The Letter Killeth Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Postscript

  Also by Ralph McInerny

  Copyright

  For Bill Miscamble, C.S.C.

  PART ONE

  1

  Winter lingers in northern Indiana, and snow continues to fall well into March, courtesy of Lake Michigan. Sometimes, of course, snow comes fluttering down with all the sweetness of a Christmas card, the weather almost balmy, puffs of breath before the face a delightful joke. More often than not, however, the temperature hovers around zero, and snow comes in on a blast of frigid wind that sends students scurrying across the campus from room to library to class to dining hall, all bundled up like Nanook of the North. Fortunately the campus walks are quickly cleared or it would have been impossible for Roger Knight to get around in his golf cart. For his brother, Phil, the Notre Dame winters were the only blemish in their current life. Not even following the fortunes of the hockey team could keep Florida from his mind as the days grew short and overcast and the snow deeper.

  “You should go, Phil,” Roger urged.

  “But you can’t get away now.”

  “What does that have to do with it? Phil, you know I don’t golf or play tennis.” Roger paused. “Of course, you smile. The thought is ridiculous. Check with the travel bureau.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Later, Roger got on the Web and went to a travel site and looked into plane tickets and resorts in the Sarasota area. Of course, he could not make the arrangements final without Phil’s go-ahead.

  “You’re trying to get rid of me.”

  “Of course, if you insist, I could resign from the faculty and go off with you.”

  “Ha. Actually, I’m beginning to like this kind of winter.”

  “Snow eventually melts, Phil.”

  Yes, and the sun also rises, but it would have been difficult to prove that in the gray and overcast days that lay ahead. How much gloomier it would have been without the snow.

  Phil’s decision to stay was not the result of anything Roger said. It was the letters.

  * * *

  Father Carmody called and told Phil, “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “The weather getting to you, Father?”

  “What’s wrong with the weather?”

  “Have you been out lately?”

  “I am just this minute leaving the Main Building. I think I’ve taken on a fool’s errand, and I want company. Can I come over there?”

  “I could come to Holy Cross House.”

  “It’ll be easier for me to come there.”

  Father Carmody was a reluctant resident of Holy Cross House, not because he did not like the accommodations of the retirement home for priests, but because of its associations. All the other residents save one or two were sliding slowly from this life, often having already left their minds behind. Father Carmody had his meals in his room so as to avoid the refectory where old men were spoon-fed by nurses, their chins wiped, all the while being talked to as if they were babies. Many of the most pathetic cases were men years younger than Father Carmody.

  Father Wangle had given him excellent advice when he moved in. “Avoid all gatherings, refuse to take part in physical therapy, get your hair cut on campus.”

  The reason for the last remark became clear to Father Carmody when he saw the wheelchairs lined up, their occupants, many once prominent and powerful in the congregation or in the university, awaiting their turn to get a haircut that would have done a marine recruit proud.

  “Stay active,” Wangle said, summing it up.

  Father Carmody had stayed active, perhaps too active for some. There were times when he felt like the Ghost of Christmas Past when he dropped in on the president or provost to give them the advantage of his thoughts on this or that. Once he had been a powerful presence in the university administration, not out front, but influencing the course of things from discreet obscurity. Officers came and went, golden boys rose and fell, but Father Carmody had always survived, ready to guide neophytes along the paths of effective administration.

  * * *

  Nowadays he did not speak softly, but he carried no big stick. In the provost’s outer office, he took a chair and fell into conversation with a young priest he did not know. How pink and blond he looked. And nervous. Ah well, coming to see the provost was like a visit to Oz. Father Carmody sought to cheer him up, asked his name, found that he had studied in Rome.

  “Ah, Rome.”

  “Have you been there, Father?”

  Carmody looked sharply at the young priest, but neither humor nor insolence seemed to explain the preposterous question. No point in explaining that he had been in Rome as assistant general of the Congregation of Holy Cross during what he liked to think were the boom years. Obviously Father Conway did not recognize him. Well, for that matter, ten minutes had passed before he realized that Conway was an assistant provost.

  “I’m thinking of visiting,” Father Carmody murmured.

  “We have a house there, you know.”

  This is what it will be like after I am dead, Father Carmody thought. Like grass of the field, swept away to be burnt, and no memory of it left. He had become a stranger in the institution to which he had devoted the long years of his life. Well, what did he want, a life-sized statue like those of Ned and Ted in front of the library? His name on a building or two? Better try to wring spiritual benefit from it. We have here no lasting city. Heaven’s my destination.

