The Memorial Hall Murder (20 page)

“Well, then, let me put the question to the lot of you in an informal way. Now, remember, nobody's committing himself or herself to anything. It's just a sense of the meeting. This is not a formal meeting. No minutes are being recorded.
The question is not what to do, but when and how.
Is that right? Look at all those hands. Does anyone disagree? Now, don't be afraid to hold up your hand and speak your piece. How about it? What, nobody? Not a soul? You mean, we all agree? Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle.”

There was another explosion of laughter. People were roaring, gasping for breath. They were slapping their knees. Someone started clapping. They were all clapping. Prolonged applause. General rapture.

Homer inched his back along the wall closer to the door. Mrs. Chamberlain was speaking again, but she had lowered her voice. She was talking quietly in the midst of an attentive silence. What was she saying? Something about Cheever?

Homer was as close to the door as it was possible to be without being seen, but now he craned his head so that his left ear was closer still, and shifted more of his weight onto his left foot. But then the polished floor undid him. His left foot slid out from under him and he fell down heavily on his left side, sprawling full length across the sill of the open door. “Oh, ouch,” said Homer. He sat up, his face blazing. There were shocked exclamations and scraping back of chairs. The youngest Overseer jumped up and strode firmly across the floor to shut the door. Homer got to his feet and glanced guiltily at Julia Chamberlain, who was staring at him with her mouth open. He grinned at her with all his teeth, feeling like the world's fool. The door closed in his face.

Oh, well, hell. Homer looked at the door. Shamelessly he put his ear against it. But he could hear nothing more. The voices in the Faculty Room were a subdued murmur. Homer gave up. He rubbed his sore shoulder and went downstairs and out of doors, heading once again for the call desk in Widener, mulling over in his mind the fragments of the emergency meeting he had been privileged to overhear.

They had been going to fire Ham Dow. Two years ago they had been about to fire Ham Dow, only they had changed their minds, and then he had been killed. Why had they wanted to get rid of Ham? Because he was a corrupting influence on the students, the way Cheever said? Had Cheever talked them into it?

But what difference did that make now? Ham was dead and gone. And what did the firing of Ham Dow have to do with President Cheever? Why had they been so eager to meet behind Cheever's back? Julia Chamberlain had been delighted to hear that Cheever and Tinker were going to be away. She had called the meeting at the last minute because they would be away. What were they discussing that was not suitable for Cheever's ears?
The question is not what to do, but when and how.
They had all agreed to that. Unanimously. Not a single dissenting vote. They had been eager to agree. They had been exhilarated, overjoyed.

Homer stopped with his foot on the bottom step of the tremendous staircase that led upward to the imperial colonnaded façade of Widener Library and looked back at the second-story windows of University Hall.

What if the question about which they had all been so happily unanimous was the decision to
fire
President James Cheever? Maybe he had offended them, like Dunster. Maybe in his general intransigence he was some kind of contemporary version of an Antipedobaptist. The enforced resignation of a Harvard president: that would be a crisis indeed! What a sacrifice of honor and esteem, for a president of Harvard to be canned!

The windows of the Faculty Room gave no sign of what was going on inside. Those tall round-headed windows had once shed the dim light of dawn on sleepy students attending compulsory chapel before breakfast, back in the beginning of time. Now they were transmitting the sunlight of a November afternoon on an emergency meeting of Overseers and Fellows, a meeting called hastily during one of the great sentimental events of the year, the Harvard-Yale game. The beautiful room had apparently always been a sacrificial chamber.

Chapter Twenty-eight

Ham had worked out an order to his life, a sort of daily routine. Of course, it was impossible to know how long a day really was, to guess when one day ended and another began. But his waking and sleeping had taken on a pattern, and he had established a schedule for the waking hours that he now thought of as the daytime.

After all, there had been only two choices. Either he could curl up in a corner and die, or he could grasp at life by every handle he could find. Ham had simply decided that Vick would search him out sooner or later. In his mind he had settled the entire responsibility for his rescue on Vick Van Horn's young shoulders. Vick was the kind of person who wouldn't stop until she had accomplished her object, who threw herself into things with all the gristle in her body. He was putting his trust in those strong bones of hers, those long determined bones that were charged to the marrow with purpose. He would rather rely on Vick's thin fingers with their bitten fingernails to claw at the walls of his prison than depend on any number of jackhammers and power shovels to dig him out.

In the meantime there was his daily routine.

First: Hygiene. Ham had found a closet in the far corner of the room, and he had spent one entire waking day piling debris from the floor into it, picking up pieces of brick and handfuls of piaster dust, eventually getting down on all fours and sweeping the residue in the direction of the closet with his hands. Now he used the closet for a urinal.

