The Book of Kills (11 page)

“What was it all about?”

“A very enigmatic message. But I don’t think devised to get me interested. A careful call.”

“Now I’m interested. Who was it?”

“He gave his name as Ivray. Harold Ivray.”

FROM HER BEDROOM WIN
dow in the back of the house, Laverne could look out over Cedar Grove as the Bronte girls had stared out at the great gravestones in the churchyard at Haworth. Sometimes she felt like Heathcliff’s wife, abandoned for another, and sometimes like Jane, wooed and won and then robbed of happiness by the married status of her lover. It was easier fitting herself into these roles than making Orion into a Heath-cliff. She knew her father’s estimate of him and knew that in another world she would share it. But she was a woman and caught in the web of her feelings, helpless against them, not wanting to break the bonds.

She stared out at an old sycamore that rose above other trees. Its trunk was pied, a few of its great flat leaves still clung to the branches. The wind that had blown all night and half the day had stripped the trees of their leaves. Soon she would be diverted by the sight of the sexton and his crew raking them up and carting them away. A life spent tending the dead. The sexton’s name was Willowby; it was a hereditary job, passed on from generation to generation in his family, stretching back to the earliest settlers. He had shown her the plots her father had bought, in the new section. Laverne preferred the trees bare, they suited her valedictory mood. It had been a month since she had decided to commit suicide.

It seemed the one thing she could do now, the only statement she could make. Her love was doomed. Once, only her parents seemed to stand in her way. Then came Orion’s defection to Marcia. Now Laverne sensed that she might lose Orion again. It was wrong but justifiable, she thought, to have welcomed him back into the house despite his wife. It all seemed so simple when they sat once more in the family room as they had done before. His marriage meant nothing. She clung to him as to her destiny. However infrequently, however secretively, they would meet, and she could live for that. She was capable of doing anything Orion asked. Tip over gravestones, desecrate graves? Of course. And out the back door they had gone and into Cedar Grove, and for days Laverne had nursed her secret knowledge. The madness seemed to seal her renewed love for Orion.

But she had underestimated her father. What he had engineered was both irrevocable and devastating to any future Laverne had looked forward to involving Orion in whatever measure. Her father had not told her what he had done but Orion had. He had not told Marcia. However, confiding in her had brought him closer. It was as if he were trying to suppress the knowledge in order to continue his great campaign against the university. He had been expelled. He was no longer a doctoral candidate. He would never join the faculty of a college and live the life her father had lived. Laverne would have moved to wherever he did, willing to settle for whatever she could get. But he had been thrown out of the program. She had no doubt it was her father’s doing. He had always risen to Orion’s defense before. Now he had abandoned him for despicable reasons. He had become passive when Orion came back, and they had laughed and joked as before, but he must have decided then what he would do.

Even in her despair she was at Orion’s beck and call. She had willingly accepted the assignment to hire a fellow to demonstrate on the field at halftime. Orion had insisted on secrecy and she had tried to comply. But how can a complete stranger hire a complete stranger for such a thing? She had hired Bernie, the brother of a girl she worked with in the library.

“Someone from the opposing team asked me to arrange it.”

“A player?” Bernie asked.

“No, a fan.”

She was having second thoughts. Bernie was employed in the most menial of tasks in the library. He was not exactly retarded, but he would never qualify for Mensa. Once he understood what he must do, he became excited. She cautioned him that this must be a secret. The fan who was hiring him insisted on that.

“I don’t want anything happening to you.”

“Like what?”

“I think he’s a gangster.”

“I don’t care.”

She told Orion she had hired someone in Niles, a boy she had never seen before and would never see again. He might have acted more grateful. That softened her regret that she had not followed his instructions exactly.

Everyone knew that the demonstrator would be dragged from the field by security. Maybe they would put him in a room for a while, then usher him out of the stadium. No one expected an arrest.

“How much did you tell him?” Orion asked when he telephoned. He seemed to be speaking through a handkerchief.

“Where can we meet?”

“We can’t.”

“There are things you ought to know.”

“About what?”

“I am not gong to tell you on the telephone.”

She put down the phone and went back to her library tasks. She had checked and learned that Bernie was not at work. His sister Shirley drew a chair up to Laverne’s desk.

“Have you heard about Bernie?”

“What?”

“Didn’t you see the picture in the paper?”

Laverne just looked puzzled, waiting. Shirley leaned forward and whispered, “It was Bernie. They’ve arrested him. He says someone hired him to do it. Someone had to put him up to it. You know Bernie.”

“I think I met him once.”

Bernie was no threat, Laverne was sure of that. But when Orion called again, minus the handkerchief, they arranged to meet in the computer cluster on the second floor. Orion was worried about Bernie, not that he knew his name. Laverne fed his worry. She might tell him some details, then again she might not.

He didn’t show up. She had left work early because she wanted to sit at this window and look out at Cedar Grove and imagine she was in Haworth, star-crossed in love like all the Brontë girls.

