The Book of Kills

by Ralph McInerny

  He turned, startled, then smiled. “Roger.” It was a blessing of their friendship that Whelan did not stammer when they talked, his handicap neutralized by Roger’s obesity.

  “You’re busy.”

  Whelan rose from his computer as if to indicate the relative unimportance of his task. They moved to one of the closed rooms where visiting scholars worked but which this morning was empty so they could converse without danger of disturbing some important research.

  “Recent events have made me curious about the university’s title to its land.”

  Whelan smiled. “Moi aussi. I have been creating a list of relevant items.”

  “I should like to see it.”

  “I’ll print it out for you.”

  “Any surprises?”

  The archives were a treasure house of surprises and even Whelan, with his encyclopedic grasp of their contents, was constantly coming upon the unexpected. He had no need of his recent assembled list of items to recall what he had found. Roger listened enthralled. He was no longer surprised by Whelan’s memory: it would have rivaled that of a medieval master who had to hold in store hundreds of texts seen once and then no more.

  Father Badin’s 1832 purchase of the land from the government was well documented and had been told in all the standard works. He had spent only a few years at the mission he established there, building the log chapel and several sheds, and ministering to the Potowatomi. In 1835, he was off again, after deeding the land to the diocese of Vincennes. Father Petit was one of the priests who succeeded him at Ste.-Marie-des-Lacs, as Badin called the mission. This was the property offered to Edward Sorin by the bishop of Vincennes. A few years later, Badin took up residence at what was now the University of Notre Dame, receiving an annuity from Father Sorin, a species of retirement plan that would make his many years lie less heavily on his shoulders. But there had been misunderstanding almost from the beginning. Badin was a shrewd bargainer but he had more than met his match in Sorin. Whelan gave a swift precis of this oft-told story and then stopped. His expression was promissory.

  “What then?”

  “Attention is then drawn to legitimacy of the transfer to Sorin of title to the land.”

  “Ah.”

  This story was unknown to Roger and he listened attentively. Whelan looped back to the saga of Father Petit, who had identified himself with the dispossessed natives and when they were herded away had gone with them, as friend, as chaplain, as fellow martyr. He was buried in the crypt of Sacred Heart.

  “I have developed a devotion to him,” Whelan confided. “I often visit him there.”

  This straightforward acceptance of the communion of the saints warmed Roger’s heart. How few moved from acceptance of the doctrine to its realization. Saints have written of the angels that attend the altar on which the Mass is offered, the Church Triumphant as well as the Church Suffering there with the Church Militant as the central event in cosmic history was commemorated. For Whelan, Petit was a contemporary, separated only by the veil of death.

  “But that was before Sorin came?”

  “And after Badin.”

  “Ah.”

  Whelan went on. Speaking as a lawyer, he doubted that either Badin’s or Sorin’s title to the land could successfully be contested.

  “Besides, who has status to contest it?”

  “Descendants?”

  “You must read of the death march to the Southwest to see how improbable that is.”

  “Could someone come forward on behalf of those Indians?”

  “They could try.”

  “I think they are.”

  Although cleared of snow, the campus walks were icy and Roger made slow progress in his golf cart to Juniper Road across which he inched, hoping he was sufficiently visible to traffic. Motorists sometimes seemed to think that if they had a clear shot at a crossing student they could take him out with impunity. He reached the library parking lot and headed across it as if it were frozen tundra. The tire treads were packed with snow and had lost their traction. An icy wind whipped at him, changing directions constantly as if to assault him on all sides. When he reached Bulla Road, he headed east toward the house where Orion Plant lived.

  Once this road had been lined with residences. Now the Day Care Center and the vast village containing the buildings which housed graduate students commanded it. In one of those buildings was the apartment Roger shared with Philip, and he felt a powerful impulse to postpone his mission and return to the warmth of his workroom and his computer. But talking with Whelan had made this visit seem even more important. What he and Phil had been commissioned to do was something he could do more easily than his brother. Faculty status should be an Open Sesame to the Plant residence.

