The Matlock Paper by Robert Ludlum

news-papers, everything. No covers, no counter stories, nothingto obstruct normal curiosity or your perfectly normal reactions. Someone broke into your apartment and smashed up the place. That’s all you know.… And there’s something else. You may not like it, but we think it’s best—and safest.”
    “What?”
    “We think Miss Ballantyne should report the phone call she received to the police.”
    “Hey, come on! The caller expected to find me there at four o’clock in the morning. You don’t spell that kind of thing out. Not if you’re on a fellowship and expect to work for museum foundations. They still revere McKinley.”
    “The eye of the beholder, Dr. Matlock.… She just received a phone call; some man asked for you, quoted Shakespeare, and made an unintelligible reference to some foreign word or city. She was goddamn mad. It wouldn’t rate five lines in a newspaper, but since your apartment was broken into, it’s logical she report it.”
    Matlock was silent. He walked over to the corner of the squash court where the ball had settled and picked it up. “We’re a couple of ciphers who got pushed around. We don’t know what happened; just that we don’t like it.”
    “That’s the idea. Nothing is so convincing as someone who’s a bewildered injured party and lets everybody know it. Make an insurance issue about those old books of yours.… I’ve got to go. There aren’t that many extinguishers in the building. Anything else? What are you doing next?”
    Matlock bounced the ball on the floor. “A fortuitous invitation. Fortuitously received over a number of beers at the Afro-Commons. I’m invited to a staged version of the original puberty rites of the Mau Mautribes. Tonight at ten o’clock in the cellars of Lumumba Hall.… It used to be the Alpha Delt fraternity house. I can tell you there are a lot of white Episcopalians spinning in hell over that one.”
    “Again, I’m not following, Doctor.”
    “You don’t do your homework, either.… Lumumba Hall is very large on your list.”
    “Sorry. You’ll phone me in the morning?”
    “In the morning.”
    “I’ll call you Jim if you’ll call me Jason.”
    “No kiss, but agreed.”
    “O.K. Practice some more in here. I’ll take you when this is over.”
    “You’re on.”
    Greenberg let himself out. He looked up and down the narrow corridor, satisfied that no one was there; no one had seen him enter or leave the court. Continuous thumping could be heard within the walls. All the courts were in use. Greenberg wondered, as he was about to turn the corner into the main hallway, why the Carlyle gymnasium was so heavily attended at eleven o’clock in the morning. It was never the case at Brandeis; not fifteen years ago. Eleven o’clock in the morning was a time for class.
    He heard a strange noise that was not the sound of a hard ball against thick wood and turned quickly.
    No one.
    He entered the main hall and turned once again. No one. He left quickly.
    The sound he heard was that of a stubborn latch. It came from the door next to Matlock’s court. Out of that door a man emerged. He, too, as Greenberg had done less than a minute before, looked up and down the narrow corridor. But instead of being satisfied that no one was there, he was annoyed. The obstinatelatch had caused him to miss seeing the man who’d met with James Matlock.
    Now the door of court four opened and Matlock himself stepped into the corridor. The man ten feet away was startled, pulled his towel up to his face, and walked away, coughing.
    But the man wasn’t quick enough. Matlock knew that face.
    It was the patrolman from his apartment at four o’clock in the morning.
    The patrolman who had called him “Doctor.” The man in uniform who knew beyond a doubt that the campus troubles were caused by the “weirdos and the niggers.”
    Matlock stared at the retreating figure.

9
    Over the large cathedral doors one could see—if one looked closely, or the sun was