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'She was valued at nine, we loaned seven and when we foreclosed the market'd turned and it was worth five. That's a two-hundred-thousand bad loan and we ate up our reserve by February because of a dozen just like her. No, a dozen and a half.'

The office did not much look like a bank president's. It was closer to a Tru-Value manager's. There was some blotchy modern litho up on the wall but Sayles saw a sticker on the side of the frame and knew he wasn't looking at the real article; you don't generally get much in the way of investment art at Walgreen's especially at a two-for-one sale.

Sayles pulled a packet of papers out of his briefcase. 'I wouldn't be here hat in hand if it weren't serious, Walt. We're looking at a shortfall of close to thirteen million this year.'

Things're tough all over.'

Sayles tried not to sound desperate. He pictured himself up in front of his class. Assured, smiling, humorous. Everything he'd learned in twenty years of teaching he brought to bear on this man. We've got benefactor commitments of about seven. We're talking to-'

The banker too was used to theatrics. 'Look out that window, what do you see?'

Sayles counterattacked. 'I see a city that'll suffer to its very heart if Auden University closes.'

'Nice try. The banker smiled and shook his head. I'm talking about that building not fifty yards up the street. Plainsman's S&L. The RTC's moved in and she's in conservatorship. They're going to sell it off. We're more solid but not a lot. The loan committee, no way'll it approve Auden a penny.' The banker's voice remained a low calm monotone as he twisted his curly eyebrow with his thumb and ring finger. He dressed in pastel plastic cloth, he had yellow teeth and glistening see-through hair and under the veneer desk he kept a casual beat with crinkly black Monkey Ward shoes. Sayles knew however that Wall Street had nothing on this guy.

'Auden closes,' Sayles said, 'it'll be a tragedy.'

'It'll be a tragedy but it'll be more of a tragedy if I write a bad loan and the US attorney up in Higgins indicts me.'

'Oh, come on, Walt, it's not like you're buying yourself a Porsche. They're not going to arrest you for loaning money to a university.'

The banker looked at Sayles and seemed to be taking his pulse. Sayles thought: I'm just like the farmers he disbursed loans to, loans written on the strength of bad collateral and their desperation facing the loss of two hundred years' worth of family land. Randy Sayles, associate dean of financial aid, knew that you never saw a person as clearly as when you hand him a large check.

The professor said, What if we gave you a piece of the new dorm? It cost twenty-three million.'

'Cost ain't worth. And if we foreclosed it'd be because the school went under. And what good's a dorm without a school to go with it?'

'Land alone'd be worth three million.'

'Not with an empty dorm sitting on it.'

'You got the parking lot right on the highway.'

'I'm sorry.'

These two words lanced Sayles's heart. He stood up and said with a despair that made both men extremely uncomfortable, "You were my last chance.' Neither said a word for a moment. Sayles picked up his financials and put them into his battered briefcase.

He started out the door.

'Hold up, Professor ...'

Sayles turned and saw in the man's face a debate. The banker arrived at a disagreeable conclusion. Writing a name and number on a piece of paper, he said, 'I'm not doing this. You didn't get this from me. You don't know me.'

Sayles looked at the scrawl. Fred Barrett. Next to the name was a phone number. Area code 312. Chicago.

'Who is he?'

After a pause the banker said, 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

He found it completely by accident.

Because Brian Okun had made up the rumour that Jennie Gebben and Leon Gilchrist were lovers, he had not bothered to do what he had promised the dean - look through the professor's office for evidence. He would have been content to tell her that he had made a futile search and let it go at that. Then when Gilchrist turned in Okun's scathing evaluation Okun would claim that Gilchrist was seeking retribution for his espionage.

A delightful symmetry to the whole matter.

The whole affair, you might say.

This was a good plan but he thought of a much better one when, placing a sheet of student grades on Gilchrist's desk, he noticed an envelope addressed in flowery script to the professor. The writer was a young woman student. Okun lifted the crinkly envelope and found to his huge amusement the paper was perfumed. Gilchrist, finally back from San Francisco, was at the moment lecturing his class, and the graduate assistant immediately sat down in the professor's chair and opened the unsealed envelope.

