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  “The quake? No problem. I just crawled under my desk and rode it out with the help of the pint in the bottom drawer. Congratulations on the promotion, by the way.”

  Betty’s look became inscrutable. “It depends on how you look at it.”

  “Administration not your bag?”

  She sighed. “I wouldn’t know; I’ve yet to administer anything more vital than the roll call.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  She made a face. “Basically, I’m the attendance cop. I spend all day on the phone, asking parents why their kid didn’t show up at school today. It’s a real uplifting task—half the parents sound like they’ve forgotten they have a kid.”

  “So why take the job?”

  Her lips twisted. “They promised the attendance gig would be temporary, that after a semester I could move up to redesigning the curriculum. Ask me how long ago the promise was made.”

  “How long?”

  “Three years. But it’s either this or get out of education completely, and I don’t have any place to go. Everyone in San Francisco is so overqualified, a Masters in Education doesn’t open doors to anything but the faculty rest rooms.”

  “Maybe you should go back to school.”

  Betty gestured to the building behind her. “Go back? I never left. I’ve been in one school or another, in one capacity or another, for over forty years. Which I tend to think is the problem.”

  As Betty contemplated the scene of her lifelong struggle, I snagged an errant pass with one hand and flipped the ball to a boy who seemed overly impressed by the maneuver. “Hey,” he called out. “Are you someone?”

  When I shook my head he seemed nearly as disappointed as I was.

  In the interval, Betty had shrugged off her mood and took my arm. “So what brings you out here? We don’t have a career day scheduled till next month.”

  I smiled. “Investigation isn’t something you get into on the way up, it’s what you grab on to on the way down.”

  She gave me a comforting squeeze. “God. Between the two of us we could start an asylum for the terminally disappointed. What’s gnawing at you, anyway?”

  “A book.”

  She made a face. “Don’t tell me I’m going to be chapter nine in your memoirs.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry. This one’s a novel.”

  Betty blossomed. “That’s wonderful. So how far are you? Do you need some editing? Maybe we could—”

  “Hold it,” I interrupted. “It’s not by me.”

  “Oh. That’s too bad. You should write a book someday, you know.”

  “Maybe I will.” In the ensuing silence, I warred again with wonder. This time I envisioned myself as a domestic le Carré.

  “I still don’t get it,” Betty said after a moment. “Did someone steal a rare book, or what?” She turned saucy. “And how many chapters will be in those memoirs, anyway?”

  “No comment; I just need information.”

  “What kind of information?” She sobered suddenly. “Does it have to do with the drive-by last week?”

  “Drive-by?”

  “The shooting. One of our kids got killed in a gang thing. It’s so sad; she was just an innocent bystander. For some reason, gangs don’t seem to shoot very straight anymore.”

  “That’s because their weapons aren’t made to shoot straight, they’re just made to shoot often. So you’ve got gang problems out here too.”

  She nodded. “I’ve collected enough knives to open a cutlery shop, and the guns …” Betty shuddered. “Isn’t it glorious how the government’s policy toward those weapons seems to be based exclusively on the balance of payments problem? How did you get mixed up in it, anyway?”

  “I’m not.”

  She looked puzzled. “Then why are we talking about it?”

  “Chitchat,” I said as I remembered some nights of our old days. “How come when we were going together it seemed so hard to think of something to talk about?”

  Betty was game enough to laugh, and I did, too, as we recalled the labors of dating. “Because when you like someone, it’s never chitchat,” Betty concluded.

  I motioned toward my car. “Got time for a cup of coffee? Or dinner, if you can.”

  Betty glanced at her watch. “Why not? I have to be back by seven, though. Big PTA meeting. I’m the A. Lucky for me, most of the time the P and T don’t show.”

  I led the way to my car and opened the door for Betty, then got in the driver’s side and aimed it at Clement Street. “I couldn’t remember if you married that guy or not,” I said as I took a left on Twenty-seventh. “Sam, or whatever his name was.”

  “I did. Unfortunately. His name was Stan.”

  “What happened?”

  “That smile I thought was so dazzling was really a sign that he was heavily into coke. He almost died at a party one night: cardiac arrest. Luckily I knew CPR. When he got out of intensive care, I told him we were history. That was about a year after I told him I’d cherish him in sickness or in health. So much for a solemn vow.” Her laugh was raw and self-critical.

  “I don’t think that applies to sicknesses that are self-inflicted and curable by an act of will.”

  She patted my arm. “Let’s pretend that’s true.”

  Shades of our dating days, I didn’t know what to say at that point, so I just went left on Clement and waited for the light to change at Park Presidio, risking an occasional glance out of the corner of my eye at Betty’s thoughtful stare, trying to guess, as I always did when I was with a woman, what the hell she was thinking about.