  The young priest was Tim Conway, and he had only recently been appointed assistant to the provost.

  “And what are your tasks?”

  “Troubleshooting. Mostly student affairs so far.”

  “Isn’t there a prefect of student affairs?”

  “You must mean Iglesias.”

  Father Carmody frowned. “The singer?”

  Tim looked blank. “No, Ben Iglesias. Student affairs.”

  “He’s the prefect?”

  “He’s a vice president.”

  “Of course.”

  What Father Carmody thought of the bureaucratization of the university and the resulting multiplication of administrative officers was a subject best brought up during a visit to
the community cemetery, where he could walk the rows of identical crosses, communing with the dead and letting them know what Charles Carmody thought of what was going on around here.

  * * *

  Just then the provost emerged from his office and cried out, “Father Carmody! I thought I heard your voice.”

  Much shaking of hands, smiles all around, and did Father Conway realize who he had been talking to? In short, a great fuss was made over the unexpected visit of the old priest who had advised presidents since the early days of the Hesburgh regime. Carmody was beginning to think that being forgotten was preferable to this kind of attention.

  “I was just going to tell Father Carmody about those letters,” Father Conway said with a touch of obsequiousness.

  The provost’s eyebrows shot up and his eyes rounded, though his smile did not falter. “Let’s go into my office, shall we?”

  There, in a comfortable island of furniture in a corner of the vast inner room, they sat. Father Carmody refused coffee. The provost composed himself and began.

  It was, he was sure, a tempest in a teapot. With a little laugh, he took an envelope from his inner pocket and handed it to the old priest. The message was in block letters, some capitals, some not. BeWarE! yOUr ofFice WilL bE bomBEd. GOD is nOt moCked. The letters had been Scotch-taped to a sheet of paper.

  Father Carmody read it a second time. “How did you get this?”

  “My secretary found it slipped under the door when she arrived yesterday morning.”

  “Some student’s idea of a joke.”

  “Of course.” But the provost sounded dubious. “Others have received similar letters.”

  The dean of Arts and Letters. The football coach.

  “The football coach?”

  It was difficult to think that any student could be otherwise than elated by the abrupt reversal in the fortunes of the Fighting Irish wrought by Charlie Weis. That certain members of the administration or of the faculty might have their lives brightened by a bomb in their office seemed a pardonable student fantasy. To threaten to blow up the Guglielmino Center was something very much else.

  “This is the sort of thing you always handled,” the provost said.

  “I’ll take this.” Father Carmody folded the sheet and stuffed it into a pocket.

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll ask Phil Knight for help.”

  The provost had to think. “The brother of Professor Knight.”

  “He is a licensed private detective. For that matter, so is Roger.”

  “Roger Knight is a detective?”

  “Was. Before we brought him here as the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies. His brother came with him. He is more or less inactive now, but he has been of help to the university on a number of occasions.”

  “We don’t want any publicity.”

  “If we did, we would call in the South Bend police.”

  “Not even Notre Dame security knows of these letters.”

  “I should hope not.”

  * * *

  The provost came with Father Carmody into the reception area, where a man rose from his seat, a look of expectation on his face. The provost blanched.

  “Mr. Quirk.”

  Quirk hurried to Father Carmody and put out his hand. “Quirk, Ned. Class of ’65. I’ll bet you don’t remember me.”

  Carmody smiled. “You lived in Dillon. You’re from Kansas City and majored in electrical engineering.”

  “Civil.”

  “You changed your major?”

  The provost threw up his hands in delight. “Father Carmody, you are remarkable!”

  “The place was smaller then.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Once we didn’t even have a provost. Only an academic vice president.”

  Quirk, smallish and rotund, bald as an egg, beamed. “I don’t recognize the campus anymore.”

  Then, as it sometimes will to any administrator, an idea came to the provost. “Ned, why don’t you discuss your suggestion with Father Carmody? I would be seeking his advice in any case.”

  This was a diplomatic bum’s rush, of course, but Father Carmody fell in with the plan. He took Quirk’s arm, and they went into the hall.

  “What did they do to this building, Father?” Quirk looked around him with dismay.

  “For the most part, simply restored it to its original condition. Not these grand offices, of course. Come.”

  In the elevator, he asked Quirk what he had wanted to talk to the provost about.

  “Does the name F. Marion Crawford mean anything to you?”

  “Is the pope German? Come on. We’re going to visit the Knight brothers.”

