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

caught him in a moment of weakness at a faculty party after he’d consumed too many Jack Daniel’s Lynchburg Lemonades.
    Besides Havilah, Tayden Smith was the only other black faculty member of the institute. A sociologist by training, the Jamaican-descended Smith was an incurable braggart and an inveterate womanizer. Of students. Though in this latter peccadillo, he had the decency to draw some boundaries. He only preyed on consenting graduating seniors and graduate students. Havilah always wondered what the predictably younger women saw in Smith. His small hands did not inspire, to her mind, sexual confidence. Not to mention he was balding in a way that resembled a patchwork quilt.
    But Smith had rattled the profession and the Bush White House five years earlier with a 600-page book on poverty and responsibility. In it he parsed crime rates, educational attainment, and joblessness between and among blacks— African-Americans, West Indians, and Africans— to the delight of conservatives.
    Because of one particularly nasty encounter on the lecture circuit that had been televised live, he had recently begun to hedge his anti-African-American rhetoric. He was generally a canny judge of his audience. He had a pitch-perfect West Indian lilt that he often amplified to telegraph his non-African-Americanness. But at one conference, he took to the podium and deployed his inflected English at the very moment he launched into a discussion about increasing African-American joblessness and poverty as cultural versus structural. The conference, though, was on immigration and poverty, and the conservatives present were dyed-in-the-wool xenophobes. During the Q & A, they peppered Smith with derisive questions about black immigrants taking low-level jobs from native-born blacks. At the first break, Smith hightailed it out of the forum, huffing and puffing from seeming annoyance and overexertion— his breakneck flight from the room required traversing the lengthy auditorium and hallway to the pressroom. Vowing to the CSPAN interviewer live on camera, between gasps for air, that he would never again attend any of the organization’s events; his name never appeared on the organization’s invited guests roster, and he cancelled his lifetime membership.
    Tristan Kadel, the only other female member of the institute, who was white, was a pioneer in the field of international human rights. Her non-confrontational style translated into her flip-flopping on just about every issue that she had initially consented to support. She was also supremely whiny and always managed to feel deeply aggrieved and aggressed whenever she was confronted about her shortcomings, which then usually resulted in her running to the nearest dean’s office for a good long session of “woe is me.” In thinking about Tristan and the possibility of an alliance, Havilah usually concluded the outlandish ponderance with the phrase, “I just can’t.”
    No wonder Kit had come to depend on her . Havilah screwed her face up. Cate and Smith rarely agreed on anything except to keep the number of women and minorities to exactly two of each. Cate, because he believed that diversity initiatives and affirmative action had lowered the quality of the faculty, and Smith, because he wanted to be the O.M.N.I.C., the Only Male Negro in Charge.
    The other four members were assistant professors. And by institute decree, those professors had no formal voting rights in tenure and promotion decisions, or on any other institute business deemed confidential, or otherwise of importance, until they became full professors. They were reduced to oily sidling up to the most cantankerous of the full professors— Smith and Cate— who they assumed carried the biggest sticks in the Warren Institute. Jean-Louis Pineau, a mediocre scholar and wisp of a man whose field of research was anthropology with a focus on contemporary Africa, was one of those assistant professors. While his fellow assistant