Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

even file them properly as the law prescribes. I wunt go around making charges of that nature if I was in your position, Professor, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m now calling you to tell you two things, which the first is, we don’t bird-dog, we don’t need to, because the power is with us as you will see if you keep vilating federal law and trying to play cat and mouse with the Service, in fact we dint even know you was in the area and no longer in Binghamton, New York, until your letter let it slip. And which the second is, I have now been personally assigned to your case and I strongly advise you to cooperate in the fullest.”

“Who is this?” Mickelsson asked.

“My name as I said earlier is Ernest diSapio, and I’m an agent with the Internal Revenue Service, Scranton office, P.O. Box 496, Scranton, Pennsylvania.”

“Wait a minute,” Mickelsson said. Tentatively, he smiled.

“I would like you to be here in my office between nine and eleven on Monday morning, November seventeenth, with a fully documented account of—”

“Hey, hold on,” Mickelsson said, his anger rising now. “I don’t know if this call is a joke or not, but I teach on Mondays, and I have no intention—”

“I can show you pretty quickly that this is no joke. I have the power to swear out a warrant for your arrest. If I was you, Professor—”

“Listen, Mr. Sapio or whoever you are, I don’t know why you’re taking this tone with me, but I assure you I don’t like it. It may be that all you ever deal with is criminals, in which case I’m sorry for you, but I am not a criminal, and I must ask you to keep a civil tongue in your head.” He was trembling a little. In a minute he’d be shouting.

“You’re not a criminal, I’m glad to hear it. In that case I’m sure you will have no objection to meeting me in this office between nine and eleven on November seventeenth. The address—”

“Slow down, God damn it!” Mickelsson shouted. “As I’ve told you already, I teach on Mondays. Besides that, I have no information to give you, everything I have is with my lawyer, you’ll have to talk with him.”

“Mr. Mickelsson, I don’t want to play games with you. In my book you’re a skip: you moved from Binghamton, New York, without sending us notification; in 1977 you filed but neglected to pay your taxes, and in both seventy-eight and seventy-nine you filed late and again have not paid. Now you may have explanations for all the above, but since you dint see fit to give them in your letter of complaint to this office, and since your attitude is clearly hostile to the work of this office—”

“However that may be,” Mickelsson said, controlling himself, suddenly aware that the maniac really might have the power he claimed, “I cannot give you the information you want; you’ll have to talk to my lawyer. I’ll give you his name and phone number.”

There was a pause. At last diSapio said, “Very well. Let me have ’em.”

He gave the man Jake Finney’s name and number.

“All right, Professor Mickelsson,” diSapio said, “I’ll be back in touch. If I was you I’d get a lawyer in Pennsylvania. You’re gonna need it.”

“I’ll do that. Thank you.” Just before diSapio hung up, Mickelsson remembered and said: “One more thing. You say the I.R.S. has not been spying on me? I’m sorry to bother you, and I’m certainly sorry to have accused you falsely, if I have—I don’t blame you for being cross, I suppose—but there’s been someone, so to speak, keeping tabs on me, one of those dark green unmarked cars. …”

“Not us, Professor. According to my records you’re separated from your wife. Maybe she’s put a private dick on you.”

“That’s not her style,” Mickelsson said, mostly to himself.

“Sorry I can’t help you,” diSapio said. Suddenly his voice was friendly, amused. With the change in tone he seemed to Mickelsson more than ever the voice of the Reich: savage, primordial, merciless.

“Well, thanks.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

That afternoon when he tried to work on his blockbuster book, he found his mind was cement. Not only could he not write, he could see no value in anything he’d written. He remembered how pleased he’d been by some of the pages stacked beside the typewriter, but reading them over now, trying to give them every benefit of the doubt, he thought he must simply have been insane. It was, when one thought about it soberly, the stupidest project imaginable—a blockbuster philosophy book! He turned off the electric typewriter—all the time he’d spent looking at his finished pages, he’d allowed it to hum to him—then stood up and raised the sheaf of papers in his hand, about to throw them in the wastebasket. At the last moment he changed his mind: perhaps another day they wouldn’t seem so bad, would at least seem revisable. He put them bade beside the typewriter, face down. He would work a little more on the house.

That night he began on the hardest of the jobs he’d set himself, the transformation of the crooked, unheated workroom into what would be, eventually, his diningroom. It had seemed an almost impossible job all those afternoons and nights when he’d stood looking in at it, sipping a drink, thinking about what had to be done. There was a double sink to be taken out; a workbench; crude, cheaply stained pine cupboards and shelves; wallpaper and one stretch of panelling to be torn away, then linoleum flooring and the waterstained false ceiling. But once he’d put his gloves on and begun to tear into it with the wreckingbar—his pipe and a glass of gin for company, on the portable radio some newscaster talking about Reagan’s vast support in Texas and his “undisclosed plan” for freeing the hostages—the work of demolition went more quickly than he would have thought possible. The shelves