The Book of Kills

by Ralph McInerny

  6

  BARTHOLOMEW LEONE WAS a graduate of the Notre Dame law school whose fate it seemingly was to represent those who had some grievance against his alma mater. He had been taught that each has a sacred right to legal representation and he had first assailed his alma mater on a principle she had taught him. But the slings and arrows of previous encounters with the university counsel had turned reluctance to relish and he was in principle disposed to lend a receptive ear to the fanciful claims of Orion Plant.

  “Are you a member of the tribe?”

  “I could be.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You must have status in order to bring such a suit.”

  “It is a class action.”

  That surely would be denied by the campus powers that be. Class was one thing Plant surely lacked. He was a pudgy, drab young man whose mouth had acquired the fixed look of one about to whine. In Leone’s legal mind, two sidled up to two, separated only by a plus that led inevitably on to four.

  “Did you have anything to do with the recent shenanigans on campus?”

  Plant adopted a sly look. “Is this conversation confidential?”

  “Not if you mean to tell me of felonies you have committed. Desecrating a cemetery, upsetting a wedding, taking two priests into custody.”

  “Two?”

  “Father Burnside and the chancellor.”

  Truth became a weapon, not an absolute. The common morality to which Plant had appealed in speaking to Professor Ranke seemed foreign to this law office. He had the vague notion that if he were frank with Leone, the lawyer would swiftly turn on him and he would be in real trouble. Locking Burnside in the log chapel was arguably a nuisance, but with the chancellor a charge of kidnapping could be brought. The small engine of graduate school regulations had crushed him. He did not mean to submit himself to the harsher machinery of the law.

  “No.”

  “You had nothing to do with all that?”

  “Those events served as catalyst. They dovetailed with my research. Suddenly my path was clear.”

  One can doubt a client’s word without accusing him of lying. Leone asked himself if his doubts of the truth of what Plant said rose to the level of conviction. His mind was suddenly dazzled by the prospect of shaking the university to its very foundations. He imagined a prone university counsel, his neck under the Leone foot.

  “Tell me about your research.”

  Listening, Leone thought of other nuts he had represented against the university, but Plant was an original. Someone who had been denied tenure might rant about academic standards, fairness, the benighted members of his department’s committee, but in the end it was a personal vendetta. If the iniquitous decision could not be reversed, the victim intended to go down with all guns blasting. Après moi le deluge, that sort of thing. At best Leone could achieve some monetary settlement in exchange for their agreement to go silently. Utter confidentiality about the deal struck was a condition of any money changing hands.

  “Here’s your thirty pieces of silver,” Ballast, the university counsel, would say, handing over a check for the agreed-on amount, holding it by the corner as if to avoid being sullied by such tainted money.

  “I had a difficult time,” Leone would say. “It could easily have gone to court.”

  “But your client talked you out of it.”

  Ballast was short and overweight and he wore three-piece suits as if they were a uniform of his position. The coats hung long on him, the buttons bulged with his well-fed torso, the tips of his shoes were just visible beneath the cuffs of his trousers. Leone sometimes dreamed of battling with this effete clown before a jury. He would wear a corduroy jacket, a knit tie, khaki trousers. The forces of the proletariat against well-dressed entrenched wealth. For all his shown reluctance in handing over the check, Leone knew that the counsel was relieved to have kept the quarrel out of the courts and the details of the settlement from the newspapers.

  Orion Plant presented a challenge. His charges were so fanciful that not even his silence might induce the university to turn over any cash to the recently released graduate student. Leone would have been happy to pursue the difficult task of proving that Plant had been unfairly treated, despite his undeniable failure to meet the minimal standards of the time allotted to completing a dissertation. There was always something that could be turned into a plus for a client. For all its regulations, academia was a place where the whimsical ruled. He would hale members of the graduate committee before the court, he would examine their own credentials and experience as graduate students in minute detail. Something would turn up, something always did. And when it did, Leone would know what to do with it. Within weeks he would be in negotiations with the university counsel. But Orion Plant’s complaint had the taint of the altruistic, and Leone listened to his potential client unconvinced.

  Leone had been raised on westerns and was ill disposed to consider Native Americans as sympathetic. A brother-in-law had recently cashed in his retirement and lost the entire amount to a casino run by a Wisconsin tribe. There ought to be a law against letting an idiot like his brother-in-law gamble away the security he had amassed over a lifetime. Leone was on the side of the sheriff, the posse, the lone platoon setting out from the fort into Apache country. Orion Plant was asking him to see those forces of civilization as exploiters. He looked at his watch.

  “What do you think?” Plant asked.

  “You don’t have a chance.”

  “You haven’t been listening.”

  “The problem is that I have.”

  “Let me leave this with you.”

  “This” was a manuscript bound at Kinko’s. The cover read: The Case Against Notre Dame: A House Built Upon a Stolen Sand. Leone said he would read it. Somewhat to his surprise, he did.

