Hardscrabble Road(95)

They were saying something on the news about Frank Sheehy and his life: his years at Princeton, his struggle to found LibertyHeart Communications. Gregor reached into the pocket of his coat and came up with a crumpled copy of Ellen Harrigan’s list. There was something else that bothered him, and that should have bothered Rob Benedetti and the police much more. They seemed to take it as a ruse on the part of Ellen Harrigan to draw suspicion away from herself, and Gregor thought that was certainly possible. He didn’t think it began to explain either why she’d made the list to begin with or why these particular people were on it.

It was a silly idea, but it at least involved moving around, so he decided to go ahead with it. He went back out onto the street and looked up and down for the cab. Rush hour appeared to be over. He had no idea what time it was. At any rate, the traffic wasn’t back-to-back here. He saw a cab in the distance and raised his hand for it. It sped up until it got to him and then pulled over to the curb.

It was one of those things. It was as if God were trying to tell him something. He got in and gave the driver the address he’d noted beside one of the names. Then he explained he was talking about one of the buildings at Penn. He’d been an undergraduate at Penn, years ago, but he’d never become really familiar with its campus, because he’d commuted from home instead of living in a dorm. It was a different time and a different place. The Ivy League was really Ivy. Poor boys on scholarships didn’t get around very much with the rich boys who ran everything from the Chess Club to the campus newspaper.

They were closer than Gregor had realized. He probably could have walked—but then, you could walk almost anywhere in Philadelphia, if you were willing to take long enough to do it. He paid the driver and got out. The campus looked deserted, or close to it. The security lights were on everywhere. Did they lock the doors at night in these places? They would have if he’d been running things.

The door to this one, the closest thing he could find to a “front” door, was not locked. He walked in and looked around. The address gave an office number on the second floor, and now that he thought of it, that was interesting. Why give Alison Standish’s office address instead of her home address? He got the list out again and looked down it to find Jig Tyler. It gave his office address, too. Either Ellen Harrigan hadn’t known the home addresses of the two professors at Penn, or she hadn’t wanted to look them up.

He went up to the second floor, feeling more idiotic by the minute. The building was nearly empty. He did see one or two people at their desks, pecking away at computers, but it was obvious that most of the people who worked here had gone home long ago. He had no reason to think that Alison Standish hadn’t gone home, too. He would have, if he was her. He walked down past the offices. Most of their doors were closed. Some of those doors had posters hanging on them: the New York City Ballet; the imminent release of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Che. He stopped for a moment in front of the Che. It astonished him that anybody still took Che seriously.

Alison Standish’s office was far at the end of the hall, and he saw before he reached it that it was open. Light was flowing out of it into the dark corridor. He went up to the door and looked in. A blond woman in her forties was standing on a ladder with her back to him, trying to get a book off a high shelf.

Gregor hesitated. He didn’t want to startle her, and he didn’t want her to fall. He cleared his throat and knocked lightly on the door. She turned around.

“You’re very tall,” she said.

“Ah,” Gregor said. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“Could you come up here and get this book for me? I should have known not to let them put books up on that shelf. I’m going to kill myself here.”

She got down off the ladder. Gregor came into the office and got on. The top shelf was all the way up to the ceiling, and even for somebody as tall as he was, it wasn’t comfortable to try to get a book from it.

“What you need is a taller ladder,” he said.

“It’s the thick navy blue one right about where your head is. It’s called Ecclesiastica Romana.”

Gregor got it. It weighed a ton. He came down the ladder and handed it over. “What is that, anyway?”

“It’s a book on the evils of the Roman Church, written by a monk in twelfth-century Provence. I have to bless Latin, really, because if he’d written it in Provençal, I wouldn’t be able to understand a word. Not that we really understand the Latin, even ecclesiastical Latin, after all this time. The context is gone, and we can never get it back again. It makes you wonder what people are thinking when they say that they understand the Bible.”