“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say he’s found something.” A thought suddenly came into my head, and I quickly checked my watch. “Either that or—damn! I’m late. I’ve got a class to teach.”
“Aw, shit,” Lucas declared. “Class? So this is gonna be like school…”
“Don’t worry,” I explained. “You might even want to sit in.”
“Great,” the boy declared. “School. Wish you woulda told me that, to begin with…” Then Lucas’ mind hopped tracks yet again: “Though I still think it’s awful strange that nobody in your family’s ever—”
“Lucas!” I countered. “Focus, kid, focus!”
“Hey, don’t call me ‘kid,’ ” he shot back. “All’s I’m saying is…”
Thus did we continue our walk toward the hangar, my new colleague forcing me to wonder several times just what I had wrought by bringing him into the investigation. But in he was; and there was no turning back now. By the time we neared the barns, my great-aunt and Terence were safely back inside the house, and there’d been no unfortunate sighting as we passed its western windows that would have led to difficult questions concerning our guest. Mike, however, was a different story: as soon as he saw that I was not alone, he stopped his frenetic signaling, and simply watched in confusion as the boy and I made our way up the path to the hangar.
“Thought you weren’t going to make your class, L.T.,” he said, his cool manner doing little to mask his suspicions; then, studying Lucas, he added bluntly, “Who’s this guy?”
“Relax, Mike,” I said. “He’s here to help. Meet Lucas Kurtz—I’ve just engaged him as a consulting member of our investigative team.”
Mike studied Lucas for a brief second, saying only, “Yeah? Hey, kid.” Then the rest of my statement reached his brain: “As a what?” he asked, stunned.
“A consulting detective,” Lucas replied defiantly. “And I already told your friend, I don’t answer to ‘kid.’ You can use my name, Dr. Li, it’s what they gave it to me for.”
“ ‘Dr. Li’?” Mike echoed, smiling in spite of himself. “Well, I beg your pardon, Lucas—I know what it’s like when people don’t show the proper respect.” He took the kid’s measure. “So you’re a ‘consulting detective,’ eh? Like Sherlock Holmes?”
“Exactly,” Lucas replied, gladly accepting Mike’s offer of mutual esteem. “Which means that—whoa, shit!” He had suddenly caught sight of the nose of the JU-52 presiding over the scene. “Sick…Completely sick! What in the fuck is it?”
I had forgotten, during a lifetime of familiarity, just how imposing and impressive the image of the plane could be, especially to a boy of Lucas’ age; and, heading just inside the hangar to fetch another slab of beef from a refrigerator-freezer that sat on the concrete floor, I said, “That is the Junkers JU-52/3m, Lucas—one of history’s great airplanes.” I put the beef into a microwave that occupied an old table next to the freezer, then set the machine to run for long enough to defrost the meat and heat the blood in the package. “It was brought here from Germany by my great-grandfather,” I went on. “Right after it was built, in 1935: rescued, as it were, from Nazi use. And now it does noble service as our headquarters.”
“No shit…” Lucas began to move toward the plane with careful steps, full of wonder. “What, he flew it all in one go? I thought planes didn’t have that kind of range, back then.”
“Some did,” I answered. “But not the JU-52. So, from Europe he flew her south to Africa, then crated her up on a freighter, shipped her to Brazil, and flew her up here.”
“Oh, I get it!” the kid said with a delighted smile. “So you guys, like, fly around in it, when you’re on a case?”
“Afraid not, Lucas,” Mike answered, watching the newcomer. “Dr. Jones’ ancestor, being a genius like the rest of his family, took the secrets of how to maintain and run it to his grave.”
“We could probably get her going, if we needed to,” I retorted. “But its real purpose now is to offer secrecy, instead of transport.”
“Well—that sucks,” Lucas said, his steps becoming more certain as he got a small, good-natured chuckle out of Mike. “But I guess it is just about the last place anybody’d come looking for you. Nobody around here’d think of it, anyway…”
“Michael,” I said, pulling the beef from the microwave as the appliance chimed, “why don’t you show Lucas around, while I take Marcianna back up and feed her?”
