One Coffee With Read Online Free PDF Page A

major museums all over the world, Sandy overlooked his peevish insult.
    Suddenly the door of the inner office opened, and a thin blond man emerged. “Phone calls,” he announced blandly, and Sandy wondered how much he had heard of her outburst. Jake Saxer was by no means one of her favorites.
    Everything about him was just a little too crisp and hard-edged. Even his straw-colored beard was precisely clipped to a Vandyke point. Andrea Ross called him a Plexiglas construction straight out of minimal art, and he did have the brittle two-dimensional intensity of a man who expects to make it before forty. At twenty-seven Saxer already had his Ph.D. and an assistant professorship. Upon his arrival at Vanderlyn College two years ago, he’d analyzed his opportunities like a hard-nosed curator assessing the authenticity of a dubious Etruscan warrior and then deliberately ingratiated himself with Professor Quinn. Quinn had just begun another definitive book on postwar trends in modern art, and Saxer was knowledgeable about sources, references and illustrations. He had made himself so indispensable that Quinn had used his authority as deputy chairman to cut Saxer’s teaching load to one survey course this semester—ostensibly so that Saxer could sort and catalog the department’s chaotic slide library but in reality to give him more free time for Quinn’s research chores.
    The office continued to fill up as people drifted in from classes to check their mail or just shoot the breeze. Piers Leyden and Andrea Ross were followed by Vance, who came in sipping his hot chocolate. Graduate students and lecturers, holding coffee and cigarettes, elbowed for space at the corner table, gossiping about the morning fiasco in hoots of laughter, which moderated slightly when Riley Quinn returned from his ten-o’clock lecture, “Conceptual Divergence in Modern Art.”
    All signs of the deputy chairman’s earlier loss of control had vanished. Once again he was a supercilious, dapper executive with a tanned face, crisp gray hair and shrewd brown eyes. Quinn always seemed to have just emerged from an expensive barbershop, his nails freshly manicured and trailing a faint scent of after-shave lotion; and in a department not noted for sartorial elegance his perfectly pressed fawn-colored suit, dark brown shirt and paisley tie set him apart. Not a speck of city dust dulled the gleaming surface of his shoes, and his pigskin slide case was custom-made and unbattered.
    Harley Harris rose from a chair beside the bookcase. “Professor Quinn—”
    “Not now,” Quinn said brusquely. “Sandy, get me Dean Ellis.” He reached around Harris and picked up one of the two Styrofoam cups on the bookcase.
    “Now just a minute!” Harris squeaked. “I have a right—”
    Quinn ignored him and, seeing Sandy signal that the dean was on the line, went into his office and closed the door in Harley Harris’s face. Harris turned angrily and almost collided with Professor Simpson, who was balancing his coffee on two thick reference tomes.
    “Excuse me,” murmured the old man and, nudging the boy aside, returned the books to the shelves below. Beyond Simpson’s bent back Harris spotted Oscar Nauman just making his way through the crowded office, and his truculence wavered.
    White-haired, six-foot-two and possessed of deep blue eyes that seemed to look past externals to the heart of any matter, the chairman towered over his colleagues mentally as well as physically. He tended to forget appointments and responsibilities, and left most departmental routine to Quinn and Sandy. When aroused in intellectual debate, his speech often became tangled and elliptical because his mind outran his tongue; but in his writings and especially in his paintings his brilliance shone forth unhindered. The only criticism ever leveled at Oscar Nauman’s work was that it was too starkly cerebral.
    Now he took the last cup from the tray on the bookcase, discarded the snap-on lid,