The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
he didn’t really advise anybody. I know you told me it was kept out of the
newspapers, but the cops knew about it. Surely you could have dealt with
him quietly, right?”
The professor wiped his mouth with the napkin and poured the last of
the wine into our glasses. “Tell me, do journalists actually use the phrase ‘off
the record,’ or is that just in films?”
“No, we say that.”
“Excellent. Then this conversation is, as you would say, off the record.”
I nodded.
“The first time Jaan fired his weapon was in January 1995. He struck a
cat, as I told you, and nearly frightened the department’s night watchman to
death. The chair of the department at the time was Professor Crowley. Now,
Hamilton had been quite a vocal supporter of Jaan’s during his early days
here, when other members of the department had doubts about Jaan’s fitness
as a professor in a university of this caliber. He supported Jaan’s application
for tenure, which was ultimately successful.
“When Jaan first shot through the window, Hamilton worked assiduously
to keep the information out of the papers, and to keep knowledge of the incident
as quiet as possible. I don’t know how he extracted promises from the
police not to divulge the information to the press, but I would not be in the
least surprised if money changed hands. It is Wickenden, after all. I believe
that only four professors, myself included, knew what Jaan had done. This
was the tail end of Hamilton’s fame, but he still was a luminary here. He
attracted plenty of students and attention, and he made it known that if we
took action against Jaan—against his protégé, as he saw it—he would leave. I
don’t know what Hamilton’s reputation is among students, but I presume
that the force of his ego is well known. Consequently, no action was taken:
Jaan promised not to carry a handgun to the university anymore, and we
promised to say no more about it.
“Three years later, though, at the end of summer, just before the students
were due to return, Jaan did the same thing again: nighttime, shadow, mistaken
reaction, and so forth. This time, as it happens, the gunshot struck the
hood of Professor Crowley’s Mercedes. When he was in it. He was unharmed
but quite terrified, and he insisted that Jaan be fired, jailed, fined—everything
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