Black Money

19

The college was in what had recently been the country. On the scalped hills around it were a few remnants of the orange groves which had once furred them with green. The trees on the campus itself were mostly palms, and looked as if they had been brought in and planted full-grown. The students gave a similar impression.

One of them, a youth with a beard which made him look like a tall Toulouse-Lautrec, told me how to find Mr. Martin’s office. Its entrance was behind a pierced concrete screen at the side of the administration building, which was one of a Stonehenge oval of buildings surrounding the open center of the campus.

I stepped out of the sunlight into the cold glare of fluorescent lights. A young woman came up to the counter and informed me that Mr. Martin was expecting me.

He was bald in shirtsleeves with a salesman’s forceful stare. The paneled walls of his office were cool and impersonal, and made him look out of place.

“Nice office,” I said when we had shaken hands.

“I can’t get used to it. It’s a funny thing. I’ll be here five years in August, but I’m still nostalgic for the Quonset hut we started in. But you’re not interested in past history.”

“I am in Feliz Cervantes’s past history.”

“Right. That’s quite a name. Feliz means ‘happy,’ you know. Happy Cervantes. Well, let’s hope he is. I don’t remember him personally – he didn’t stay with us long – but I had his records pulled.”

He opened a manila folder on his desk. “What do you want to know about Happy Cervantes?”

“Everything you have.”

“That isn’t much, I’m afraid. Just why is Mr. Stoll interested in him?”

“He came back to town a couple of months ago, under an assumed name.”

“Has he done something wrong?”

“He’s wanted on suspicion of assault,” I said, toning it down. “We’re trying to establish his identity.”

“I’m glad to co-operate with Mr. Stoll – he uses a lot of our boys – but I may not be too much help. Cervantes could be an assumed name, too.”

“But don’t your students have to present records, of birth and education and so on, before you let them in?”

“They’re supposed to. But Cervantes didn’t.”

Martin peered down at the contents of the folder. “There’s a note here to the effect that he claimed to be a transfer student from L.A. State. We admitted him provisionally on the understanding that his transcripts would reach us by the first of October. By that time he’d already left us, and if the transcripts ever arrived we sent them back.”

“Where did he go?”

He shrugged, retracting his bald head tortoise-like between his shoulders. “We don’t keep track of our dropouts. Actually he never was our student.”

He had no transcript, Martin seemed to be saying, therefore he didn’t exist. “You might try his old address here, in case he left a forwarding address. It’s care of Mrs. Grantham, on Shore Drive, number 148. She has quite a few apartments which she rents to students.”

I made a note of the address. “What courses was Cervantes taking?”

“I don’t have a record of that. He didn’t stay long enough to have his grades posted, and that’s all we’re interested in. I suppose you could try the Dean’s office, if it’s important. He’s in this building.”

I walked around the outside of the building to the Dean’s office. His secretary was a large-busted brunette of uncertain age who handled herself with a kind of stylized precision. She typed Cervantes’s name on a piece of paper and took it into a filing room, emerging with the written information that he had registered in French Language and Literature, on the senior level, and upper-division Modern European History.

I was certain for the first time that Feliz Cervantes and Francis Martel were the same man. I felt a certain humiliation for him. He had taken a big leap and found a toehold. Now he was falling.

“Who taught him French Language and Literature?”

“Professor Tappinger. He’s still teaching the course.”

“I was hoping it would be Professor Tappinger.”

“Oh? Do you know him?”

“Slightly. Is he on campus now?”

“He is, yes, but I’m afraid he’s in class.”

The woman glanced at the electric clock on the wall. “It’s twenty minutes to twelve. He’ll finish his lecture at twelve exactly. He always does.”

She seemed to take a certain pride in this.

“Do you know where everybody on campus is all the time.”

“Just some of them,” she said. “Professor Tappinger is one of our institutions.”

“He doesn’t look much like an institution.”

“He is, though. He’s one of our most brilliant scholars.”

As if she was an institution herself, she added: “We consider ourselves very fortunate to have attracted him and kept him. I was worried he’d leave when he didn’t get his promotion.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“You want the truth?”

“I couldn’t live without it.”

She leaned toward me and lowered her voice, as if the Dean might have the place bugged. “Professor Tappinger is too dedicated to his work. He can’t be bothered with departmental politics. And frankly his wife is no help.”

