran up to 327. They had seen two young guys in T-shirts and baseball caps on backwards in a hot rod parked on the other side of the Mews in a place where they could watch our building. They didn't recognize them or their car, a purple Dodge with lots of rust on the front end. Besides, why would anybody who lived in the Mews sit in a car outside with the stereo turned up? They had been slaping the rhythm on the doors with their hands. Solomon had noticed the car another time.

No sooner had we alerted our neighbors than the purple Dodge reappeared in the same place and, when it didn't, a black and yellow Chevrolet, with "Yellow Jacket" written on the doors did, or a bilious green Oldsmobile. Young locals sat in them listening to music that sounded more like rythmic noise to the olders and in-betweeners. We also began to receive calls from young men with the local accent, both at the submarine and at home, often in the middle of the night. They sneered and snarled words like shit and fuck threatening vague revenge for even vaguer offense. I told everybody to answer them by asking who was paying them. This question brought angry denials that anybody was, but it shifted the subject from us to them and gave us a chance to learn their voices. They pestered Emily, Edie and Lora so often that the women tried to get Zenia Bell to trace the calls. Once they had navigated through the phone tree, however, they found that each human being who finally answered had a different excuse for disappointing them. Cary, Murma and I had a talk with Sergeant Thomas Q. Thomas, an old friend, who had a reputation for policing young people in Concordia. Asking us please not to quote him, he told us somebody had sicked the Mongols on us.

"The Mongols?"

Tom Tom boomed with rare laughter: "Not the ones who rode horses across Asia killing people. The ones you see in hot rods around town 

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hollering at girls. They don't have the guts to get in real trouble. They need money, so they will do anything to earn it without getting arrested. You remember Freddy Kingfisher?"

No, but we remembered Buck Kingfisher whose front teeth Jamesy Willowby had knocked out with a baseball bat and whose genitals Celia Gretchkow had painted green. Tom Tom had caught Buck dealing in cocaine, for which he got two years in the Purvis Juvenal Facility.

"Freddy's his little brother," explained Tom Tom, "but he ain't so little any more. He's a Mongol. Some folks call them mongrels, which makes them mad and they gang up on you. Kids that never had a chance, busted families with dads that drink, take drugs, beat their women. They can't get decent jobs and they can't keep the jobs they get. It drags on from generation to generation... my folks used to call them po white trash."

Me: "We suspect somebody of paying them to harrass us."

Tom Tom had some friends at Zenia Bell who had admired him when he was playing football for ZU. He would give them our names, our numbers and the hours when we were getting the unwanted calls. They would trace the calls for him. He also knew a pay phone the Mongrels used and, if he could catch them making nuisance calls, he could book them. He couldn't book them for sitting in their cars, listening to their radios or even hanging around, even if they did it repeatedly near 327 Tree Shadow Mews or our residences. All he could do in that case was check their identities, which he already knew, and question them, but they would insist that they weren't doing anything against the law. While harrassing the harrassers wouldn't stop them, it might dissuade them from going further. Tom Tom would have to catch them in a crime to justify the kind of questioning that might reveal the identity of the person who had hired them. We asked him how they got along with students. The didn't get along with them at all. They hated everybody who had anything to do with ZU, which they blamed for their misery, an attitude inherited from their parents. Yet they avoided students, some of whom were tougher than they were, and a fight with students 

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always attracted more students. Tom Tom regretted that all of his efforts to rehabilitate them had failed: "Like building on mud."

One afternoon, Kit and Handy called Deanna and Guy out on the balcony to tell them that the black and yellow Chevrolet was parked in the usual place. We followed them over as two cars driven by neighbors approached it from either side and wedged it in between them. A few dozen neighbors assembled while two lingered behind them, one with a bicycle chain and the other with a jack lever. Having raised their radio to its highest pitch, the two Mongrels in the yellow jacket sat sullenly as if they hadn't noticed the crowd around them. A neighbor jerked the hood up and disconnected the battery. The Mongrels jumped out of the car shouting obscenities and approaching him threateningly. 

Me: "Who sent you?"

They turned on me.

"How much are they paying you?"

"Nobody!" shouted the taller one.

"Nothing!" shouted the plumper one.

"How much did Nobody give you?" demanded the hood-raiser.

Everybody laughed except the Mongrels.

Joe Cather, who managed the Mews, approached with his cell phone in his hand: "Trespassing, disturbing the peace..."

"Mobbing us, messing with our car..."

