Campus confidential, p.26
Campus Confidential, page 26
All six men came over to us and surrounded us.
“Mack,” said the Provost. “Vinnie Junior. Nice to see you.”
“You told us you had everything under control!” said a big man, the one the Provost had called Mack. “You told us you had them under control!”
“And I do,” said Provost Johnson. “They’re right here.”
“Not your daughter!”
“She’s not going to say anything.”
“I don’t know. She seems pretty mouthy to me.”
A muscle in Provost Johnson’s jaw jumped, but he said, still speaking as smoothly and calmly as if we were at some kind of a donor meeting, which we were, “I assure you, she won’t say anything.”
“Yeah. We’ll make sure of that. What about her?” Mack nodded at me.
“You won’t say anything either, will you, Rowena?” the Provost said.
I shook my head emphatically. “Your secret is safe with me.”
“You see?” said the Provost. “Rowena knows how to be reasonable. Why don’t we all go inside and talk like civilized people? There’s no need for guns, I assure you.”
Mack thought for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “You and I will go inside and talk. I’m not feeling too good about this deal anymore. I want to hear you promise you’re going to uphold your end of the bargain again.”
“Of course. I’d be happy to. But in the meantime, why don’t you let Rowena go? You don’t need her.”
“I think we do. I think we need to keep her and explain to her just how important it is to keep her mouth shut.”
“I think Rowena understands perfectly well, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said. “This isn’t the first time I’ve kept my mouth shut, anyway.”
“Yeah?” Mack shifted around to look at me. “You’re the Russian professor, right?”
I nodded encouragingly.
“Yeah, that’s right. Well, tell you what: why don’t you and Vova here go off and he can explain to you in a language you’ll understand what will happen to you if you don’t keep your mouth shut, and Vinnie and I’ll go talk with the Provost. You can go with her.” He jerked his head at John Greene.
John made like he was going to argue, but then followed along meekly as three of the men shepherded us away from the door, while Mack and two others walked Provost Johnson into the building.
“What are you going to do to us?” demanded John Greene, as soon as Mack was inside. “You can’t do this! This is a crime! You...you should let her go! Rowena...Rowena’s never done anything! I can’t let you treat my faculty like this!”
“We let her go,” said the man next to me. “First she understands.”
We stopped under a streetlamp in the edge of the quad, next to the main road that led out of campus. A car was driving slowly towards us.
“We go for ride,” said the man next to me. “Then we talk.”
“Maybe we don’t need to go for a ride,” said the man next to John Greene. “We can just take care of ‘em here.”
“They will find them,” said the man next to me. I could see his face in the eerie light of the streetlamp. It looked familiar.
“Like they did that other guy, that janitor who got too nosy?” The other man grinned at me. “They found him, but they never found us, did they? Open your mouth, sweetheart, and you’ll end up just like him. Or worse.”
“No,” said the man next to me. “She not like him. She nice. She help my son. He—bad boy, but she—good girl. Help him. Danya tell me.”
“I’m not going to say anything, I swear,” I said, and repeated it in Russian for Danila’s father’s benefit. “I lived in Russia,” I continued, still speaking in Russian. “I know how these things work. I won’t interfere, I promise.”
“See?” said Danila’s father, poking me in the side. “Good girl. Not dangerous. Yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. You and me—we talk. You.” He nodded towards the other man. “You speak English. You talk to him.”
The other man grinned. “Not a problem. You got a car nearby?” he asked John Greene.
“Yes...in the senior administrative parking lot...chairs get special parking privileges...normally I can’t get into it but today it was half-empty...right over there.”
“Great,” said the other man, and he gripped John by the arm and started marching him briskly in the direction of the senior administrative parking lot, right on the edge of the front quad, only a few yards away.
“Come,” said Danila’s father, and jerked his head towards the side of the road. He took my arm and started walking me in that direction, the other man following along behind us.
“You helped my son,” Danila’s father said meditatively in Russian as we walked along. “He told me what you did for him at the final. You could have failed him but you didn’t. That was kind. And you helped him in other ways, all semester. He liked your class. He even wanted to keep studying Russian. He’s a good boy,” he added. “Smart. But he doesn’t understand about hard work and acting right. He doesn’t know who he is: Ukrainian like me, Russian like his mother, Jewish like his grandmother, or American like his passport. And he’s ashamed of me and what I do, but he goes to your expensive college on my dollars anyway, and brags about his mafia connections.” He sighed. “I don’t know what to do with him. What do you recommend, Professor Roe-eena?”
“Well...do you really want my advice?”
Danila’s father nodded.
“Maybe send him far away? So that he’s not here, getting drawn into your...work.”
“That is good advice,” said Danila’s father thoughtfully. “I don’t want him to follow in my footsteps, to be honest. We came to America so that he wouldn’t. His mother wants him to be a surgeon, and I want him to be a programmer. But a legal one, not a hacker. I don’t like crime, you know. I wasn’t always a gangster. I was in OMON. You know OMON?”
“Yes. My fiancé was an OMON officer, too, for a while.”