“I thought she was cute.”

“I suppose she’s cute enough, but she’s a flibbertigibbet. If Professor Tappinger had a mature partner–” The sentence faded out. For a moment her efficient eyes were fixed on dreamland. It wasn’t hard to guess the identity of the mature partner she had in mind for Tappinger.

She directed me in a rather proprietary way to his office in the Arts Building and assured me he always returned there with his lecture notes before he went home for lunch. She wasn’t wrong. At one minute after twelve, the professor came marching down the corridor, flushed and bright-eyed, as if he had had a good class.

He did a double take when he saw me. “Why, it’s Mr. Archer. I’m always surprised when I see somebody from the real world in these purlieus.”

“This isn’t real?”

“Not really real. It hasn’t been here long enough, for one thing.”

“I have.”

Tappinger laughed. Away from his wife and family, he seemed to be much more cheerful. “We’ve both been around long enough to know who we are. But don’t let me keep you standing out here.”

He unlocked the door of his office and urged me inside. Two walls of shelves were filled with books, many of them unbound French volumes and sets. “I suppose you’ve come to report the results of the test?”

“Partly. It was a success, from Martel’s point of view. He answered every question correctly.”

“Even the pineal gland?”

“Even that.”

“I’m amazed, frankly amazed.”

“It may be a sort of compliment to you. Martel seems to be a former student of yours. You had him for a week or two, anyway, seven years ago.”

He gave me a startled look. “How can that be?”

“I don’t know. But it can’t be pure coincidence.”

I got out Martel’s picture and handed it to him. He nodded his head over it. “I remember the boy. He was a brilliant student, one of the most brilliant I’ve ever had. Unaccountably he dropped out, without a word to me.”

His cheerfulness had evaporated. Now he was shaking his head from side to side. “What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. Except that he turned up here seven years later with a wad of money and a new identity. Do you recall the name he used in your class?”

“You don’t forget a student like that. He called himself Feliz Cervantes.”

He looked down at the picture again. “Who are these other people?”

“Guests at the Tennis Club. Cervantes held a job there for a couple of weeks in September of ’59. He was a part-time cleanup help.”

Tappinger made a clucking sound. “I remember he seemed to be in need of money. The one time I entertained him in my house, he ate up virtually everything in sight. But you say he has money now?”

“At least a hundred thousand dollars. In cash.”

He whistled. “That’s just about ten years salary for me. Where did he get it?”

“He says it’s family money, but I’m pretty sure he’s lying.”

He studied the picture some more, as if he was still a little confused by Martel’s double identity. “I’m sure he had no family background to speak of.”

“Do you have any idea where he came from?”

“I assumed he was a Spanish-American, probably a first generation Mexican. He spoke with quite an accent. As a matter of fact, his French was better than his English.”

“Perhaps he is a Frenchman after all.”

“With a name like Feliz Cervantes?”

“We don’t know that that’s his real name, either.”

“His transcripts would show his real name,” Tappinger said.

“But they’re not on file here. He was supposed to have gone to L.A. State College before he came here. Maybe they can help us.”

“I’ll query L.A. State. A former student of mine is teaching in the French department there.”

“I can get in touch with him. What’s his name?”

“Allan Bosch.”

He spelled the surname for me. “But I think it would be better if I made the contact. We university teachers have certain ah – inhibitions about talking about our students.”

“When can I check back with you?”

“Tomorrow morning, I should think. Right at the moment I’m on a very tight schedule. My wife is expecting me for lunch and I have to get back here in time to look over my notes for a two o’clock class.”

I must have showed my disappointment because he added, “Look here, old chap, come home with me for lunch.”

“I can’t do that.”

“But I insist. Bess would insist, too. She took quite a liking to you. Besides, she may recall something about Cervantes that I don’t. I remember she was impressed with him when he came to our party. And people, frankly, are not my métier.”

I said I would meet him at his house. On the way there I bought a bottle of pink champagne. My case was starting to break.

Bess Tappinger had on a good-looking blue dress, fresh lipstick, and too much perfume. I didn’t like the purposeful look in her eye, and I began to regret the pink champagne. She took it from my hands, as if she planned to break it over the prow of an affair.

She had covered the dinette table with a fresh linen cloth cross-hatched with fold marks. “I hope you like ham, Mr. Archer. All I have is cold ham and potato salad.”

