The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
Gomes piped up from his chair. “See, it’s not so much that this is a small
town as that it’s a cone-shaped town, with the pointy part up top, and what
we’re talking about here—a crime involving a professor at Wickenden’s most
powerful institution—happens at the very top of the cone. No way, in my
experience, something like this happens without somebody from the university
finding out. Maybe the night watchman tells his wife, who tells her sister
the teacher, who mentions it to another teacher, who’s married to a reporter,
who tells an editor, who tells an old friend, who tells a neighbor, and so on,
like a game of telephone.”
“By the time it trickles up, though, the man might have become Son of
Sam Two,” said Joe.
“Yeah, and news like this would have a way of distorting, especially coming
from a group of people who probably hate guns and don’t have much
exposure to violent crime in the first place, you know?” Gomes had moved
his chair closer to the desk where we were sitting. Something about spending
time with the two of them made me feel good: safe but excited. They seemed
intellectually intimate—finishing each other’s sentences, refining each other’s
thoughts, each making the other better—and that, in my experience, is rare.
Gomes continued: “A man carries a weapon, and the Wickenden crowd
turns him into some sort of Neanderthal.”
“Right,” agreed Joe. “So the first thing I did was, I phoned Uncle Abe
and asked if he could call in a favor, check the department’s payroll records
in the university offices. See what it was costing them to keep Pühapäev. You
know what he made per year?” Joe leaned across the table, black eyes boring
into me, hands clasped like a magician’s enclosing a dove. “A dollar.” He
opened his hands.
“One dollar?”
“Yep. One dollar. That’s not so unusual as you might think, though. You
got a professor who maybe comes from money, or who’s married to a doctor
or a lawyer, and just teaches for the hell of it, doesn’t need the salary. But the
university needs to pay them for tax purposes. So they take a symbolic dollar
and float the rest back.
“In Pühapäev’s case, though, that wasn’t all. He was also donating, on top
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