  Five minutes spent shivering on the doorstep, wondering if he should sound the bell yet again, made Roger doubt he would be admitted. Lights were on, he had the sense that someone was in the house, though the racket of the wind would have whisked away any sound that might have come to him, even if his ears had not been hidden away beneath the woolen cap he had pulled down firmly over his head. There was a taste of winter in the air, though the prediction was that there were still warm weeks ahead. Indian Summer.

  Finally there was the sound of the door being unlocked. It was opened and someone was vaguely visible through the steamed glass of the door. A woman’s hand cleared a porthole and peered out. Roger pulled off his hat and shouted to the wind that he was Professor Knight. Finally the storm door was unlocked and pushed open. Roger heaved himself inside and fell onto the sofa, huffing and puffing.

  “Thank you. Is your husband home?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Roger Knight. Professor Knight.”

  “In history?” Her manner had changed from wary to sympathetic when he sat on the sofa without hesitation. Now she was wary again.

  “No, no. I am a university professor.” He smiled. “A man without a country.”

  She was an unprepossessing young woman. Suddenly a man appeared from another room. He stood and looked with disappointment at Roger.

  “I’ve heard of you.”

  “Word gets around. I know your dissertation director Otto Ranke rather well. He mentioned you.”

  Orion’s reaction to this was edgy and odd. He swung on his wife. “Get us some coffee, why don’t you?”

  She gave an impatient sigh and then said to Roger, “Would you like coffee?”

  “Please. Not for me.”

  “I want coffee,” the presumed Orion said, glaring at her.

  “Then I’ll have some too,” Roger said cheerfully. He had a hunch that Orion had not told his wife of the demise of his academic life. This seemed an advantage of some sort, he wasn’t sure why.

  “So you know Ranke?” his host said when they were alone.

  “I’m Roger Knight.” Roger rocked forward and extended his hand.

  “Orion Plant.” They shook hands. “So you know old Ranke?”

  “I was reminded of something he once told me about things that have been happening on campus.”

  “What things?”

  “Silly things, by and large. I didn’t see it myself, but I understand someone dressed as an Indian brave made himself conspicuous during halftime.”

  “I heard about that.”

  “You weren’t at the game?”

  “I never go.” Roger had met members of that fraction of Notre Dame people who professed never to follow any university sport, never to have seen a game. But it was not on principle with Orion. “How’s a graduate student supposed to afford a ticket?”

  “I suppose the stipend is small.”

  Orion looked thoughtfully at him. “What exactly did Professor Ranke say about me that brought you out on a day like this?”

  “It is terrible weather. Totally different from Saturday. I don’t suppose any one would run around half clothed on a day like today.”

  “You seem fascinated by that.”

  “Actually, it was mer
ely a catalyst. Not unlike the wedding at the log chapel a few weeks ago.”

  “What was that?”

  “You don’t know?”

  He might just as well have denied hearing of the halftime incident. If anything, the disrupted, or at least postponed, wedding, received more attention. Certainly student attention. Perhaps they imagined their own future weddings made a pawn of by someone’s idea of fun. Roger described the scene, tendentiously.

  “Dressing up and demonstrating is one thing, depriving someone forcibly of their freedom quite another. I say nothing of the sacrilege.”

  “But think of the point of it! They were protesting what was done to the Native Americans who occupied this land long before any white man came.”

  “Professor Ranke told me you had become quite knowledgeable about all that.”

  “It’s a kind of hobby, only tangential to my dissertation.”

  “Then you think the demonstrators have a case?”

  “I was there, man. I was one of them.”

  “The leader?”

  “They wouldn’t have known the facts if I hadn’t told them. How could anyone know the facts and not want to do something about it?”

  Mrs. Plant came in and Roger was introduced formally. She brought the coffee in mugs, black, and, having sat, asked, “Do you take anything with it?”

