The man looked at Franco and plunged his right hand into his pocket.
“Who is Posno?” Lew asked.
“You don’t know?”
“No, enlighten me.”
“Posno,” she said, “is a maniacally ambitious, talented economics professor at Sanahee University, a self-proclaimed expert on not only micro-and macroeconomics, but politics, philosophy and astrophysics.”
“Andrej Posnitki,” the young man said, eyes on Franco. “Grad students and faculty call him Posno to evoke a name that suggests a mythical monster.”
“Grendel, Cronos, Scylla,” she said.
“Where can we find him?” Lew asked.
“Library,” said the man.
“Which library?” Lew asked.
“Almost any library,” said the woman. “Andrej Posnitki, Posno, is a character in Campbell Restin’s novel More Fool That.”
“Won the Ledge Award, the Millman Award and was a strong contender for the National Book Award in 1978,” the woman said.
The man and woman moved down the sidewalk. His voice rose with animation with the name Bruckner.
“What the hell’s going on, Lewis?” asked Franco.
“We’re looking for someone who borrowed a name,” Lew said. “Or a mythical monster.”
The corridor on the eighth floor smelled of Lysol and gardenias. The carpeting was gray, the walls muted white. They moved to Rebecca Strum’s door.
“I don’t believe this, Lewie. Anyone can just go up an elevator and knock at Rebecca Strum’s door. She’s…”
“Famous,” Lew said, using the brass door knocker and stepping back. The door opened almost instantly.
Rebecca Strum, no more than five feet tall, hair thin and white, skin clear, a thin book in her left hand, stood looking at them with a smile that made Lew think she knew why they had come to her door.
“Yes?”
“My name is Lewis Fonesca. This is Franco Massaccio. You had a car accident four years ago, a car bumped into you on Lake Shore Drive.”
“I remember,” she said, pulling up the drooping sleeve of her olive-colored sweater.
“About ten minutes before that my wife was killed on Lake Shore by a hit-and-run driver in a red sports car.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” she said. “Red sports car?”
“Yes.”
“Come in.”
They followed her into the living room. The windows looked out toward downtown Chicago. The room was neat, uncluttered, only one picture on the wall, a large blown-up photograph of a harbor surrounded by tree-covered hills. The rest of the wall space was lined with shelves filled with books evenly lined up, most of them hardcovered. Facing the window was a desk nestled between two bookcases. On the desk was a pad of yellow lined paper, about half the pages tucked under it, and an open laptop computer. Nothing else.
They sat on three identical chairs padded with green pillows and matching arms. Rebecca Strum kept the thin book in her lap and said, “Coffee?”
“No, thank you.”
“No,” echoed Franco, looking at the shelves of books.
“Can you tell me again what happened?” Lew asked.
“It was more than four years ago,” she said. “Why now?”
“I’ve been asleep,” Lew said.
She nodded in understanding and said, “The driver was a man, Asian, probably Chinese, about forty-five. His eyes were moist. I think he had been crying. He may have been drinking, taking drugs or suffering from a mental disorder or possibly a trauma. His driving was erratic, weaving back and forth. He… never mind.”
“What?” Lew asked.
“The look on his face was very much like yours right now, the same look of grief and mourning of people who have had their pretenses, illusions, masks, torn from their faces. Gaunt, haunted in despair, a legion of brothers marching to hell.”
“You wrote that,” Franco said.
“Yes.”
“ The Dirt Floor, right,” said Franco. “That’s the only thing I memorized and I wasn’t trying. My wife is the real fan. No fan isn’t the right word. Respecter, admirer?”
Rebecca Strum nodded and smiled.
“In the window of his car the red sports car,” she said, “there was a yellow-and-red parking permit about the size of a sheet of typing paper cut in half.”
“Did you tell the police this?” Lew asked.
“I didn’t remember till several months ago when I saw a permit on a car exactly like it parked on 51st Street. I didn’t think the police would be interested in a minor traffic accident after four years. Had I known your wife had been killed by this car, I would have called the police. Not a sin but a misdemeanor of omission. ‘Had I but known’ is the historical cry of people who do not accept their responsibility, their guilt. How can you heal if you don’t accept that you are ill? The Germans in the town next to the concentration camp where my family died and I… I’m sorry.”
She placed her book next to her on the arm of her chair and tugged at her sleeve. She had pulled it back just enough for Lew to see the first three numbers tattooed on her right wrist.
“Now, may I anticipate your next question?” she asked. “First, yes, I would recognize the man in the red sports car. I told this to the detective who talked to me after the accident. Second, the parking pass in the window of the car on Fifty-first was for Mentic Pharmaceuticals in Aurora. Now, I’m sorry but I must finish rereading this today,” she said, putting a hand on the book. “Dante’s Inferno. I’m having a discussion of it on campus tomorrow with some graduate students who will understand it but won’t feel it. It’s not their fault. Have you read it?”
“No,” Lew said.
Franco nodded no.
“You might want to,” she said, looking at Lew. “It’s about the poet Dante’s descent into Hell and Purgatory and then to Heaven.”
She looked at the book and then at her shelves.
“At lectures, discussions,” she said, “I ask people if they have read Dante, Moby Dick or War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Iliad, Sister Carrie. The answers are always the same. They say they have read them all. When asked to tell me something about the book, it becomes clear that the reading was far in the past and forgotten and perhaps they have deluded themselves into believing that they have read the classics. They feel guilty. They vow to themselves to immediately read something by Thomas Mann. You understand?” she said.
Lew nodded. Franco said, “Yes.”
“It is human nature,” she said, “to believe you have learned from the past, that you remember it when, in fact, you must make the effort to keep the past alive. I did it again, didn’t I?”
“What?” asked Franco.
“I lectured to you.”
“No,” said Franco.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been doing it long enough to recognize my somber certitude when I hear it.”
She touched the number tattooed on her wrist. Lew’s need to find out what had happened to Catherine should have seemed small compared to that number on Rebecca Strum’s wrist, but it didn’t.
“Is there anything else?” she asked.
“Posno,” Lew said.
She looked puzzled.
“Posno? That’s a character in some book I think,” she said.
“Yes, Andrej Posnitki, Posno.”
“I’ve never read it,” she said.
Franco shrugged.
“Would you check the name on the Internet for us please?” asked Lew.
“Lewie,” Franco whispered loud enough for her to hear. “You know who you’re asking to-”
“No,” she said, getting up with the help of both hands placed just above her knees. “It’s fine. Now I’m curious about why a man with a face worthy of Munch should want to know about a character in a novel.”
She moved to the desk by the window and sat slowly, hands on the arms of the wooden desk chair. Lew stood over her left shoulder, Franco over her right.
“Years ago,” she said, “Well, really not that many years ago, I used to do this for Simon Weisenthal.”
Her dappled fingers danced over the keys of the laptop and images, lists popped up and then stopped.
“Thirty-seven-thousand six-hundred and seven hits,” she said. “Not an unusually high number even for as obscure a fictional character as Andrej Posnitki. Colley Cibber, a very minor actor, poet and playwright, has more than ninety-nine-thousand hits. Cibber was an actor known most for the fact that Alexander Pope ridiculed him in The Dunciad.”