“I don’t have it on me. Can I bring it this afternoon?”

“You do that,” I said.

He was back at two that afternoon with $375 in cash. He was just a little reluctant to part with it-I don’t think because he would miss the money so much but because this made the deal firm, committed him to a plan that he knew very well was morally reprehensible. He was purchasing his master’s degree. It would be a big status thing for him, that master’s, and he’d have gotten it unfairly, and it would always bother him a little, and he knew as much already. But he handed me the money, and I took it, and we both sealed our pact with the devil.

“I suppose you’ve done lots of theses,” he said.

“Quite a number.”

“Many in history?”

“Yes. And a good number in English, and a few in sociology and economics. And some other things.”

“What did you do your own on?”

“My own?”

“Your master’s and doctorate.”

“I don’t even have a bachelor’s,” I told him truthfully. “I joined the Army the day I left high school. Korea. I never did go to college.”

He found this extraordinary. He talked about how easy it would be for me to go through college and walk off with highest honors. “It would be a snap for you. Why, you could write your thesis with no sweat. The exams, the whole routine. It would be nothing for you.”

“Exactly,” I said.

Cudahy’s thesis was a very simple matter. I already knew quite a good deal about the Terrible Turk and the Starving Armenians. My library contained all the basic texts on the subject and more than a few lesser-known works, including several in Armenian. I speak Armenian, but reading it is a chore. The alphabet is unfamiliar and the construction tedious. I also had an almost complete file of the publications in English of the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia. Biased though they were, the League’s pamphlets could not fail to impress in a bibliography.