That seemed to please Danila’s father, as I’d hoped it might. “You see! You do understand! So you also understand that you can’t support a family on an OMON officer’s salary.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“So, bribes...private security work on the weekends...and here I am. We wanted Danila to have a good life. It’s okay that I’m a gangster if he has a good life, you understand? But it’s hard to get into America, and even harder to make a living here. I used to be a policeman, I used to be a good citizen and believe in the friendship of nations and liberté, égalité, fraternité, but now I’m a gangster, because that makes more money. It’s the American way.”
“I understand,” I said.
“I thought so,” he said in satisfaction. “Here’s the car! Get in, Professor Roe-eenna.”
“Where are you taking...where are we going?”
“For a talk,” he said. “And Mack will want to talk with you as well. We’ll go to his house.”
That didn’t sound good at all. I had a certain amount of faith in my ability to talk my way out of trouble with Danila’s father, but much less with Mackenzie’s father. I had the feeling that helping out his daughter was going to weigh a lot less with him than helping out his son had with Danila’s father.
“Come on,” Danila’s father chided me, pulling me over to where the car had stopped in front of us. “Get in, Professor Roe-eenna.”
I looked around. Two men, both armed, and another in the car. My chances of making a break for it seemed slim. Maybe Mackenzie’s father would be grateful. I let Danila’s father push me into the front seat.
“Let’s go,” he said in Russian to the man behind the wheel. By his profile I guessed he might be Vitya’s father.
The car pulled forward, driving cautiously in the slush. We drove slowly past the three-sided main quad, where the lights in Dreme Hall still blazed, and towards the campus entrance, where the lynching trees that had been transformed into fairy gardens twinkled magically in the still-falling snow.
“They’re behind us,” Danila’s father said, looking back to where a car, presumably John Greene’s, had pulled out of the little administrative parking lot and was rapidly catching up with us. “But they’re going too fast in this snow...Americans don’t know how to drive in snow...Shit!”
The car behind us accelerated rapidly, fishtailing in the slush but still shooting forward with a screech of rubber.
“Go!” screamed Danila’s father.
There was a loud bang, and the sound of metal tearing into metal, and our car jumped forward and then came to a dead halt, locked in place by the other car, which had plowed straight into it.
46
The driver was still untangling himself from his airbag, and the men in the backseat were still untangling themselves from each other, when I slithered out of my seatbelt, out from behind the airbag, and out, out, out the passenger side door.
For an instant I froze in indecision. I was sure that was John Greene’s car that had plowed into us. Stay and help him? But what would I do? Better to get help. Run back across campus and try to get to my car and escape in it, hoping and praying that it wouldn’t stall out?
The bright lights on the trees flanking the campus entrance winked on and off invitingly. Danila’s father had managed to extract himself from the jam in the back seat, swearing and huffing but looking like he meant to grab at me. I threw my purse at him, startling him, and took off towards the entrance and the open road.
At first my only plan was escape. But after I had shot through the entrance and found myself on the sidewalk, I had to decide where to go. To the left of campus was an upscale neighborhood with single-family houses set well back from the road. I could run from house to house begging for help, and maybe I would get it in time or maybe I wouldn’t, and maybe I would get shot as an intruder. To the right of campus were student apartments, now mostly deserted with the start of winter break.
I glanced back. Everyone was clustered around the two cars, which looked firmly stuck together. One man looked up and made as if to set off after me. I bolted across the road and straight ahead, on my usual route home.
It had been an instinctive decision, to get as far away from my pursuers and to head towards home, but after two blocks I realized no one had caught up with me. Their car was totaled, and none of them had been able to keep pace with me on foot. They would have to get reorganized, get another car, send out a search party after me...that would take them several minutes at least, and maybe longer. I could stop and call for help. If I had my phone. But I’d abandoned my purse, and my phone had already been broken. The only thing I had was my keys, still clutched in my right hand from when I’d taken them out back in the garage.
I slowed to a jog and looked up and down the street. In the space of two blocks I had left the façade of safety provided by campus, and entered the neighborhood of vacant lots and sagging porches and men who sat on them all day instead of working. But right now no one was sitting on their porch. No one was out in the street doing normal things, but occasional shadowy figures were clustered in dark street corners, maybe gossiping about sports, maybe doing drug deals.
I started running again, keeping my eyes turned away from the shadowy figures in the hope that if I didn’t look at them, they wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t go back towards campus. But I knew the way home from here. And on the way home there was a police station, only two miles from here. Even in my winded state and wearing dress clothes—thank God I was in my running shoes—I could do two miles in fifteen minutes. My followers would be hard pressed to catch me in fifteen minutes.
Sinister heads turned and watched my progress as I flashed past, but decided it was too much bother to molest me or help me. The important thing was to get into a rhythm. I was gasping in panic and from the sprint I’d just run, and I’d run myself out in another couple of blocks if I didn’t get that under control.
