The 13th Fellow: A Mystery in Provence Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the academic chattering classes, and to her credit, at least from Havilah’s perspective, Améline Fitts wasn’t the gatekeeper variety academic; she was merely a striver. She didn’t care to block anyone else’s coming up; she only wanted others to move swiftly out of the path she had been making. Fitts was an academic pugilist. Her faculty colleagues at Princeton regaled others at various yearly academic meetings with tales of Améline’s antics.
    At a reception hosted by the Ethics and Global Democracy Forum at Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace, one notable professor of politics had carried on loudly within Havilah’s earshot. He claimed a good friend’s office in the creative writing program was directly across from Améline’s, and that on afternoons in the minutes before faculty meetings, you could hear the Dirty South ditty by rappers Mystical and Ludacris, “Move Bitch, Get out the way, Get out the way,” blaring. A dirty martini in his hand and rumpled suit on his person from the long international flight, he’d sneered that for the Tinkerbell-sized Fitts the tetchy meetings were like fight nights, and she believed she was “Iron Mike” Tyson, Evander “Real Deal” Holyfield, or better still, that proper Brit boxer, Lennox “The Lion” Lewis. For well-oiled Professor Rumpled Suit, Améline’s feistyness was a mark of her unrefined class breeding. Good book reviews and public intellectual bonafides be damned, it was clear to Havilah that he felt Améline Fitts belonged anywhere but in the halls of the peerless Princeton University.
    Améline though was also right about the contentious temperament of the Warren Institute faculty. Havilah wanted to imagine that they were no more persnickety than other faculty. But to refer to Havilah’s colleagues as “beastly” was certainly not the way Améline should have gone about trying to endear herself to one of those “beastly” faculty members. What had Kit been telling her? Havilah began to feel somewhat protective of her faculty colleagues. She began to take an inventory of the institute’s nine-member faculty, including herself and Kit.
    The bespectacled Manning Cate was a bird-faced Southern cultural historian who was beginning a book on the New South and the politics of white Southern liberals. As a full professor with tenure, he could never lose his job unless he committed some unspeakable crime. He was at the top of the professorial food chain where the ranks ran from beginning, untenured assistant professor to tenured associate professor after six to eight years to the final rank of full, tenured professor— which could take all of one’s career. Manning Cate had yet to receive the coveted endowed professorship, the pinnacle of academic achievement that conveyed excellence and standing to all in the know and was typically signaled on one’s business card, email signature block, and the university’s website. He had written a tepidly received but widely reviewed biography of Robert Penn Warren. Such was the scowl that seemed permanently affixed to Cate’s face that he looked as if the sourest lime was his breath mint of choice.
    When he learned Kit had been named head of the Warren Institute, he was beyond nonplussed. He also resented the fact that Kit was often called upon more frequently by newspapers, scholarly societies and the like whenever anything having to do with Warren was up for feting. Kit was more T. S. Eliot with his many reinventions of the self than Robert Penn Warren. But he did grow up in Elkton, a county or so away from Warren’s hometown of Guthrie, Kentucky.
    Cate, she knew, thought Kit was a snit. But then again Cate didn’t think much of anyone besides himself, Warren (whom he sought to imitate right down to his ill-fitting, worn-out-of-season, seersucker suits and deck shoes), and his wife Sela, who actually preferred Jim Beam— the bourbon— to Cate himself. At least that was what he’d said when Havilah