  “This is fine.”

  “We always drink it black.”

  “Coffee. One of the white man’s contributions to the continent.”

  “And tobacco is the Indian’s gift.” Orion pulled out some cigarettes and lit one defiantly. Marcia got hold of the package before he put it back in his pocket, took one, and waited for him to light it. Finally she lit it herself.

  “In this case, the Indian giver is being asked to take it back.”

  “I’ve quit,” Orion said. “I know I can. But I choose to smoke.”

  “He did quit,” Marcia said in awed tones. “I never could.”

  “We’ve been talking about incidents on behalf of Indians that have taken place on campus lately,” Roger said.

  “Never heard of them.”

  Orion looked at her. “Of course you did.”

  “I did not.”

  “Are you a student, too?” Roger asked.

  “I work on campus.”

  When Orion did speak of the way the university had acquired its land, it was a hopelessly garbled version. Perhaps deliberately so. After his visit to Whelan, Roger would scarcely have given Orion a passing mark on his presentation.

  The battery in his cart was low and Roger regretted not recharging it while he talked with the Plants. He would risk that he had enough power to get home. It was only several hundred yards away. He told the Plants that as he squeezed behind the wheel.

  “They stole all this land too.” Orion said. Marcia, not dressed for it, had come outside too, and she clung to her husband’s arm. As he drove away Roger was saddened by the thought that he had learned enough to give credence to the view that Orion had toppled gravestones and, more grave, kidnapped the chancellor, the trustee Noonan, and Father Anselm. Even so, the information was wanted to neutralize his charges, not to have him put in prison. There was consolation in that.

  The wind had gone down during the interval of his visit and he got within walking distance of the apartment before the battery of his golf cart went dead.

  14

  PROFESSOR OTTO RANKE sat in committee, his mind wandering, thinking of a recent headline in the Observer: GROUP DEBATES NAME OF COMMITTE. He had come to relish these proofs of student illiteracy. It was all he could do not to read the student paper with a correcting pencil. Committee was a word no member of the faculty was likely to misspell. How much of their time was spent, scattered around a table like this, discussing some interminable topic. This was a meeting of the college ethics committee and he was departmental representative involuntarily, having been appointed by Sencil after the chair had explained to him the refusal of junior members to do anything beyond the minimal for their exorbitant pay.

  “But committee work is part of the minimum.”

  “I wish I could convince them of it.”

  “Let me try.”

  “No, Otto, no.” The thought alarmed Sencil. He was in his forties and perhaps had some residual memory of a time when faculty taught twice as much as they did now and accepted academic tasks without complaint. Sencil’s cowardice meant that the senior member of the department was expected to carry water for his delinquent juniors. Of course he accepted. The habits of a lifetime were hard to break. He had lived to regret his acquiescence.

  Once, a student caught cheating was expelled without ceremony or hesitation. He had broken the sacred covenant that must obtain between teacher and student. Now, a professor brought his suspicions to this committee and they considered the case and acted as jury. They were not a hanging jury. The accused student routinely threatened to employ a lawyer. The level of proof had been raised to a point where it was virtually impossible to reach a guilty verdict. The criteria were no longer those of the academy, but of civil law. Still, complaints were brought and the committee sat.

  The room they met in was a windowed seminar room off the main corridor of DeBartolo. Passersby slowed and stared at them, puzzled, and then went on. Clearly this wasn’t a class and the members were so heterogenous, departmentally speaking, that their raison d’être was not obvious. An assistant dean was in the chair, a misanthrope who ignored male members and allowed sisters of her sex to preach endlessly. It didn’t matter. Futility engaged in by either gender was still futility. Ranke thought of his own suspicions of only a year ago, the Russell Bacon case. It was odd to think that it had been brought to his attention by Orion Plant. Now Orion had been cast into outer darkness, rightly, while Bacon sizzled along toward his doctorate. The young man was a charlatan and a cheat.