The neighbors laughed.

The plumper one jerked a switchblade out of his pocket and flicked it open.

The bicycle chain and the jack lever approached.

"Who sent you?" I repeated.

"We was just sitting here listening to our radio."

"They can't do nothing to us for that." 

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Patrolman Cole Branch, Shade Branch's nephew, appeared and pointed at the switchblade: "Fold it up and give it to me, Freddy." Cole checked their driver's licences, questioned them and listened to the crowd. He told the hood-raiser to reconnect the battery and advised the Mongrels to leave, not come back, tell their friends and keep their radios turned down unless they were in a place where they wouldn't disturb other people. Once they had left, I asked him:

I suggested that all of us who had cameras or cassette recorders keep them ready. The more evidence we gathered, the greater the risk for the Mongrels. Soon, we had an opportunity to use them. At a half past two on Friday night, Mongrel music jolted Edie out of bed and she saw the three hot rods parked in front of her apartment building with their radios going full blast. Laughing and shouting, a dozen young men were shuffling around and each had a can in his hand. Edie called Kit and Handy first and then the rest of us. In twenty minutes, cars blocked the street on both sides and a few dozen students surrounded the Mongrels. Solomon and Guy were taking pictures, while Edie was using her cassette recorder. Shouting obscenities, the Mongrels were trying to shove the nearest students away. Freddy jerked something out of the same pocket and slashed at the nearest student who happened to be over six feet tall and weigh over two hundred pounds. Looking at his arm, the student exclaimed: "He cut my arm!" Another student slipped past him with a piece of two-by-four and, aiming at Freddy's head, swung downwards as he lurched sideways and caught him on the shoulder. You could hear the bones crunch under the blow. In no time, all twelve Mongrels were on the ground screaming and cringing from the knuckles and toes pounding them and we were running from one to another trying to stop the mayhem. The olders and in-betweeners were surprised to find a few girls joining in and one with her fingernails, but, fortunately none of them were ours. Suddenly Tom Tom barked: "Back off!" And they backed off.

Having called the rescue squad to attend the wounded, he questioned the Mongrels first, then the students and, finally, us and the neighbors. I asked 

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the Mongrels again who had hired them and they replied that they had done nothing wrong. "Nothing wrong?" roared Tom Tom. "You were disturbing the peace at two-thirty in the morning and seven of you were drinking underage." He kicked one of the empty beer cans rattling down the street and the ensuing silence attested admiration for the agility of his 250 pounds of muscle. "Freddy Kingfisher slashed Joel Baker's arm with a straight razor and Joel's friend Stigel Hummer broke Freddy's shoulder with a two-by-four. We could throw Freddy and Stigel in jail... If we had enough room and money, we could jail a dozen of you on both sides." He turned and faced the Mongrels, who recoiled as if they were facing annihilation: "How many times have I told you guys? I could get every one of you a job. If you weren't afraid of work, you could earn good money and the girls would notice you. All you have to do is ask me." After a few seconds of the scowl that had once scared quarterbacks into throwing interceptions, he growled: "Did you hear me?" Twelve Mongrels jumped in unison.

After four or five days of peace, the nuisance calls resumed, but Tom Tom caught Freddy with the receiver in his hand along with three other Mongrels shouting over his shoulder. All four had been drinking, all four were under eighteen, all four were charged. Questioning Freddy once again, Tom Tom warned him that he was getting in deeper and deeper for Buck.

"It wasn't Buck."

"... "

"... Jamesy."

Still another investigation of Jamesy's activities at the PJF revealed nothing more than some encrypted computer files for which he claimed he had forgotten the key. The same officer, who had done the previous investigations, wondered why Warden Gallosheen had ignored her recommendations to bar Jamesy from access to computers. Apparently the warden depended on his prisoner to solve problems with the computers in his office. So we couldn't catch Jamesy, but maybe we could catch EH. Cary and I asked Wilma to find out whether Abe had given EH an emergency grant that he might have used to hire Jamesy. Abe could award 

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such grants without the appproval of the Research Grant Committee. In response to the dean's inquiry, the auditor found that his records indicated none to EH, but rather one for $2000 to Priss Charitzky for the purchase of microfilms of letters written by Lord Byron's mistresses. She had every right to obtain a grant for such a purpose, according to Cary, but where was the emergency? Microfilms of these letters had been available for years.

