Steve’s Shorts: Russians, Part One of Five…
[This story originates from a relatively new what-if that came to me when the events mentioned in the story surrounding the Russian agents in my home town played out—yes, that really happened! I finally got around to telling a similar story based on my what-if. It has a setting more in tune with many college students starting their classes this month. Enjoy.]
Russians
Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore
Part One of Five
Professor Boris Vashchenko left his desk chair and walked over to his office window, waiting to see Janet Connors as she left the building and entered the quad. Beautiful and smart. She’ll be successful in whatever career she chooses. His student reminded him of Natasha, a musician he had dated in Moscow for a time. I wonder what’s become of her. He was surprised he still cared.
Boris jerked when the shot rang out. Connors stumbled and fell. He rushed out of the office and downstairs, taking the steps two at a time.
On the way down, he thought about America’s gun culture. Shootings had occurred at other universities. Is Janet Connors a fanatic’s victim?
His afternoon office hours had come too soon. He heard the knock, looked at his watch, and sighed. He opened his office door.
“Hello, Ms. Connors. Please come in and take a seat.”
Connors was the case of one calculus student where he could say his role as professor was largely superfluous but still made him feel that his efforts as a teacher of the next generation weren’t wasted. Why is it the best students come to my office hours more than those who really need help? Talking to other professors, he had concluded that was a common phenomenon…and complaint.
“The bad ones don’t give a rat’s ass,” his friend and colleague Gerry Grimes had told him. “You’ll get used to it.”
“What can I do for you today?” he said to his student.
“I’m having problems with Stokes’ theorem,” she said.
Boris smiled, recalling his problems with that same theorem so long ago. He had finally developed a gut feel for it in an applied physics course on fluid flow, and now appreciated its beauty through its generalizations to manifold theory.
“It’s a tough one,” he said. “You’re familiar with the fundamental theorem of calculus: the integral of the derivative of a function over an interval is the difference in the values of the function at the endpoints of the interval?” She nodded. “Think of the endpoints as the boundary of the interval. Stokes’ theorem just generalizes that to where we have a vector field and its curl, the 3D-cousin 3D of the derivative.”
She thought a few moments. He waited. “Hmm. That’s not so mysterious anymore. The proof seems complicated, though.”
“Powerful theorems often have complex proofs.”
“Advanced algebra seems easier. I get group theory. Vector calculus seems geometrical but non-intuitive. Does anyone study it anymore?”
He nodded. “It’s often used in applications, and academics use its generalizations in differential geometry. There’s a famous book about gravity that’s really a differential geometry textbook. I guess that’s becoming more applied too, with space travel and detecting gravitational waves.”
“You mean Einstein’s General Theory?” He nodded again. “Wow! That’s neat.”
“I think so too.”
She asked a few more questions and then left, leading to the present situation where he ran out the door into the quad.
***
Some students he had seen sitting on a bench in the quad had also heard the shot and seen Connors fall. They rushed toward her and arrived before Boris. The girl kneeling beside Connors had turned her over.
“Call 9-1-1,” Boris told the boy. “Let me examine her,” he said, kneeling on the other side of the girl. The bullet had entered the back side of the victim’s forearm and continued on through, leaving a clean but bloody and ragged hole. He took out his handkerchief. “Press here,” he told the girl.
He stood and looked back at his office building. Against the glare of the sun, he could see nothing. He took out his own cellphone and dialed campus police. “We have a shooter in Sullivan Quad. We’ve called 9-1-1, but you’ll probably arrive sooner. The victim will need an ambulance. Can you close down this area? The shooter might be targeting us at this moment.”
The campus cops were trained for these emergencies now. The dispatcher on the other end of the line promised to do her best.
“Let’s carry her behind those trees,” Boris told the boy.
Boris was surprised by how light Connors was. She looked like a porcelain angel as they laid her down on a grassy slope. Even her lips were pale.
At least she’ll be shielded from a gunman on the roof.
