5. Thomas
Thomas
The first word I heard clearly in the cloister was tithe.
The second, three exchanges later, was flagged, and it came out of the taller one like a plate breaking.
I want it on the record that I wasn't eavesdropping, or I was, but only in the way where you're frozen mid-step in the dark with your keys in your hand and every possible movement would be worse.
Monday night, quarter to eleven. I'd stayed late in the library annex marking essays, because my flat has a radiator that argues and the annex has one that doesn't, and the short way back to Corbett runs through the cloister, which at that hour is a stone tunnel with four lamps doing the work of ten.
I was two arches in when I understood the sound ahead of me wasn't the fountain.
Two people, in the corner where the cloister turns, up against the pillar the way you stand when the conversation is the kind you'd deny having.
Grad students, by the coats and the bags.
One tall, hood up. One shorter, in a green scarf that I'd seen before, on a person shelving books in the annex with her back very straight.
They were whispering, and here's the thing about whispering that nobody tells you: done hard enough, it carries better than talking.
It strips the voice down to consonants and fear, and the cloister is a whispering gallery, and I got maybe one word in five, and I have never written anything down faster in my life than I wrote those words once I got home.
"...the tithe..." That was the tall one. Then the scarf, fast, urgent, a hiss with grammar in it: "...not until the interval, that's the whole point, you can't just..."
"...they moved it. I'm telling you they moved it..."
"...then who's sitting this term? Because if..."
"He can't." Full voice for two words, panic punching through the whisper. "He's flagged already. Nobody gets flagged twice."
And then my heel came down on grit.
It wasn't loud. It was a sound the size of a struck match, and they came apart like startled birds, the two of them shearing off the pillar in opposite directions, and the tall one was gone around the turn before I'd finished inhaling.
The green scarf got ten feet, stopped, and looked back at me.
One second, maybe two. I've been looked at a lot at this college, catalogued, checked, counted, but this was new: she looked at me the way you look at a thing you're afraid you'll be asked about later.
"Hey," I said, gentle, the voice you use on a spooked animal, "sorry, I didn't mean to—"
Gone. Not running. Walking with the terrible speed of someone who knows running is evidence, footsteps going quick and flat down the stone and out through the arch at the end, and then the cloister was just me and four lamps and the fountain sound that wasn't voices, and I stood there with my keys in my hand like the last man at a party nobody would admit to throwing.
* * *
Here's what I did with it, because there's a procedure now. The procedure is: notebook open, tea going cold, radiator arguing, two in the morning.
Item twenty-one: overheard in the cloister, 10:45 p.m., verbatim as caught: the tithe. Not until the interval. They moved it. Who's sitting this term. He can't. He's FLAGGED already. Nobody gets flagged twice.
Item twenty-two: they weren't gossiping. Gossip leans in. These two were propping each other up.
And then, because a good theory is a ladder you climb to see how wrong you are, I built the obvious one.
Working theory: drug market. It fits more than I wanted it to.
Code words, check: every campus market invents a vocabulary, and tithe is exactly the kind of ironic-Gothic branding a bunch of overread grad students would land on.
Fear, check: markets run on supply and somebody higher up, and both of those make people whisper against pillars.
Flagged, check: markets flag people, narcs and bad debts and users gone shaky, the kind you don't go near twice.
Missing hours, check, sort of: people lose evenings to what they take.
The scarf's interval could be a supply schedule.
Sitting this term could be holding, or dealing, pick your slang.
Then the other column, which is why I'll never make a conspiracy theorist, because I keep both columns.
Against: no money. I've watched this campus for two weeks the way I watch everything, and nobody's flush, nobody's furtive about packages, nobody's eyes are wrong in the way that trade makes eyes wrong.
No product. Not a smell, not a pill, not a rumor of one, and grad students cannot keep a secret that's fun; they can only keep the other kind.
And the big one, the one I keep bumping into in the dark:
Leah Brandt did not leave my office high.
She left vaguer. Whatever's being taken around here, it isn't being swallowed.