  2

  Beauty lies, not in the eye of the beholder nor in the mere thereness of the beheld, but in some complicated relation between the two. In fact, the beloved thing itself, or the person herself, is seldom seen at all, if seeing lies in mere perception. What wife ever sees her husband as does some neutral observer, if such there be? What husband who might say of the wife of his bosom that she walks in beauty like the night imagines that he is describing her for all to see? Third parties are notoriously mystified by what draws this man to this woman. They may have eyes to see but are unable to see what for the smitten is all in all.

  Such thoughts and their expression characterized the discussion of the University Club of Notre Dame as the members sought to deal with the news that the dear squat building, the dining room with its vaulted roof, and the poky backroom bar, where the discussions went on, were all doomed to destruction. An edict had gone out from the Main Building announcing that the club would be razed to make way for an extension of Engineering, and the outraged members of the club were thrust into the position of one whose spouse is spoken of by a stranger.

  In the dining room, at the facetiously named Algonquin table, in a corner where the self-described Old Bastards met for lunch, and at other tables where more random diners congregated, the sense that a Sword of Damocles hung over this familiar setting provided the common subject of the day. There is a music of anger, largely percussive and profane, and the club had swelled with it ever since the judgment had been circulated to the members.

  The administrator with the hyphenated name was subjected to imaginative abuse.

  “Who is he?” demanded Potts, professor emeritus of philosophy, surveying the other OBs with a rheumy eye.

  “What do you mean, who is he?” Wheeler barked, as if his anger could be directed at Potts.

  “I mean I never heard of him. How long has he been here?”

  Potts had celebrated the golden anniversary of his joining the faculty, and anyone with less than a quarter of a century on campus had for him the status of an unregistered alien. Someone guessed, and Potts snorted.

  “I knew Montana,” Armitage Shanks said.

  “The quarterback?”

  “The architect. Frank Montana. He designed this building.”

  “Is he to blame for the acoustics?”

  How sweetly sad it was to think that once complaints about the acoustics in the dining room might have provided topic enough to get them through a meal.

  “Speak well of the dead,” Shanks advised. “There’s nothing wrong with the acoustics. It’s your hearing that is defective.”

  “What?”

  “Can he be stopped?”

  “Who?”

  “The man you don’t know. The man who has no sense of the tradition of this place. He thinks it is just a building that can be torn down and replaced with another.”

  “It can be and it will be.” Bingham, late of the law school, spoke with the mordant satisfaction of a magistrate invoking the death penalty. “We have been put in the position of those poor widows who learn that a new highway will be run through their living room. Eminent domain. Protests are useless.”

  A special meeting of the membership had been called, a committee formed, and an elaborate report prepared and sent to the Main Building. Its only result had been a statement th
at a new place might possibly be found for the club. Perhaps a donor could be found …

  “A donor gave the money for this building!” Potts cried.

  The Gore family had financed the building of the club with the understanding that a massive collection of beer steins would be housed there. And so they were, enshrined in a number of glass cases in the wall that separated the sunken dining room from a series of all-purpose rooms on a higher level.

  “Have they been told?” Bingham asked.

  “The original donor is dead.”

  “His family, then?”

  “They are not pleased.”

  “They should be furious. Is there a statute of limitations on the recognition of benefactions?”

  All looked to Bingham. He shrugged. “If they want to tear this place down, nothing can stop them.”

  “It’ll be the Grotto next. Or Sacred Heart Basilica.”

  “The Main Building could simply be burned. That’s a tradition.”

  The predecessor of the Main Building had gone up in flames in 1879 and within a year been replaced by the present edifice. Father Sorin, the founder of the university, had been away from campus when the terrible news came to him, and he returned immediately, vowing to rebuild within a year, and so he had.

  “Where is Sorin now?” Potts asked piously.

  “The question is theological.”

  “In the community cemetery.”

  Plaisance sighed. “It is enough to make one half in love with easeful death.”

  “Nothing lasts.”

  “The place has fallen into the hands of barbarians.”

  On and on went the discussion, engaged in with the peculiar satisfaction that morose delectation provides. Plaisance had come as near as any of them to the admission that this latest outrage promised to provide the subject of discussion for many future meals at the Old Bastards’ table.

  “We should march on the Main Building in protest.”

  “We could let our hair grow, and our beards. Only the unruly get a hearing.”

  “Not even God could grow your hair, Potts.”

  “What?”

  They were interrupted by Debbie, the hostess, offering more coffee. The thought of consuming more liquid caused unease, as she knew it would. They looked around and noticed as if with surprise that they were the last occupants of the dining room.