The Book of Kills (9 page)

“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.

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 in 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.

BARTHOLOMEW LEONE, LIKE EVERY
one 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.

He had not had to read much of what Orion had amassed to see its many weaknesses as the basis for a suit. But early on he had considered making the unfamiliar transition from the legal to the moral. In the time since, the idea had grown in him until he had become a veritable Torquemada in the wings. The material he had would be devastating if made public in a proper way.

To his credit it must be said that when Leone thought of his
enemy it was Ballast he saw, not anyone in the administration, not any of the good fathers, at least those among the living. In some degree, it was the triumph of a higher justice that he hungered and thirsted for. But that left room for the imagined pleasure of Ballast helpless before his righteous onslaught and exposed once and for all to his employers as incompetent. But not immaterial. Ballast had taken on weight in office. Leone had it on good authority that Ballast took a slimming swim in one of the university’s Olympic pools twice a week. Floated, was more probable. Well, he was soon to sink.

Something of Leone’s elation dissipated when Orion Plant arrived. What a sullen, disagreeable fellow he was.

“You going to take the case?”

“Please sit down. Orion, this is more than a case.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean that we are going to take the high ground. I have sketched out a plan for a moral assault. This is too big for mere legality.”

“I want to sue the bastards.”

“That would be inadvisable.”

“Have you read what I gave you?”

“Assiduously. It doesn’t hold up legally. In a narrowly legal sense the land is theirs. I am willing to stipulate that. But there is a higher tribunal than the state. I needn’t tell you how public opinion has swung in favor of the oppressed. Indians are regularly used in television commercials designed to wrench the heart. We will invoke the university’s own high proclaimed standards against it.”

“With what result?”

Leone paused. He doubted that his own triumph over Ballast
would engage the sympathy of his client. It was important to proceed with care.

“How would you like being known as the man who brought Christianity to Christendom, who shook the university loose from the clutches of hypocrisy and forced it to acknowledge that you were right as rain and they despicable?”

“Will there be a settlement?”