Chris Jordan - Measure of Darkness

Teddy looks up from the screen, grimaces. “Nope. None on Harvard Bridge. There may be MIT security cameras somewhere in the area, farther up Mass Ave. If so, they won’t be advertised. I’m looking.”

The swiveling chair turns in my direction. “Alice? Are you up for another visit across the river?”

Silly question.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology spans a mile or so of Cambridge frontage on the Charles River, facing Boston and the world. Love that dirty water, as they used to sing. And still do in certain Boston bars at closing time. Or so I’ve heard. I’m not a closing-time kind of girl, for the most part. Not surprisingly my ex-husband, the con man, he knew all the words to “Dirty Water” so he could croon along with the inebriated locals, even though his knowledge of the city, as I now understand, came mostly from old reruns of Cheers .

Enough about my ex. He can’t even really be my ex if he was still married to the last three wives he bamboozled, right? They didn’t call him Wedding Willy for nothing. Okay, so I’ll shut up about Mr. Adorable, whatever his real name is. May he rot in hell, or Toronto, or wherever they’ve got him under lock and key.

I’m over him. Totally.

It being a fair kind of late-spring day-blue skies, warm breezes wafting the perfume of steaming asphalt- I retrieve my bike from the garage, don the dorky helmet and pedal across the river on my new Trek Soho, the urban model with the cool carbon belt instead of a chain. Knowing full well that to impress a typical MIT undergraduate I’d have to be riding a unicycle on top of a skateboard while juggling spheres of plutonium. No, not common old plutonium, that’s so yesterday-make it antimatter. Anything less and a fully adult female becomes invisible to college kids, assuming she’s more or less fully clothed and hasn’t had humungous breast implants recently. Not that it matters-I’m not here for the undergrads, and a little invisibility might be useful, even if it doesn’t exactly keep the ego properly inflated.

The quarry, courtesy of a boss lady brain fart-excuse me, sudden inspiration-is the faculty lounge in the Department of Physics. Not as easy as it sounds, because it turns out the physics department is spread all over the campus, and the physics professors, all hundred and twenty of them, find all sorts of places to consort with each other. Like extremely intelligent cockroaches, as one undergraduate blogger put it. Charming thought. I envision a bunch of geeky dudes with unbrushed mandibles, chittering away as they consume, cups and all, Styrofoam containers of heavily sugared coffee. The same blogger (he calls himself “Gregor,” by the way, and yes, I got it) refers to the physics faculty as “8-Ballers” because the courses all begin with that number. 8.01 being the introductory course, 8.04 being Quantum Physics and so on.

8-Ballers. Sounds sort of cute. In contrast to the hollow-eyed summer-semester students who stumble around campus fueled by energy drinks, swelling their talented brains with ever more information. None of those spotted in the halls of physics actually have white tape wrapped around the stems of their glasses, cliched geek style, but pocket protectors are much in evidence-almost, it seems, as an act of defiance, or even a badge of honor. A fair description of the average complexion would have to include the word pasty, and that applies to the dark-skinned students as well as the light. Every last one of them looks like she or he could use a day at the beach. I never do find a faculty lounge-so much for boss lady’s big idea-but instead eventually stumble upon a cubicle corral of administrative assistants, one of whom instantly bursts into tears when I ask if any of them knew Professor Keener.

“Oh my God, it’s so, so sad,” she says, sniffing. “Are you a friend?”

“Yes,” I tell her, and then amend, “Well, not exactly, but I have good intentions.”

The weeper, a slightly heavy woman of forty or so, wears large thick-lensed glasses that magnify her watery blue eyes, distorting what would otherwise be an attractive, lightly freckled face. The fact that she’s weeping makes me like her instantly-she’s the first to exhibit an openly emotional reaction to the professor’s violent death. Without saying another word-her cubicle mates are eyeballing the stranger who started the waterworks-she gets up from her desk and indicates that I should follow out into a foyer area that serves as a waiting room. No windows, pale walls, the only decoration a series of neatly framed black-and-white high-speed photographs of a bullet piercing a textbook, finally emerging with a little puff of exploded paper. Is shooting books an MIT thing? Somehow that seems unlikely. Whatever, it’s not the mystery I’m here to solve.

The weeper plops heavily onto a couch, opens her purse and removes a tissue, using it to wipe her delicate, upturned nose. She sniffs, takes a deep breath and then in a surprisingly strong voice demands, “What do you mean, ‘good intentions’?”

The couch being the only seat in the little room, I perch on the opposite end, so as not to crowd her. “We’re trying to locate his little boy. He’s missing.”

“Joey,” she says, almost defiantly. “His name is Joey.”

“So you know about him?” I say, dumbfounded.

“Who are you, exactly?” she wants to know, suddenly guarded.

“My name is Alice Crane. I work for a private investigator.”

“So you’re like a detective?”

I shake my head ruefully. “More like a secretary running an errand. My boss wants to know if Professor Keener’s colleagues are aware that he has a child. Our impression was that he’d been keeping it a secret, for reasons yet to be determined. But the fact that you know about Joey, that pretty much changes everything. I can’t wait to tell boss lady she’s wrong.”

The guarded look has turned suspicious. “Maybe you better show me some ID.”

I open my wallet, hand her my driver’s license.

“This could be fake.”

“Could be, but it’s not. We have reason to believe Joey is missing. Would you know anything about that?”

“You think I’d kidnap a little boy?”

“No, of course not. By the way, you know my name is Alice,” I say. “What’s yours?”

She thinks about not telling me, decides against it. “Clare,” she says, as if daring me to contradict her.

“You seem to be angry, Clare. I’m sorry if I made you feel that way. I’m just trying to help my boss find a missing child.”

“Not angry,” she says, dropping her voice to barely a whisper. “Afraid.”

“Afraid of me?” I say, incredulous.

“Maybe. If you’re one of them.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “One of who? ”

“One of Professor Keener’s enemies.”

Clare crosses her plump little arms, looking brave and afraid and defiant, all at once. And then she tells me, bit by bit, the most amazing tale.

“A few months after founding QuantaGate, Joseph met a beautiful Chinese woman at a party hosted by Jonny Bing, on his big yacht. He didn’t want to go- Joseph wasn’t exactly a party animal-but Bing insisted he make an appearance, it was important to the company. Anyhow, she was there at the party. Ming-Mei. I don’t know if that’s a stage name or what, but she claimed to be a singer and actress in Hong Kong. Didn’t speak English, so Jonny Bing acted as translator. Very attractive, obviously. Ming-Mei, I mean. After a few days she returned to Hong Kong, and then a week or so later, with the help of an English-speaking friend, she contacted Joseph by email. Result, she returns to Boston- I happened to know that Joseph paid for her ticket-and he leased her an apartment in Chinatown. He thought she’d be more comfortable around Cantonese speakers, although he insisted that she take English lessons, with an eye toward applying for citizenship. I know this because Joseph asked me to find her a tutor.”