BACK    CONTENTS    ABOUT

Page 33.

17. Professor Sander Three Months Ago

The phone in a shady hallway rang, and the housekeeper came from the kitchen to answer.

It was one of the professor's many admirers and former students.

The girl actually sounded as if she were weeping, but would not say why and insisted on speaking with den Häar Professer.

Frowning with puzzled concern, the middle-aged woman set the receiver down and hurried into the garden in back to inform Professor Sander that he had a call, and it sounded important.

The elderly man was at the moment chipping away with a masonry pick at a flat piece of stone to be laid into the property's far back wall. His white hair fluttered in a wind-blown shock over his pink skull. He dripped with sweat, frowned with concentration, and looked very robust for a man of his age. He wore the dark blue overalls of a common laborer, and looked like a guy who'd stop anonymously into a tavern for a beer when he was done with his labors.

As she called his name, her womanly instinct told her the weeping girl on the phone meant this was a life-changing telephone call.

"Telefon!" she called out, full of concern, as she stood on tiptoes with hands folded together over her black housework dress

Sander was a robust man in his seventies. He'd made a new life for himself after his wife had died of cancer ten years ago. His joys in life now revolved around his son, his books, his gardening, some teaching, and his growing passion for the Progressive Alliance for Peace (PAX).

Over the years, he had been offered many civil and academic honors, and he had refused most of them. He did not want to be co-opted by the establishment. It was enough to carry the titles Ph.D. and Professor. It was the greatest honor of all to have his articles published in peer-reviewed journals to the approval and pertinent but respectful critique of his peers. He had been offered knighthoods by several European monarchies, and had politely refused. The independent, rigorous academic scholar in him tended more toward an ascetic, simple honesty of facts and analysis. He was forever, as the Spanish might say, Forastero—outsider. As a Belgian journalist had once quipped in writing: "Sander the Outsider is so out that he is more in than most of the in-crowd." That had made Hilaire laugh. It was years ago, when he was still a brash disciple of Bloch and Braudel to lead new generations of the Annales school of understanding human history. He liked to call his broad interest macro-history. He saw it as a parallel way of segmenting history into micro (detail) and macro (abstraction), compared with micro-economics and macro-economics, between which the first dealt in numbers and names, the second in variables and abstractions.

He greatest pride lay in seeing the growing professional success of his son, Pierre, a professor of engineering in London. Pierre was tall, handsome, an unmarried man still playing the field with adoring women friends, a promising intellect of good income and connections, and an only child who would carry on the Sander family name.

Professor Hilaire Sander, having retired from his long teaching and research career in economics and business, now worked when he pleased. He was a professor emeritus at several universities in rotation, from Trier to Louvain to Paris and other places depending on his interests and their needs. He sometimes did a stint in Luxembourg, but was more interested now in savoring distant cities and new faces.

When he wasn't home writing or gardening, his time was increasingly taken up with the PAX movement. The power of global corporations had passed critical thresholds in the twenty-first century. Many corporations were wealthier and more powerful than some nations—many certainly had more clout than Luxembourg, for example.

With ground swell support in many nations, the Progressive Alliance was a peaceful, moderate movement of students, workers, and small business interests around the world. It was a moderate-center ideology to regain ground lost by labor unions and municipal governments. It was gaining support from many smaller national governments who recalled the larger powers, where democracy had become a sham because of relentless bribery and lobbying by armies of lawyers and insidious persuaders pushing a million different business agendas at the cost of the common good. Sander wanted a revolution, not in blood and violence, but at the ballot box—before things could get out of hand. If people became desperate enough, they would resort to arms to overthrow politicians and justices who were in the pocket of Big Money. Something had to be done before it came to that, and increasingly this took more of Hilaire Sander's time than his teaching.

Aside from his thoughts of Pierre, and his hopes for PAX, the anchor of his life was the little residential property southwest of Echternach, not far from the large park and recreational lake. His small cottage nestled in a tangled, English-style quarter acre of flowers and shrubbery, trees, and even a bubbling fountain. The garden was what the English had once called an ambage, from the Latin ambulare, to walk. The property's outer boundaries were defined by a low masonry wall that the professor himself kept repaired with mortar, loose stones, and sweat as he wore leather gloves and old clothes like a worker. He liked to get dirty once in a while, dressed in blue overalls like a railroad baggage porter or a truck mechanic. He identified with working class people as much as he enjoyed being an intellectual with a home library of over a thousand old-fashioned print books in addition to all the world's resources online. His economics and political science scholarship was respected and published in peer-reviewed journals around the world.

The housekeeper, a middle-aged woman, came to the back door. "Monsieur le Professeur," she said in typical Letzebuergesch with a sprinkling of French words and phrases, "there is a telephone call."

The gun eased off. "No tricks."

TOP