It leaves people lighter. It takes the reason out and closes the skin over the hole, and there is no market I've ever heard of where the product is a four-minute cry you can't explain and a thank-you for a conversation that never happened.
Item twenty-three: "who's sitting this term." Leah went sideways on a Thursday. The word is a noun here. Find out what it's a noun FOR.
I thought about asking the cohort. I got as far as drafting the casual version in my head, hey, weird question, what's a tithe around here, and then I played the tape forward: the room shutting the way it shut over M.
Vane, Hannah's pen stopping, Wes building a joke over the hole at speed, like a man throwing boards over a well.
And a colder thought under that one: the woman in the green scarf had looked at me like I was a thing she'd be asked about.
If my questions caused her to be questioned, I'd be the one who did that. I put the casual version away.
I looked at that last line for a while, and then I did something I want credit for: I went to bed. Growth.
* * *
Wednesday was the first formal faculty dinner of term, hall, gowns, candles, the works, and somebody's seating chart put me at the Headmaster's right hand.
I know it wasn't chance, because I watched the chart do its work.
There's a board in the antechamber with the placement on it, calligraphy and all, and the man ahead of me, a chemist with seniority and a face for it, looked at the board twice, the second time with his glasses up, like the board had said a rude word to him.
Elena found me over the sherry, followed my eyes to the chart, and made a noise into her glass that in a lesser woman would have been a whistle.
"Well," she said.
"It's alphabetical," I said. "Probably. Somewhere in there, alphabetically—"
"Mercer," she said, "I've sat these dinners eleven years, and the last new hire who sat at that elbow was a Nobel shortlist." She patted my arm. "Chew slowly."
There was a stranger at the far end of the high table, a small gray woman introduced somewhere in the announcements as a visiting fellow, history of institutions, a name I didn't catch and nobody around me seemed to have caught either, and she watched the hall the way a proctor watches an exam, and I want it noted that I clocked her before anything else that evening happened, because afterward the evening was mostly one thing.
He was already seated when they brought us through. Dark gown over the dark suit, candlelight doing to his temples exactly what you'd expect candlelight to do, and when I sat he said, "Dr. Mercer," in the voice, the one that makes my surname sound like an appointment I'm early for.
"Headmaster."
"How stands the case against me?"
I'd promised him a longer conversation about my Boethius chapter at the welcome dinner, two weeks and one corridor ago. Of course he'd kept the thread. He keeps everything; I was starting to understand that the way you understand weather, by getting rained on.
"The case is troubled," I said. "Witnesses keep defecting."
"Which witnesses?"
"Boethius, mainly. I reread book three this week to use it against you and it took your side. I'm considering perjury."
"You would not be the first." He turned his glass a quarter turn, squaring it to a line on the linen only he could see, and I watched the hands do it and made myself study the salt cellar. "State the argument at its strongest."
So I did. That's the thing I'd forgotten about him between meetings, the thing the want-log keeps failing to file: he doesn't flatter you by agreeing, he flatters you by aiming.
I gave him consolation-as-honest-transaction, the cell in Pavia, philosophy showing up precisely when rescue doesn't, the whole spine of my monograph, better than I'd given it at my own defense, because at my own defense nobody's gray eyes were doing that.
He heard all of it. Then he said, "The man they executed was not the man they arrested."
"That's—"
"The charges were unchanged. The cell was unchanged. The sentence was carried out." He said it the way other men hand you a receipt. "Everything the world would call the situation was identical, and the man was not. On the evidence, I would call that a rescue."
"You'd call it a rescue that ends on an execution."
"Name one that does not," he said, "eventually," and picked up his fork, and I sat there hearing my own heartbeat over a hall of two hundred people, because we were not talking about Boethius, and I could not for the life of me have told you what we were talking about, only that the floor of it was a long way down.
The candles between us needed trimming. One flame stood up tall while I was looking at it, taller than a flame that size has business standing, and I remember it because I was staring at anything in the world that wasn't his hands.