Salter’s attitude had its dangers, and the chief one was just being demonstrated to him. He could never be sure, when he did entertain a new enthusiasm, that his wife hadn’t tried to interest him in it ten years before. Science fiction was forbidden to him because she had been recommending it for so long that he had no idea who were her favourite authors. He once knew that science fiction would bore him, and now that he was not so sure, it was too late.
But harness-racing. Jesus Christ! Gradually Salter recalled bits and pieces of things he had seen or heard and ignored over the years until he became fairly sure of the truth: that harness-racing was the major maritime pastime, and that the Montagus figured prominently in the sport. Oh shit, he thought. For another half an hour he swung between justification and guilt, until he went to bed in a mood of truculent misery.
CHAPTER 2
The following morning Salter phoned the chairman of the English Department at Douglas College and arranged for some interviews. He had often seen the college as he walked downtown from his office, and he had a vague impression of two or three converted warehouses, several shiny glass buildings, and a fountain. He established that the English Department was in one of the glass boxes, and set off from his office with plenty of time to walk. He wanted to have a look at the sleazy section of Yonge Street (his favourite stretch) to see what might be ‘cleaned up’ for the visiting Mayor of Amsterdam. What am I supposed to do, he wondered, as he viewed the morning sprinkling of bums, homeless adolescents and strained-looking gays who called this strip home. Should I get a couple of hundred off-duty cops to walk their wives up and down, like good Toronto burghers? What the hell does ‘clean up’ mean? It would be easy enough to avoid the issue and drive the Mayor round the Yorkville area where, he had read in the paper, Toronto’s beautiful people gathered to be looked at, but the Mayor had specifically asked to see Yonge Street because it was the only street he had heard of. Salter made a mental note to recommend that the Mayor be taken through at the lunch-hour when the street would be crowded with office workers.
The buildings of Douglas College appeared earlier than he had expected, now that he was looking for them, and Salter became aware that the College was much larger than he had thought. It was a quiet time of the academic year, between examinations and convocation, and there was only a handful of students about. The first three he asked had no idea where the English Department was, but finally he stopped one who directed him to the right building. Salter struggled through a pair of glass doors apparently designed to guard the entrance to a tomb, and found himself in the typical lobby of an academic building at the end of term. Every wall was covered with posters advertising last week’s concerts, lectures, dances and the monthly meetings of the Tae Kwon Do club. It looked like the day after the Boxing Day sale.
At one side of the lobby a security guard was talking to a small plastic box held up to his mouth. Salter had to wait for him to finish his chat, evidently with a colleague at another desk somewhere, about the need to make sure someone called Wong did his share of the work. ‘I said to Teperman last week, how come Wong’s always on days, and me and Eddie do nights? He said, Wong’s wife is up the spout, he said. He’s gotta stay home nights. I said, How do you know my old lady ain’t up the spout, too? Or Eddie’s. You know what he said? He said, You ain’t married, he said. I said, You don’t have to be married, not to get someone up the spout, I said. It’s all right to live common-law these days. He said, Are’ you? I said, No, but I could be couldn’t I? You never asked me, but you believe anything that fucking Wong tells you. He does, Eddie. Sure. Anything Wong wants, and there’s you and me left sucking the hind tit. You know?’ Listening to this, Salter wondered again at the thousands of security guards that had sprung up in Toronto in the last ten years. Was there a job for him in the business if he ever got totally fed up with errand work? Eventually the guard noticed him, and broke off from Eddie long enough to direct him to an elevator. He rode up to the fourth floor and stepped out into an empty corridor. More notice-boards, but this time most of the announcements were about literary events and plays that had taken place during the term. One small typed-notice advertised a ‘complete set of texts for English 022 for sale, never been opened’. Another huge poster, printed black on a grey background said, without explanation, ‘THE DEADLINE HAS BEEN CHANGED. IT IS NOW THE 28TH.’ Underneath, in pencil, someone had written, ‘Somehow, I still feel uneasy.’
Salter looked along the corridors which led away from the elevator at right-angles, one to the left and one straight ahead, wondering which route to take. Both looked as though they had been trashed during the night. Piles of dirty paper lay everywhere, concentrated in heaps around the office doors, but strewn along the walls as well. Some of it had been roughly gathered into cardboard boxes stacked side by side, evidently a first attempt at a clean-up. Salter’s eyes cleared, and he recognized the papers as English essays, waiting to be picked up by the students, but his initial impression, that he had stumbled into an alleyway where the department threw its garbage, remained.
He chose the corridor to the left, and walked along it reading the names on the doors. As he turned the corner he almost stumbled over a girl seated at a desk, typing, and he asked directions to the chairman’s office. She pointed to a corner office, the only one Salter had seen so far with the door open. There a secretary led him to the door of an inner office which opened as they approached it, and a large smiling man waved him in.
Hector Browne, the chairman of the English Department at Douglas College, was a fat dandy. Salter guessed his weight at two hundred and ten pounds, but there was nothing of the slob about him. His blue suede jacket, grey flannel trousers, and brilliant dark loafers were immaculate, and the toffee-coloured shirt made of some kind of thick linen, worn open at the neck, completed the impression of a carefully planned appearance. Salter found the total effect very pleasant, like stepping into a well-kept drawing-room. Because the building was new, Browne’s office was the usual concrete and glass cube, but Browne had done his best to warm it up with some blown-up photographs of portraits that looked slightly familiar.
The chairman led him to a settee and sat down with him. ‘It’s about Summers, of course, Inspector?’ he offered.
‘Yes. Just some enquiries about what he was doing in Montreal, and who was with him.’
‘It’s shaken us up here, I can tell you. I wasn’t close to David myself, but no man is an island, is he? Interesting how the clichés come into their own on the big occasions, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Salter said, ‘If you weren’t close to him — Professor? . . . Mister? . . . What should I call you . . . Chairman?’
‘No, no, not “Chairman”. It sounds like the head of the party, doesn’t it? “Mister” is fine. I am a professor, but so is everyone else around here, so we don’t use the title much except on passports and that sort of thing. It’s a great help in getting through the Luxembourg Customs. For hotel reservations, though, “Doctor” is better, if you are a doctor, as Stephen Leacock pointed out. Ideally, of course, one should have an arresting name—like Rockefeller.’
‘Summers was a professor?’
‘We all are, as I said. Do you know anything about Douglas College, Inspector?’
‘Nothing, sir. Perhaps you could fill me in.’
Browne leaned back and put the tips of his fingers together, parodying the gesture. He began in a lecturing style, with enough exaggeration to show he was not to be taken too seriously. As he talked, though, it was evident that, rehearsed as he was, he believed what he was saying.
‘Douglas College,’ he said, ‘was set up in the ‘sixties in response to the explosion in the demand for higher education, a demand which the voters, as the politicians read them, wanted satisfied. For a brief period, unique in Ontario history—in my time, anyway—education was politically fashionable. It was a period when Ontario politicians anxious for higher office sought the Education portfolio as having a very high profile, one of the largest budgets and plenty of opportunity for headlines. During this