The Committee. Sterling Watson

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СКАЧАТЬ same way that a photographer had made this image come into focus in a darkroom.

      A dark room. That was how Stall thought of that time. The field hospital in France, the nurses and doctors coming and going, the constant poking and prodding, the raging fever that made him mutter things that made no sense, and finally the needles, the blessed needles with their cargo of the new medicine known as penicillin, the magic potion that had saved Stall’s life, and then waking up, coming back to himself, coming out of the dark room and seeing the young man, no more than a boy, lying next to him in the field hospital, a kid with half his arm missing, shot off, Stall supposed, like the bits and pieces of so many men Stall had marched with and crouched in foxholes with for that brief time that was an eternity in the winter of 1945.

      And then the boy coming to himself too, and the two of them talking, shyly at first and then more openly, confident that they might both leave this place and go to Paris rather than to a snowy field where the corpses waited for the ground to thaw and the white crosses to multiply row upon row. They talked about their lives and the futures they now believed they would have.

      The boy in the photo Connor had given Stall was named Frank Vane. The door of the dark room opened wider and the light poured in and it all came back to Stall. The boy in the photo hailed from Jacksonville, the son of a prominent businessman, scion, as the novels said, of a wealthy family. Vast tracts of timber and pulp mills and shipping and more. The boy had told Stall, as they lay side by side in the field hospital, the story of his young life, speaking in the diffident, modest way of young men who have been reared to the noblesse oblige of the Southern aristocracy. Together, Stall and Frank Vane had caught a convoy of trucks to Paris, and they had stayed in a little pension not far from Sacré-Cœur, and they had drunk the wines and eaten the food of a delirious, liberated Paris, and then one night, out walking alone, Stall had met the young French girl with whom he had spent the first carnal night of his life.

      Stall looked up from the photo into the concentrated darkness of James Connor’s eyes. Stall said, “He lost the arm, half of it, in the Hürtgen Forest.”

      “A bad place, I heard.”

      “That’s what he told me.” Stall handed the photo back to Connor. “How do you know about it?”

      “I know the boy’s father. He’s a donor. That’s how I came by the photograph. The son, this Frank Vane, works for the Committee now. He’s one of their lawyers, and the blond goon who came to my office—his name is Cyrus Tate—says Vane told him he knows you and he thinks you’ll want to work with the Committee, help them look into the English Department, which, by the way, they think is the likeliest of all departments to harbor homosexuals and radicals.” At this, Connor smiled the smile of irony and said, “When I hear such things, I think of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane.”

      They didn’t teach it, Stall thought, they wrote it. He said, “Did you know, Jim, that the great poet Ben Jonson fought as the champion of the English army against the champion of the Spanish in Flanders and slew his man?” And he did teach it, off and on.

      “I did not know that,” Connor said, “but I was certain that you would add to my fund of knowledge. I thank you for that vital information.”

      There was a knock at the door and Connor said, “Enter.”

      The white-haired Negro in his white jacket with a white towel folded over his forearm said, “May I serve you gentlemen a libation?”

      “Yes, Ezra,” Connor said, “I’ll have a bourbon. Tom?”

      “The same.”

      When the Negro had closed the door, Stall said, “Work with them?”

      Connor lifted his chin in confusion.

      “You said the Committee thinks I’ll work with them. What does that mean?”

      “It means do their bidding. Work for them.” Connor waited, as though an explanation of this should come from Stall.

      “Jim, I . . .”

      “You can’t think of any reason for this?”

      “None.”

      “Well, Tom, it has to do in some fashion with this young man, Vane. His father is rich as Croesus. He’s given generously to this institution. I don’t know the man well, or his political leanings, but I assume he is, like most north Florida businessmen, conservative.”

      “You mean he’ll like what the Committee wants to do?”

      “I mean I don’t know, but it seems likely.”

      “And his son? Frank Vane? I knew him as a boy in a hospital in France. A nineteen-year-old PFC with half his arm shot off.”

      “I don’t know how he fits into this picture.” The president tapped his forefinger twice, on the picture and on the subpoena. “The more pressing point is that for some reason this Cyrus Tate thinks the Committee can work your connection to Frank Vane to their advantage, and we need to know why.” Connor waited.

      God, this is Byzantine. It came to Stall that now he was expected to supply a reason for the murky workings of the diseased minds of the Johns Committee. The Frank Vane he had known for only a few weeks thirteen years ago was a decent, intelligent, and cultured boy, or as much of one as a rich kid from Jacksonville could become before he was shipped out to Germany and the hell of the Hürtgen Forest. Even more astonishing to Stall was that he had been asked by the president of his university to spy on his colleagues, and now, apparently, the Committee which was the brainchild of a semiliterate accidental governor had told that same president that they expected Stall to spy for them.

      “So,” Connor said, “we have a quandary. We are caught between Scylla and Charybdis, or as the plainer folk I grew up among say, between a rock and a hard place.”

      Now the entire, awful absurdity of this thing lay plain before Stall. “You’re saying I have to work for you or you’ll suspect me of working for the Committee?”

      “Let’s just say I know whose side you’re really on, and it wouldn’t hurt the right side if you pretended to warm up to the wrong one. If you see what I mean.” Connor’s smile was droll, and Stall knew that he wouldn’t be smiling if he didn’t think he had Stall’s balls in a vise. The game was joined, and President Connor had more than an ordinary man’s avidity for games. In this one, Stall was to be his pawn.

      Stall said, more to himself than to Connor, “If my colleagues, my friends, get the idea I’m some kind of informer, they’ll shun me. I’ll have no chance of becoming chairman. Hell, I’ll have to leave town under cover of darkness.”

      “Tom, you have a flair for the dramatic. It won’t be as bad as all that. I’ll take care of you. What will be bad, what could be a disaster, is what Charley Johns wants to do to this university. He’d like to turn the whole state system into a Baptist seminary with compulsory chapel, a curfew, a dress code, and loyalty oaths. The best faculty we have will leave for places where this kind of stupidity is laughed at. We’ll be censured by any number of professional organizations. It could take this state fifty years to recover from the kind of damage Johns can do.”

      Ezra knocked again, and this time entered without being bidden. He served the two bourbons from a silver tray and left as quietly as he had entered.

      Connor raised his glass to Stall. “Well СКАЧАТЬ