The Book of Kills (7 page)

When the chancellor and his party left the box, they moved swiftly to the lower level and there, in a room reserved for security forces, the officers of the university confronted the halftime Indian. He sat in the brightly lighted room on a stool, a blanket draped around his shoulders. The paint on his body had been smeared in the struggle to take him into custody. He looked with manic cheerfulness at the administrative party. Ballast had been questioning him without result.

“He won’t say who he is.”

“Has he no identification?”

“Where would he carry it?”

Mrs. Noonan had begun to weep. Something was very wrong and she did not know what it was, only that her husband had missed half the game and nobody knew where he was. Miss Trafficant tried unsuccessfully to console her.

“Where is Mr. Noonan?” the chancellor demanded of the captured Indian.

“Would that be High Noonan?”

It is a serious offense against Canon Law to strike a priest; the traffic in the opposite direction is murkier. It was all the chancellor could do not to slap the smirking face of the captive. Once the highest officers of this institution would have been able to recognize any student, but neither the chancellor nor anyone in his party knew who this lad was. Of course, none of them came into regular contact with students.

“What should we do with him?” a security person asked Ballast, switching her ponytail as she did.

“Is he under arrest?”

“We don’t have the authority to arrest anyone, not properly.”

And so, perforce, the South Bend police were called and the cat was, or soon would be, out of the bag. The chancellor took his party to the Morris Inn, the campus hotel, in awaiting limousines. He wished he were going to his room and to his bed where he could pull the covers over his head and curse the day he had been plucked from the ranks to his present eminence. At the Morris Inn they found both Noonan and Father Anselm. Some time before, they had been pushed into the lobby, cloth sacks tied over their heads, hands bound behind them, stripped to the waist. Their bodies had been painted, with especial attention paid to the scar left by Noonan’s open heart surgery.

ORION PLANT HAD SPENT
the day of the football game in company with his wife, Marcia, and a graduate student in mathematics named Byers. Neither of them knew that he was establishing his alibi. He himself had had no direct contact with the man named Hessian, a mercenary in any case who was exhibitionist enough to accept the role assigned him. He thought it was a spoof, and any small reluctance he might have felt was swept away by the mention of national television. Byers had no knowledge of that particular event. Laverne had assumed the job of recruiting Hessian with dedicated loyalty and she, he was sure, would be quiet as the grave even under torture. He still had not told Marcia that he was no longer a graduate student and that now they must survive on her salary from the Huddle.

Disappointment at his dismissal had long since given way to satisfaction, as if he had deliberately arranged his own departure. He felt free. He was no longer in thrall to the pedantic demands of academic research. He had not wasted much time on his approved project, not since he had stumbled upon what Leone had called his crusade. What Orion referred to, not facetiously, as the Younger archives had set him on the path that would take him on to glory. Whatever the outcome of his efforts, the name Orion Plant was assured of a permanent place in the annals of Notre Dame.

The bedroom that had been occupied by Mrs. Younger before she took refuge with a married son in San Diego had been converted into a war room of research. A plain table sat among the cabinets holding the records of Younger Real Estate, but Orion’s attention had been concentrated on papers that dated from the nineteenth century. There he had come upon the plat book of property the Youngers had owned on land now occupied by the new golf course. There had been a house, of course, but it was only the ownership of the land that was of interest in the plat book. The name Andrew Jackson had caught his attention, and then Chief Pokagon’s. To Orion’s cold eye it was clear that Marcia’s forbears had jobbed the Indians out of that land at least at several removes. Under the aegis of Andrew Jackson it had passed from the Indians to white ownership and then in a direct line to Silas Younger, Marcia’s great-great-grandfather. From that point on, work on his dissertation had become a distraction and he had pursued the spoor from cabinet drawer to cabinet drawer.

“Your relatives were natural historians,” he told Marcia. She smiled as if unsure this was a compliment. But in the Younger operation no piece of paper was considered too unimportant to be filed away and kept.

The dossier Orion had given to Leone the lawyer was but a sampling of the goods he had gotten on the university. At the beginning, he had been motivated by a generic iconoclasm. Notre Dame was a volatile mixture of braggadocio and inferiority complex. The fact that he had been accepted by no other graduate program was held against him when he arrived, as if, he grumbled, he had aimed at the bottom and hit it.

“I didn’t apply anywhere else.”

“That wasn’t wise. You were lucky to get in here.”

This vacillation between self-deprecation and chest-thumping bravura fascinated for a time. It was difficult to tell which was genuine and which bogus. How could an institution draw constant attention to its rankings by one magazine or another and at the same time insist on its uniqueness? To be in the top twenty-five was perhaps comparable to being number one, but aside from football and philosophy that ranking had eluded Notre Dame. With time he became disgusted with this constant looking in the mirror for reassurance. True self-confidence would have dictated indifference to the vagaries of magazine staffs who presumed to assess the colleges and universities of the nation. Yet the current ranking was prominently featured on the university website.

