The Book of Kills Read Online Free PDF

the two men were divided on the possible outcome of the game. Listening to them, Roger wondered how a point could spread. He went off to his study to ponder this Euclidean problem.
    When he checked his e-mail, he found a message from Father Carmody, courtesy of the young computer whiz at Holy Cross House where Carmody resided and where “young” meant a priest in his early seventies.
    “Call me. Carmody.”
    Call me Ishmael, Roger thought, and picked up the phone. The chiding voice of a nurse informed him it was too late to put through a call to a resident. It was nearly nine o’clock.
    “Could I leave a message?”
    “For Father Carmody?”
    “Yes.”
    “What is it?”
    “Call me. Roger.”
    “Is that all?”
    “He’ll understand.”
    Father Carmody had himself driven over to the Knights’ apartment the following morning. Philip, feeling the effects of his late-night seminar on college football with his two visitors, was not a pretty sight when he went to answer the door. Theundeniably clerical persona before him, a type rather than Father Carmody his particular self, made Philip even more affable than, under the circumstances, he would have been to their friend. Now he saw the priest as a trophy he might display to his guests at breakfast.
    “Breakfast?” Father Carmody said, looking at his watch. The priest rose and retired early and this had a distinct advantage. “Is Roger here?”
    Roger had half listened when Philip went to the door, but when he recognized the voice of Father Carmody he wheeled away from his computer and faced the priest as he came into the study.
    “You got my message?”
    They said this in unison, then laughed, Roger more boisterously than Father Carmody. The priest took a chair with a rigid back and lowered himself into it, adjusting his spine to the welcome support of the chair. He had come with a specific request.
    “I would have put it to Philip, but he seems . . .”
    “He was up late. He has visitors here for the game.”
    “Who are we playing?”
    “Florida State.”
    “The Seminoles,” the priest murmured. “That was an Indian tribe, wasn’t it.”
    “Yes it was.”
    “That’s why I’m here.” He readjusted his back against the chair. Father Carmody suffered from lower back pain. “Indians. The university is being sued, or is at least threatened with a suit, over the land on which it is built.”
    It did not surprise Roger that an elderly priest resident in the Congregation’s retirement home should come to him with arequest from the administration, not when that priest was Father Carmody. The old priest was not, of course, among the chancellor’s confidants and advisors—he had indignantly rejected this suggestion when Roger once had made it, indeed, he seemed about to say more before years of self-control stilled him. Father Carmody was someone called in when the solution to a pressing problem eluded the usual privy council or required more than usual discretion.
    Roger followed the excellent rule of not indicating that he had any prior knowledge of what Father Carmody had to say. It was always best to permit an uninterrupted narrative. Afterward, he could see how it comported with the snippets he had already picked up from Professor Otto Ranke. And of course most of what Carmody told him was new.
    Bartholomew Leone, a nemesis of the university, had contacted Ballast, the university counsel, with a request that they enter into negotiations on the recent dismissal of Orion Plant from the graduate program in history. Since there seemed absolutely nothing to discuss there once Ballast consulted the history department, he assumed that the charge that academic regulations had been unjustly breached was a decoy.
    “This former graduate student is the source of the charge that Father Sorin knowingly bought stolen property, stolen from the Indians, and that therefore the land should revert to the Indians. Or their heirs.”
    “Is Orion Plant one of