The police shut down the entire campus. Agents from the FBI made an appearance after the ambulance left. Local cops and the local CSU were already on the scene, so the FBI left most of the crime scene work to them.
Boris and the two kids spent the rest of the afternoon answering questions. He left when the local cops fanned out to interview other students and faculty. The FBI left just before him, satisfied that this wasn’t a federal problem.
***
“Guess I caused a lot of excitement,” Janet Connors said, smiling at her visitor.
“That’s one way of describing it, I suppose,” said Boris. “How do you feel?”
“Still a bit sleepy. Guess they gave me something?”
He eyed the various IVs. “Who knows? You were in a bit of shock, I think. Did you talk to the police?”
“Not yet. The doctors wouldn’t let them interrogate me.”
“Good for them. Hopefully not an interrogation and just information gathering. The students who helped out, Sara and Michael, and I were grilled. I think the authorities are still talking to students, especially in the dorm directly across the quad from my office building, and to other faculty from the other offices, to determine if they saw anything. Many heard the shot.”
“Whoever it was had a lousy aim,” she said. “If I were the shooter, my target would be dead.” He raised his eyebrows. “Just saying. I know a little about guns. My mother made me take courses and often took me to the range.”
“The cops will ask you many questions, like, do you have any enemies, Ms. Connors?”
“Call me Jan. Maybe the guy I beat out for valedictorian?” She laughed. “Of course, I went to the prom with him, so he probably doesn’t fit the profile of an enemy or a sniper. And he’s all the way across the country now, at Stanford.”
Boris nodded. “Are you in a dorm or apartment? Maybe a present or past roommate?”
“An apartment. Mary Sue and Vlad are my roommates. Mary Sue’s a music major and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Vlad’s a bit of a weird nerd. We call him Vlad the Impaler because he’s always reading vampire stories. Writes them too, but he knows computers backwards and forwards. Strange, huh? The three of us met our freshman year and hit it off. Mary Sue’s an African-American from Tupelo and Vlad’s from Saratoga.”
“Tupelo, Mississippi?” Jan nodded. “Saratoga, New York?”
“No, Saratoga, California. Silicon Valley, near San Jose. Kids go to school all over the place. Those who can, anyway.”
“Give the police that information. They’ll want to interview your roommates, more to ask them if they know anyone who might want to hurt you. You might not know you have enemies on campus, Ms.—er, Jan.”
“You’re being very helpful. Why?”
“This happened on my watch,” said Boris. “And you remind me of someone.” He looked at his watch. “I need to get going. I have an 8 a.m. class.” He wrote his cellphone number on a pad next to the hospital bed. “Call me if you need anything. You’ll probably feel better in the morning.”
***
In the hospital corridor outside the girl’s room, Boris stopped a moment and made a call. “This is Professor Vashchenko, Sergeant Fonseca. You said to call if I thought of something important. When I arrived at the hospital, I was surprised to see there’s no policeman on duty here. Don’t you think Ms. Connors deserves some protection? Her attack might be a personal one—a stalker, someone who identifies her with a woman who jilted him, whatever.”
“Leave the detective work to us, professor,” said the voice on the other end. “But I’ll check with the chief if we can send a uniform to the hospital. That’s not a bad idea. I’d rather keep Ms. Connors alive because I want to be able to interrogate her.”
“Don’t do it now. She needs her rest. I cut my visit short for that reason.”
“I understand she’s hot. You got a personal interest here, prof?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. She’s my best student!”
***
A bit after 2 a.m., there was a knock on Boris’s apartment door. It caused a bitter memory of when the FSB had come knocking one night. The chess master had told him it might happen. You play chess with a guy and you’re Putin’s enemy!
He rose, turned on lights, and found his bathrobe. He went to the door and looked through the peephole, seeing a rotund man in an old tan raincoat chewing a toothpick and holding up a badge. Boris opened the door but left the chain on.
“Detective Fonseca, Professor Wachanko. You talked to me. I need to talk to you.”