“Uh, yeah, sure thing, L.T.,” Mike said casually; then he caught my eye, adding, “First, though, I’ve got one or two messages from the university to relay—and you really do have to be ready to teach soon. If I gotta do it, so do you.” He turned to the newcomer. “Lucas, just hang on a second, and then I’ll give you the grand tour.”
Still transfixed by the dulled silver of the JU-52’s skin, Lucas replied, “Sure thing, Dr. Li.”
“Hey, and now that we’re speaking the same language,” Mike added, “you can drop the ‘Dr. Li’ garbage. My partner likes that kind of crap—but if you’re Lucas, then I’m Mike.”
“Yeah?” Lucas turned for a moment, deeply appreciative that the playing field had been at least partially leveled. “Okay, Mike.”
“I will remain Dr. Jones, however,” I said. “A little democracy goes a long way.”
At that Mike and I moved outside; and as we did his expression changed from amusement to alarm. “Have you lost your damned mind, L.T.? A kid? In on this? What is he, fifteen—?”
“Just hear me out, Mike,” I replied; and as quickly as possible I explained Lucas’ qualifications, assuring Mike that the kid’s involvement did not have to be particularly deep, but could still prove crucial, given both what he knew and his ability to move in worlds that we could at best visit under a cloud of suspicion.
“Well,” Mike judged, after listening to this defense. “Maybe. Just as long as you’re sure we’re not going to put him in any kind of danger. He gets hurt doing what we ask, and I don’t have to tell you, it’ll be Christmas for everybody who wants us nowhere near this investigation. Not to mention the media, they’ll get out the fucking long knives.”
“I know, Mike—but talk to the kid. He’s sharp, he knows what’s going on in this county, and I really don’t think we have to worry about him.”
Mike shrugged at that, accepting what was already, so far as I was concerned, a fait accompli. “You’re the boss,” he said at length, scratching his head.
“Bullshit I am. But on this, I’m right. Now, then—what were you going so batshit about a few minutes ago?”
“Oh.” Mike tried hard to switch gears. “Some things about the girl—Shelby—don’t line up, like I figured. I’m still researching it, but—it could be something solid.”
“Well, try Lucas on that. Apparently Shelby had quite a reputation in the county, and he knows a few things about her.”
“Yeah?” For the first time, Mike began to see the point of my having brought the intrepid young man onto our team. “Well, maybe I will ask him…” Heading into the hangar, he called, “Okay, Lucas—let’s get you aboard and show you around…”
I guided Marcianna back up to her enclosure, meanwhile, and performed the evening’s chores, filling her dinner with the same soluble tablets I had given her earlier: supplements that, her vet had long ago assured me, could help keep her immune system powerful enough to hold all strains of leukemia at bay, and give her something like a normal life span. Then I watched her eat and lingered in the enclosure a few extra minutes, knowing that she required this attention to keep her calm until I returned later that night. But her full belly soon made her begin to roll and loll about in the enclosure’s grass, which was generally the signal that I could depart; and so I locked her gate up tight and went back down the hill to the hangar.
When I got there, I could hear Mike’s and Lucas’ voices echoing from within the plane, the boy’s questions and declarations reflecting his increased excitement at finding what must have been to him a dream world of mo
dern investigative techniques inside an already astonishing, secret space to which he’d been admitted as a privileged member. I wasn’t surprised: at his age, when my own cancer had kept me away from the normal activities that a young man should enjoy with his peers, both my great-aunt’s farm and the old JU-52 had been wonderlands where, during weekends and vacations, I had retreated from the unkindnesses of both my immediate family and my schoolmates into a universe where I fancied myself not only the equal but the superior of the average, two-legged youth. Knowing at least the rough circumstances of Lucas’ own life, I could readily imagine what he must have been feeling at having the run of a machine that, though long since grounded, still emanated power and command. And, sure enough, once inside the plane, I caught sight of the kid’s quick form darting back and forth from the equipment that Mike and I had installed for our teaching and investigative work to the intact controls of the JU-52’s cockpit: the most exciting feature of the plane, and intact in every detail, from its multi-paned, panoramic windshield right down to my great-grandfather’s pair of leather and fleece flight jackets and sets of radio headgear. Sympathetic as I was to his excitement, however, I knew that we had to get his wildly firing brain under control; so I immediately took on the air of the teacher that I would momentarily have to become for my actual students.
