On the day before The Professor took his own life, Giovanni “Papa” Grasso sat in a modest meeting room in the Tri-Towns where a zoning committee was meeting to discuss the future of the property formerly known as Morgenthau University. I wasn’t there, but Grover was. He had heard Simeon mumbling about it on his cell phone and decided to take a walk over to town hall before he went over to moonlight at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Papa Grasso was the size of both his sons put together, and his clout was just as big. It had been close to seven years since Papa and his late brother had bought the Morgenthau property and they had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the deal. With one vote, and with one handshake, they could recoup all their losses and turn a slick profit.
Of course, the profit that Papa Grasso would make would only be a profit in monetary figures. In reality, owning the property had been the largest disaster of his life; personally, spiritually and physically, not just financially. The seven year battle to transform the campus into a sprawling splatter of townhouses had left him with high blood pressure, a stomach ulcer, a son whose head was so fucked up that he didn’t go outside for fear of phantom drug addicts, as well as the loss of his co-investor and brother to the same stress-related ailments that would kill him if things didn’t change.
Papa Grasso had pulled many strings and lined many pockets. He had twice petitioned the zoning committee to re-classify the campus as a residential area and had been denied both times. The board was very clear; they would not allow Morgenthau to be demolished for yuppie townhouses. In order to get a new zoning board appointed, he donated tens of thousands to the opposing political party, sabotaged their candidates, financed a smear and intimidation campaign, and had some of his cronies rig polling places on election day.
The end result of Grasso’s scheme was a brand new government that swept the local elections the year before The Professor’s death. They had little experience, no real agenda, taskforces or five-step programs. The new government had been assembled for the sole purpose of re-zoning Morgenthau. The new government excused the zoning board, which furiously complained to the newspapers, but were ignored by a public more concerned with celebrity gossip. Crime in the Tri-Towns began to rise. The new government, already in over their heads and looking for a scapegoat, began to look to the old campus and its homeless hoards as the source of the big problem in town. The solution was simple, and it started with Giovanni “Papa” Grasso.
At 8:15 in the morning, the gabble fell and a motion came to the floor. It happened so quickly and so quietly that Grover thought he had entered the wrong conference room. Within a matter of seconds, the board proposed “The Reclassification of Community Board 7” approved it, and quickly went on to the next matter of business. A joyous Papa Grasso lurched up from his chair, shook a few hands next to him and left the room to go downtown and sign the papers with the developers that had remained unsigned for over five years.
Grover was hardly astonished or devastated to learn that the campus’ fate had been decided by corrupt, government officials. He had been at Morgenthau longer than anyone but The Professor, and he secretly believed that this date would have come sooner. Had The Grassos really cared about the property, they would have strung barbed wire along the gates. They could have hired personal security to maintain the property and they could have hired landscapers to maintain the overgrown jungles and the lavish gardens. Had they truly loved their alma mater, they would have allowed it to keep functioning as a university that churned out CEOs, State Senators, Pulitzer–winning photographers and professors of art and history. Instead, they had stabbed it in the stomach and watched it slowly bleed to death.
It would only be a matter of time before the college would be razed for the condos. They would have to tear down the Main Residence Hall, because there was no way to repair the damage that the squatters had done to the building. The library was gorgeous, but it was haunted, and it probably always would be. Weeds and neglect had suffocated the Gardens’ exotic plant life, not to mention the fact that there were several corpses buried without hermetically sealed coffins. Admin and Services were literally sewers, since Alistair had run his makeshift sewage lines into their basements. Had they truly cared about this place, they would have razed it to the ground when they bought it so that people like us couldn’t come and sully something so beautiful.
Grover couldn’t help thinking that if The Professor hadn’t sunken to such desperation following Kendra’s murder that perhaps he would have led the charge to save Morgenthau from the developers. He wouldn’t do it for us, because he was very vocal about his disgust for his fellow residents.
He would stand up because he had been standing up for seven years. He stood up when the school eliminated his program, when they closed down his school and when society shunned him for living a life of squalor and destitution. He stood up through freezing winters and brutally hot summers. He had stood face to face with Nolan and The Watcher. He remained standing even when they killed the only woman that he ever loved, although it devastated him to do so.
Depressed, bedridden, anemic and heartbroken, The Professor kept standing, even if he wasn’t quite sure what he was fighting for anymore. In the beginning, he was fighting to save his job, but he never really liked his job. The only thing in his life that had remained a constant was the University where he grew up, studied, lived and worked. He was not going to let a thief like Giovanni Grasso to get the best of him and take away the only place that he had ever called home.
Over his dead body.
A few days after The Professor’s death, Willie drove a stolen car back over to the University to find a parade of goldenrod colored construction vehicles lined up along the eastern wall of the campus. The sun was finally setting on Morgenthau University and there was nothing that any of us could possibly do about it.
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