Gretchkow had taught a course on the romantics before he he was denied tenure and became a full-time assistant dean. Wilma had him ask Priss questions she couldn't honestly answer. What was the emergency? he asked. A report on the use of a grant was due only a year after the award, she replied. He wasn't asking her to account for her use of the money, but rather the nature of the emergency. She needed the microfilms as soon as possible for a study she had been invited to contribute to a special edition of a journal. Since the letters had already been microfilmed, she only had to order copies which would have costed more like $200 than 2000. She needed a lot of microfilms. How was she going to read that many in the time implied by her emergency? She was a fast reader. Noting the volume and pitch of her voice, he asked her whether she had received the microfilms yet. No, she had only sent a check.

"For $2000?"

"No, for 1000."

"I thought I had better not send that much money all at once."

"I thought I could work on half of them while I was waiting for the others."

"In my bank account."

"No, they charge for that."

"Don't you think I had better wait until I receive the first order?" 

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"You are ordering them from the Bilbo Foundation, aren't you?"

"Of course!"

"$2000 seems like a lot of money to me."

"... What is this? The Spanish Inquisition?"

When he told us the story, Gretchkow saved his smile for this protest. Under his military moustache, this handsome but cruel smile must have tormented Priss even more than his monotone questions. Panic over the danger of having to account for the $2000, he explained, drove her to worse panic over that of having to account for the $3750. A call to the Bilbo Foundation revealed that they had never received her order.

Around six one evening, I got a call from Meg O'Sullivan, Cary's sister who had been taking care of him since he lost his wife. Cary had told her that he would stop at West Berlin on the way home, but, even so, he should have showed up by now and his office phone didn't answer. Having asked Murma to call the other guys, I jumped in the car and drove to Murkington as fast as I dared. There were only a half dozen cars in the lot, but Cary's green Pontiac was one of them. I ran to the elevators and took one up to the fifth floor. Cary's door was open and he was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands and a bloody wound on the back of his head. He raised his head in panic and I saw black eyes, a flattened nose, cut and swollen lips and bruises on his face and arms. "Cary! Where else are you hurt?"

"All over," he said in a rasping voice, trying to shrug and smile.

He shook his head: "They ran off with the phone."

"Everything's locked up. Pay phones on the first floor."

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down to the fourth floor. I pulled the window up and yelled: "Anybody got a cell phone?" Edie took one out of her purse and showed it to me. "He's up here in his office, Room 567. Call the rescue squad and the campus police. If anybody has a first-aid kit, bring it up here." As I started back upstairs, I saw a wire hanging over the side of a barrel on the fourth-floor landing. Grabbing the phone, I ran back to Cary's office. "The guys are on the way up. I told them to call the rescue squad and the police. Anything I can do before first-aid gets here?" Cary shook his head. I pushed his desk chair over to him and struggled to help him into it. Deanna and Kit, who had taken an elevator, burst into the room out of breath with the first-aid kit from Solomon's car. Handy and Guy, who had run up the stairs, were on their heels. They were dressing Cary's head and face, when Edie, Emily and Solomon arrived. 

"Those bastards!" shouted Edie, startling all of us. "Breaking his nose wasn't enough! They had to break his tooth too!"

"You ought to see what my nose and tooth did to them!"

"Don't worry about me," he told her. "I'm in paradise with a bunch of houris taking care of me." Lora appeared. "Here's another one!" he exclaimed almost joyfully.

Solomon left to get Meg and Murma. The rescue squad were effective and the campus police, pedantic. The policemen made a face when Deanna regretted that we had forgotten to call Tom Tom. Cary told them that he was standing in front of his file cabinet when three young men wearing Holloween masks appeared and one of them, who wore a black, wart-covered mask with horns, slugged him so hard that he fell and hit his head on his desk. As he lay on his back, the other two stood on either side kicking him and a fourth, whom he hadn't seen before, watched the hall from the door. He caught a glimpse of a hump on his shoulder and his arm in a sling which he hid on the other side of his body. The one with the warts and horns stomped on his face and groin, and he howled. Scared, the other three fled, but the warts and horns yanked the phone plug from its socket, took the phone and, stopping at the door, shouted: "Any more trouble and the girls'ill get worse." His upper front teeth were missing. Cary hadn't 

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noticed any of the Mongrels' cars following him when he drove from the Mews to Murkington, but at least one of them must have followed him when he left after five. The directory on the wall beside the elevators would have given them the number of his office. Although a surgeon had to reconstruct his nose and a dentist, his tooth, he had no other broken bones and his skull wasn't cracked. The riot in front of a music librarian's house in the middle of the night had received no more than routine attention from the local press, but the assault in broad daylight on a distinguished professor in his own office got the coverage it deserved by WZTV, WZFM, the Student Advocate and the Concordia Semaphore. The press in Mapleton and elsewhere in Zenia reported the story too. The participation of both the librarian and the professor in the Skullthorp project implied a campaign against it. Irony recalled the criticism of the project by the English Department. The Mongrels, as Tom Tom feared, may have taken pride in the publicity. Now, everybody in Concordia knew all about them.

