Lawrence Block - Tanner On Ice

It was a nice way to make a living. Sometimes I got to recycle my efforts – it was safe and ethically sound, say, to adapt for NYU a paper I’d done for Columbia – but most of what I did was one-time-only, so I was forever learning and writing about something new. The research was a pleasure and the writing came easy, so it was the ideal situation for me.

But now it was 1997, and I felt like the messenger services must have felt after everybody in New York got a fax machine. Because my line of work was outmoded.

It wasn’t that students had suddenly turned honest, and it wasn’t that educators had finally figured out how to keep students from presenting others’ work as their own. But what had once been a cottage industry for a handful of enterprising freelancers had become Big Business. A couple of outfits operated nationally, purporting to offer “term paper assistance,” and in fact offering term papers, impure and simple, on an entire catalog of subjects. They would even give it to you on disk, so you could personalize it with a few awkward sentences of your own, reformat it in the style preferred by your particular institution of learning, and print it out and turn it in.

Since they could sell the same paper over and over, dozens upon dozens of times, they could offer their wares at attractively reasonable prices. It was, in fact, a wonder that any college student went to the trouble of doing his own work. It wasn’t cost-effective, if you stopped to think about it. With what you had to pay to go to a decent college, why not pay a few dollars more to be sure of a good grade? And look at the time you’d save, and think what you could do with it.

I suppose I could have knocked out term papers for the catalog outfits. They needed new work all the time. But my gorge rose at the very thought. It was like putting a man who did custom coachwork on the assembly line at the Ford plant. Thanks, but I don’t think so.

But you couldn’t ring an 800-number and order up a master’s or doctoral thesis, and that was the sort of work I preferred, anyway. With a thesis you could dig in and buckle down and really produce something. I might fabricate some of the footnotes – one doesn’t want to approach scholarship with too much in the way of reverence – but I did good work all the same. And, without any real effort on my part, I found myself back in business. I got a phone call one afternoon from a young man named David Van Sumner. The name rang a bell, and I soon found out why.

“My father suggested I give you a ring,” he said. “Bruce Van Sumner? You did some work for him in 1968 or 9. That was a while ago, I wouldn’t expect you to remember, but-”

It wasn’t that long ago, not to me. “Bruce Van Sumner,” I said, “‘Blake’s Lamb and Tiger and Their Influence on Charles Dickens.’”

“You remember.”

“It would be hard to forget,” I said, “because he chose the topic, of course, and I’ve never been convinced that Blake’s lamb and tiger had any influence on Dickens. But I guess I was persuasive enough. How’s your father doing?”

“He’s at Iowa State. He’s tenured, and first in line to head the department when the top man retires.”

“That’s great.”

“And I’m following in his footsteps. I’ve done all my course work for my doctorate at Columbia. And I’ve done plenty of research for my thesis, but I can’t get the thing written.”

“Like father,” I said.

“You said it. And my dad told me how you’d helped him out, and said he didn’t know if you were even alive, let alone still, uh, in the business. But he said you might know somebody, and-”

Young Van Sumner’s thesis topic was ethnocentrism in the novels of Tobias Smollett. That meant I was going to have to read Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker again, and thank God for Evelyn Wood. As he’d said, he’d done a good deal of reading and research himself, and taken abundant notes. That would make my job easier, and would be a big help to him when he had to defend his thesis at his orals. I met him at an Ethiopian restaurant on 125th Street – all sorts of ethnic groups, scarcely discernible in New York twenty-five years ago, have moved in and opened restaurants – and I looked over his notes and quoted him a price and a delivery date. He shook my hand and wrote out a check for half my fee.

“You’re younger than I expected,” he offered. “My dad looks good for his age, but you’re amazing. What’s your secret?”

“Good genes and plenty of sleep.”

So I was back in business. I knocked off his thesis, putting in a few hours a day as a break from my own studies, and I beat the deadline I’d set myself by a full week. I’d written the thing on Minna’s computer, and I printed it out and admired the typeface I’d selected. It looked good, and the content was good, too. I could be proud of it, I told myself, and so could David Van Sumner.

I was in a mood to celebrate. If Minna had been around I’d have taken her out somewhere, but she’d gone out earlier with some friends her own age. (I still found myself thinking that way, although they were my age as well.)

So I went out for a walk, and a couple of blocks down Broadway I felt myself drawn to a tavern called the Pit Stop. There was nothing special about the place, but it was halfway between my apartment and the 103rd Street subway stop, and so I’d gotten in the habit of stopping in once or twice a week for a beer.

I hadn’t been in since the Great Defrosting, but I went in now, and the place looked exactly the same. A little dimmer and dingier, maybe, but otherwise unchanged. Amazingly enough, the same bartender was behind the stick. His name was Charlie, and from the looks of things he was still drinking the same drink. It consisted of Drambuie, vodka, and prune juice, and he’d invented it for a contest sponsored by the cordial’s U.S. importer. He called it a Rusty Can Opener, and never could understand why it hadn’t won, and how come nobody in the place ever ordered one.

“Charlie,” I said.

He looked at me. “Tanner,” he said, and drew me a beer without asking. “You been out of town or something? Seems to me I ain’t seen you in a while.”

“I was away.”

“Yeah, I figured,” he said, and took a swig of his Rusty Can Opener. “Must be a few weeks since I seen you, maybe as much as a month.”

“A long time,” I agreed.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “I’ll tell you, you ain’t missed a thing.”

A couple of nights later Minna and I were having dinner. I’d worked up a new version of beef stroganoff using Portobello mushrooms. I generally cook kasha as an accompaniment, and at Minna’s suggestion I’d combined the buckwheat groats with an equal amount of quinoa, an Andean grain only recently introduced to the U.S. market.

The results were a success. “You’re right,” I told her. “They complement one another. And the cooking times are the same, which simplifies things. I’ve combined kasha and bulgur, and that works, but I think I like this even better.”

The phone rang. She went to answer it – it was generally for her these days – and came back a minute later wearing a frown.

“It was a wrong number,” she said.

“I hate when that happens.”

“It was the third time today, Evan. And it was the same wrong number each time, and I even think it was the same person calling.”

“We used to do that when I was a kid,” I remembered. “Call the same person five times running. ‘Is Joe there?’ Then your friend calls. ‘Hi, this is Joe. Were there any calls for me?’”

“How amusing.”

“Not if you’re more than ten years old,” I said. “Did it sound like a kid?”

“It sounded like an adult,” she said. “Except…”