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briefly. But that was before my marriage.
    Can you tell us when you talked to him last?
    As much as saying they did not believe her.
    We have a busy day, gentlemen, Lemaster said, and her appreciation of him quickened, and felt like love.
    They sorryed and thanked their way out the door.

CHAPTER 3
    KEPLER
    (I)
    “C ITY’S A POWDER KEG ,” said Boris Gibbs, with satisfaction. “Ready to blow any minute.”
    Julia, who had noticed no protesters or riot police on her way in to the divinity school this morning, nodded politely, and said nothing. By the city, he meant Elm Harbor, where the university was located, and where she and Boris were having, for the moment, lunch; not the Landing, nearly half an hour distant. The Landing, of course, where they both lived, was nearly all white; and the city…wasn’t.
    “I’ve been listening to that radio guy, Kwame whatsisname. All right, he’s a little bit over the top, but he has a ton of listeners, Julia. A ton of listeners. They hang on his every word, and, believe me, he’s riling them up.” He seemed to hope something would happen. A lot of white liberals were like that these days, waiting desperately for African America to reawaken and lead the Left out of the wilderness. But Boris Gibbs was no liberal. He owned no politics anyone could discern, and few emotions apart from a stormy self-satisfaction. He lived to slice up events, or ideas, or egos. Pressed, he would concede the sinfulness of the desire to flay others. It was, he often said, the thorn in his flesh. He seemed delighted to have one.
    “I believe you, Boris.”
    “That black professor the campus cops beat up a couple of years ago. Remember? The unarmed kid who got shot in the car chase. Plus all the ordinary bullshit of everyday life. This business with Kellen is the last straw, you mark my words. The racism your people have to face these days is depressing.”
    Your people.
She liked that one, almost as much as calling murder
this business with Kellen.
She said, evenly, “I read the papers, Boris. It was armed robbery, not a hate crime.”
    Boris shook his head at her naïveté and took a huge and ugly bite of his huge and ugly burger. He was, by his own reckoning, a huge and ugly man, with a bloated pink face and twisted, unhappy features that bespoke a life of misery, but he was one of the happiest people she knew: he always said what was on his mind, and so avoided the stress of holding back. They were deputy deans together at Kepler Quadrangle, the popular name for the div school, even though Boris, something of a campus historian, would rush to tell you that Kepler was the building, not the school. When not busily carping, Boris taught a bit and mainly managed the div school’s budget, at which task he was a wiz, but the dean wisely kept him out of public view.
    “At least that’s what the police say,” he smirked.
    “Meaning what?”
    “Meaning, you’re a grown-up, Julia. You get to decide for yourself what to believe.”
    Julia swallowed the sharp retort that sprang to her throat. It was Tuesday, and she was tired of speculation about Kellen Zant. But the campus could speak of little else. Not many Ivies see a professor shot dead, and never one as popular as Kellen. The college paper had managed to mention six times in two days that the president had found the body of what the articles kept calling his “occasional adversary.” Not even Kepler was immune. Little Iris Feynman, the third deputy dean in their underpaid administrative triumvirate—she managed “external affairs,” meaning relationships with the university, the few alumni who had money to give, and any reporter who might accidentally wander in while looking for, say, the business school—had been in Julia’s office earlier today to report a rumor that a disgruntled graduate student had done it. But the smart money—according to old Clay Maxwell, the New Testament specialist, whom Julia had encountered when she went to the