The Concordia and ZU Police Departments were always patting each other publicly on the back and kicking each other privately in the shins. The riot occurred in town and the assault took place on campus, but non-students who lived in town were responsible for both and they targeted a university project conducted on university property off campus. A further complication in the public negotiation and private bickering was the jealousy of Concordia police chief Willie Brandon for his subordinate Sergeant Thomas Q. Thomas, who was evidently the most appropriate investigator for this case. Chief Willie kept insisting that town and gown crime required diplomacy, hence the necessity of his involvement, yet Silas Fixx, the ZU police chief, who knew Willie was jealous of Tom Tom, demanded his consent to deal with his sergeant directly. The Yellow Jacket had been seen in the Murkington parking lot at the time of the assault on Cary. A telephone tug-of-war between the two chiefs gave the Kingfisher brothers a whole week to thumb to Canada, but Freddy was afraid to leave without Buck and Buck enjoyed flaunting himself around Concordia too much to go with him. To him it seemed like revenge for the shame of Jamesy Willowby knocking his two upper front teeth out and Celia Gretchkow painting his genitals green, a crime recalled by the press and remembered by the public. Jamesy and his friends had left Buck locked up in a cage for stray dogs or mongrels according to a joke circulating among the students. After many telephone calls between Mayor Bessy Kabritzky, President Hamilton 

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Softack, Dean Wilma Furlock, other town and gown officials, Sheila Wilcox, other angry citizens, Congressman Forthwright and other troubled officials in Mapleton including the governor, Tom Tom settled the matter by recruiting a campus policeman who admired both the former football star and the successful policeman. Thus Clancy Tokens agreed to Watson Tom Tom's Holmes, an elegant solution as everybody from bottom to top agreed, despite grumbling by Willie and chuckles by Silas.

Cary was still in the hospital entertaining (literally) his many guests when Harriet Strubel brought him a cactus consisting of an upright body and two arms, one with the forearm turned downwards and the other, upwards. She had grown it herself and it's name was Signalman. They had been friends ever since Cary had admired the cactus on her desk in the English Department office. "Is that cheek sore?" she asked him. He shook his head and she kissed him there. He thought she was going to ask his permission to name her child after him, as some of his students had over the years, but Harriet wasn't even pregnant or at least not with a baby. Professor Howard had asked her to make backups of e-mail messages to applicants for graduate assistantships in case any of them should accuse him of bias in selecting those who would receive offers. Thus Harriet had to extract the messages that answered this description and ignore the others, a horribly boring job, but she found one that made her feel as if she were being pricked with a thousand pins. Professor Howard had addressed it to Professor Charitzky: "Send JW one thousand and hold the other back pending results." Neither Harriet nor Cary needed clarification. After loud protests over the dean's suspicion of Priss' emergency grant, little had been said and much had been thought. Cary promised Harriet that nobody but him, me and the dean would ever know what she had told him and he kissed her on the cheek.

He invited Wilma and me to visit him after supper and we agreed to keep Harriet's secret. After a minute of silence, Wilma said: "This is one of the hazards of my job. I have to act on evidence I couldn't use in court. I could hire a professional investigator to find legal proof that Priss, on orders from EH, credited a thousand dollars to one of Jamesy Willowby's bank accounts -- how many does he have? -- and that Jamesy distributed some of the money to the Mongrels with orders to harrass you and your 

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associates, and a promise of more if they succeeded in intimidating you. Or I could let EH and Priss know that I know what they have done and give them until next summer to find jobs somewhere else."

Cary: "You are going to tell us that, in the first case, the university would have to pay such an investigator too much, hiring him would provoke a backlash from people who resent such intervention, the investigator might not find the evidence we need and, even if he did, we might lose in court."

Me: "So we let EH and Priss off with a move to another university where they will continue to do what they are doing here! They might even find stronger support for their opposition to our project. We will simply be exporting our evil to another institution."

