The Savage Professor Read online

  Contents

  also by robert roper

  titlepage

  copyright

  dedication

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part II

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  also by robert roper

  fiction

  Royo County Tales

  On Spider Creek

  Mexico Days

  In Caverns of Blue Ice

  The Trespassers

  Cuervo Tales

  nonfiction

  Nabokov in America

  Now the Drum of War:

  Walt Whitman and

  His Brothers in the Civil War

  Fatal Mountaineer:

  The High-Altitude Life and

  Death of Willi Unsoeld

  The Savage Professor

  A NOVEL

  ROBERT ROPER

  ASAHINA & WALLACE

  LOS ANGELES

  2015

  WWW.ASAHINAANDWALLACE.COM

  Copyright © 2014 by Robert Roper

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States by Asahina & Wallace, Inc.

  www.asahinaandwallace.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, digital, or any information strategy and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a writer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review or feature written for inclusion in a periodical or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952701

  ISBN: 978-1-940412-13-9

  To Andrew

  Part 1

  chapter 1

  Landau moved to Berkeley from San Francisco in the early eighties. The choice was simple: more sun on the east side of the bay. A house he could afford (a bungalow on Cherry Street). But he really moved because of horror and fear, the fear attendant on running one of the first cohort studies of “the gay plague,” which they didn’t know yet was caused by a virus. Wise heads suspected that, and since the loathsome wasting was quite obviously passed from one gay fellow to another, why not to the eager docs and epidemiologists who worked at SF General? So each time he went to the ward where they housed the poor buggers, he thought of his chapel-going English mum with her bad teeth, how she would feel if he died young. How disappointed she would be.

  Berkeley in the first Reagan kingship. All the left-wing realtors and professors with distinguished chairs were stunned, were turning their faces from the affronting vision of the bad right-wing movie actor taking over. Landau, half-Brit, didn’t care about American politics so much. They were like a language learned from tapes, not to be depended on at points of stress. But he caught the mood of dire affront, heard the beneath-all-mention tone. All right, then let the country go to hell. Berkeley itself was doing very well, thank you. House prices were starting their spectacular rise. If you had enough to buy that first bungalow, in a few years you might trade up to something that would make you a millionaire. In ’85 he sold Cherry Street and moved to a house off Cragmont in the hills. An “Italianate villa,” as the realtorese had it, faced in cracking vanilla stucco and built in the twenties by an eccentric developer who put up only ten dwellings before going under. By luck it bordered one of the footpaths that enfilade the Berkeley Hills, connecting the curvy, contour-ploughed streets with steep walkways full of askew steps.

  Berkeley had a world name. Landau discovered this odd fact on trips across the suffering globe, chasing the immunodeficiency virus and drug-resistant TB and other causes of statistically representable misery. In a windblown, godforsaken wetlands outpost in Botswana, where HIV had established itself to the tune of twenty-five percent, mention of Berkeley elicited a strong response. “Oh, ho,” a village headman, a Sekgoma of the Bamangwato, said to him. “Oh, yes, Berkeley, Berkeley, indeed.”

  “What, you’ve heard of it, sir?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “And what have you heard, sir?”

  But the old man would only smile, shaking his head ruefully.

  It was a name recognized as instantly as “New York,” strangely enough. Colleagues in states of the former Soviet Union all knew it—they had been there as students, or a cousin had, or they’d hoped to go there as postdocs. Now they lived in decayed housing blocks and drank and worked in labs without Internet or refrigeration, but at the mere mention of Berkeley they grew animated. Once there had been a moment there, under those careless California skies. A shining outbreak of something.

  The old hillside villa. Here he repaired after his days at UCSF running teams of homeless-monitoring, young-injector-studying public-health types. Here he limped after vexing sessions with his endlessly manipulative departmental antagonists, traversing the gray bay of San Francisco early and late in a series of vehicles for which he became locally noted, the white Lincoln, the turquoise Jag, the Porsche that needed a muffler, the Volvo longboat. When he cast his mind back over his semi-glorious, too-soon-terminated scientific career, the eras correlated in terms of autos driven and girlfriends struggled with, his different multiyear projects often conceived as he fell in love and celebrated with the purchase of another car, and concluded as his dire faults as a man became the subject of complaint.

  The villa had been an anchor through it all. The house was almost too obviously an expression of his flawed personality—so said Deena, still a good friend and the denominating girlfriend from the convertible Lincoln period. There were cracks in the stucco, though he had paid over seventy grand for a structural retrofit, and the house was as solid now on its creeping California hillside as modern engineering could make it. Inside, a scouth of books, as the Scotsman said. Some that had been with him since the beginning, since before he went to St. Paul’s, where he had been a subsidy boy, a scholar on the foundation. Books bought as a lonely Bohemian maths grind at LSE, where he had gone instead of Cambridge, for “political” reasons. Plain paperbound books in French, bought at outdoor stands along the Seine, as they ought to have been. A solid selection of the approved high-lit product of the last forty years, books spoken of in the pages of the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, Les Temps Modernes. Mystery novels by the hundreds, by the thousands. Oodles of sci-fi, and pornography, an eclectic sampling, still consulted sometimes in the dead of night, with the left hand. Math texts read for brain tuning. The full epidemiological monty, of course, everything in any way relevant to his own lines of study plus all others, everything ever attempted by his busy generation, in special nine-foot-tall shelves of stained cherrywood.