  The paper he had submitted to Ranke’s seminar on the tragic history of the Congregation of Holy Cross in New Orleans that had nearly led to a break between Notre Dame and the mother house in LeMans had been passable and not much else. It happened to be on the top of the pile when Orion had come for one of his infrequent consultations. The phone rang as they were talking and Ranke answered it. A bored Plant had picked up the paper and read it. He was still holding it when Ranke finished the call.

  “Why are you keeping this?”

  “Those papers are from my current seminar.”

  “But this is my paper!”

  Ranke dismissed this, saying all papers looked the same nowadays. Meaning bad. But Orion was incensed. He rattled on. He sounded like one of the cases brought before the ethics committee. But Orion was adamant. He knew his own paper, didn’t he? And of course Bacon had had opportunity to download it from Orion’s computer. Orion found his library carrel claustrophic and left the door open when he was in it, and unlocked when he was not.

  “I keep everything on the hard disk. We talked about this assignment. I called up my old paper and gave him advice about his.”

  “No wonder they’re similar.”

  “Similar? They’re identical.”

  Orion was on his feet. He would prove it. Off he went and within the hour, he was back. He dropped a laser-printed essay on Ranke’s desk.

  “I’ll compare them for you.”

  And he did, standing beside Ranke’s chair, pointing back and forth between the two papers. They were line-for-line identical. Bacon had not even reformatted it before printing it out. He had remembered to substitute his name for Orion’s and change the dates. In that, at least, his paper was original.

  “I’m going to break his neck,” Orion roared. His indignation was that of someone seldom in the right.

  “Orion, sit down and listen.”

  Ranke explained to his presumed protégé about the ethics committee. He felt like a bad angel, corrupting the young. He was conscious of betraying, by proposed inaction, the ideals of scholarship, to say nothing of simple human honesty. Orion listened i
n sulking disillusionment. Ranke was patient and lengthy in his explanation of the futility of bringing any charge. When eventually Orion left, Ranke felt unclean. For once Orion had been wholly right. Bacon should have been expelled forthwith on the basis of this unequivocal evidence. In a better time, he would have been. But times had changed. Not for the first time, Otto Ranke wondered if he had not lived too long, or at least put off retirement too long.

  That was not quite the end of it. Some days later, a scowling Orion returned.

  “I should have stored it on a floppy,” he said when he had sunk into a chair.

  “What happened?”

  “I told Bacon I knew what he had done.”

  “And he denied it.”

  “No. He crowed about it. Maybe if he hadn’t I would just have followed your advice. I told him you knew of the plagiarism. That was my big mistake.”

  When Orion next looked at the files on his hard drive he found that the seminar paper was no longer there. It had been erased. It seemed clear that Bacon had done it. Any charge now would be only hearsay. Ranke felt relief and hated himself for it.

  Now Ranke permitted the discussion of the ethics committee to become audible. Academic women continue to be guided by compassion, however misguided. The accused was always in good hands with them. They too had known unjust oppression. . . . Ranke took his mind out of gear again and looked out the window, not the ones giving a view of the corridor outside, but those through which the campus in the final phase of autumn was richly visible. How many more campus seasons would he see? The longer he stayed, the greater the risk that he would have someone like Bacon for a colleague. Perhaps he already did.

  15

  BARTHOLOMEW LEONE, LIKE EVERYone else, bore the effects of Original Sin. He sensed a signal victory in the offing and he was fidgety with delight. He moved up and down his office, waiting for his client, anticipating the inevitable jousting with Ballast. He had pored over the bound document Orion Plant had left with him. He had pursued the spoor of possible precedents and come up empty. Of course, academic law was relatively new and precedents were as often set as followed, but the conviction had grown upon him that Ballast would make mincemeat of him in court, if the case ever went to court, which he doubted. This was a moment when a wise lawyer threw in the sponge, advised his client he did not have a case, putting an end to it. But Leone awaited his client with a different purpose in mind.