We Install (15 page)

“I talked with my lawyer,” van Gilder said.

That snapped Kling's attention back to the here-and-now in a hurry. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Van Gilder nodded. Then he sighed. “He said you had probable cause to arrest me, so suing you wouldn't go anywhere. But some people will think I did it whether you let me go or not. This is bound to louse up my business. How do I get my good name back?”

Unfortunately, that was a damn good question. Kling did the best he could with it: “The people who matter to you know you're innocent. For the others, for the yahoos, you're a nine-days' wonder. They'll forget you as soon as something else juicy hits the news. You may get hurt for a little while, but I don't think it'll last long.”

“I hope not.” Van Gilder didn't sound convinced. Kling didn't push it, because he wasn't a hundred percent convinced, either.

He led the scooter dealer to the station's front door. A police vehicle waited outside to take van Gilder home. He could get on with his life—as much of it as he had left after getting busted for a really nasty crime. He was liable to be right; the stain from the arrest wouldn't vanish overnight.

A few minutes after van Gilder disappeared, Kling's phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket. “Sergeant Kling speaking.”

“This is Jack Cravath, Sergeant.” Sure enough, Cravath's face looked out of the phone screen at Kling. “I just called to say thank you.”

That didn't happen every day, or even every tenth of a year. “You're welcome,” Kling answered. “I'm only sorry we had to meet the way we did.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Cravath said. “So the Snarre't turned the hoxbomb loose for the hell of it, did they? And it found somebody it could bite?”

“That's what they're saying,” Kling answered. “Maybe I believe 'em, maybe I don't. It puts the best face on what they did—that's for sure.”

“Why would anybody do such a horrible thing?” Cravath asked.

“My guess is, because they thought they could get away with it,” John Paul Kling said. “Maybe they didn't figure the hoxbomb would find anybody vulnerable. Maybe. But why put it in van Gilder's pocket if that wasn't what they wanted?”

“Why do it at all?” Jack Cravath repeated.

“Most likely, they didn't think we could catch them. They like our machines, remember,” Kling said. “They probably guessed we couldn't figure out what was going on, because we didn't have the right kind of technology to handle it. If we'd tried by ourselves, they might have been right, too. But hoxbombing is so evil, their own people got involved, and that made the difference.”

“A lot of humans wouldn't admit it,” Cravath said.

“Yeah, well … You know what else?” Kling said. “The Furballs think we're just as dumb and weird as we think they are. And a lot of the time, they're right. So are we. But I'll tell you something funny. That one Snarre'i detective, I wouldn't mind working with her again. How's that for peculiar?”

“I deal with them all the time,” Cravath said. “They aren't so bad. They're no worse than we are.”

“Come on—which is it?” Kling asked. Cravath didn't see the difference. But then, he wasn't a cop.

LOGAN'S LAW

This story appears here for the first time. It's one of my occasional lunges at mainstream fiction. I first started playing with it in the 1980s, when some of the events on which it's based were fresher in my mind. That should be obvious from the technology, and lack of technology, involved. It is fiction, though. Of course it is. It says so right here on the box.

H
e sat in the sixth-floor office, glumly grading finals. It was a bright spring Berkeley Thursday outside, but fluorescent no-time in there. A file cabinet cut off most light and all the view from the window. The desk faced away from it anyhow, toward the books stacked everywhere. Good solid stuff: the
Cambridge Medieval History
, the
Monumenta Germaniae Historiae
, journals like
Speculum
and
Viator
, dictionaries and hagiographies, the tools of a medievalist's trade.

Why did he come up to campus? Working at his place would have been just as easy. His stuff was unpacked, into closets, onto shelves, boxes folded flat and stowed for his next move. But the apartment was a worse tomb than this, and at night the queen-sized bed felt way too big. He wasn't used to sleeping alone, not these last eight years.

He bent to the bluebook in front of him. Somebody walked past the door. He noticed out of the corner of his eye. A minute or two later, he caught another flick of motion: same jeans, same top somewhere between rust and maroon. Someone who wanted to know what was up with in his High Middle Ages class next quarter?

He sighed and put down the pen. But this was part of the job, too. “Help you?” he called.

He thought for a second she didn't hear him. Then she cautiously stepped into the office after all.

What was she doing here? She wasn't one of the bright, eager, unprepared undergrads who filled his courses. Like him, she was gaining hard on the tired side of thirty. “What can I do for you?” he asked, and felt like an ass the second the words were out of his mouth.

He got lucky—she wasn't listening. Her eyes wandered from the map of thirteenth-century Germany half-unrolled and leaning against a bookcase to the boxes full of back numbers of
Byzantinische Zeitschrift
(one on a chair, the other on its side underneath) to the two shelves solid with black-spined paperbacks: Penguin Classics.

While she checked out the office, he did the same with her. About five-four, slim, with hair as black as the Penguins, tied behind her head. Hazel eyes, very fair skin. She carried herself like a dancer.

