The Book of Kills

by Ralph McInerny

  “He’s buried in the crypt of Sacred Heart.” Ranke sent up his words in little puffs of smoke. Orion looked at his director impassively. He had nodded through the professor’s boring lectures, but now his estimate of his guide sank further. Orion had found the burial plot of Father Edward Sorin in the community cemetery located just off the road that led from the grotto to the highway across which stood Saint Mary’s College, the sister institution of Notre Dame.

  “Father Sorin?” The question was meant to make Ranke’s ignorance explicit.

  “No, no. Petit.”

  “Ah.”

  Orion thought Ranke might be wrong at least in this, but he was not. This oddly increased his disguised contempt for his director. He began his research.

  He had been at it three years when he met Marcia. She worked in the Huddle, preparing stir-fried concoctions to order. He might not have noticed her if she had not, surreptitiously but making sure he noticed, put a double portion of chicken in his order as she began to cook it. The second time this happened he read the name on the plastic badge she wore.

  “Marcia.”

  “Marcia Younger.”

  “Than what?”

  Her pained expression told him he was not the first to make a bad joke of her name.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Everybody does it.”

  “I’m Orion Plant.”

  “I know.”

  Those behind him in the line were beginning to mutter, but Marcia was practiced in antagonizing customers. He pushed on, paid, and took a table. Some minutes later, minus the plastic snood she wore over her hair while stir-frying, Marcia joined him.

  “I asked who you were, that’s how I know.”

  And so it began. She was a substantial young woman but her face was pretty, made even prettier by the adoring expression in her eyes. He was not used to the deference she showed him. She had the impression that he was a junior member of the faculty. As a graduate assistant, he was part of the platoon of indentured servants who made life even easier for the faculty. He felt that he was monitoring the professor’s lectures and in his discussion sessions he subtly corrected what Ranke had said. He did not correct Marcia’s misapprehension. After all, in a few years . . .

  Her father was dead, her mother stone deaf; Orion became a constant visitor in their small house just east of the campus, within walking distance of graduate student housing on Bulla Road. As they walked back from her house they could see Hesburgh Library lift like a great sarcophagus among the trees. It was there that his study carrel was located. After a few months, they seemed to be engaged. When, given her passionate yielding, an early marriage seemed advisable, Orion told her they would be married in the log chapel.

  “I’m not Catholic.”

  “That doesn’t matter.” In his cluttered, imperfectly formed Catholic mind a cunning thought occurred. Marriage to Marcia might not really count so far as the great book in the sky was concerned. He changed his mind about the log chapel, citing as reason his great reluctance that he might be married among those primitive paintings in which the natives obsequiously received the great white fathers. Orion and Marcia were married in the courthouse by a judge who had just sentenced a man to life imprisonment. Orion did not voice the joke that occurred to him. They honeymooned in Niles and moved in with her mother. Marcia wrote down the good news for her mother to read after several shouted versions failed to get through to her staring, open-mouthed parent.

  Her father had been in real estate as had his father before him, the family business going back generations. The records of the now-defunct enterprise were in old wooden file cabinets stored in a rental locker north of town. An hour spent perusing them piqued his interest and Orion brought the records to the house and it was not long before his passion for research was diverted to the records of Younger Real Estate. The records went back into the nineteenth century and proved to be a vein of precious ore.

  3

  WHEN ROGER KNIGHT HAD accepted the offer of the Huneker Chair of Catholic studies, his brother Philip, a private detective, moved to South Bend with him. For Roger, Notre Dame might be second only to Bardstown, Kentucky, in the American past of the church to which he had converted while a precocious graduate student at Princeton, but for Philip it was a place where seasons of sports succeeded one another liturgically. He continued to conduct his business, though more and more sporadically, from their new location. Roger had earned his doctorate summa cum laude at the age of nineteen, a boy who had inflated to dirigible size in the course of his accelerated studies. Armed with his degree he had emerged into a professional world that eyed him with wary caution. He had been on the short list for several teaching positions but in the end was given, in Philip’s phrase, the short end of the stick. He lost interest in poring over The Chronicle of Higher Education for other opportunities and eventually, when Philip retreated from his Manhattan location to the comparative civility of Rye, Roger applied for and received a private investigator’s license and Philip’s advertisement in the Yellow Pages of strategically chosen major cities announced that Knight Brothers Investigations could be reached at the 800 number listed. Roger created a Web page as well and for some years they had taken on clients with a problem interesting enough to lure them from Rye. Meanwhile, Roger read and communicated via e-mail with kindred spirits about the globe on the myriad of things that engaged his scholarly mind. He wrote a book on Frederick Rolfe, aka Baron Corvo, which enjoyed first a succès d’estime and then, thanks to its selection by the History Book Club and its adoption by Barnes and Noble, enjoyed a wide readership as well. It was this book that caught the attention of Father Carmody and led to the offer of the Huneker chair.