“All right, Lucas,” I called. “Plenty of time for that later. Right now I’d like you to take the”—I checked my watch yet again and frowned—“damn, the five minutes or so we have until my class begins to acquaint yourself with a few basic concepts, so you can follow the talk.”
“Already done, L.T.,” Mike said, stepping out from behind the black backdrop that separated our working area from the classroom and indicating one of the several desks at his work station, which ran aft from the bulkhead of the cockpit. “I’ve given Lucas the basic gist of your ‘Context’ course, and cleared a space for him to take some notes.”
“But don’t expect me to do much of that!” Resplendent in a flight jacket that was much too big for him, with headphones and attached mouthpiece around his neck and goggles on his forehead, Lucas was in the pilot’s seat, and he jerked a thumb back at the desk Mike had somehow managed to free of some of his clutter. “I can keep it all locked up right here,” the boy went on, tapping on his temple. “Just like Mr. Holmes. And I wanna see how this whole college-by-TV system works, L.T.” At a mindful glance from me, the boy corrected himself wearily. “Dr. Jones. Hey, how come those initials bug you, anyway?”
“Who says they bug me?” I asked, collecting a group of papers from my own desk, which was beside the open hatch.
“Mike does,” Lucas answered simply. “So what’s the deal?”
I looked at my partner. “Just couldn’t resist, could you, Michael?”
“Hey,” Mike said, moving beyond the cloth screen and switching on the video monitors, then making sure the computer that handled them from the instructor’s desk was powered up. “You wanted the kid—the young man—to feel at home, bud.”
“Unh-hunh…” I drew aside the partition and sat at the desk. “It’s entirely unnecessary for you to know why I object to those initials, Lucas—”
“But they are yours, right?” the kid interjected. “Dr. Levon Trajan Jones?”
“That is not the issue at hand!” I called out, waiting for my students to check in on the screens before me. “Suppose you just tell me what my communist associate has taught you about ‘The Theory of Context’?”
“ ‘Communist’?” Lucas echoed. “Hey, look, even I know the Chinese ain’t really communists, anymore—”
“And I am not Chinese!” Mike bellowed. “My family came here in—”
“All right, all right, let’s just knock it off,” I answered. “If we can quit being entirely childish before our paying students log in, we may just be able to preserve the illusion that we know what we’re doing. Now, then, Lucas: three minutes, ‘The Theory of Context’—go.”
Lucas launched into an explanation that was clearly an effort to prove that he was qualified to join our team: “The Theory of Context has to do with making sure that every case and every suspect in a case is treated individually, so that you build your conclusions about all the events and all the—the, whatever, all the circumstances—of a crime, and about the suspects, too, in their own particular context, and don’t just let the kind of statistics that crime scene investigators normally use make you decide which things to pay attention to. Like, for example, just because eighty percent of my school can’t pass the standardized tests they give us every year doesn’t mean that, if you meet a kid from my school, he must be an idiot. You just don’t—” His brain was working hard, I was gratified to see, at mastering the concept. “You just don’t decide who’s the most likely suspect first, based on statistics and past cases, then pick your evidence to match that one suspect. You look at every suspect, and figure what each one usually acts like, then let all the evidence lead you in the right direction. Because somebody might seem weird or suspicious, but in the context of his usual life, the way he does things might not be incriminating at all. Like that.”
I was impressed to hear that the statement, even if abbreviated and slightly jumbled, was only minimally dosed with language that he’d clearly picked up from television. “Very good,” I pronounced. “Very good, indeed, Lucas.”
