The Magnanimous Detective
Some Things about Ficino, Part 3
The Magnanimous Detective
A Subversion
An Arrest
Ficino went through the door behind the men, and by the time the doors swung shut behind him, they were already far down the hall, trotting shoulder to shoulder. Ficino broke into a light jog, and a smile appeared on his face. He wanted to call out something like Hey, stop! But he felt that that would be too much. Instead, he followed them. They turned down another hall. So did Ficino. They went into what they must have thought was another classroom, but which was actually a mop closet, came back out, looked around as Ficino, now at a quick walk, closed in on them, head still cocked at a friendly angle, his close-lipped smile fixed, and they kept trotting down the hall, stepping lightly as though they were trying to be very quiet and careful. They turned down yet another hall in the academic maze of halls, into the administrative wing of the university. Ficino had no trouble staying with them.
The floor there was carpeted and the three pairs of footsteps made no sound as they progressed. The two men passed by a glass window on their left that looked into a breakroom. Only a few lights were on. The coffee in the pot was low. A red dot glowed beside it. They went into a door on their right. A few moments beat past and Ficino entered too.
It was a lecture hall that looked identical to the one Ficino had just left behind, except the lights were off, it was dark, and instead of a blackboard with chalk taking up the center, there was a blank, white lit surface coming from a projector set up at the back of the room, by the entrance doors. The projector was on, but there were no slides to give the light form upon the also-white backdrop. A diffuse, cold light crept through the hall, illuminating very little.
At the top, half-circular step of the hall, Ficino stopped, let his eyes adjust (which they did quickly, without the aid of squinting or eye-rubbing), and saw the flight-suited men disappear behind the wall over which the empty white rectangle was projected. In all of the lecture rooms at the university, there were spaces behind these walls, making them look like minimized stage backdrops or out-of-place facades. Often, these spaces were used for storage or for improvised, secondary offices for underpaid faculty.
Ficino took a step down the aisle, then another. He paused and rubbed the back of his head, his eyes gazing blankly into the white rectangle. But he blinked, put his hands back in his pockets, and his smile returned as he continued downward toward the edge of the wall.
He looked behind, where the two men had disappeared. Everything was dark, except for a single cone of light deep in the indistinct back-area. He entered the room, or area, since there wasn’t a clearly defined door or threshold, and behind him the lecture hall receded until he was almost completely surrounded by darkness. The impression was one of a falsely infinite space, like being in a planetarium without stars. Ficino got closer and closer to the cone of light (a frozen comet in that untrue void). He could tell it was a desk lamp, but it wasn’t on a desk. It was on top of a tall, gray filing cabinet, which it partially illuminated.
When he stopped, it was because a man had stepped out of the shadows.
He was on the shorter side, wore a long, greasy-looking overcoat and a hat. He was smoking a long cigarette, blowing thick smoke (as though uninhaled) into the solitary light. Ficino’s eyes were fully adjusted now, and he could see the two flight-suited men standing a few feet back in the dark. The one still could not stand still, and the other held his writing pad out in front of his scrunched face.
The man began with an “I” and a pause, and then held forth, cigarette in hand, smoke whirling about his head, explaining in an oratory, dramatic style, never looking at Ficino, who stood there bewildered and almost amused with his hands at his sides, that his colleagues had been attending his, Ficino’s, lectures for the past week, and that they had taken notes on every one of them, thorough notes, exegetical, you could say, notes, and that these notes—the man pointed to the writing pad, hovering in his colleague’s hand in the dark behind him—had been gone over by none other than himself (he pointed at his rounded chest with the burning end of the cigarette) every night (here in this room? Ficino wondered, looking for a desk or a chair and not finding one), parsed through, duplicated, annotated, and filed away for further, later analysis or judgment, and he had to say, said the man, pausing for a puckering drag of the shortening cigarette, he wasn’t going to pretend that he understood everything of what Ficino was saying each night, that would indeed be pretense. But no matter, the man said, he understood enough. Oh yes, quite enough. The professor, said the man, was being investigated by the State Agency of—and here the man muttered a few incomprehensible syllables into his high coat collar—for domestic security reasons. Now, said the man, while I by no means feel the need to explain myself to you or to anyone else, I nevertheless would like to make something clear, namely that, as a detective for the—he muttered into his collar again—I must be, and am, highly tolerant toward differing viewpoints. Put plainly, I don’t care about your personal politics, nor for that matter your aesthetics, or your sexual proclivities, or what kind of toothpaste you use. I am what is called magnanimous toward perspectives that differ from my own—I can never let the contingency of a political opinion or nexus of opinions taint my work (he outspread his short arms) as an eminently (he spread them wide again) magnanimous detective. But, what my associates here have provided me with, the cut of the jib of your lectures, the gestalt, so to speak, of what we are here trying to prove that you are trying to say—well, it is beyond a doubt outside of any reasonable, well—what I mean to say is that I know what you’re up to. This, the concluding title of your series of talks, well, this to me, as well as my colleagues—the two men in the shadows nodded, one more vigorously than the other—is ridiculous, hyperbolic, unbelievable, but also mincing, dilettantish, effete—the detective sputtered for a moment and his mouth dropped open, his eyes grew three sizes but also somehow narrowed—accusingly? He gaped at Ficino and took a big, long breath of smoke, eyes still wide and yet narrow.