The Book of Kills (5 page)

“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?”

“Some of us can.”

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.

He returned with the excuse of seeing his professor, but he asked about Laverne and she was summoned. Soon the murmur of their conversation and sudden bursts of laughter came from the family room at the back of the house that overlooked Cedar Grove Cemetery. Freda and Otto looked at one another but said nothing. Those visits had become regular. Laverne would make popcorn and they would watch any silliness on television in order to remain in the family room and away from her parents in the front part of the house. They went out infrequently—as often as not to a movie shown on campus—but he was a graduate student living on a pittance. They developed the lugubrious habit of going across the backyard for long walks in Cedar Grove Cemetery.

Ranke did not deny that the apparent direction of his daughter’s relations with Orion Plant affected his treatment of the young man. Like most graduate students, Orion had arrived with an inflated notion of the state of his knowledge. This was followed by a dip in the slough of despond when the extent of the ignorance they had brought with them was revealed in class and seminar. Orion skipped this second phase and thus never advanced to the third desirable condition when the demands of
the discipline were understood and a chastened confidence began. Orion remained as he had come, unaware of the vast gaps in his learning. And then one day, in Ranke’s office, Orion casually mentioned that he had married.

Hope leapt in the professorial breast. Laverne had gone off to visit a classmate in Detroit some days before. Had the young couple eloped? Was this his son-in-law who sat before him, simpering and foolish?

“She’s from a local family. She works in the Huddle.”

Otto Ranke had never confronted such a situation in his entire life. The father in him suggested bounding over his desk and throttling this callous fool. After a moment, his stolid Teutonic ancestry took over.

“Well,” he said.

“It came as a bit of a surprise to me too.”

Had Laverne been told of this new attachment that had led so swiftly to the altar? Ranke did not press Orion for details. He diverted the conversation to academic channels. Nothing in his manner could have conveyed to his student the contempt he felt for him. His own honor seemed to have been compromised. But all this was suppressed as they turned to the amateurish paper to which Ranke had already given a mark far higher than it deserved.

Laverne had not known. When she heard the news she languished. She became a recluse in her room. She took several days off from her job in the library and when she returned to the check-out desk she was, like so many females in library employ, one whose future was entirely behind her.

A new modus vivendi established itself between professor and student. Orion was known as his protégé and Ranke could not bring himself to make known his true estimate of the young
man’s prospects as an historian. He continued to dissemble with his colleagues. They came to count on him as Orion Plant’s champion. Colleagues had watched with dismay his defense of the unpromising Plant, but Ranke continued to shield the young man from the judgment that should have been passed on him. And so for years it had gone.

Three months before, Ranke returned home, grunted at Freda, who tried to detain him, and went into his study. It was there that he heard emanating from the family room sounds that had seemed to be stilled forever. There was a young man with Laverne and that man was undoubtedly Orion Plante. Their conversation murmured as before, the outbursts of laughter recalled a better time. Ranke sat at his desk and did not know what to do. Later, when Orion had gone and Freda had retired with a cup of broth, Ranke confronted his daughter.

“Was that Orion I heard back here with you?”

“Yes.” She looked up at him with radiant, defiant eyes.

“What was it all about?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Laverne, the man is married.”

“Not in the Church!”

“Not in the Church?”

“It was impulsive, but he had the good sense not to enter into a real marriage.”

“Has he proposed to you?”

She wanted to say yes, he could sense that. One visit had wiped away the empty years. Things were back to status quo ante. The expectations she had, perhaps rightly, entertained before were back in full force.

“I don’t want you entertaining a married man in this house.”

He left her to ponder what he would have been happy to
generalize into a Kantian universal. No self-respecting father would care to have his unmarried daughter murmuring and laughing with a married man in his home.

It was some time before he learned that what he had thought was a solitary visit, a nostalgic return of the faithless beau, had been the first of a renewed series. Freda colluded with the young couple, moved by the status of Orion’s marriage. Not even an annulment would be needed, only a divorce as civil as the marriage.

“Then he has proposed?”

Freda seemed confused.

“So he hasn’t?”

“But, Otto, he is back . . .”

Laverne was no more informative. She was openly defiant now, displaying that madness of the female in want of a mate. How powerful is the drive of nature that she could find the man who had broken her heart acceptable once more. There was something fresh and animated about her. She might have been wakened from a long sleep. Ranke repeated his order about her seeing Orion in his home, but it was no longer a Kantian imperative. Perhaps something could happen even now . . .

The clandestine meetings continued. Months passed. Orion continued living with his wife and her family. Should Otto ask him what his intentions were?

All indecision left him when the headstones in the cemetery were toppled and he learned that Laverne had been entertaining Orion while her father attended a lecture by a visitor to campus. Otto Ranke saw it all. His daughter had been cruelly used again, and the fact that she was unaware of it made it worse. She had provided a base of operations for the desecration in Cedar Grove. He was sure of it, intuitively certain. The canons
of his profession did not warrant the inference, but doubt was a stranger in this matter. How easy to slip out of the house, into the cemetery, and then back again, unobserved by any campus patrol that might have been in the vicinity. A few days later, at the meeting of the graduate committee, Otto Ranke added his black ball to the others and Orion Plant was ejected. Laverne languished. There were no further visits. Professor Ranke found it difficult to rejoice in his Pyrrhic victory. His daughter, having twice taken leave of her senses, now took a leave from her post in the library. Freda was confused but silent.