  The section of American novels unusually robust—these had been his way of trying to get to know his father, who had died you
ng. Parts of his father’s Yankee character had seemed to wink at him from the stories of Jack London, of Stephen Crane, of Hawthorne, Melville, Farrell, Hemingway, James Jones—the whole Y-chromosome-addled bunch. A renegade union organizer, driven out of the States in a prewar purge of Reds, dear old Dad had retreated to London, where an older relation, a man also named Landau, a Lithuanian Jew, had owned three cinemas. In the year of Landau’s birth, ’42 his dad had been dying of congestive heart failure while outwardly prospering for the first time in an errant life. All that remained now were six framed Kodak shots: in these Landau Sr. showed a face of great good cheer, a charming, not-unhandsome face that said to his never-to-be-met son, “We could have had great fun, you and I—I miss you and, you know, in a useless sort of way, I love you.”

  * * *

  One cool night in late October 2006, a Wednesday, Landau took the N-Judah Muni Metro to Civic Center, took BART across the bay, and drove from the BART parking lot home to north Berkeley in his powerful black 525i, yet another flash car bought used and on the downside of its expected lifespan. Semi-retired now. Romantically unattached. Soon to be sixty-four, good God. Will you still feed me, will you IV me, etc. He was going home to be alone, not an unwelcome prospect, to eat a piece of wild salmon bought the day before and cooling in his refrigerator, on the second shelf down, with a fruity New Zealand sauvignon blanc also cooling in there somewhere. Useless now, professionally eunuched. Still going to his office two days a week to ride herd on his junior colleagues, who, doing what comes naturally, were tearing off great chunks of his research empire, figuring that he’d be gone in another year or two, why not.

  He was in a mildly valedictory mood as he gunned up Cedar from the flats, comfortable in the worn black leather of his cushy Beemer seat, the two degenerative discs in his lower back giving him not much trouble—maybe it was all the lap-swimming he’d been undertaking recently, at the suggestion of his chiropractor friend, Georges Vienna. Once a sleek dolphin of a man, Landau was now more manatee—Deena said he looked like a Jewish Helmut Kohl. When he got in the pool at the Berkeley Y a sizable displacement of fluid ensued, yet he did not wallow, no, he struck out powerfully, and he did not soon tire. Others spoke of swimming as a chore, as the epitome of hamster-on-a-wheel-type exercise, but Landau looked forward to his sessions—alone with his thoughts, he often sang to himself, as the gray whales are said to do.

  His housemaid, Elfridia Mattos, had been in to clean this day, and the house looked thirty percent more orderly. The terra-cotta floors had been mopped, the glass doors onto the west-facing deck had been washed, and there was a pleasant scent of citrus-zested cleanser. Elfridia, from Chiapas, four foot seven, late twenties, sometimes came to work with two cousins. All of them were pretty, short-necked women with tar-colored hair and hazel eyes. When negotiating over pay Elfridia seemed embarrassed to ask for anything, but Landau had heard her cracking rapid-fire jokes in her native idiom, and he had come to realize that she was a gifted raconteur, someone with a wicked tongue.

  “Elfridia, as of next week, I will leave an extra sixty dollars in the envelope,” he had told her recently.

  “Hokay, if you wan’ to, doc-tor.”

  “That way, when you bring the cousins, maybe it divides out a little better.”

  “Hokay.”

  Landau perceived that all was well with his house, everything spic ’n’ span, even the cat-food bowl laid out on a fresh piece of newsprint on the floor, from the green sports section of the San Francisco Chronicle. He put down his leather satchel full of manuscripts and had a prolonged pee in the cramped downstairs bath, unable to wait the extra thirty seconds required to mount to the larger facility on the second floor. Such are the vagaries of the aging prostate in its eternal embrace of the diminishing male bladder. Had a slug of German mineral water while standing in front of his fridge, looking for his salmon fillet, and there it was, on the third shelf down not the second, Elfridia must have moved it. He went back out to the foyer. Here, on a glass-topped entry table that had never looked quite right—Deena said it was “designerish,” “an idea not a table”—was the mail, all Sierra Club membership pitches and credit card offers. When had he last received a personal letter, a love letter, more to the point? In 1998. From Clarissa Plante, a French-Canadian epideme met in exotic Jo-burg, slender, athletic, smart, brunette. Fifty pounds lighter then, Landau had appealed to her as a romantic figure, as he had appealed in those days to a number of interesting women, most of them docs of some kind, world-saving globetrotters, bio types. And where are they now, all my gal-pals? Yes, and why am I so alone now, boo-hoo, boo-hoo?