“What a lot of books,” she breathed, a grad student's lust for the printed page in her voice.

“Wish they were mine,” he agreed.

“No?”

“Christ, no. This is old Blaustein's office—my chairman, I mean—but he's teaching in Hamburg this year. I've got his classes, and he lets me use the office. He drops dead over there, I'm out in the hall with my brother's pickup, you betcha.”

“Don't blame you. This is an incredible collection. Not my field, but incredible.”

He glanced at her left hand: no ring.
Whoa, boy, down
, he told himself. He remembered what his buddy Ed Logan said a couple of years back, when Ed's divorce was fresh and new. Ed was having a tough time connecting as a new single, and they were both pretty drunk. Ed sat on his couch—a couch he didn't have any more—looking down into a glass of gin and ice, and solemnly declared, “Man, the good ones are all taken.”

After a while, they made a joke of it: Logan's Law, to go with Newton's and Murphy's and Sturgeon's and the rest. Now his own marriage was egg on his face, and it wasn't so funny any more.

She took a couple of deep breaths, then blurted, “Does writing a dissertation make everybody hostile?”

“I'm single because of mine.” It wasn't the whole truth, or even half, but it wasn't a lie, either. The months at the Mac, and before that fighting sources and lexica and secondary literature, sure hadn't helped.

She accepted the words without surprise. “I was talking with my friend Liz Martin—she's in Near Eastern studies; do you know her?”

“'Fraid not.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, I was talking with Liz and she said something totally innocuous, and I screamed in her face.”

“It's crazy-making,” he agreed. “I'm Steve, by the way.”

“Oh,” she said again. A beat later: “I'm Jen.”

“Hi.”
More inanity
, he thought. To cover it, he asked her what her thesis topic was.

“Dutch administration in the East Indies—Indonesia, now—between the two World Wars.” It was no stranger than the study of Manfred Hohenstaufen's struggle against the thirteenth-century papacy that earned him this temporary spot behind a desk. Jen went on, “I was on my way to give Teske my second chapter, but he doesn't act like he cares when he gets something—he took three months to read chapter one. Even when he did, he hardly had anything to say about it.”

“You don't know when you're well off. Blaustein fought me comma by comma all the way through.”

“It'd be nice to find out,” she said wistfully.

“Ha! Change this, revise that—then put it back the first way again.”

They bitched for a while: not enough money, not enough time, probably no fulltime job at the end anyway, and a workload that made you a hermit to survive. Grad students' gripes seemed pretty much the same in modern Southeast Asian studies as in medieval Europe.

She looked at her watch. “I've got to run.”

He hesitated, then plunged: “Could I—dammit, I don't know how to do this any more—could I ask you for your phone number?”

She smiled, maybe at the awkward parenthesis. “Sure.” She took a scratchpad and pen from her purse. “Here.”

“Thanks.” He looked at the little sheet.
Jen Barkman
, she'd written. She crossed her sevens like a European. “Call you tonight?”

She was already at the door. “Okay,” she said, and disappeared.

The phone rang four times before she answered. “Hello?”

“Jen? Hi, this is Steve.”

“Oh, hi. How are you?”

“All right. Um—have anything planned for tomorrow night?”

“Translating tax records, maybe. Besides that, diddly.”

“Well, do you like Japanese food? There's a good place not far from my apartment. Best sushi on the East Bay, I think. And have you seen ‘Trouble All Over' yet?”

“No, and I want to,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Up in Martinez.”

“Martinez has sushi?” She sounded amazed. “I'm in the Oakland Hills. That's a long way for you to make the round trip picking me up. How do I get to your place?”

“Take the 80 up to Carquinez Scenic Drive. …” He finished the directions.

“About seven?”

“Say, six-thirty. The movie starts at twenty past eight.”

“Sounds good. Give me your number in case something goes wrong.” When she had it, she asked, a little sheepishly, “Um, Steve—what's your last name?”

That startled a laugh out of him. “You didn't read it on my door card? It's Whortleberry.”

She giggled, then said at once, “Sorry.”

“It's okay. Everybody does that. Actually, the name's kind of useful now—people remember me by it. No fun at all when I was a kid, though.”

“I can imagine,” Jen said, and then, “I'd better get back to it. The tax registers are calling.”

“I'll let you go.” He knew how a thesis could drive somebody. “See you tomorrow.”

“'Bye.”

He was standing naked in front of a steamy mirror, trimming his mustache, when the cell phone chirped. He grabbed it. “Hello?”

“Steve? This is Jen.”

“Hello.” His stomach lurched as if he were on a rollercoaster, one he hadn't known he was riding. “What's up?” But he feared he could guess. She had to be crazy to go out with somebody freshly single. What kind of excuse would she come up with?

“I don't think I can get up there tonight. Clio—Clio is my dog, named for the Muse of History, you know—Clio has something wrong with one of her paws, and I don't want to spend a whole evening away from her. I'm sorry to mess things up, but—”

“It's okay,” he said, biting the bullet as gracefully as he could. “Maybe another time.” Now she'd come back with
Maybe
in the drone that meant
Not on your life
.

