Thad went to the door and looked out. Harrison and Manchester were standing in the door of the department common room, drinking coffee. In their ham-sized fists, the mugs looked the size of demitasse cups. Thad raised his hand. Harrison raised his in return and asked him if he would be much longer.
'Five minutes,' Thad said, and both cops nodded.
He went back to his desk, separated the creative writing files from the others, and began to replace the latter in the file drawer, doing it as slowly as possible, giving the phone time to ring. But the phone just went on sitting there. He heard one ring someplace far down the corridor, the sound muffled by a closed door, somehow ghostly in the building's unaccustomed summer silence. Maybe George got the wrong number, he thought, and uttered a little laugh. The fact was, George wasn't going to call. The fact was, he, Thad, had been wrong. Apparently George had some other trick up his sleeve. Why should he be surprised? Tricks were George Stark's spécialité de la maison. Still, he had been so sure, so goddamned sure —
'Thaddeus?'
He jumped, almost spilling the contents of the last half a dozen files onto the floor. When he was sure they weren't going to slip out of his grasp, he turned around. Rawlie DeLesseps was standing just outside the door. His large pipe poked in like a horizontal periscope.
'Sorry,' Thad said. 'You threw a jump into me, Rawlie. My mind was ten thousand miles away.'
'Someone calling for you on my phone,' Rawlie said amiably. 'Must have gotten the number wrong. Lucky I was in.'
Thad felt his heart begin to beat slow and hard — it was as if there were a snare-drum inside his chest, and someone had begun to whack it with a great deal of measured energy.
'Yes,' Thad said. 'That was very lucky.'
Rawlie gave him an appraising glance. The blue eyes under his puffy, slightly reddened lids were so alive and inquisitive they were almost rude, and certainly at odds with his cheerful, bumbling, absent-minded-professor manner. 'Is everything quite all right, Thaddeus?'
No, Rawlie. These days there's a mad killer out there who's partly me, a fellow who can apparently take over my body and make me do fun things like sticking pencils into myself, and I consider each day which concludes with me still sane a victory. Reality is out of joint, good buddy.
'All right? Why wouldn't everything be all right?'
'I seem to detect the faint but unmistakably ferrous odor of irony, Thad.'
'You're mistaken.'
'Am I? Then why do you look like a deer caught in a pair of headlights?'
'Rawlie — '
'And the man I just spoke to sounds like the sort of salesman you buy something from on the phone just to make sure he'll never visit your home in person.'
'It's nothing, Rawlie.'
Very well.' Rawlie didn't look convinced.
Thad left his office and headed down the hall toward Rawlie's.
'Where are you off to?' Harrison called after him.
'Rawlie has a call for me in his office,' he explained. 'The phone numbers up here are all sequential. The guy must have gotten the numbers bolloxed.'
'And just happened to get the only other faculty member here today?' Harrison asked skeptically.
Thad shrugged and kept on walking.
Rawlie DeLesseps's office was cluttered, pleasant, and still inhabited by the smell of his pipe — two years' abstinence apparently did not make up for some thirty years of indulgence. It was dominated by a dart-board with a photograph of Ronald Reagan mounted on it. An encyclopedia— sized volume, Franklin Barringer's Folklore of America, lay open on Rawlie's desk. The telephone was off the hook, lying on a stack of blank blue-books. Looking at the handset, Thad felt the old dread fall over him in its familiar stifling folds. It was like being bundled in a blanket that badly needs to be washed. He turned his head, sure he would see all three of them — Rawlie, Harrison, and Manchester — lined up in the doorway like sparrows on a telephone wire. But the office doorway was empty, and from somewhere down the hall, he could hear the soft rasp of Rawlie's voice ' He had buttonholed Thad's guard-dogs. Thad doubted that he had done it by accident.
He picked up the telephone and said, 'Hello, George.'
'You've had your week,' the voice on the other end said. It was Stark's voice, but Thad wondered if the voice-prints would match so exactly now. Stark's voice wasn't the same. It had grown hoarse and rough, like the voice of a man who had spent too much time hollering at some sporting event. 'You had your week and you haven't done doodly-squat.'
'Right you are,' Thad said. He felt very cold. He had to expend a conscious effort to keep from shivering. That cold seemed to be coming out of the telephone itself, oozing out of the holes in the earpiece like icicles. But he was also very angry. 'I'm not going to do it, George. A week, a month, ten years, it's all the same to me. Why not accept it? You're dead, and dead you will stay.'
'You're wrong, old hoss. If you want to be dead wrong, y'all just keep goin.'
'Do you know what you sound like, George?' Thad asked. 'You sound like you're falling apart. That's why you want me to start writing again, isn't it? Losing cohesion, that's what you wrote. You're biodegrading, right? It won't be long before you just crumble to bits, like the wonderful one-hoss shay.'
'None of that matters to you, Thad,' the hoarse voice replied. It went from a scabrous drone to a harsh sound like gravel falling out of the back of a dump-truck to a squeaking whisper — as if the vocal cords had given up functioning altogether for the space of a phrase or two — and then back to the drone again. 'None of what's going on with me is your concern. That's nothing but a distraction to you, buddy. You just want to get going by nightfall, or you're going to be one sorry son of a bitch. And you won't be the only one.'
'I don't — '
Click! Stark was gone. Thad looked at the telephone handset thoughtfully for a moment, then replaced it in the cradle. When he turned around, Harrison and Manchester were standing there.
5
'Who was it?' Manchester asked.
'A student,' Thad said. At this point he wasn't even sure why he was lying. The only thing he was really sure of was that he had a terrible feeling in his guts. 'Just a student. As I thought.'
'How did he know you'd be in?' Harrison asked. 'And how come he called on this gentleman's phone?'
'I give up,' Thad said humbly. 'I'm a Russian deep-cover agent. It was really my contact. I'll go quietly.'
Harrison wasn't angry — or, at least, he did not appear to be angry. The look of slightly tired reproach he sent Thad's way was a good deal more effective than anger. 'Mr Beaumont, we're trying to give you and your wife a help. I know that having a couple of fellows trail after you wherever you go can get to be a pain in the ass after awhile, but we really are trying to give you a help.'
Thad felt ashamed of himself . . . but not ashamed enough to tell the truth. That bad feeling was still there, the feeling that things were going to go wrong, that maybe they already had gone wrong. And something else, as well. A light, fluttery feeling along his skin. A wormy feeling inside his skin. Pressure at his temples. It wasn't the sparrows; at least, he didn't think it was. All the same, some mental barometer he hadn't even been aware of was failing. Nor was this the first time he'd felt it. There had been a sensation similar to this, although not as strong, when he was on the way to Dave's Market eight days ago. He had felt it in his own office while he had been getting the files. A low, jittery feeling.