Kendall sat forward in his chair. “What guy?”
“My accountant. You think I’d let Piasecki operate without oversight? No way! Everything he does gets double-checked out here. If he’s pulling anything, we’ll find out. Don’t worry. And then that Polack’s up shit creek.”
Kendall’s mind was racing. He was trying to come up with an answer that would prevent this audit, or delay it, but before he said anything, Jimmy continued, “Listen, kiddo, I’m going to London next week. The Montecito house’ll be empty. Why don’t you bring your family out here for a long weekend? Get out of that cold weather.”
“I’ll have to check with my wife,” Kendall said tonelessly. “And the kids’ school schedule.”
“Take the kids out of school. It won’t kill them.”
“I’ll talk to my wife.”
“Anyway, you did good, kiddo. You boiled Tocqueville down to his essence. I remember when I first read this book. Must have been twenty-one, twenty-two. Blew me away.”
In his vibrant, scratchy voice, Jimmy began to recite a passage of Democracy in America. It was the passage Kendall had printed on the bookmarks and for which the small press was named: “In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man,” Jimmy said, “and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past.”
Kendall stared out the window at the lake. It went on endlessly. But instead of finding relief and freedom from the view, he felt as if the lake, all those tons of cold, nearly freezing water, were closing in.
“That fucking kills me,” Jimmy said. “Every time.”
2008
FRESH COMPLAINT
By the time Matthew learns that the charges have been dropped—there will be no extradition or trial—he’s been back in England for four months. Ruth and Jim have bought a house in Dorset, near the sea. It’s a lot smaller than the house Matthew and his sister grew up in, when Ruth was married to their father. But it’s full of things that Matthew remembers from his London childhood. As he climbs to the guest room at night or goes out the side door on his way to the pub, familiar objects leap out at him: the carved figurine of the Alpine hiker, in lederhosen, purchased on a family trip to Switzerland, in 1977; or those glass bookends that used to be in Dad’s office, solid blocks of transparency, each containing a golden apple that, to his child’s eyes, had appeared magically suspended. Now they’re in the kitchen, holding up Ruth’s cookbooks.
The side door opens onto a cobblestone lane that winds around the back of the neighboring houses, past a church and a cemetery, into the center of town. The pub is opposite a chemist’s and an H&M outlet. Matthew’s a regular there now. Other patrons sometimes ask why he’s come back to England, but the reasons he gives—problems with his work visa and tax complications—seem to satisfy their curiosity. He worries that something about the case will pop up on the Internet, but so far nothing has. The town lies inland of the English Channel, 120 miles from London. PJ Harvey recorded Let England Shake in a church not far away. Matthew listens to the album on headphones while he walks on the moorlands, or runs errands in the car, if he can get Ruth’s Bluetooth working. The lyrics of the songs, which are about ancient battles and the English dead, dark places of sacred memory, are his welcome back home.
Occasionally, as Matthew drives through the village, a flash goes off in his peripheral vision. A girl’s bright blond hair. Or a group of students standing outside the nursing college, smoking cigarettes. He feels criminal just looking.
One afternoon he drives to the seaside. After parking the car, he sets out walking. The clouds, as they always do here, hang low in the sky. It’s as if, having traveled across the ocean, they’re surprised to find land beneath them, and haven’t withdrawn to a respectable distance.
He follows the trail until it reaches the bluff. And it’s then, as he looks west over the ocean, that the realization hits him.
He’s free to go back now. He can see his children. It’s safe to return to America.
*
Eleven months ago, early in the year, Matthew had been invited to give a lecture at a small college in Delaware. He took the Monday-morning train down from New York, where he lived with his wife, Tracy, who was American, and their two children, Jacob and Hazel. By three that afternoon he was in a coffee shop across from his hotel, waiting to be picked up by someone from the physics department and taken to the auditorium.
He’d chosen a table near the front window so that he could be easily seen. While he drank his espresso, he went over his lecture notes on his computer, but soon got distracted by answering e-mail, and after that, by reading The Guardian online. He’d finished his coffee and was thinking of ordering a second when he heard a voice.
“Professor?”
A dark-haired girl in a baggy sweatshirt, carrying a backpack, was standing a few feet away. As soon as Matthew looked up at her, she raised her hands in surrender. “I’m not stalking you,” she said. “I promise.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Are you Matthew Wilks? I’m coming to your lecture today!”
She announced this as though Matthew had been hanging on the answer to this question. But then, seeming to realize that she needed to explain herself, she lowered her hands and said, “I go here. I’m a student.” She pushed out her chest to show off the college seal on her sweatshirt.
Matthew didn’t get recognized in public much. When it did happen, it was by colleagues of his—other cosmologists—and graduate students. Occasionally a reader, middle-aged or older. Never anybody like this.
The girl appeared to be Indian-American. She spoke and dressed like a typical American girl her age, and yet the clothes she had on, not only the sweatshirt but the black leggings, Timberland boots, and purple hiking socks, along with a general sense that clung to her of undergraduate uncleanliness, of the communal, dormitory existence she lived, didn’t keep the extravagance of her face from making Matthew think of her genetic origins far away. The girl reminded him of a figure in a Hindu miniature. Her dark lips, her arching nose with its flared nostrils, and most of all her startling eyes, which were a color that might only exist in a painting where the artist could mix green and blue and yellow indiscriminately, made the girl look less like a college student from Delaware than a dancing gopi, or a child saint venerated by the masses.