She turned to her husband. “Daddy, what do the wine books say about ham and pink champagne?”

“I’m sure they go together very well,” he said remotely.

Tappinger had lost his effervescence. A glass of champagne failed to restore it. He chewed fitfully at a ham sandwich and asked me questions about Cervantes-Martel. I had to admit his former student was wanted on suspicion of murder. Tappinger shook his head over the young man’s broken promise.

Bess Tappinger was excited by the champagne. She wanted our attention. “Who are we talking about?”

“Feliz Cervantes. You remember him, Bess?”

“Am I supposed to?”

“I’m sure you remember him – the Spanish young man. He came to our Cercle Français icebreaker seven years ago. Show her the picture of him, will you, Archer?”

I put it down on the linen cloth beside her plate. She recognized the busboy right away. “Of course I remember him.”

“I thought you would,” her husband said meaningfully. “You talked about him afterwards.”

“What impressed you, Mrs. Tappinger?”

“I thought he was good-looking, in a strong masculine way.”

There was bright malice in her eyes. “We faculty wives get tired of pale scholarly types.”

Tappinger countered obliquely: “He was an excellent student. He had a passion for French civilization, which is the greatest since the Athenian, and a wonderfully good ear for French poetry, considering his lack of background.”

His wife was working on another glass of champagne. “You’re a genius, Daddy. You can make a sentence sound like a fifty-minute lecture.”

Perhaps she meant it lightly, as her consciously pretty smile seemed to insist, but it fell with a dull thud.

“Please don’t keep calling me Daddy.”

“But you don’t like me to call you Taps any more. And you are the father of my children.”

“The children are not here and I’m most definitely not your father. I’m only forty-one.”

“I’m only twenty-nine,” she said to both of us.

“Twelve years is no great difference.”

He closed the subject abruptly as if it was a kind of Pandora’s box. “Where is Teddy, by the way, since he’s not here?”

“At the co-operative nursery. They’ll keep him till after his nap.”

“Good.”

“I’m going to the Plaza and do a little shopping after lunch.”

The conflict between them, which had been submerged for a moment, flared up again. “You can’t.”

He had turned quite pale.

“Why can’t I?”

“I’m using the Fiat. I have a two o’clock class.”

He looked at his watch. “As a matter of fact I should be starting back now. I have some preparation to do.”

“I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to your wife.”

“I realize that. I’m sorry, Mr. Archer. The fact is I have to punch a time clock, almost literally, just like any assembly worker. And the students are more and more like assembly-line products, acquiring a thin veneer of education as they glide by us. They learn their irregular verbs. But they don’t know how to use them in a sentence. In fact very few of them are capable of composing a decent sentence in English, let alone in French, which is the language of the sentence par excellence.”

He seemed to be converting his anger with his wife into anger with his job, and the whole thing into a lecture. She looked at me with a faint smile, as if she had turned him out: “Why don’t you drive me to the Plaza, Mr. Archer? It will give us a chance to finish our talk.”

“I’ll be glad to.”

Tappinger made no objection. He completed another paragraph about the occupational sorrows of teaching in a second-rate college, then retreated from the shambles of the lunch. I heard his Fiat put-put away. His wife and I sat in the dinette and finished the champagne.

“Well,” she said, “here we are.”

“Just as you planned.”

“I didn’t plan it. You did. You bought the champagne, and I can’t handle champagne.”

She gave me a dizzy look.

“I can.”

“What are you,” she said, “another cold fish?”

She was rough. They get that way, sometimes, when they marry too young and trap themselves in a kitchen and wake up ten years later wondering where the world is. As if she could read my thought, she said: “I know, I’m a bee-eye-tee-see-aitch. But I have some reason. He sits out in his study every night till past midnight. Is my life supposed to be over because all he cares about is Flaubert and Baudelaire and those awful students of his? They make me sick, the way they crowd around and tell him how wonderful he is. All they really want is a passing grade.”

She took a deep breath and continued: “He isn’t so wonderful, I ought to know. I’ve lived with him for twelve years and put up with his temperament and tantrums. You’d think he was Baudelaire himself, or Van Gogh, the way he carries on sometimes. And I kept hoping it would lead to something, but it never has. It never will. We’re stuck in a lousy state college and he hasn’t even got the manhood to engineer a promotion for himself.”