"What if we hired our own lawyer to do the investigation? With all the sympathy and outrage, we should be able to raise enough money to do that."

Cary nodded doubtfully.

I sighed my despair and Cary chuckled grimly. 

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"I only hope that Jamesy doesn't apply for entrance to ZU. If you raise enough money -- how much is enough? -- and if your lawyer finds proof of all the links in the chain from EH to the Mongrels, you might win, but can you afford the time and energy? How about the Skullthorp project? How about your own research? Since I'm nearly as old as you are, I can say that you don't have a whole lot of time to spare."

What could we say?

She got up glancing at her watch and left, while Cary and I looked at each other mystified.

We spent part of the time wondering what she was up to and the rest arguing back and forth in search of an exit from the trap she had caught us in.

"It would have been easy in the eighteenth century," I concluded. "I would have challenged EH to a duel and that would have been the end of it."

"The end of what? You, for instance? He was with Special Forces in Vietnam. It takes a war to make heroes out of crooks."

"Maybe we could get Tom Tom to throw him out of the window in his office."

"Your solutions are too brutal. What if he came home one evening and found you in bed with his wife and daughters?"

"It would be even sweeter revenge if he found you instead of me."

"Shirley used to think I'm cute."

Prickly entered Cary's office: "I just wanted to see where it happened."

"Here!" Cary pointed downwards.

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"I guess the cleaning woman finally got around to it."

"Gretchkow told you so you could tell Priss..."

"Wilma..." said Cary bowing ceremoniously.

Bowing: "And EH."

"No, on the way back. Who is Omega? Tom Sprinkle? Delly Cooper?"

"How did she take it?"

"She always does that."

"Ah hah!"

Tom Tom arrested Buck ten days after the assault on Cary. Buck knew that Cary would see the gap in his teeth if he opened his mouth and that Tom Tom would arrest him if he didn't leave town. Humiliation had exasperated his hatred to the point where he couldn't stop his teeth from flashing and his body from strutting around his neighborhood. He epitomized the dignity deficit plaguing the milieu that had spawned the Mongrels. Cary recognized him and, by his arm sling and the hump on his shoulder, Freddy, but he couldn't have recognized the other two Mongrels if fear of offending Buck hadn't driven them to admit their complicity. Witnesses had seen the four of them entering Murkington Hall and returning to the yellow jacket in the parking lot. Yet no attempt to extract any further admission of the connection to Jamesy succeeded and Tom Tom had promised Freddy not to let Jamesy know that he had betrayed him. The tension in the jaws of all four attested their fear of revenge by this deceptively polite and attractive 

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young man in the PJF. Further questioning only gave him another opportunity to tease the investigator into chasing false leads until frustration discouraged her. Everybody knew that EH had instigated and that Jamesy had ordered the harrassment of the submarine crew and the assault on Cary, but Buck, Freddy and the other two Mongrels had to pay for their crimes. Buck got two years in prison for aggravated assault, while Freddy and the other Mongrels, on pleas by Cary and Tom Tom, got off with suspended sentences and a few months of community service. Cary and Tom Tom argued that the authors of the crimes would receive no worse punishment than public disapproval, an injustice that would aggravate their henchmen's hostility to society.

It took EH and Priss six weeks to find another job, in an equally reputable English department at another state university, with substantial raises in salary and a promise of grant money that would enable them to make further trouble for us. Since their new appointments began next fall, however, they had six more months to continue their mischief in Concordia before moving away. Their third of ZU protested against the circumstances behind their departure, which they considered abusive and partisan. The local press reported the allegation of irreparable loss in a context that implied approval. When journalists quoted Cary and Wilma, they truncated their statements so that their discretion sounded or looked more like embarrassment. They insinuated that the loss of two distinguished English professors -- the word raised eyebrows even among the uncommitted third -- had resulted from a whispering campaign orchestrated by us. They even echoed the criticism of our project by EH, Priss and their allies, thus contradicting the approval they been giving us six weeks earlier. Then Wilma paid us a surprise visit in the submarine -- we really were crowded! -- and convinced us, such was her charm, that the scandal was a wonderful joke and she actually had us laughing by the time she left. The press, she told us, always amplifies the loudest noise they hear and promptly forget it as soon as they hear another one. Indeed, an investigation of the ZU Foundation by the state police overshadowed the loss of professors Howard and Charitzky a few days later. They suspected the Foundation of using alumni contributions to fund the purchase of performance enhancing drugs for ZU athletes.