It is, of course, of the nature of graduate students to grumble and when in private assembly to damn the program and mock the faculty. But this, too, was ambiguous, a hedge against possible failure. With Orion it became wholly sincere. His contempt for his discipline was not localized. He came to despise the pointless pedantic dissertations his peers were engaged in writing. What earthly difference would one outcome or another of their research make? Professor Ranke might regard his delving into the past of the place as a diversion, but it had become a holy war for Orion. Marcia was his ally, but only up to a point. Laverne, whom she scornfully called the “professor’s daughter,” was a sore point.

“She’s a double agent, 0.”

007? He tried to josh away her suspicions. But he had grievances of his own. At her insistence, he had included Byers in the tribal councils, as he called them.

“He’s in mathematics.”

“Even so.”

It was as if she wanted to balance his inclusion of Laverne. To tell Marcia that admitting Laverne to the campaign was a way of compromising Ranke would have been met with derision. But Orion really didn’t trust Byers. Byers had been there at the log chapel when they disrupted the wedding in the name of the wronged Indians, but he pleaded an examination when it was a question of kidnapping the chancellor. Byers might have been making sure that he was minimally involved and keeping out of harm’s way. And Orion had the sense that he had never forgotten that once Marcia had been his girl.

But Byers was there when they ringed the television set to see the fake leprechaun prance onto the field and then tear off his green disguise to reveal his painted body. They cheered as he escaped again and again from the clutches of the security forces.

“He certainly earned his money.”

Fifty dollars, collected from the reluctant group of conspirators. Orion had tossed in a twenty to sweeten the pot, avoiding Marcia’s eyes.

Later, someone commended Laverne on her choice and Marcia bristled. “He’ll be arrested, you know. He’ll tell them everything. Let’s see what Laverne does then.”

Orion stood and put on his coat. Marcia looked up. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to check out the Morris Inn, see how they’re taking it.”

He did not see Marcia look at Byers.

THE MORRIS INN WAS
packed after the game. Fans of the opposing teams had forgotten the animosities that preceded the contest and were now toasting one another in a show of good sportsmanship. The chancellor was not there, having been whisked away to a more controllable post-game celebration on the fourteenth floor of the library, an aerie from which the now emptied stadium was visible to the south, the campus to the west, Mishawaka, its mall and many satellites to the east, and to the north the long lines of traffic heading for the toll road.

The chancellor was drinking Evian on ice with a twist. His party were imbibing more enervating potions before they went in to dinner hosted by the president. The hours all this would consume lay before the chancellor like a penitential task. He was finding it difficult to keep his chin up and show the flag in the customary way. These happy people were directly or indirectly responsible for the affluence of the university and this was small compensation for their loyal labor. Behind the chancellor’s smile, hidden from those with whom he exchanged banalities, was the memory of that half-dressed madman streaking up and down the field carrying his banner. It was one more move in a game he understood only as an effort to torment him. Suddenly, tall cadaverous Sisson stood before him, tipping his
head forward so that he could both look down at the chancellor and look over his glasses.

“Another triumph.” Sisson’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. He represented the persistent effort of some alumni to have football de-emphasized, to stop what they thought was a drift toward secularization. Sisson wanted all theologians to take the oath prescribed by Canon Law for teachers of Catholic doctrine. He wanted the chancellor to initiate and lead a movement on the part of other chancellors to accept
Ex corde ecclesiae
, the document on Catholic universities, unreservedly. Sisson scoffed at the excuse of academic freedom. He laughed at the suggestion that a more militantly Catholic Notre Dame would have difficulty raising money. He claimed that he himself could raise more but too many potential donors were put off by the direction the university was taking. Sisson himself possessed unmeasured wealth and he was generous to a fault, the fault being that he carefully earmarked the money he gave for projects of which he approved. Now he began a litany of complaints, things that had been passed on to him by students and faculty. Father Bloom felt under seige and abandoned by the president and his minions. He almost welcomed the bustling arrival of Ballast.

“Mr. Sisson,” the university counselor cried. Sisson leaned forward to look at Ballast. He seemed not to remember him. “I’m going to have to ask Father to come aside with me for a moment.”

Sisson dismissed them. Ballast got a good grip on the chancellor’s arm and led him away to the area by the elevators.

“He’s been arrested.”

“Is he a student?”

“He says not.”

“Then who is he?”

“He says his name is Tonto.”

“He’s part of it.”

He did not need to explain to the counsel what the whole was. Ballast had entered eagerly into the chancellor’s theory that there was a vendetta against him.

“As chancellor,” Ballast insisted.

“I’m beginning to think it’s me they’re after.”

“The immediate question is, do we ask that charges be pressed or dismiss it as a harmless joke?”

“Harmless! He was on national television.”

“His message will be seen as a joke.”

“But is it?” There was desperation in the chancellor’s eyes.

“Half the staff of the archives is working on it.” Ballast got on tiptoe to whisper into Father Bloom’s ear. “And the Knight brothers.”

“Ah.” He sipped his Evian as if from need. Afterward he worked his lips like a woman who had just applied lipstick. “Have him prosecuted.”

“You’re sure.”

“Absolutely. We have to strike back.” He paused. “Check with the president, of course.”