  He read it late into the night, sipping scotch and water, enthralled. Plant had indeed made a persuasive case against the legitimacy of Notre Dame’s title to the land on which it stood. Plant might have received a doctorate on the basis of the research he had done on this. He should have entered his hobby horse in the race.

  Leone had had only a vague conception of Badin before he read Plant’s manuscript. The first priest ordained in the United States, in Baltimore, had lived a roving ministry going to Bardstown, Indiana, Michigan—before they were states, of course—buying up land out of who knew what selfless greed. His deal with Sorin was lavishly narrated and documented. How could Edward Sorin fail to fear when his title to the land was contested in the late 1850s? But it was Plant’s mention of natural law that triggered something deep and obscure in Leone’s memory.

  The Unwritten Law had dubious status in the courts, but in the Church it was the rock on which alone positive law could be justly built. Half an hour’s reading made clear that such a complaint would be laughed out of any court. But Leone had found the unexpected something which would enable him to triumph once more over the university counsel. How could Notre Dame dismiss as irrelevant the natural law of which the Church claimed to be the providential custodian?

  The ice melted in Leone’s drink, he stopped lighting cigarettes, he closed the manuscript and stared into space. A small smile formed on his lips. Victory was in that smile.

  7

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS ONLY Thursday, the campus had already begun to swarm with visitors for Saturday’s game with the Seminoles. Early arriving Florida State fans registered in their various local hotels and then descended on the campus wearing elements of their school’s regalia. War bonnets were seen and tomahawks flourished. A mocassined man of middle age, gone in drink—thus verifying perhaps the claim that alcohol should be kept from the red man and his friends—jumped into the reflecting pool in front of Hesburgh Library. The pool was three feet deep. His feathered head did not protect him when he struck bottom. He was pulled sputtering over the surrounding ledge, spitting out water. Then he gave out a spine-tingling war whoop. It would be an exciting ga
me.

  Phil had invited guests for the game, one that drew national attention of a special kind. Even in the dullest season, every Notre Dame game made it onto national television. A losing team provided solace for the many who hated the Fighting Irish and what was thought to be their unjust hold on the country’s attention. Loyal fans from coast to coast gathered around their sets, certain that the Blessed Mother would pull victory out of the hat. But this was a winning season for Notre Dame and Florida State too was unbeaten. Warring statistical accounts, put together by analysts who in another age would have studied the entrails of birds, professed to show that Notre Dame’s schedule could not match that of Florida State. Defenders pointed to the scope of the Irish schedule, their opponents drawn from all the major conferences, while Florida State only dominated its own conference. As the game drew near, arguments became heated, level heads were needed to prevent partisans from coming to blows. Phil’s guests, Muggs Bofield and Charlie Callahan, were aficionados of the game itself and professed to be above mere partisan judgments. But the two men were divided on the possible outcome of the game. Listening to them, Roger wondered how a point could spread. He went off to his study to ponder this Euclidean problem.

  When he checked his e-mail, he found a message from Father Carmody, courtesy of the young computer whiz at Holy Cross House where Carmody resided and where “young” meant a priest in his early seventies.

  “Call me. Carmody.”

  Call me Ishmael, Roger thought, and picked up the phone. The chiding voice of a nurse informed him it was too late to put through a call to a resident. It was nearly nine o’clock.

  “Could I leave a message?”

  “For Father Carmody?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Call me. Roger.”

  “Is that all?”

  “He’ll understand.”

  Father Carmody had himself driven over to the Knights’ apartment the following morning. Philip, feeling the effects of his late-night seminar on college football with his two visitors, was not a pretty sight when he went to answer the door. The undeniably clerical persona before him, a type rather than Father Carmody his particular self, made Philip even more affable than, under the circumstances, he would have been to their friend. Now he saw the priest as a trophy he might display to his guests at breakfast.

  “Breakfast?” Father Carmody said, looking at his watch. The priest rose and retired early and this had a distinct advantage. “Is Roger here?”

  Roger had half listened when Philip went to the door, but when he recognized the voice of Father Carmody he wheeled away from his computer and faced the priest as he came into the study.

  “You got my message?”

  They said this in unison, then laughed, Roger more boisterously than Father Carmody. The priest took a chair with a rigid back and lowered himself into it, adjusting his spine to the welcome support of the chair. He had come with a specific request.

  “I would have put it to Philip, but he seems . . .”

  “He was up late. He has visitors here for the game.”

  “Who are we playing?”

  “Florida State.”

  “The Seminoles,” the priest murmured. “That was an Indian tribe, wasn’t it.”

  “Yes it was.”

  “That’s why I’m here.” He readjusted his back against the chair. Father Carmody suffered from lower back pain. “Indians. The university is being sued, or is at least threatened with a suit, over the land on which it is built.”