  “It’s just that it’s so damned hard to tell the good ones from the bad ones anymore,” Betty said as we started moving again, as though she’d heard my question. “It’s so hard that after a while you start believing there aren’t any good ones left. Which means that if you’ve never been married, but want to be, you find yourself starting to settle for something you shouldn’t have to settle for.” She brightened. “But only once. At least for me. I kind of like my life these days, all things considered.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve got a lot of friends, both at school and elsewhere, including a couple of men who value me for more than my bust size. I sing in a madrigal group, hike Muir Woods with the Sierra Club, mother the hell out of a couple of cats, and cultivate a plot of ground about the size of this car. It’s all sort of vicarious and displaced, I suppose, but people are living far worse lives than mine out there, let me tell you. I used to live one of them myself.”

  I pulled to a stop in front of a Russian bakery and we went inside. After we placed our orders, Betty looked at me over the salt and pepper. “How about you, Marsh? What have you been doing for the past six years? You’ve been shot more than once, I see from the papers.” Her eyes narrowed and she offered a sly smile. “I trust it didn’t damage any vital organs.”

  I matched her grin. “I’m okay, I guess, organs included. I’m not so sure about their vitality.”

  “How’s Peggy?”

  “Fine.”

  Betty cocked her head. “You don’t make her sound so fine.”

  “She’s not working for me anymore.”

  “Really? I thought you and Peggy were forever. Actually, I thought Peggy was the reason you and I never went much beyond third base. So what happened?”

  “I got involved in a personal problem she had, and basically I screwed it up.”

  “I think I read about that—a phone freak, wasn’t it? So what happened?”

  I shrugged. “Instead of blaming the creep who was doing the damage I sort of blamed Peggy for the whole mess, subconsciously at least, which she didn’t appreciate, understandably. We caught the guy, mostly thanks to Peggy, so the immediate problem got taken care of, but she decided it would be better if she didn’t work for me for a while. And I decided that based on the way I handled her problem, I wasn’t the man I thought I was.”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know how to put
it, exactly; being able to be professional no matter how difficult the situation is what it amounts to, I guess. No matter how unbecoming my instincts.”

  “No one’s perfect, Marsh,” Betty said softly. “Not even Mrs. Tanner’s baby boy.”

  “That doesn’t make it easier.”

  “Easier to what?”

  “Keep doing what I do. When I know it’s trivial. When I know other people do it better.”

  Betty’s look became maternal. “Sounds like mid-life crisis number twenty-four.”

  I shrugged. “That’s what age is all about, I’m finding out—eating away the rationales that got me through the first forty years. So I’m trying to find some new ones.”

  “What have you come up with?”

  I smiled. “Settling for less seems to be what it comes down to.”

  Betty stuck out her tongue. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You know what I mean. For some reason it helps to remember that I’m one of the species that brought us the holocaust, mud wrestling, and the last presidential campaign—a species only slightly more evolved than the neighbor’s dog. From that perspective, all you have to do to keep going is convince yourself that you do less harm than good in the world.”

  Betty’s expression clouded. “You find that easy to do, do you?”

  I met her eyes. “Not always.”

  “Me, either,” she muttered.

  Though I hadn’t sought it, Betty had joined my mood. The silence between us was overwrought, but it contained a bond that led Betty to ruminate on her life as well.

  “I really do love teaching, you know? Even after all these years. I’ll get back to it, eventually, I hope. But it’s scary what we’ve done to our school system, Marsh. It used to be our pride and joy, but now the urban public school is essentially an extension of the ghetto—the voters don’t want to pay for it, the rich don’t send their kids there, the poor blame it for not solving their problems, and the teachers get burned out trying to make it work. So we end up with what we’ve got—a system that thinks it’s done its job if its graduates can read a bus schedule.”

  “That’s a pretty dismal picture.”

  “I haven’t even gotten to the worst part.”

  “Which is?”

  “That inner-city public school graduates don’t have a chance at the most prestigious colleges.”

  “Why?”

  “Because regardless of the propaganda they put out, those schools don’t feel a responsibility to disadvantaged kids in ways more meaningful than tokenism. So no matter how hard they try, and no matter how well they overcome obstacles the slick colleges don’t even try to fathom, for the majority of poor kids the ticket to the good life stays well out of reach.” Betty raised a brow. “You haven’t become a father since I saw you last, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Too bad. If you had, you could put your offspring in a school like Jefferson and watch her begin to rot. I’m sure you’d find it fascinating, from a clinical point of view.” Betty finished her coffee in a savage gulp. “So why are we here? You said something about a book.”

  Though I had a morbid fascination for the previous subject, I was thankful for the shift of theme. “What I need is for you to tell me about the private schools here in the city.”

  Betty cocked her head, as though educational institutions were the last things she expected me to ask her about. “Elementary schools? Middle schools? High schools? What?”

  “High schools.”

  “That narrows the field. Montessori? Waldorf? Parochial?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Something more ritzy.”

  “As far as I know there are only two exceedingly exclusive private high schools in San Francisco.”

  “What are they?”

  “San Francisco Arts and Sebastian.”

  “Tell me about Sebastian.”

