Free War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel by Kris Nelscott Page B

called some of the names on the list she had given me before I left. I never reached the people I wanted. Instead I was informed that they were out of town, or in one case, decided “at the last minute” to spend his summer in Venice.
    On my last call, I managed to reach Daniel’s college master. I felt odd talking to someone called a “master,” even though I knew that the name came from the English university tradition and had nothing to do with slavery.
    The master – or special master, as he called himself – would be in his office, and we set up a time to meet. When I hung up, I told Jimmy and Malcolm that we were leaving.
    Jimmy and I would go to the meeting . Malcolm would explore, talk to anyone he met, and hook up with us at a designated spot.
    The special master had given me instructions on how to get to his building. He told me to find the New Haven Green, and his directions proceeded from there.
    The Green wasn’t hard to find. It was the exact center of New Haven, a large square park filled with trees and sidewalks. Three churches dominated the east side of the square, their spires rising into the clear blue June sky. On the west side, Yale University began, hidden behind an ivy-covered stone wall that looked as intimidating as it was supposed to.
    I found a five-story block-long concrete parking structure on nearby Temple street, and left the van inside it. Malcolm went off on an investigation of his own, promising to meet us on the Green in two hours.
    Jimmy and I went in the other direction, through the big Tudor arch that led us onto Yale’s campus. The great stone buildings behind us blocked the traffic noise from College Street, and it felt like we had entered a whole new world.
    Ahead of us lay well - mowed grass and lovely pathways. To our left, a long Colonial building was dwarfed by the mock-Tudor buildings behind it. A statue of Nathan Hale stood outside the Colonial, and it turned out that Mr. Give-Me-Liberty-Or-Give-Me-Death had lived in that Colonial building when he had been a student.
    I wondered how Daniel had felt when he first came here. Like Malcolm, he had never lived anywhere except Chicago’s South Side. Knowing Daniel, he had probably researched Yale, but research wasn’t like reality.
    This place had been designed to intimidate those who didn’t belong.
    There weren’t a lot of students on the grounds. The handful that we saw weren’t going from class to class but instead were lounging against the large trees that gave the area its character. Obviously, there was summer school, but equally as obvious, not that many students attended.
    It didn’t take us long to reach Daniel’s college. Yale followed the Oxford and Cambridge model, dividing the students into twelve residential colleges. The master lived on site, as did, apparently, the dean of that college and a handful of professors.
    We had to ring a doorbell and get buzzed through yet another archway to enter the college. The Gothic architecture and all the stone spoke of wealth to me. It seemed exotic to Jimmy, who couldn’t stop touching the curved walls.
    The archway opened into a wide quad. There were more students on this patch of green grass, many of them sunbathing as they read thick tomes. A game of touch football went on along the far end, the boys laughing and jumping with ease. Someone had hooked a bicycle rack to the stone courtyard in front of one of the doorways, ruining the medieval look. Above us, a stereo blared the rhythms of the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper.”
    Jimmy didn’t seem to notice that so far all of the students we had seen were white. Usually this many white people made him nervous, but he was too intent on the university itself to pay much attention.
    The masters’ quarters were in one of the Gothic Towers. We went to the thick wooden door as instructed, and I pounded the brass door knocker. Jimmy had never seen one, and wanted to give it a try. I let him do it once, and then we