I forced myself to breathe slowly and calmly and focus on my footsteps in the snow. I knew how to run in snow. Last winter, the last time I’d been in Russia, Dima had been even more obsessed than usual about keeping me safe by keeping me strong and fit, and along with self-defense training, had chivvied me up and down Gorky Park in the snow, shouting the names of female Heroes of the Soviet Union in my ear as encouragement, until he’d finally collapsed, bent double, the cigarettes he’d started smoking again during his last bout of jail time for attending unsanctioned meetings catching up with him, and I’d kept running just to show him how I felt about that kind of treatment. That had been annoying, but it had worked. Hard to complain about a little running when you have the names of teenagers who’d been tortured by Nazis and died heroically for their motherland, whose statues you saw every day in Revolution Square Station, running through your head.
Nadezhda Volkova, I chanted to myself silently, in time with my footsteps slapping against the snow. Nina Sosnina, Zina Portnova, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya. Nadya, Nina, Zina, Zoya. Nadya, Nina, Zina, Zoya. Nadya, Nina, Zina, Zoya. It was soothing. I could run forever like this...I could hear a car coming down the street behind me.
It’s just someone driving home after work, I told myself. Nadya, Nina, Zina, Zoya, Nadya, Nina, Zina, Zoya...
The car swerved in my direction. I burst forward. The car fishtailed in the slush and pulled left to avoid hitting a streetlamp, and then swerved hard right again, jumping up on the sidewalk but having to pull left, back onto the street, to avoid a telephone pole. It stopped for a moment and let two men out, and then started up again, revving its engine and accelerating ahead of me, surely to cut me off at the next intersection...the police station was only a few blocks away. If I could just get through the next intersection without getting caught, I would be safe. Surely they wouldn’t follow me into a police station.
The car had pulled into the next intersection and turned and stopped so that it was blocking the sidewalk. The two men behind me weren’t gaining on me, but I wasn’t losing them, either. I could try cutting across to the other side of the street, but they would follow me, and if I left my familiar route, I would be lost in a very bad part of town. Could I run around the car, or jump onto the hood and run across? Not fast enough. One of the men was drawing his gun.
I cut left with a suddenness that startled the others, and dashed for the other side of the street. Where was everyone? Why was no one out on the street at 7:00pm on a Friday? Because this wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. And if anyone saw me, they probably wouldn’t help me. What was that rumbling? Like a dragon, coming in to land...a huge truck was coming up the street behind me.
It can run interference for me, I thought, and slowed for a second to let it catch up to me.
It swerved left, towards me.
“Grab hold, baby girl!” shouted the driver.
It was a garbage truck. I sprinted up and grabbed onto one of the handles on the back. It accelerated faster than a truck like that should be able to accelerate, sliding through the intersection with a roar and thundering down the street, with me swinging from the handle on the back and my pursuers watching me escape, mouths open.
47
The truck dropped me off at the police station and then roared away, the driver giving me a thumbs-up out the window but not stopping to chat with the police, not even with the police of his own precinct.
When I ran in, I was confronted by an alarmed desk clerk who initially thought I was trying to stage a raid. It took me several attempts, as I gasped for breath, to explain to her that people were chasing me, and that I had run all the way from campus.
By the time they had mustered up a couple of available patrol units to look for my pursuers, they were long gone. I tried to convince them to go to campus, but I was told that multiple units had already responded to multiple 911 calls, and I should give a statement.
Giving my statement took a while, even after I got my breath back. Not certain what would they would find on campus, I stuck more or less to the truth but glossed over Madison’s drug use and—doubting that I was doing the right thing, but doubting even more that doing anything else would be any better—her father’s apparent complicity in what was going on. Instead I emphasized the involvement of Mack D’Annunziato and Vinnie Angelo Junior, which made the officer taking my statement groan out loud.
“Sorry,” she said, covering her mouth. “But surely you know who they are?”
“Oh, I know.”
“Yeah, well...we’ll look into it, but, I mean, look at this place...”
I looked around. The shabbiness would have done a local Russian precinct station proud.
“You didn’t hear this from me,” she said. “But I don’t know there’s much we can do against those guys. I’ll file the report, but...”
“I get it,” I said. “I just want to have it on file.”
She nodded. “Yeah, me too. So let’s get it down right, okay?”
After that was done there was some discussion of whether I should go home. I still, miraculously, had my keys, which had cut deep grooves in my palm when I had grabbed onto the handles of the garbage truck, but no purse and no phone. After some calling back and forth, the officer who had taken my statement offered to drive me back to campus so that I could pick up my car.
“That’s very kind of you,” I told her.
“That’s why I got into this, you know what I mean?” she said. “To help people. Let’s go.”
On the drive over to campus she told me her name was Janice, she’d had a child born out of wedlock at eighteen, and she was trying to save up for her daughter to go to college.
“I’d drive her past here and tell her if she worked hard in school, she could get into a place like this,” she said as we pulled into campus. “Now I’m not so sure.”
“Universities are pretty much like everywhere else,” I said. “You don’t leave wherever you come from behind when the gates to the ivory tower slam shut.”