  At Notre Dame, Roger was a free variable floating over departmental divisions. He taught but one course a semester and it was cross-listed in English, philosophy, theology, and history. It was thanks to the latter connection that he had come to know Otto Ranke, an elderly professor to whom the concept of retirement was anathema. To Roger he represented a Notre Dame that was no more, a remnant of the small band whose teaching and writing bore the stamp of the religious affiliation of the university. Now Notre Dame described itself as a national research university and its distinctiveness as an institution, academically at least, was threatened. Today, Otto Ranke, with his interests in the role of the American bishops at Vatican II, and a monograph on distinguished visitors to the South Bend campus that had featured F. Marion Crawford, Robert Hugh Benson, Henry James, and William Butler Yeats, would have been an unlikely prospect for a position in the history department. With the retirement of Marvin O’Connell and Philip Gleason, Ranke was the history department for Roger Knight.

  “A student of mine is writing his dissertation on that,” Ranke said one day when they were discussing the past of the coordinates of space the university occupied, and the fate of the Indians had come up.

  “I’d like to meet him.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “An odd fellow.”

  Roger would have thought this would be a commendation rather than the reverse for Professor Ranke, but no further explanation was offered. They sat for a moment in silence, enveloped in the smoke from Otto’s pipe. The smoke, from irresistible sweetness turned over time into something approaching the American pronunciation of the professor’s family name, and there were complaints from purists along the corridor of Decio Hall. Notre Dame was a listed as a smoke-free campus, something that Ranke considered the result of the guttering of the fire of proud and confident Catholicity among the faculty. But he had been here before most of the campus buildings went up, his colleagues’ parents had been children when he joined the faculty, and he was unmoved by their reiterated complaints. Smoking was still grudgingly permitted in the faculty office building, but plaintiffs insisted that cigars and pipes were excluded. They had no case. If Ranke noticed that he had been ostracized as an inconsiderate old bastard devoid of sensitivity, he gave no s
ign of it, but serenely lighted pipe full after pipe full of his aromatic offering to a better day.

  Their conversation turned to the recent events in Cedar Grove Cemetery. Ranke nodded as if it too were an expected consequence of the university’s swerve into secularization.

  “Bigots,” he opined, and began to speak of past episodes, notably the depredations of the KKK.

  “Religion doesn’t seem to be at the bottom if it,” Roger said.

  “Religion is at the bottom of everything.”

  Nothing could have stated more succinctly Roger’s own conviction and he settled back contentedly to Ranke’s impromptu lecture on the hooded hordes that had once harassed the campus.

  4

  IN HIS OPULENT OFFICE IN the recently renovated Main Building, the chancellor brooded. Memories of the men who had met his plane when he returned from Hong Kong made him feel vulnerable to unknown menaces. His bags had been commandeered and he had been ushered swiftly to an exit.

  “Where’s Johnny?”

  The answer was lost in the racket made by the automatic doors of the terminal. Outside, an unseasonable cold greeted him. Father Bloom was pulling up the collar of his coat when his elbows were seized by the two accompanying him and he was hustled into a waiting car that was definitely not the university vehicle that was Johnny’s pride. The driver behind the wheel was not Johnny. The car had sped off, the chancellor was unceremoniously conked on the head, and a darkness almost welcome after his long journey descended.

  When consciousness returned he found himself in a small unlit room. There was a single television camera standing straddle-legged in a corner.

  “You awake?” The voice might have been one of those that had come to Joan of Arc except for its cryptic menace.

  “Where am I?”

  “In custody.”

  Silence. His further questions went unanswered. He realized that he was bound to the chair in which he sat with rope pulled tightly about legs and chest and knotted firmly. Fear rose in Father Bloom’s breast. In foreign lands, he was often warned about the risk of physical dangers due to local political conditions. He had never thought of South Bend as similarly threatening. His aprehension took the form of a Stevensonian title. Kidnapped. It had been one of his favorite books as a boy; he had dreamed of going into literature, but he had been ordered into theology where he had languished until he was plucked from the ranks and groomed for the soon-to-be-created office of chancellor of the university. From then on he had been the toy of one éminence grise after another, shadowy figures he had never thought of as forces in the Congregation. They had great plans for the forward leap of the university. He led a charge that others had planned. Where were his mentors now when his life was threatened?

  Not a day had passed before he was marching to the drum of his unseen oppressors. The television camera was turned on from another room and he spoke the words he had memorized. When at the end he blurted out, “I’m sorry,” his act of contrition might have covered sins undreamed of by those who held him captive.

  On the second day, after hours when no bodiless commands or questions had come to him as if from airy spirits, the door was opened and his rescuers appeared. They had been informed by telephone where he could be found. He babbled half coherently of his ordeal.

  “A prank,” he was told.

  “A prank!”

  “The less we make of it, the less their triumph will be. A jokester ignored is a sorry sight.”

  No sorrier sight than the chancellor when he was unbound. He stood, a wobbling Prometheus, and refused the suggestion that he had been the victim of a practical joke.