“At this hour? Very well. Can I examine your credentials?”
Fonseca handed the badge in, Boris examined them, and took off the chain. “Just call me Boris,” he said, opening the door wide. He figured the detective was almost illiterate and would never be able to pronounce his last name.
“Sure thing,” the detective said, sitting in a one of the matching wingchairs and crossing his legs, “if you call me Leo.” He smiled. “We got a problem, Boris.”
“Is Jan Connors OK?”
“Fine, far as I know. We have a uniform on duty at the hospital. One roomie is missing, though, and the other one is hysterical. Strange setup there, by the way. A bit kinky if you ask me.”
“Students with roommates? Why is that unusual?”
“Two gals and a guy. There used to be an old sitcom about that, called ‘Three’s Company,’ I think. You probably never saw it. Pretty clean by today’s standards. With today’s kids, we could be talking about a sex cult.”
“They’re students, but also adults free to make their own choices. Who’s missing and who’s hysterical?”
“Little black girl named Mary Sue is the hysterical one, saying the cops aren’t doing a damned thing, ‘fraid she’ll be next, bla-bla-bla. Some guy name Vladimir is the one missing. Your kind, prof.”
“My kind?”
“Russian. Vladimir Levitsky. Mary Sue hasn’t seen him since before the attack. I’m thinking he was the one who took the shot at your student. I’m also thinking he’s on his way back to Russia as we speak. We’re checking airports and other transportation hubs.”
“He’s from California. You might want to check for flights there too. Why would he want to kill Jan?”
“Maybe Mary Sue and Jan were a bit too kinky-close? Maybe he thought Jan spurned him, even if she didn’t? Maybe he wanted to impress Jodie Foster? You tell me.”
“I have nothing to add to those conjectures. I didn’t even understand one of them. Why are you here?”
“Playing Columbo? Another TV series. Not very up on pop culture, eh? Don’t ever go on Jeopardy.”
“And here I thought I spoke English well. I don’t think you answered my question. Why are you here?”
“Just noticed the address of your apartment is only three blocks from the weird trio’s. I’ll generalize my original question: do you have a thing going with any of them?”
“That’s such a stupid question that I shouldn’t even bother to answer it, but the answer is no, Leo, I don’t have any relationship with any of them.” He got up and started pacing. “I didn’t even know their apartment was three blocks away, but this is a university town—single professors and students who live off campus still find it convenient to be near their classes.” He paused and faced the smaller man. “I might have seen this Mary Sue and Vlad around, but I wouldn’t have known they were Connors’s roommates. I heard their names the first time today…” he looked at his watch…”yesterday. And Jan Connors is simply a student with a lot of promise.”
“Doesn’t Mr. Levitsky work in the same academic area as you?”
“Computer scientists use a different kind of math, Leo, not algebraic topology. Not even close.”
“You’re both Russians.”
“Levitsky is probably a naturalized or even natural-born citizen. Even his parents might be.”
“And do you resent that?”
“What?” Boris was astonished. “Why would I? In five years, I’ll take my citizenship test. I’m already an associate professor here. And mathematics respects no borders. My life is an open book.”
Fonseca smiled. “Yeah, but I can’t read it if it’s in Russian.” He stood. “If it’s any comfort, I believe you. And I apologize. I’m just doing my job.” He paused at the door. “By the way, did I say we found blood near Levitsky’s bed? There might be foul play. Place is such a mess that Mary Sue said neither she nor Jan Connors wanted to go inside. Takeout cartons and dirty clothes all over the place.” He shrugged. “Guess you have to be careful. You think you know someone, and they turn out to be slobs. Mary Sue said neither she nor the girl had any idea. This place, now, is pristine. You’d be the perfect man for my ex. G’night, Boris.”
After the cop left, Boris took two aspirins and tried to get some sleep. He couldn’t manage that until just before the alarm went off. My next lecture is going to be a disaster!
***
In libris libertas…
