The Headmaster's Wife (61 page)

“The thing is,” Jig said, not turning around, “we've got a window of opportunity. He's going to be in rehab how much longer? A month, forty days, something like that. So for another month or forty days, there are no more hour-long screeds on radio about how I'm selling out the American government and the American people, how I'm Benedict Arnold—except he never says Benedict Arnold, did you notice that? He either doesn't know the reference or he doesn't think his listeners will. How I'm a traitor and a Communist.”

“You are a Communist,” Delmore said. “All decent people are Communists at heart.”

“He means a member of the Communist Party, which I most certainly am not. I don't join parties. I haven't even joined the Greens. The question is how to shut him up. It would be a very good thing for me if he'd go to jail.”

“I don't believe he will go to jail,” Delmore said. “He's too useful to the special interests that run this country. That run this world. He keeps the masses content and focused in the wrong direction.”

“At the moment, he's keeping the masses focused on me,” Jig said. “Or maybe not at the moment. Up until the moment before this one. And when he comes out of rehab, you know what he's going to do. He's going to blame all this on a plot by Communists and liberals and left-wing nuts. Which he seems to think are all the same thing.”

“He's going to push it all off onto that handyman of his. Sherman Markey.”

“He's trying very hard.”

“You know he will. They'll put Markey in jail for being a dealer and let Harrigan off with probation or something. He'll never go to jail.”

“Didn't I hear that Markey was suing him?”

“Through the Justice Project, yeah. They do good work, but they're a little too middle of the road. I think progressive organizations hurt themselves when they temper their message to appeal to what they think is the mainstream, because I don't think the mainstream is really the mainstream. People aren't going to take you seriously if you don't stick to your principles.”

The quad looked dead and empty. Jig was tired of looking at it. He turned back and saw that Delmore was now more off his chair than on it. Sometimes he didn't understand why people like Delmore went on living. He understood Joe Six-pack. Joe Six-pack liked what he liked and was satisfied with it. Delmore was half one thing and half another, intelligent but not quite intelligent enough, erudite but not quite erudite enough, cultivated but not quite cultivated enough. No wonder he went in for “progressive” politics. It was the only place on campus where he wouldn't expose himself as a mistake on the part of the committee on admissions.

This was not someplace he wanted to go.

He picked up a few of the things on his desk: a graphing calculator; a snow globe with a miniature plastic replica of the Cathedral of Notre Dame inside it; a copy of his book,
Selling Suicide.
It wasn't that Drew Harrigan was calling him a traitor that was the problem. It was the other things he was saying, the things about contacts with Al Qaeda, about aiding and abetting Islamic cells on campus and in the city, about money laundered and money sent. It was a laundry list of things that could easily become criminal charges under the right circumstances. They were well on their way to the right circumstances. Jig Tyler wasn't Delmore Krantz. He could see the writing on the wall and the look in the eye of the Dean, who remembered McCarthy but had his own skin to save first.

It was cold out there and it was going to get colder. If the news these days proved anything, it was that it was easy as hell for an innocent man to die in the electric chair.