Second: Breakfast. Cold water from the pipe. Ham had found a lump of concrete with a cavity in it, and he was using it as a catch basin under the pipe. Now he picked up the basin and tipped it carefully to his lips. Then he used the remainder to wash his face and hands, emptied the basin into the closet, and set it back under the pipe to fill again. That was the end of breakfast. Well, it didn't matter. He had long since stopped feeling hungry. His stomach often hurt him, gnawing and clenching on nothing, clapping its empty sides together, but he no longer thought about food. He was weak, he knew that, and each day was taking its toll. But he no longer felt the nausea and dizziness of those first waking hours underground. He had had a problem with his belt, because of the lack of food. He had been unable to make new holes as his body shrank, so for a while it had been a problem to keep his pants up. But now he was able to tie the ends of the belt in a sort of knot, bunching the folds of his trousers around his waist.

The next item on Ham's daily schedule had once been exercise, but it had occurred to him almost immediately that for the first time in his life the fat on his body was something to be hoarded. He must not waste it, burning it off with unnecessary movement. He would continue to keep his parts in working order, but there would be no more jogging in a circle in the middle of the floor.

Third: Music. Ham picked up his cello and his bow from the corner where he had leaned them carefully the day before. The cello was the remnant of a long piece of split wood, broken to the right size over his knee. The bow was a thick splinter about two feet long. Ham sat on a pile of bricks in the pitch dark, wedged the pointed end of his cello against another brick on the floor, grasped his bow and drew it across the cello, humming a strong A for the voice of the open string. Then he performed his usual warm-up exercises, his left hand racing down the neck of the cello, working its way through a hundred combinations of accidentals in brisk seesawing tiddle-diddles. Swiftly he ascended the scale of B-flat major, from first position to third to sixth, and then his hand rode up over the swelling curve of the body of the cello into thumb position. Humming in a higher and higher falsetto the notes that lay closer and closer to the bridge, Ham brought his fingers down
thucka-thucka-thuck.
Then he came rapidly down the scale again in double stops. It was a useful exercise of Popper's. Ham grinned in the dark, remembering how Vick had hated that one. “Oh, God,” she had cried one day, shaking her fist at the ceiling. “I hope Popper fries in hell.” But she had struggled through his exercises, she had whaled away at Feuillard's
Tägliche Übungen
, month in, month out. She had sunk her long healthy teeth in them like the bulldog she was, and wouldn't let go.

End of exercises. Now he had earned a little reward. Ham shifted his weight on his hard chair and lowered his head over his instrument. Then he began thumping the fingers of his left hand on the neck of his surrogate instrument in precise sixteenth notes, singing at the same time the pure patterns of the first of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, slowing the tempo only for the rubato passages that brought the strict geometry of the music to nodes of wonder and power. He played as many of the Suites as he could remember.

Fourth: Lunch. Ham's mouth watered. He put his cello and bow away in the corner of the room and took the package of peanut brittle out of his pocket. He unwrapped what was left of it carefully and then, closing his eyes, he bit off a tiny corner. Then he sucked it for as long as there was anything left to suck, before he permitted himself to crush the salty nuts between his teeth.

Time for dessert. Ham knelt in the corner beside his concrete basin and took a drink. Then he picked up the brick that lay on the floor to begin the next task in his daily routine.

Fifth: Hit the pipe. Hit the pipe for two solid hours. (For what felt like two solid hours.) Every day Ham hit the pipe with the dots and dashes of the Morse Code SOS, in separate bursts of a hundred times. Between sessions he allowed himself daily excursions into his repertoire of rhythmical patterns, humming the tunes at the same time, or singing the words of all the songs he could remember. Right now he was running through the
Pilgrim Hymnal of the Congregational Conference of New Jersey.
A pious youth spent in a choir loft had imprinted it on Ham's mind, page by page. So far he had worked his way through all the hymns for the Beginning and Close of Worship, and for Morning and Evening, and now he had arrived at Advent—hymns for the Christmas season. Well, that was probably about the right time of year for the world outside (if there was still a world outside). Ham had tried to make a wild stab at figuring out how long he had been imprisoned in this small chamber in the dark. He had calculated so many days for this, and so many for that, and then he had divided by two, because his own days were shorter than twenty-four hours, he was sure of that. But his calculations still brought him all the way to the end of November, even into December. Six weeks. How much longer could he hold out? Well, he wouldn't think about it. Today was today. He would hit the pipe. Hit the pipe. Hit the pipe.

O Come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, That mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear.

bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing!

bingbingbing BANGBANGBANG bingbingbing!

Chapter Twenty-nine

“Hello, is this Buildings and Grounds? Mr. Maderna? Hey, Maderna, this is Crawley. You know, Crawley at Memorial Hall?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Crawley. Is everything all right over there now?”

“Oh, yeah, except there's this pipe. Keeps knocking.”

“A knocking pipe? Is it one of those old radiators? Just where is the pipe located, Mr. Crawley?”

“Here in my office. Going half the time. You'd think it was a whole goddamn marching band. Bangs like crazy.”

“You mean the radiator? Did you loosen the radiator valve?”

“Oh, sure, only I don't know if it's the radiator or not. Doesn't do no good, loosen no valve on no radiator. You just ought to hear it. Christ, it's driving me crazy.”

“Well, it sounds like a simple matter. I'll send someone—Oh, just a minute, Mr. Crawley.”