  She shrugged. “Like I said—expensive, exclusive, originally Episcopal, now nondenominational. Endowed to the hilt by its more illustrious graduates, which include half the moguls in town if you don’t count immigrants from the Pacific Rim. And good, unless you feel rich kids ought to be taught something more altruistic than the Pythagorean Theorem. Why? You know someone who’s angling for a scholarship?”

  I shook my head. “You know anyone who works there?”

  Something in my look made Betty careful with her answer. “Maybe. Why?”

  “I’m trying to get a line on something I think happened there about nine years ago.”

  “What was it?”

  I hesitated. “Does any scandal come to mind when you think of Sebastian?”

  She considered it. “Nope. Should it?”

  I hesitated. “This is confidential, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  I summarized the plot of Hammurabi, neglecting to mention that so far it was only that and not an extract from the police files. “You ever hear of anything remotely like that happening at Sebastian? Or any other school, for that matter?”

  Betty shook her head. “But I’m not that close to the place. And teachers molesting students isn’t unique, unfortunately, though in most schools no one does much about it, if it didn’t amount to rape and the teacher resigns without a fuss. But a scandal like that would have stirred things up at Sebastian, that’s for sure—they guard their reputation like Fort Knox. And they would have moved heaven and earth to keep it quiet.”

  “Could they have gotten the job done? Covering it up, I mean?”

  “Let’s put it this way—if any institution in the city could, Sebastian could. They’ve got graduates in half the board rooms in town, and in most of the city departments, too; the DA’s office included.”

  “I need to talk to someone who was around there back then. Preferably a teacher.”

  Betty thought a minute. “I used to know a woman, she was the soccer coach, if you can believe it. Kind of intense, even discounting the jockette routine, but a good person. She’s not there anymore, though; I think she’s a paralegal.”

  A passage from the book came back to me. “Was she a big fan of Little Women?”

  Betty laughed. “This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had in my life.”

  I was not immune to lust, Heaven knows, nor oblivious to the emergent charms of the young women who decorated my classes at St. Stephen’s. But I swear to all that I was formerly able to regard as holy that I did not lust for Amanda Keefer. If I felt anything for her it was pity, an urge not commonly regarded as blameworthy, but one that has in my case proved more culpable than lechery.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 145

  9

  After borscht, piroshki, and a dessert of reminiscenses, Betty Fontaine gave me directions to the Sebastian School. After dropping her back at Jefferson, I followed the route she described, down California to Divisadero, over the hump of Pacific Heights, eventually into the notch of Cow Hollow, in the shadow of the Presidio Army Base.

  Long a San Francisco treasure, the base is slotted to fall victim to the leavings of Reaganomics—in order to reduce its budget without sacrificing its store of hardware, the Department of Defense wants to close it down. The consensus is that transfer to civilian control will occur some time in the next decade unless the budget boys decide it will cost more to close it than to keep it open. The base sits on such prime property that if the transfer really happens, it will be warred over by everyone from tree huggers to condo kings to disarmament Utopians for the rest of my lifetime. The battle will no doubt feature the oxymoronic methodology so prominent in Vietnam—they will destroy the property in order to save it.

  The Sebastian School was established in 1908, or so the plaque on the gatepost informed me as I glanced at it while circling the block the school occupied as forbiddingly as a Scottish fortress. From outward appearances, school looked permanently out—no students or teachers were in evidence, no bikes or balls had been left behind at recess, no litter or graffiti besmirched the walls or corners. Then I remembered
this was a private school, which meant among other things that it could afford to keep itself clean.

  I found a parking place on Greenwich, then reconnoitered on foot. As I strolled toward the school, the evening mists began to gather, adding weight to the pulse of aggressive seclusion that emanated from the houses that surrounded me—the healthy pulse of aristocracy—that seemed to want to shove me out of the neighborhood before I got anyone into trouble. I shrugged my jacket higher on my neck and, like Carroway and Gatsby, pressed on against the current.

  I was kept from getting closer than twenty yards to the building by a row of wrought iron spears that were sufficiently sharp to disembowel anyone who tried to scale them. Beyond the stiff black fence the grassy carpet and well-tended grounds were like no school yard I had ever seen, indicating the curriculum at Sebastian included everything but high jinks. In furtherance of that impression, the granite blocks that formed the walls seemed mates with those that defined the City Hall and the Hall of Justice and other structures about town that most commonly trafficked in misery.

  I spent several minutes alternately looking out for someone who might regard my presence as suspicious and pressing my face through the pickets in the fence, wondering whether the excellence of the education that I readily assumed was conferred within was important enough to offset the sense of superiority and separation that I assumed would be a by-product of that environment. If the past decade has proved anything, it’s that money and morality are not congruent, and the blame for that surely lies in part with schools like Sebastian. The last thing I wondered, as the dusk of evening became the sepulcher of night, was whether anyone who labored within that formidably fenced enclosure was inclined to do anything about it.

  I abandoned my sociological speculations and started back toward my car when I heard a clank and a squeak from somewhere behind me. I stopped next to a nearby ginkgo, backed against its trunk for camouflage, and waited to see what the odd sounds signified.