  It did not surprise Roger that an elderly priest resident in the Congregation’s retirement home should come to him with a request from the administration, not when that priest was Father Carmody. The old priest was not, of course, among the chancellor’s confidants and advisors—he had indignantly rejected this suggestion when Roger once had made it, indeed, he seemed about to say more before years of self-control stilled him. Father Carmody was someone called in when the solution to a pressing problem eluded the usual privy council or required more than usual discretion.

  Roger followed the excellent rule of not indicating that he had any prior knowledge of what Father Carmody had to say. It was always best to permit an uninterrupted narrative. Afterward, he could see how it comported with the snippets he had already picked up from Professor Otto Ranke. And of course most of what Carmody told him was new.

  Bartholomew Leone, a nemesis of the university, had contacted Ballast, the university counsel, with a request that they enter into negotiations on the recent dismissal of Orion Plant from the graduate program in history. Since there seemed absolutely nothing to discuss there once Ballast consulted the history department, he assumed that the charge that academic regulations had been unjustly breached was a decoy.

  “This former graduate student is the source of the charge that Father Sorin knowingly bought stolen property, stolen from the Indians, and that therefore the land should revert to the Indians. Or their heirs.”

  “Is Orion Plant one of them?”

  “That is the assumption. Why else would he turn some humdrum historical research into a crusade?”

  “Why indeed?”

  Father Carmody sat forward, then thought better of it and eased his back against the firm support of the chair.

  “I think you’ll agree that a good offense is the best defense.”

  It sounded like one of the truisms that had been spoken in high slurred voices late into the night. “Of course.”

  Father Carmody ticked off the episodes that had enjoyed a brief run in the local media and then drifted into that great black hole that swallows up the news. Roger had not known of the episode at the log chapel. Father Carmody waved his hand.

  “That doesn’t matter. It is the vandalism in the cemetery that presents an unequivocal instance of law breaking.”

  “But more distasteful than legally serious.”

  “No doubt. Then there is the kidnapping.”

  “Father Burnside?”

  “No no. The chancellor.”

  This was indeed news. The events Father Carmody related had been successfully kept secret. The pathetic performance of the chancellor on the video that had been left at Corby Hall was described.

  “Did they ask for ransom?”

  “They want a concession that the land is stolen.”

  “But they did not keep the chancellor prisoner until they got it.”

  “The next message told his whereabouts and rescuers went to fetch him. It has left him shaken.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  The theory in the Main Building was that recent events had been elements in a carefully planned strategy that would stretch into an indefinite future, with more pressure put on the university with the passage of time. Kidnapping the chancellor had been a dramatic way to get his attention. And a copy of the damning video could be delivered to a television station at any moment. It was the chancellor’s particular wish that all copies of the sad scene he had enacted for his captors be destroyed.

  “What offense did you have in mind?”

  “They, Roger. I am a mere messenger. But in this case I think they may actually be right. The assumption they want explored is that the same people are behind the legal threat and perpetrated those outrages.”

  “That seems plausible.”

  “Proof is needed. And discretion, of course; the other side must not be alerted that the inquiry is going on.”

  “And you want Philip to conduct it?”

  “You and Philip.”

  An accuser accused of sacrilege and kidnapping would be thrown from his moral high horse and lose the rhetorical advantage that agitating for Indians undoubtedly gave in the present atmosphere. Roger said he was certain Philip would agree to take the case.

  “Are you going to the game, Father?”

  “I prefer to watch it at Holy Cross House. We have a very large screen television now.”

  “Can you hear the cheers from the stadium there?”<
br />
  “Some of us can.”

  8

  PROFESSOR RANKE LIVED with his wife and daughter in a modest ranch house on Angela Boulevard, on the edge of the campus and within easy walking distance of his office in Decio. The interview with Orion Plant not only spelled the end of the young man’s academic career but also wrote finis to another matter Ranke had driven into the deeper recesses of memory. But this disturbing thought emerged then. Orion and Laverne Ranke, his daughter. Once there had been what in an eighteenth-century novel would have been called an understanding between them. Nothing overt, simply the significance of the unstated, the logic of events. In his first years as a graduate student, Orion had been a frequent presence in the Ranke home. The first time he had been included in a group of students the professor had in for a Sunday afternoon sherry party. Laverne, a recent graduate of Saint Mary’s and of the same age as these graduate students, joined the party, along with Freda, Mrs. Ranke.

  Otto Ranke had carried into his private life the high standards of his profession—or was it perhaps vice versa. In any case, he would never have been able to fly in the face of facts. Laverne was what Pascal said Cleopatra would have had to be if the course of history were to have been different. There were angles from which her nose did not seem overly large. Her eyes were good, but she wore glasses with weak lenses and frames meant to draw attention away from the protuberance that supported them. Laverne had her mother’s complexion, a sort of off-white that paled throughout the fall and then became splotchy with cold weather. Laverne’s one undeniable endowment was her hair, inherited from the Ranke side. Thick, reddish, undulant, it swept back from her narrow forehead and formed a great distracting compensation for her face. Ranke had sometimes thought that if Laverne could back into a room she would overwhelm. She and young Plant hit it off.