The poem scanned very badly, thought Okun the critic.

When the memory of you / swallows me the way I took / your lovely cock into my mouth ...

He decided he would have given it a D for form and a C minus for content (Your thinking is unoriginal, your meter too unvaried and honey is a hopelessly trite metaphor for semen.') This didn't matter however because he believed the poem would have at least one ardent reader.

Okun now sat in Dean Larraby's office, watching her flick the poem with a tough, wrinkled index finger. You didn't . . .' She hesitated. You didn't get it out of his mailbox?'

It wasn't stamped or postmarked, you stupid fool, how could it have been mailed? Okun said mildly, 'I'd never do anything illegal. It was lying out on his desk.'

'Who's the girl? Doris Cutting?'

'Student of his. I don't know anything about her.'

'Do you know if he took her to San Francisco with him?'

I just said I don't know her. Senile already? Okun frowned. 'I wonder.'

This is enough for me.'

'It's hard for me to speak against him,' Okun said. 'He's taught me so much. But to sleep with a student. .. It's a very vulnerable time for young people. I used to respect him.' His mouth tightened into a little bundle of disappointment.

'Well fire him. We have no choice. It's got to be done. We'll wait till the semester's over. His last lecture's when?'

Two days.'

'I'll tell him afterward, after the students have gone. We'll want to minimize publicity. You'll keep this quiet until then?'

He nodded gravely. 'Whatever you'd like, Dean.' Okun stood and started for the door.

'Oh, Brian?' As he turned she said, 'I just wanted to say, I'm sorry. I know this was difficult for you. To put the school above your personal loyalty. I won't forget it.'

'Sometimes,' Okun said, 'as Immanuel Kant tells us, sacrifices must be made for a higher good.'

2

You said you'd polish them.'

'I'll polish them.'

You said today.'

'I'll polish them today,' Amos Trout said, slouching in his lopsided green Naugahyde easy chair. He scooped up the remote control and turned the volume up.

His lean, wattle-skinned wife poured the Swan's Down cake mix into a Pyrex bowl and decided he wasn't going to get away with it. She set down the egg and said, 'When I was to church Ada Kemple looked right down at my feet, there was nothing else for yards around, had to've been my feet, and if that woman didn't have a gleam in her eye when she surfaced I don't know what. I liked to die of embarrassment.'

'I said I'd polish them.'

'Here.' She handed him the navy blue pumps as if she were offering him dueling pistols.

Trout took them then looked at the TV screen. It wouldn't've been so bad if Chicago wasn't playing New York and it wasn't the bottom of the sixth and the score wasn't tied with Mets go-ahead on third and only one out.

But She had spoken. And so Amos Trout turned the sound up again and carried the shoes down to the basement. (Don't seem so scuffed that the toothless bitch Ada Kemple has anything to snicker about through her smear of cheap pasty makeup.)

'... a grounder to left ... snagged by the shortstop, backhand! What a catch! There'll be a play at home... The runner-'

CLICK. The TV went silent. His wife's footsteps sounded above him on their way back to the kitchen.

Ah, it hurts. Sometimes it hurts.

Trout grimaced then snatched a newspaper from the huge stack that had accumulated while they'd been on vacation in Minnesota. He spread it out on the mottled brown linoleum. He stood slowly and got the paraphernalia - the blue polish, the brush, the buffing cloth - and set it all out in front of him. He picked up each shoe and examined the amount of work. He turned one upside down. A broken toenail like a chip of fogged ice fell out. He set the shoe down on the newspaper and as he applied polish he focused past the shoes to the paper itself.

Trout read for a moment then stood up. He tossed the shoes on top of the clothes dryer. One left a long blue streak on the enameled metal. He carried the newspaper into the kitchen where his wife sat cross-legged, chatting on the phone.

The game was too loud,' she said to him. 'I shut it off.' Then returned to the phone.

He said, 'Hang up.'

