The Book of Kills (18 page)

“You got any AA batteries?” Ballast asked the next time he popped like a cuckoo out of the chancellor’s office. His Palm Pilot had gone dead. “I’ll bring them in,” she said, having had an inspiration.

She called Harold and asked him to bring her some AA batteries.

“It’ll be a while.”

“You running out of energy?”

“Not likely.”

“They’re for the chancellor. Emergency.”

He dropped whatever he was doing and came. He had picked up the batteries at the bookstore.

“I thought you had those things in stock.”

“Why would we?”

“Wait. I’ll be right back.”

She tapped and entered, and silence seemed to go like a wave before her. Ballast took the batteries and looked apologetically at the others, but he was ignored. She closed the door again on the resumed discussion.

Harold was not in the office. She couldn’t believe it. She had called up his personnel file and wanted to show it to him and ask about his middle name. It was right there on the screen. She had half expected to find him looking at it when she returned.

She sat, but her spirits sank lower than she did. What an unpredictable guy he was beginning to be. She tapped a key and the file came up. She leaned forward, her mouth open. Harold’s middle name had disappeared from the first line of his personnel file.

Her buzzer sounded and she went into the chancellor’s office. He looked worse than he had when he came back from being kidnapped. The trustees were in a ring facing the desk, the chancellor’s advisors scattered about the edges of the room.

“Can we accommodate all these gentlemen for the game tomorrow?”

“I called Corby and have four. Finding a fifth won’t be difficult.”

“Would you get us rooms in the Morris Inn?”

Anita looked at Schippers. The Morris Inn was booked in perpetuity for game weekends. The chancellor controlled three rooms. She explained this.

“We’ll double up.”

All the other multimillionaires nodded. They seemed to like the prospect of roughing it.

“Of course you’re my guests,” the chancellor said.

They had never doubted that by the looks they exchanged.

“Maybe we should continue this without kibitzers, Father.”

Schippers said this to the president, referring to the chancellor’s advisors. Father Bloom seemed about to protest, but Ballast had risen and then the others followed suit. Anita held the door for them. The chancellor watched them go as if he were being abandoned.

Ballast said, “They’ll eat him alive.”

“What’s he done?”

“You heard him. He didn’t know how to reassure them that everything is all right.”

“He’ll tough it out.”

They wandered away, instructing her to call them immediately if the chancellor asked for them.

“Maybe we should wait here.”

“I have work to do.”

The interruption had served to take her mind off Harold’s surprising departure after she had explicitly asked him to stay. Did he find her bossy? She was bossy. Somebody had to be around here.

The local evening paper arrived. Not the
Picayune
, which in
any case had decided to lay off the university, but the other one. They had decided to fill the vacuum created by the
Picayune’s
failure to follow up its scoop. The story was on the front page, running along the bottom third of the page. It told of the mysterious death of Orion Plant, who had been researching the legitimacy of the transfer of the land the university stood on. The clear implication was that these events were connected. There was no mention of the chancellor’s having been kidnapped. Orion’s summary dismissal from the graduate school was mentioned with the heavy implication that this had been a species of retaliation.

Feeling devilish, Anita made copies of the story and took them in to the chancellor and his guests.

ROGER SURRENDERED HIS
ticket so Phil could take Lieutenant Stewart to the game. The two attended the pep rally Friday night as well, but Roger did not repine. He was able to keep his appetite for athletics under control and had been to many more games than he had really wanted in order to keep Phil company. After all, Notre Dame athletics had been the decisive point in Phil’s agreeing to move to South Bend when Roger received his unexpected but welcome offer of the Huneker Chair of Catholic Studies. He invited Whelan from the archives to a spaghetti dinner, with wine for Whelan and a huge tossed salad for them both. The associate archivist was delighted. His infernal stammer mysteriously disappeared when he was with Roger Knight, as long as there were no other people around.

“I’ll bring what I’ve found.”

“That is not why I’m asking you.”

“I’ll have it in my brief case anyway.”

“I’ve brought
The Book of Kills,”
he said when he was settled in a chair with a preprandial glass of wine.

This was the document that had been put together by an amateur researcher who was much in the archives, a list of all the mysterious deaths that had occurred on or near the campus over the years.

“Had she found out about Cruelle, the murderer of Indians?”

“I’ve added that. Information was scattered about.”

It was all Roger could do not to start in on the document immediately, but his duties as a host came first. He added the spaghetti to the boiling water, put in a dash of salt, and gave an unnecessary stir to the salad. Shortly the pasta was al dente and they settled down to eat. Whelan was on his third glass of Chianti when Roger cleared the table, anxious to study
The Book of Kills
. But his interest was in the new material Whelan had gathered on the murder of Indians, half a dozen over a year’s time, a quarter century after the founding of the university.

After some minutes Roger looked at Whelan, who was refilling his glass. “Are there descendants of Cruelle still about?”

“Not by that name,” Whelan said with a fluency unusual even when he was with Roger. “I am still in the process of tracking them down.”