ORION HAD NEVER QUITE
trusted Bartholomew Leone and now he distrusted him. It was clear that the lawyer was involved in some campaign of his own and that the dossier Orion had compiled merely represented munitions for this private battle. After he left the lawyer, Orion betook himself to a saloon some streets away from the building that housed Leone’s office. It was the moment for a thorough examination of the status quo.

With a scotch and water, mixed, he repaired to a booth out of the traffic and notice of the bar. He placed his glass carefully on the surface before him and then fished from his pocket a handful of slips he had pocketed when he was last in the library. They were set out for the note-taking of those consulting the computerized holdings of Hesburgh Library and thus were there for the taking, so he took, perhaps presciently anticipating this moment. He uncapped his ballpoint, sipped his drink, and did not write, but thought.

First, women. He was like Buridan’s ass midway between two not very appetizing bales of hay. Starving would not have been a disaster, but he had lived a double life too long for assured continued safety. Laverne had come first, she had that unarguable claim; Marcia had thrust herself upon him and, far from resisting, he had taken her to his bosom. He still marveled at the shrewdness that had prompted him to urge a fast and
judicial wedding upon her. He had told her of the long lines of aspirants for both Sacred Heart and the log chapel. Of course, every residence hall had a chapel and priests were thick on the ground, but fortunately that did not occur to Marcia. Besides, she was not a Catholic. He was not much of one himself, but he had the presence of mind to realize that a time might come when the nonexistence of his marriage in the eyes of the Church might be a powerful Pharisaic card to play. He had not married Marcia with any till-death-do-us-part intention, so that the marriage would have been a candidate for annulment even if it had been a Church wedding.

But what precisely was his present complaint against Marcia? She retained her job, they lived in a house that belonged to her family—to her mother, actually, who had decamped to San Diego to be with her son. Orion had been almost shocked by this dispersal of the last vestiges of a family whose roots were deep in northern Indiana. But he was happy to have his mother-in-law out of her house. Marcia was, if not a quiz kid, loyal. Nor was she as unobservant as he had supposed. Somehow she had learned of the re-established lines of communication with Laverne. Her pathetic effort to play the jealousy card by insisting on the inclusion of Byers almost endeared her to him.

Laverne. How think of her apart from her paternal parent? For years he had been grateful to Ranke for his protection, even while despising him for so violating the clear rules for the completion of the dissertation. And how think of Ranke’s protection apart from Laverne? The professor was securing a husband for his daughter, that was his clear motivation. It puzzled Orion that he had jeopardized all that for Marcia.

But the yo-yo movements between the two women were nothing
compared to the fundamental aim of his life, one that had taken gradual shape over the years until now it was more compelling than anything else—his future as a graduate student, his risible marriage, the plangent Laverne. Count that as Marcia’s most precious endowment, the records of the Younger enterprise. He held back from Leone, excluding from the dossier that which now, in this dark moment when his present was as parlous as his future, seemed his trump. It was a story he had pieced together patiently from the initial hints until all the pieces had suddenly come together like steel filings under the influence of a magnet. The time had come to release this bombshell, if only to blast himself free of the suffocating advocacy of Leone.

He left his half-finished drink and sought a phone. The instrument had known hard service in this locale. Who knew how many drunken conversations it had transmitted—pleas, threats, cajoling, amorous cooing? The directory was similarly abused. He found the number in the Yellow Pages and dialed with the precision of a terrorist setting the timer of a bomb.

“Maudit, please.”

“What department?”

“He’s a reporter.”

“Is he now? Does he have a first name?”

Orion could not remember Maudit’s Christian name, insofar as he was a Christian. He had been the terror of the
Observer
during his senior year, a chuckling nihilist who had leveled one irresponsible charge after another at the administration, the publication for which he wrote, his fellow students, and, of course, the faculty. Orion had wheedled a savage attack from Maudit as a hedge against mistreatment.

“What is your name, please?” he demanded.

“You want my name? Who is this?”

“I am calling with the story of the half-century. If you delay me further I shall want to know your name.”

“One moment.”

But it was five minutes before the flutey voice of Maudit was heard. “Who is this?”

“Orion Plant.”

“A voice from the grave. My own, I mean.” Maudit had not survived to graduation. “What’s up?”

“I intend to make your name as a journalist.”

“That’s good of you,” came the sarcastic reply.

“I am at the Amber. In a corner booth. I shall expect you.”

He hung up. He knew Maudit. The advertised worshiper of fact and objectivity was a prey to romantic unlikelihood. He would come.

He came. Twenty minutes later. The past three years had been kind to Maudit, sartorially speaking, but his face looked ravaged with lack of sleep and surplus of misbehavior. His weak eyes got used to the dim light and the thunder clouds of smoke that rolled through the Amber Saloon. He slid into the seat across from Orion.

“What are we drinking?”

“Whatever you like.” He hailed an unshaven waiter and Maudit ordered.

“Now then.”

“Wait until he has come and gone.”

“Is it true that you have been ejected from the history department?”

“Who told you that?”

“Have you?”

“A misunderstanding. As I suggested on the phone, I have a story for you.”

It might have been a lecture, it fell so neatly into place. In a few quick strokes, he recreated the primitive community that had been here prior to the arrival of Father Sorin. He spoke with real feeling of the Indians.