Her neck skin quivered at the command. She blinked at him. 'I'm talking to my mother.'

'Hang up.'

She looked at the yellowed rotary dial for an explanation of this madness. 'I'll call you back, Mom.'

He took the receiver from her and pressed the button down to clear the line.

'What are you doing?'

'Making a phone call.'

'Aren't you going to polish my shoes?'

'No,' he said, 'I'm not.' And began to dial.

The Oakwood Mall. How Bill Corde hated malls.

Oh, the stores were clean, the prices reasonable. Sears guaranteed satisfaction and where in the whole of the world did you get that nowadays without more strings attached than you could count? Here you could buy hot egg rolls and tacos and Mrs Field's dense cookies and frozen yogurt. You could slip your arm around your wife, walk her into Victoria's Secret and park her in front of a mannequin wearing red silk panties and bra and a black garter belt then kiss her neck while she squirmed and blushed and let you buy her, well, not that outfit but a nice sexy nightgown.

But malls for Corde meant the Fairway Mall in St Louis, where two policemen had died because of him and that was why he never came here.

He glanced at Toys 'R' Us. In the window a cardboard cutout of Dathar-IV stood over an army of warriors from the Lost Dimension. Corde looked at this for a moment then walked on until he found Floors for All. He wasn't more than ten feet inside before a sports-coated man all of twenty-one pounced. 'I know who you are,' the kid said. "You're a man with a naked floor.'

'I'm-'

'Floors are just like you and me. We want new threads sometimes, so does your floor. It gets tired of the same old outfit. What's in your closet right now? A double-breasted suit, slacks, Bermudas, Izod shirts, ha, a khaki uniform or two, ha, am I right? Think how jealous your floor is.'

'No-'

'You don't know what a difference new carpeting makes. To your peace of mind. To your marriage.' He was a pit bull with a feeble blond mustache. 'Do you want to talk about stress? What color's your carpet now?'

'I'm not really interested-'

'Bare floors? Whoa, let's talk stress.'

'No carpet. Just Amos Trout.'

"You're not here to buy carpet?'

'No.'

'Detective?' Trout came out from the back room. They shook hands.

'Hey, Sheriff,' the kid said, 'your police station have carpeting?'

Trout waved him away.

When they were seated by Trout's desk Corde said, 'Eager.'

'Haw. No. Pain in the ass. But he sells carpet. Hell be down at the Nissan dealership in three years and probably selling Boeings by the time he's twenty-eight. I can't keep boys like that long.'

Corde asked, 'You said you saw the ad in theRegister?

The wife and I were to Minnesota on vacation for a while after that murder happened. Just a coincidence but I saw it when I spread out the paper to shine her shoes. You shine your wife's shoes, Officer?'

'They do love it, don't they? Now tell me, you were driving along Route 302 that night. That'd be 'Tuesday night, April 20?'

'That's right. I was driving home. It was about ten, ten-thirty or so. That Tuesday was our acrylic pile sale and we'd done so well I'd had to stay late to log in the receipts and mark down which're checks, which're charges, which're cash, you get the picture. So I got me a Slurpee and was driving past the pond when this man suddenly runs into the road in front of me. What happened was that my left high beam's out of whack. And I don't think he could see me coming because there was this bush hanging out into the road that the county really oughta take care of.'

'You had a clear view?'

'Sure did. There he was in front of me, leaping like a toad on July asphalt. Then he saw me and just froze and I swerved out of the way and that was that.'

'Was there a car nearby?'

"Yessir. But I didn't see what kind.'

"Was it light or dark?'

The car? Lighter more'n darker.'

'You recall the plates?'

'Don't even know if it had plates or was a truck or sedan. I just didn't notice, I was so concerned with not running that man over. What was left of the Slurpee went onto the floor and for the first time I was glad I got the maroon interior.'

'He was a man, not a boy?'

'Not a boy, nope. Probably late thirties, early forties.'

'Could you describe him?'

'Solid build but not fat, short hair, not real dark, combed straight back. He was wearing dark pants and a light jacket but the jacket was covered with dirt.'