“If you find any, they are not likely to be happy that all that sad history of the family has been paraded in the newspapers.”

“There was another tonight.” Whelan fished the newspaper from his brief case.

“They all but accuse the university of assassinating Orion Plant,” Roger said as he perused the piece.

“In that I am sure they are wrong.”

“Of course. But a veiled accusation can do more harm than an unequivocal one.”

“It is a chilling thought that there is a murderer at large.”

Whelan used the phrase with the ease of one who claimed to read a thriller every other day. What did he read on the off days? The Western Canon. They had discussed the attacks on the great works of literature rampant now in the English departments of the nation, with inroads of leveling made even
locally. Whelan scoffed at classes offered in mystery fiction.

“It is of course possible for a thriller to be more than a thriller. I could give you instances.”

“This is an area where I am completely out of the picture.”

“But even if such a book rose to the level of literature, the genre is far down on the spectrum. It is nonsense to suggest otherwise.”

“Once all current fiction and poetry were absent from curricula. I suppose the idea was that these could be read on one’s own while the verdict on them was slowly formed.”

Whelan was
in medio iubilationis
when he left, and Phil had not yet returned. Audible from the campus were the rumblings of the gathering crowd, anxious for the morrow’s game. The night air was cold when he saw Whelan off. He watched his friend depart with carefully measured steps, walking becoming in his condition a deliberate act requiring all his attention. Roger looked up at the clear sky and Whelan’s phrase came back to him. A murderer at large. And so there was, and doubtless he was more afraid than anyone who thought of him.

QUINLAN HAD HEARD OF
the unscheduled descent of the most powerful of the trustees, the news coming from Miss Trafficant via Trepani, and the president of the faculty senate was certain he knew the reason for their visit. The series of episodes and revelations had put the administration in a bad light, but now the light was sinister with the discovery of the body of Orion Plant. The wake was scheduled for Sunday night, and Quinlan intended to be there, to show the flag. It would be interesting to see how the administration handled this. Would they try to ignore the tragic death of this young graduate student?

Quinlan was ensconced at a table in the back bar of the University Club, drinking Guinness from bottles. One more sacrilege among so many. This table was his usual haunt on game weekends, and his companions were his regular table mates on such occasions.

“I suppose they put the sudden arrivals in Moreau Seminary.”

“No,” said Trepani, her teeth exposed. “They’re all in the Morris Inn.”

“Who was evicted, I wonder?”

“The adminstration would not have dared give them other than royal treatment.”

Quinlan’s normal attitude toward trustees was indistinguishable
from his attitude toward the administration. He was an ex officio attendant at trustees meetings, without a vote, and from observation he had conceived a deep-seated dislike for the officious Schippers. The multimillionaire had taken on a proprietary air toward the university as his contributions multiplied. It was irksome that Schippers was a collector of rare books and spoke of them as if they were more than commodities, collectibles. But it was a characteristic of trustees that they sought to mimic professional scholars, working up little bits of learned lore to parade at their gatherings. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Quinlan’s conception of a university was medieval, a corporation made up of professors, some of whom did administrative duty on short terms to facilitate the essential work. Now there was a professional class of administrators who pretended to an expertise that was independent of any involvement in the teaching and learning that took place on campus. Worse, these parasites behaved as if the faculty were their employees. Public relations people spoke for the university, rehearsed by others who were strangers to the classroom. And there was an infrastructure as well, a pullulating mob who more or less autonomously made decisions that by rights should be made by the faculty. It grieved him to think that students received more direction from these anonymous men and women than they did from the faculty. What image must alumni carry away from the place?

Heidi Aufklarung, a deconstructionist from the English department and a regular at the Quinlan table, had drunk deep and was now repeating the lecture she had given that afternoon. Quinlan tuned her out. It was difficult to champion the faculty
when they were before one’s eyes. Sandra Trepani was raking her lower lip with her upper teeth and swiveling her glass of mineral water mindlessly. Heidi’s voice rose as she made a particularly nihilistic point. Raul Calderon and Jacques Nadir were poised to pose difficulties when Heidi paused for breath.

In the club beyond, the level of noise rose as people came in from the pep rally. Two tall men looked in, saw that all the tables were occupied, and stood at the bar. Trepani leaned toward Quinlan.

“The one on the left is the brother of Roger Knight.”

“Don’t tell me he is on the faculty too.”

“He’s a detective.”

Ah. The administration’s man, hired to harass Orion Plant. On another occasion Leif Quinlan might have brooded over the anomalous way in which Roger Knight had been hired. As a university professor he had not come directly under any department’s appointment and tenure committee, though his name had been passed through several in a pro forma way. It did not help that Roger Knight, without any previous teaching experience, had proved to be a popular and innovative teacher. Quinlan had actually toyed with the idea of sitting in on the seminar Knight had offered on Barbey d’Aurevilly, but had thought better of it. He might have seemed to be spying on a colleague. Roger had listened with wide unblinking eyes when Quinlan explained to him the crucial importance of the faculty senate.

“Do you have power?”