“And if you want to know how this ‘Context’ stuff all got started,” he went on proudly, “it was the dude who wrote that weird book that fell outta your pocket before.”
“Whose name was—?”
Lucas paused for an instant, then called, “Doctor—Doctor—” He’d clearly forgotten; but then Mike whispered something and he shouted, “Dr. Laszlo Chrysler!”
“Kreizler,” I replied, calmly and carefully. “Put a t before the z when you pronounce it. And I heard you, by the way, Michael.”
“Give the kid a break, L.T.,” Mike answered. “He got the important part. Pretty much.”
“Pretty much?” Lucas cried indignantly. “I nailed it, you two assho—”
“Class is in session!” I declared, silencing further nonsense as the screens in front of me filled with large squares, each containing the face of one of the SUNY-Online students enrolled in my “Theory of Context” course. Michael got Lucas calmed down while I dimmed the lights and greeted the dozen or so participants who had shown up for the session. The space before me darkened and transformed into the rather otherworldly and uniquely intimate arena that from the first had surprised me with its capacity to offer an exciting learning environment. Yet there were greater reasons for the charge I felt as I readied myself for that evening’s lesson: for this would be the first time that Mike and I would be part of an active murder investigation while conducting our courses, thus giving their subject matter special immediacy. And I, in particular, had the encouragement of both a new source of information concerning the case—Lucas—as well as Mike hard at work on what he believed would be his own breakthrough. In short, while I was teaching truly life-and-death concepts inside the JU-52, future lives and deaths would actually be hanging in the balance in the world immediately around us; and so I would have to try hard to focus on my students without letting my concentration drift too often toward what was transpiring beyond the backdrop just behind me, shielding those same pupils from the terribly nonacademic application of the principles they would be discussing. A great challenge, to be sure—and one that, I quickly found, Lucas had no intention of making any easier.
{iv.}
Agood half-dozen students were missing from the class, a fact that demanded quick comment from me: “I will remind you all that the time zone differences which affect some of you won’t be considered legitimate excuses for absenteeism.” In fact, Mike and I took it as a compliment that we had enrollees from all over the country; but when seated at the desk, the taskmaster in me had to take over—gently, if possible, but always pointedly.
Our video system was so constructed that e
ach of the students could see not only my face but those of their classmates on their computers (albeit in much smaller scale than Mike and I had designed to appear across our three huge screens); and a look of partial but still commendable embarrassment filled the expressions of the members present upon their realization of just how many of their number were absent. Most of the class, in keeping with the current national enrollment in all aspects of the criminal sciences, was made up of women. But it was one of the men present—an often annoying yet somehow appealing twenty-five-year-old, raised on my own home island of Manhattan but now residing, at his wealthy parents’ expense, in the dormitory for such people that the borough of Brooklyn had become—to chirp up with:
“Well, it is a Friday night, Dr. Jones.”
“Thank you for stating the obvious, Andrew,” I answered. “But in this classroom, we operate not by Eastern Trust Fund Time, but by Eastern Daylight Time, according to which it is only Friday evening. In addition, as you will recall, Dr. Li and I agreed to teach this extra session of courses because of demand, not because our own lives are so impoverished that we needed to spend our summer days and twilights basking in the glow of your eager faces.”
“Just shut up, Andrew,” murmured one of the better students in the class, a black woman in her early thirties named Linda, behind whose impressive if intense features could be seen a window that displayed a view of a housing project in the Bronx.
Andrew attempted to defend himself: “All I’m saying is—”
“Andrew, just put a lid on it!” declared yet another voice, which belonged to one of the class’ younger members, a girl from Tennessee named Amy, whose delicate features belied quite a forceful personality. “You’re wasting time.”
“Precisely, Amy,” I said. “Now—when we left off last time—”
Suddenly I heard Lucas’ voice float over the partition: “That Andrew dude is gonna get his ass an F!” he laughed, drawing an immediate but amused shushing sound from Mike.