But she went on, “I was thinking you could have dinner down here where I'm staying. The movie's at the Eightplex, and I wouldn't feel so bad about going off for a couple of hours.”

Reprieve from the governor
ran through his mind. “How do I get there?” The directions were more complicated than the ones he'd given her. “Can I bring anything?” he asked. “Beer? Wine?”

“Beer, I think,” she said. He grinned like an idiot—his ex hated the stuff.

“When do you want me?”

“Whenever. If dinner runs late, we can always catch the 10:45 show.”

“See you soon, then.”

He dressed quickly and threw on the rumpled herringbone jacket every male one-time grad student seems to own. Just on the off chance, he stuck a Trojan in his wallet. He hadn't worried about anything like that since high school. As he locked the deadbolt, the ugly furnished apartment felt surprisingly like home.

His old Nissan didn't like the Oakland Hills, or any others. He managed to drive past Jen's street and had to double back. Even when he found her address, he thought he had it wrong. Most of Oakland was tough and working-class, but this. … The house was a mansion, set well back from the street. His car coughed climbing the steep driveway, then sighed into silence when he killed the ignition.

Jen came out on the deck and watched him unfold. “I didn't know you were so tall,” she said.

“I guess I was sitting down the whole time when we talked before.” His angular six-three and odd last name were usually the first two things people noticed about him. Funny she'd missed them both.

He went around to the other side of the Nissan for the beer. “Quite a place,” he said, climbing the narrow flagstone stairway toward her.

“Isn't it? I'm housesitting. The owners' last daughter just went off to college, and they bought a smaller place in Sausalito.”

“Wow, life's tough.”

“Yeah. They want someone here till they sell this one. It's a great deal—no rent, I have all the privacy I need, and a pool and sauna besides.”

“I'm so jealous.”

“Come on in. I'll show you around.”

She led him to the side door. It opened onto the kitchen, which was the size of his living room. He put the beer in the refrigerator, met Clio—a big black retriever who did limp—and walked through several rooms with cathedral ceilings and a forest's worth of wood paneling.

“Had enough?” Jen asked.

“You're staying in a place like this and you still want to be a grad student in history?”

“Might as well enjoy it while I have the chance. Let's go back to the kitchen. I'll put you to work.”

“I'll open a couple of those beers before you do.”

“Sure.”

They drank most of a bottle each. Then she said, “It's chicken breasts and stir-fry vegetables—you get to cut up the veggies. Told you I'd make you work.”

“I'm easy. Where's the knife?”

“In that drawer there.” She got out fresh broccoli, mushrooms, an onion. He bought the same mix, but quick-frozen in a plastic bag. She said, “Cut everything thin. They're not supposed to be in the skillet long.”

“Gotcha.” The knife thocked on the cutting board. Steve was functional in the kitchen—and cooking for himself was cheaper than eating out every night.

They talked while he chopped and she fiddled with the chicken. She was twenty-nine, from Milwaukee, divorced herself: “Three years now. Yeah, I went through the wars.”

“I thought you might have.”

Her laugh rang sour. “Scars still show?”

“No, no. Just—you seem to know where I'm coming from, is all.”

“Well, sure. Divorced people are the only ones fit to talk with other divorced people. Nobody else knows what you mean.”

He remembered his parents' pained incomprehension when he told them he and Elaine were breaking up, his married friends' sympathy—tinged with alarm, as if divorce were something catching, like the flu—and the barely concealed amusement of a couple of bachelor buddies. Nothing from any of them had touched the sudden aching emptiness the collapse left inside him.

“Why don't you bring those vegetables over here if you're done with them?” she said.

It was the first time he'd stood really close to her for more than a couple of seconds. Wondering if he should touch her made him as nervous as a tenth-grader. In a way, that was about what he was. Who knew how the rules had changed when he was out of circulation?

“Penny for 'em,” she said, out of the blue.

His cheeks heated as he told her.

“Oh, that.” She fed strips of chicken into the pan with the vegetables. “No rush, is there?”

Having no good answer, he let her tend the stir-fry. Some of his nerves went away.

The chicken came out fork-tender. The vegetables were perfect, too: hot clear through but still crisp, juicy, full of flavor. Soy sauce and a touch of something he couldn't quite name only added to them.

“What's that, mm, tang?”

“Fresh-grated ginger.”

“Uhwishush,” he said with his mouth full, then tried again. “Delicious.”

They were nearly through when she asked the question he'd half hoped for, half dreaded: “Want to talk about what went wrong?”

“I suppose.” But he took a long pull at his beer before he went on. “My fault as much as Elaine's, I guess. She always wants to be out and doing stuff. A party, a play, a concert, dancing, shopping, just driving around. Me, I'd sooner curl up with a book or have a couple of friends over and talk all night. If we'd worked right, maybe we would've split the difference. But she got speedier and I dug in my heels. … Does that make any sense at all?”