For a moment I stopped breathing. Terrified and clumsy, I turned, saw the darkened windows, all but invisible above the dark street, and on impulse ran toward them. The door through which I’d made my exit was firmly bolted. No other lights showed in the building’s facade. At this hour, the door was probably set to lock behind anyone who walked out-surely that was normal. I was standing there, hesitating, on the verge of running around to the other doors, when the streetlights came on again, and I felt suddenly abashed. There was no sign of the two students who’d walked out behind me; they must, I thought, have gone off in a different direction.
But now another group of students was strolling past, laughing; the street was no longer deserted. What if Rossi came out in a minute, as he certainly would after having switched off his light and locked his office door behind him, and found me waiting here? He had said he didn’t want to discuss further what we’d been discussing. How could I explain my irrational fears to him, there on the doorstep, when he’d drawn a curtain over the subject-over all morbid subjects, perhaps? Embarrassed, I turned away before he could catch up with me and hurried home. There, I left the envelope in my briefcase, unopened, and slept-although restlessly-through the night.
The next two days were busy, and I didn’t let myself look at Rossi’s papers; in fact, I put all esoterica resolutely out of my mind. It took me by surprise, therefore, when a colleague from my department stopped me in the library late on the afternoon of the second day. “Have you heard about Rossi?” he demanded, grabbing my arm and wheeling me around as I hurried past. “Paolo, wait!” Yes, you’re guessing correctly-it was Massimo. He was big and loud even as a graduate student, louder than he is now, maybe. I gripped his arm.
“Rossi? What? What about him?”
“He’s gone. He’s disappeared. The police are searching his office.”
I ran all the way to the building, which now looked ordinary, hazy inside with late-afternoon sun and crowded with students leaving their classrooms. On the second floor, in front of Rossi’s office, a city policeman was talking with the department chairman and several men I’d never seen before. As I arrived, two men in dark jackets were leaving the professor’s study, closing the door firmly behind them and heading toward the stairs and classrooms. I pushed my way through and spoke to the policeman. “Where’s Professor Rossi? What’s happened to him?”
“Do you know him?” asked the policeman, looking up from his notepad.
“I’m his advisee. I was here two nights ago. Who says he’s disappeared?”
The department chairman came forward and shook my hand. “Do you know anything about this? His housekeeper phoned at noon to say he hadn’t come home last night or the night before-he didn’t ring for dinner or breakfast. She says he’s never done that before. He missed a meeting at the department this afternoon without phoning first, which he’s never done before, either. A student stopped by to say his office was locked when they’d agreed on an appointment during office hours and that Rossi had never shown up. He missed his lecture today, and finally I had the door opened.”
“Was he in there?” I tried not to gasp for breath.
“No.”
I pushed blindly away from them toward Rossi’s door, but the policeman held me back by one arm. “Not so fast,” he said. “You say you were here two nights ago?”
“Yes.”
“When did you last see him?”
“About eight-thirty.”
“Did you see anyone else around here then?”
I thought. “Yes, just two students in the department-Bertrand and Elias, I think, going out at the same time. They left when I did.”
“Good. Check that,” the policeman said to one of the men. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary in Professor Rossi’s behavior?”
What could I say? Yes, actually-he told me that vampires are real, that Count Dracula walks among us, that I might have inherited a curse through his own research, and then I saw his light blotted out as if by a giant-
“No,” I said. “We had a meeting about my dissertation and sat talking until about eight-thirty.”
“Did you leave together?”
“No. I left first. He walked me to the door and then went back into his office.”
“Did you see anything or anyone suspicious around the building as you left? Hear anything?”
I hesitated again. “No, nothing. Well, there was a brief blackout on the street. The streetlights went off.”
“Yes, that’s been reported. But you didn’t hear anything or see anything out of the usual?”
“No.”
“So far you’re the last person to see Professor Rossi,” the policeman insisted. “Think hard. When you were with him, did he do or say anything strange? Any talk of depression, suicide, anything like that? Or any talk of going away, going on a trip, say?”
“No, nothing like that,” I said honestly. The policeman gave me a hard look.
“I need your name and address.” He wrote down everything and turned to the chairman. “You can vouch for this young man?”
“He’s certainly who he says he is.”
“All right,” the policeman told me. “I want you to come in here with me and tell me if you see anything unusual. Especially anything different from two nights ago. Don’t touch anything. Frankly, most of these cases turn out to be something predictable, family emergency or a little breakdown-he’ll probably be back in a day or two. I’ve seen it a million times. But with blood on the desk we’re not taking any chances.”
Blood on the desk? My legs were weakening under me, but I made myself walk in slowly after the policeman. The room looked as it had on dozens of other occasions when I’d seen it in daylight: neat, pleasant, the furniture in precise attitudes of invitation, books and papers in exact stacks on the tables and the desktop. I stepped closer. Across the desk, on Rossi’s tan blotting paper, lay a dark reservoir, long since spread and soaked and still. The policeman put a steadying hand on my shoulder. “Not a big enough loss of blood to be a cause of death in itself,” he said. “Maybe a bad nosebleed, or some kind of hemorrhage. Did Professor Rossi ever have a nosebleed when you were with him? Did he seem ill that night?”
“No,” I said. “I never saw him-bleed-and he never talked about his health to me.” I realized suddenly, with appalling clarity, that I’d just spoken of our conversations in past tense, as if they were ended forever. My throat closed with emotion when I thought of Rossi standing cheerfully at the office door, seeing me off. Had he cut himself somehow-on purpose, even?-in a moment of instability, and then hurried out of the room, locking the door behind him? I tried to imagine him raving in a park, perhaps cold and hungry, or boarding a bus to some randomly chosen destination. None of it fit. Rossi was a solid structure, as cool and sane as anyone I’d ever met.
“Look around very carefully.” The policeman released my shoulder. He was watching me hard, and I sensed the chairman and the others hovering in the doorway behind us. It dawned on me that until proven otherwise I would be among the suspects if Rossi had been murdered. But Bertrand and Elias would speak up for me, as I could for them. I stared at everything in the room, trying to see through it. It was an exercise in frustration; everything was real, normal, solid, and Rossi was utterly gone from it.
“No,” I said finally. “I don’t see anything different.”
“All right.” The policeman turned me toward the windows. “Look up, then.”
On the white plaster ceiling over the desk, high above us, a dark smear about five inches long drifted sideways, as if pointing toward something outside. “This appears to be blood, too. Don’t worry; it may or may not be Professor Rossi’s. That ceiling’s too high for a person to reach it easily, even with a step stool. We’ll have everything tested. Now think hard. Did Rossi mention a bird getting in that night? Or did you hear any sounds as you left, maybe like something getting in? Was the window open, do you remember?”