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Letters, a faculty member, and…” He paused for effect. “Charlie Weis.”
    â€œNo.” Now Mary Alice was hunched forward.
    â€œYou remember Father Carmody, Manfred?”
    Mr. Fenster looked as if he would like to deny it, but he nodded.
    â€œHe brought the news to the Knight brothers when I was there. I had heard of it where I ran into Father Carmody. He came along with me to the Knights. The brother Philip has agreed to look into it.”
    â€œWho else knows?” Mary Alice asked.
    Quirk shrugged. “I don’t know.”
    â€œBill, this could be a real scoop. We have to ask Roger Knight about it.”

8
    Even granting he was paranoid, a possibility that Oscar Wack did not dismiss—he prided himself on keeping an open mind—even paranoids have real enemies, as someone must have said. He should remember who that someone was, but he didn’t. It was a troubling realization that much of what he thought and said merely echoed what he had read and heard. But no matter, who can own an idea, or a phrase? Last week, in a lecture, he had told the story of the actress in the confessional asking the priest if it was a sin to think herself beautiful when she looked in the mirror. “No, my dear, only a mistake.” Even his students had found it funny. Where had he read that? How unnerving then when the sinister Raul Izquierdo, colleague, foe, occupant of the next office, breezed into Wack’s office without knocking, a Styrofoam cup of coffee held before him as if he were about to propose a toast, crying, “Congratulations.”
    Wack waited. There was irony and sarcasm in the very air of the faculty office building.
    â€œYou’re been reading the journals of the Abbé Mugnier. And quoting him in class.”
    â€œI’m surprised you recognized it.”
    â€œWhen I myself quoted it in a recent paper?” Wack felt that he had been pounced on. As soon as Izquierdo said it, he remembered the one memorable sentence in the loathsome offprint his colleague had sailed onto his desk not long ago.
    â€œIt’s hard to footnote remarks in class.”
    That was a counterthrust. The referees of a journal to which Izquierdo had sent one of his innumerable and unreadable articles had raised the question of plagiarism. Izquierdo had been unfazed.
    â€œWhat would they say of Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake ?” he had asked the departmental committee Wack had suggested look into the matter on the basis that such a charge touched on the integrity of them all. How sly to pronounce it Finnegans Wack.
    â€œThat they’re works of genius,” Wack said, his damnable voice contralto.
    â€œAre you quoting?”
    Once he had the committee laughing, Izquierdo was home free, and he knew it. It would be too much to say that Wack had made an enemy by demanding that the matter be looked into; he and Izquierdo had entered the meeting as enemies. They left the room together, Izquierdo’s arm thrown over Wack’s shoulders in a bogus gesture of bonhomie. “Nice try,” he whispered. “I’ll get you for this.” The threat was made with a smile of Mexican silver.
    â€œWhy don’t you take a few laps in the Rio Grande?”
    â€œMy family were landed gentry in California when yours were still swinging from trees in the Black Forest.”
    Now had come that absurd letter threatening to firebomb Wack’s office. Its provenance seemed obvious. The disturbing visit of Philip Knight to the departmental office shook his certainty, but not for long. He bided his time, left the door of his office open, waited for the sound of Izquierdo skipping off to the men’s room. He looked out. Izquierdo had left his office door open as usual. In a trice, Wack was inside. He had to try several times to get the match to light, then he dropped it into the overflowing cornucopia of Izquierdo’s wastebasket. He fled the building, but as soon as he was