  “They filmed me,” he cried. “They made me say things . . .”

  “We heard.”

  “Well?”

  “Benign neglect, that’s the ticket.”

  “They were not benign.”

  “We must be.”

  Alone now at his desk, he shuddered at the memories. He had become used to his ceremonial existence. He was treated with deference wherever he went—except perhaps during his periodic appearances before the faculty senate which was dominated by notorious cranks whose careers were not going well. He was praised and catered to in a way he wanted to think was not solely due to the office he held. But his recent ignominy had been wholly impersonal, his captors had not cared a whit for him. It was the head of this great institution, whoever he might be, they had wanted to humiliate. He still was unable to gauge the seriousness of their demands. His advisors must be correct; it had been, in however bad taste, a prank.

  His phone lit up and he answered it to be told that the university counsel was on the line.

  “I’ll speak to him.”

  “Father,” said a fruity voice, “there is something we must discuss.”

  “Yes.”

  “The rogues who detained you have now retained a lawyer. I have received a communication I don’t think can be ignored.”

  “Come at once.”

  He put down the phone and once more his heart sank. It sank further when he learned that what one of his mentors had jocularly referred to as the alleged native uprising had secured the services of Bartholomew Leone, a frequent adder at the institutional bosom. Leone had represented disgruntled employees, unpromoted faculty who had decided to sue, a disenchanted assistant coach who had aired dirty athletic laundry in an attempt to recover his position. The chancellor, a teetotaler, suddenly understood the urge some men felt to drink.

  5

  ORION PLANT ANSWERED Professor Ranke’s summons with foreboding. They discussed his parlous condition as a candidate for a degree and Ranke had not been, as so often in the past he had been, encouraging.

  “You have exceeded the allowed limit by four years.”

  “You know that I am at work on my dissertation.”

  “I know nothing of the kind. The last time you showed me what you considered the draft of a chapter was half a dozen years ago.”

  “But I have kept you au courant.”

  “You have sat there and described at length what you were about to do, but you have not done it.”

  “Do you have to smoke?”

  “It is a pleasure not a necessity. Would you like to step outside for a moment to catch a breath of fresh air?”

  “My research has led me in a surprising direction.” Plant hitched forward in his chair, his small eyes bright. “Do you know how the natives of this region were robbed by the white man?”

  “Orion, the whole country sits on land that could be described as stolen.”

  “But this is worse.”

  “Tell me.”

  Ranke seemed relieved to be deflected from the reason for this interview. His manner at the beginning of the account was skeptical, but as Orion went on he grew impatient.

  “You are giving a very slanted version of those events. In any case, Father Badin bought the land from the government which had obtained it by treaty with the Potowatomies. Father Sorin was given the land by the diocese to whom Badin had ceded title.”

  “Stolen property. That it was paid for does not alter the crime.”

  “A crime requires the transgression of some law. What statute do you have in mind?”

  “Law! Law is the edict of usurpers. I appeal to the natural law, common morality.”

  “I wonder what a court would make of that.”

  “I intend to find out.”

  Ranke was embarrassed by his passion, but Plant was not deterred. He was rehearsing the plea he intended to make before the world, one that had been prepared for by recent events in which he’d had a hand. Around him he had gathered a small band made up of dissidents, other students who found academe mendacious, its requirements unfairly onerous, a make-believe world constructed when the truth was left behind. But mention of the law concentrated Orion’s mind. It was soon displaced by what Professor Ranke then told him.

  “As far as I know you are not a descendant of the tribe for whom you presume to speak. And as of now y
ou no longer have status in this university. You are no longer a candidate for a degree. I have intervened for you again and again, rules have been bent out of shape for you, and to no avail. Obviously you have been wasting your time on this pointless crusade rather than doing what you are ostensibly here to do. The department long since lost patience with you. I can no longer misrepresent the status of your research. A vote was taken. You have been stricken from the rolls. I asked you here to tell you that.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “They can and they have. And the vote was unanimous.”

  “You too?” He searched for the phrase and then had it. “Et tu?”

  “Etiam ego.”

  What the hell did that mean? But the meaning was unequivocal. His career as a graduate student was over. He felt an odd elation as he rose to his feet.

  “Maybe I will consult a lawyer.”

  “You have no grievance.”

  “We’ll see about that.” At the door he turned. It was the moment for a dramatic gesture. But nothing ringing occurred to him. “You haven’t seen the last of me,” he cried, and left.

  The hallway outside, so familiar to him from long years of coming along it to Ranke’s office, seemed alien and he an intruder. He could imagine one of the ridiculous members of campus security appearing to take him to the campus entrance and like the angel in Genesis ordering him out of Eden. A muffled cry rose in his throat and his eyes misted with tears. A moment later, eyes brushed dry, he hurried down the corridor, a man with a mission. His pace slowed when he thought of giving this news to Marcia. He had been cashiered, dismissed, fired. Lord, to whom should he go? In the event he went to the only local lawyer whose name was known to him.