The Nicholas Linnear Novels Read Free

tension lacing his upper torso. “And now I’m beginning to feel as if I’m adrift, far out at sea where there’s no sign of land in any direction.”
    “Then there’s nothing I can do to change your mind.”
    “Nothing, Sam.”
    Goldman sighed. “Edna will be very upset.”
    For several moments their eyes locked in a kind of silent struggle where each, it seemed, was sizing the other up.
    Goldman put his thick hands flat on the desk top. “You know,” he said quietly, “years ago in the police department of this city it used to be that the only way you got ahead was if you had a rabbi down at headquarters. Someone who looked after you when things got rough or”—he shrugged—“who knows? Used to be the way of the world—all over.” He put the unlit cigar into the opposite side of his mouth. “Now, maybe, it’s different. Corporations, they don’t know from rabbis. You gotta conform. You gotta suck up to all the vice-presidents, get invited to their weekend parties, be nice to their wives who’re so horny and unhappy they’d hump a tree if it could tell them how pretty they look; you gotta live in that certain part of Connecticut where they all live in their two-story houses with the semicircular drives. Used to be they had button-down minds; now they got computer minds. That’s getting ahead, Nick, business-wise. So they tell me. Me, I wouldn’t know. Not firsthand anyway. I’d retire before they’d get me into that kind of trap.” His eyes were clear and they sparkled despite the fact that the light was so dull and leaden. “Me, I was brought up with rabbis. They’re in my system; no way I can get ’em out now, even if I wanted to.” He sat forward in his high-backed chair, his elbows on the desk top, leveled his gaze at Nicholas. “You get what I mean?”
    Nicholas looked at him. “Yes, Sam,” he had said, after a time. “I know exactly what you mean.”
    The aching cries of the circling gulls hid the sound of the siren for a time, but, as the ambulance drew nearer, its wailing rise and fall, rise and fall blotted out all other sound. People were running silently along the expanse of the beach, looking birdlike and rather awkward as they tried to compensate for the too soft footing.
    He had come out to West Bay Bridge early in the season. In order to survive now, he had to push it all away from him, into a comforting middle distance, not too close, not too far away. The agency, Columbia, everything. Not even a discovery of some drowned corpse was going to interrupt his solipsistic world; it was too much like the city.
    Oddly enough, it put him in mind of the call. It had come only a few days after he had left the agency. He had been in the middle of the Times’ Op-Ed page and his second Irish coffee.
    “Mr. Goldman was good enough to give me your home number, Mr. Linnear,” Dean Whoolson said. “I trust I’ve not intruded.”
    “I still don’t understand why you’ve come to me,” he said.
    “It’s quite simple, really. There has been, of late, a renaissance of interest in the field of Oriental Studies. The students here are no longer satisfied with the superficiality, shall we say, of many of our oriental courses. I’m afraid they view us as sadly out of date in that area.”
    “But I’m hardly qualified as a teacher.”
    “Yes, we are well aware of that.” The voice was rather dry, like a pinch of senescent snuff floating through the air. But underneath there was an unmistakable note of sincerity. “Naturally we are aware that you do not possess a teaching license, Mr. Linnear, but, you see, this course I have in mind would be perfect for you.” He chuckled, an odd, startling sound as if made by a cartoon character. “For us, too, I might add.”
    “But I have absolutely no familiarity with the curriculum,” Nicholas said. “I wouldn’t have any idea where to begin.”
    “Oh, my dear fellow, it’s a piece of cake,” Dean Whoolson said, his voice now radiating