The shabby little cubicle, or maybe the champagne that had been drunk in it, seemed to generate lectures. I made an observation of my own: “You’re being pretty hard on your husband. He has to go out and cut it. For that he needs support.”

She hung her head. Her hair swung forward like a flexible ball. “I know. I try to give it to him, honestly.”

She had reverted to her little-girl voice. It didn’t suit her mood though, and she dropped it. She said in a clear sharp voice she had used with her son the day before: “We never should have married, Taps and I. He shouldn’t have married at all. Sometimes he reminds me of a medieval priest. The two best years of his life came before our marriage. He often tells me this. He spent them in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, not long after the war. I knew nothing of this, of course, but I was just a kid and he was the white hope of the French department at Illinois and all the other sophomores said how wonderful it would be to be married to him, with his Scott Fitzgerald good looks, and I thought I could finish my education at home.”

She looked over the partition at the kitchen sink. “That, I certainly have.”

“You married very young.”

“Seventeen,” she said. “The terrible thing is, I still feel seventeen inside.”

She touched herself between her breasts. “With everything ahead, you know? But nothing is.”

For the first time the woman was coming through to me.

“You have your children.”

“Sure, I have my children. And don’t think I don’t do my best for them and always will. Is that all there is, though?”

“It’s more than some people have.”

“I want more.”

Her pretty red mouth looked pathetically greedy. “I’ve wanted more for a long time, but I’ve never had the nerve to take it.”

“You have to wait for it to be given,” I said.

“You’re full of sententious remarks, aren’t you? You’re fuller than La Rochefoucauld, or my husband. But you can’t solve actual problems with words, as Taps thinks you can. He doesn’t understand life. He’s nothing but a talking machine, with a computer instead of a heart and a central nervous system.”

The thought of her husband seemed to nag her continually. It was almost making her eloquent, but I was growing weary of her boxed-in tension. Perhaps I had brought it on, but basically it had nothing to do with me. I said: “This is all very interesting, but you were going to talk about Feliz Cervantes.”

“I was, wasn’t I?”

Her look became meditative. “He was a very interesting young man. A hot-blooded type, aggressive, the kind of man you imagine a bullfighter might be. He was only twenty-two or three – so was I for that matter – but he was a man. You know?”

“Did you talk to him?”

“A little.”

“What about?”

“Our pictures, mostly. He was very keen on French art. He said he was determined to visit Paris some day.”

“He said that?”

“Yes. It’s not surprising. Every student of French wants to go to Paris. I used to want to go myself.”

“What else did he say?”

“That was about all. Some of the other students turned up, and he shied away from me. Taps said afterwards – we had a quarrel after the party – he said that I had been obvious with the young man. I think Taps brought you here to have me confess. My husband is a very subtle punisher.”

“You’re both too subtle for me. Confess what?”

“That I was – interested in Feliz Cervantes. But he wasn’t interested in me. I wasn’t even in the room as far as he was concerned.”

“That’s hard to believe.”

“Is it? There was a young blonde girl from one of Taps’s freshman courses at the party. He followed her with his eyes the way I imagine Dante followed Beatrice.”

Her voice was cold with envy.

“What was her name?”

“Virginia Fablon. I think she’s still at the college.”

“She quit to get married.”

“Really? Who was the lucky man?”

“Feliz Cervantes.”

I told her how this could be. She listened raptly.

While Bess got ready to go shopping I moved around the living room looking at the reproductions of a world that had never quite dared to exist. The house had taken on an intense interest for me, like a historical monument or the birth-place of a famous man. Cervantes/Martel and Ginny had met in this house; which made it the birthplace of my case.

Bess came out of her room. She had changed into a dress which had to be hooked up the back and I was elected to hook it up. Though she had a strokeable-looking back, my hands were careful not to wander. The easy ones were nearly always trouble: frigid or nympho, schizy or commercial or alcoholic, sometimes all five at once. Their nicely wrapped gifts of themselves often turned out to be homemade bombs, or fudge with arsenic in it.

We drove to the Plaza in ticking silence. It was a large new shopping centre, like a campus with asphalt instead of lawns where nothing could be learned. I gave her money, which she accepted, to take a taxi home. It was a friendly gesture, too friendly under the circumstances. But she looked at me as if I was abandoning her to a fate worse than life.