  He opened a mailing from Nancy Pelosi, requesting his help defeating the evil Republicans in the upcoming elections. Nancy looked good in the photo. It showed her standing between Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, dressed in a tight blue skirt that barely reached her knees. Happen to know she’s older than I am, but she’s still a babe, look at her, any male of a certain age would give her a throw. If you were only here tonight, Nancy, I’d ply you with some of the fruity, put some sounds on the stereo (maybe Steamin’, Miles from back when he still felt the need to entertain), and history would be in the making, romantic history.

  He heard a distant buzzing. So restful was the silence of his hillside villa, surrounded by trees—camphors, sycamores, redwoods, madrones, eucalypti—so thick the silence that customarily obtained in his remote neighborhood, with well-behaved liberal families on either side, that the distant barking of a dog, or the thin, eerie cry of a Steller’s jay imitating a red-tailed hawk, came as a shock. Visitors who stayed awhile, foreign types especially, Londoners, Muscovites, always marveled at the silence, and sometimes it made them anxious. Tonight Landau could hear every creak and tick of his wood-and-stucco castle, not that there were all that many creaks but far, far away was a dim electric motor sound—maybe a slow-speed drill being used for home repair, or an alarm clock buzzing under some bedclothes.

  It switched off. The thought of bedclothes recalled to him the book now resting on his bedside table, the new Andy Blunden bio of Wittgenstein, which he had been burrowing into for a couple of weeks, reading each night before falling asleep—surely it was a serious enough book not to be read that way, with logical passages merging into dreams, but he was angry with Wittgenstein for some reason, did not want to show him too much respect. The respect signaled by clearheaded morning reading.

  Why not read him tonight, though, and take down the old Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in support? Have them with dinner, on the metal bookstand, in a fair, openhanded light. Either that or the new Michael Connelly killer-thriller. He headed upstairs toward his bedroom, half thinking of changing out of his wrinkled office-going pants and shapeless tweed jacket, half of what to read tonight, the taste of what he might read almost as palpable as the anticipated salmon in the fridge. The Connelly then, just for fun. A thriller not a thinker. But no, no, the Blunden, and read it while you’re still half-awake. You might learn something.

  Landau’s bedroom, a grand crow’s nest, all tall windows and green views and shelves of books leaning this way and that, sat up high in the treetops. Year in and out there was a pleasant scent of leaves and living wood. What are you, a visiting friend from north London had once asked, a bloody chimp, Landau? At home in the forest canopy? Bed all disarranged, though—strange. Elfridia had forgotten to put it in order. Pillows strewn, covers all bunched. Standing on one leg as he pulled off his pants, he imagined a scene of Elfridia and her young cousins loafing the afternoon away, getting into his liquor cabinet, tuning in some norteño music on the stereo. Making fun of the professor’s weird artwork and stressed furniture. Hijole, ven aqui, Juanita! as they found some book of choice porn and went off in squeals of laughter, imagining him having a bit of a stroke, sitting nude in the orthopedic recliner, his thick thighs splayed out.

  One pant leg off, he balanced on the other foot. In olden times, he had swotted up Span
ish and gone south like the other California Sandalistas, although in his case, under cover of a study being run out of Stanford on hep C. Got to see all those countries down there to some extent, liked Mexico the best, who would not? Mexicans were carnal, crazed, and vivid, their country violent and mysterious. By contrast the average Costa Rican was a plate of overcooked spinach, the average Nicaraguan a mud puddle. Gross stereotyping but there you were. Funny how that south-of-the-border era had ended, just suddenly over one day, on to other pastures. An epidemiologist of your kind is a tourist of pain, Deena had once said—all you need is a choice disease to study, a bit of funding, and you’re happy as a clam.

  He stumbled, threw himself toward his bed. Just barely managed to execute a half-twist that put his bottom on the mattress and not his head. The profound thump of his 240 pounds produced more of that electric buzzing sound, closer at hand now, half-sputtering. After a few seconds it stopped again. Landau looked right then left in the rumpled bedclothes, felt the covers to either side, found a foot, a leg. He made a sound he later described to the police as Unnggrrhh!! and propelled himself off the mattress onto the floor, onto his hands and knees. Wearing his boxers and his sport coat and his black nylon socks. Scrambled over to a bookcase, stood back against it, palms pressed backwards.

  Good God—that was a leg, man. A human leg. Landau’s down comforter was humped near the right-center of the king-sized bed. It was a $1,200 SeaCrest goose down comforter bought last winter, the sort of indulgence one tells no one about, for shame that it should have come to this—that one should look forward to going to bed each night because of the warmth of one’s blankie, not because of the nearness of a lover. To sleep under it was to feel bundled within a sun-warmed cloud. He lurched bedward again and pulled the covers half-down. A woman with glossy gray-brown hair down to her white shoulders lay facedown in his sheets, immobile, nude to the tops of her buttocks. Apparently zonked.