The Resurrectionist (6 page)

“Great. When can you come?”

“No time like the present.”

Jacob knows he should acknowledge the lesson from his old teacher. “Thank you for making the time.”

“Not a problem. What have I got to lose by changing my day? Flexibility's the key to life, Jacob. It's why I'm such a happy fucking camper.”

N
OONTIME RUSH IS
in full swing at the Hub. Waitresses jostle their way through throngs of doctors and lawyers and politicians who have crowded into the narrow alley-shaped café during the hour-long break from clinic, court, and legislature. With the combination of its prime downtown location and its venerable meat-and-three menu, the Hub has been a Columbia institution since the fifties. And it looks it: the paneled walls are covered with the autographed photos of governors and football coaches, its acoustic tile ceiling sooted dark brown from the exhaust of forty years of deep-fried lunches. Jacob has arrived in time to secure a coveted booth underneath the scowling face of Joe Morrison, who had written in black marker on his photo, “Best meatloaf in Dixie.” Above Coach Morrison, the ceiling fan spins lazily enough for Jacob to study the quarter inch of dust accumulated on each of its blades.

The cowbell over the front door clangs again and Jacob looks up to see McMichaels making his way in, pausing at every table to exchange a handshake and a few words, stopping longest at those tables where legislators sit huddled and cabalistic. When he finally slides into the booth across from Jacob, he is still nodding and smiling at diners across the room. A waitress appears at the table instantly, although Jacob has been there for nearly ten minutes without so much as a nod from the waitstaff.

“Afternoon, dean,” she says as she spreads paper napkins and beat-up silver on the Formica tabletop. “Tuesday special is country-fried steak.”

“With gravy?”

“If you want it.”

“I do, June,” he says, and takes a long look at her. “When are you going to run away with me, June-bug?”

June only rolls her eyes. Jacob gives her his order, including fried okra at the dean's insistence. Once she is gone, he leans closer to the dean, though the din in the Hub probably makes it unnecessary.

“We've got a situation,” he says.

“No, we don't,” the dean says, spreading a napkin in his lap. “I sent Jake Thacker in to handle it, and I know it got handled right. I'd bet good money that Internal Review Board meeting went off without a hitch. Washburn signed those resignation papers, I know, Jake, because I sent the right man to do the job.”

“He signed the papers.”

Now McMichaels leans over the table, grinning. “I hope you roasted him a little.”

Jacob would like to tell him so, but it had been Washburn, imperious as ever, who had very nearly done the roasting. Even with the entire Internal Review Board ringed around him at the closed meeting—and Kirstin Reithoffer chairing the proceedings in her stern Austrian manner—Washburn had refused to buckle until the very end. From the outset he had challenged Jacob's presence, snorting when Jacob said he was there in an advisory role.

“I don't see how you have any advice worth contributing,” Washburn said. “The rest of us here, you will note, are
scientists
.”

“Doctor Washburn, you are a scientist who has been found selling cadaver organs to research interests for personal profit. Whatever title you claim, the man in the street—the taxpayer—would call that graft and corruption. Even those of us who fall short of scientific status can see the serious breach of medical ethics you've committed. The dean sent me here to see that you don't wind up in legal custody and disgrace the school any further.”

“Disgrace,” Washburn spat. “You speak of disgrace, with your record.”

Jacob had been rising before he realized it, but felt the cool hand of Kirstin Reithoffer on his chest. Reithoffer had taken over then, and within a half hour Washburn had signed the confidentiality papers that severed all his ties to the Medical College of South Carolina, banished to a future in chiropractic science for all Jacob cared.

The dean is still looking at Jacob expectantly. “He got a little of what he's due,” Jacob says. “We took his lab keys and sent him packing.”

June is back now with sweet tea and their lunch, everything balanced precariously on her suntanned arms. The dean thanks her and digs in.

“You did the right thing, Jake. Remember, I'm a holistic man. Got to maintain the health of the entire organism. If a part is bringing down the whole, away it goes.” He holds a speared piece of fried okra aloft on his fork, regarding it as though it were a rare diamond. “Trans fats. They'll kill you quick, but damn, it's worth the trip, isn't it?”

“Right. But Washburn's not the situation I mean. Bowman's crew found bones in the cellar yesterday.”

“Medical waste, sure. It's an old building.”

“More than waste. Bones. They're human. Adam Claybaugh and I took a quick look this morning. Most of them show signs of dissection. We found a skull with a trepanation in it.”

“How many of them?”

“Can't say yet. Some are still partly buried, but Adam thinks maybe remains of forty or more. We found an infant still mostly intact. Pickled in an old whiskey barrel.”

McMichaels seems to have lost his appetite. “Why didn't you tell me this yesterday?”

“Couldn't get past your entourage.”

“You tried the house?”

“Twice. Two messages.”

“Ah. The help.” McMichaels waves a hand in the air as though swatting at something. “God, God,” he says. “We'll have to keep a very tight lid on this.”

Jacob forks a piece of baked catfish into his mouth. Baked, the menu claims, but it is swimming in butter. “We will. There were three on the crew. I know one of them. I'll talk to him. Bowman's too dumb to think much about it so long as he's billing us by the hour.”

“Good. Put them all to work on something else—painting, whatever. Keep Bowman happy and don't miss a payday.”

“Jim, did you know about the basement?”

McMichaels mops at the splatter of gravy on his plate with a roll. “Back in the day, we used to sneak down there at night in the fall. Halloween. A little hazing ritual, back before the school was coed. Harmless kid stuff, letting off steam. But I saw some of it, yes, and I should have had it taken care of before we called in the physical plant.” The dean's eyes have gone distant. “For fuck's sake, Jacob, why were they
digging
down there?”

McMichaels takes another bite of steak and pushes his plate away. “It would be a shame if this came out. We've done so much good work, so much. People wouldn't understand. Those were good men, Jacob, no matter how that basement may have looked to you today.”

“It didn't look too much different from Washburn to me.”

“You're wrong about that. Standards were different then.”

Jacob shrugs. He knows that the public would not see the distinction. Anyway, the dean is rising to leave.

“What about the bones?”

McMichaels rests a big hand on Jacob's shoulder. “I need you to take care of it for me. We need for it to go away.”

Slowly, Jacob nods. The hand pats his shoulder. “I'm behind you a hundred percent.”

Then he is gone, making his way toward the door, stopping again at tables occupied now by recently arrived customers. Before McMichaels has made it out the door, Jacob realizes he has left him with the check. When June shows up again, he slides his corporate AmEx card across the table.

June shakes her head. “Don't take credit cards, honey.”

O
UTSIDE THE HUB,
Jacob pauses on the sidewalk, the tinny sound of the restaurant's cowbell echoing in his ears. The day is humid but otherwise clear, and the scorching concrete of the sidewalk throws back the sunlight as brightly as bleached bone. He checks his watch and decides to squeeze in an hour at the school's archives.

He can feel the sweat threatening to soak through the armpits of his coat by the time he rounds the corner onto Pendleton Street and his destination comes into view. Beaupre Hall, despite its august name, is an ugly bunkerlike building that looks squat even at its height of four stories, a nightmare of poured concrete built in 1966—a low point from Columbia's architectural dark ages. So long as its air conditioning is blowing full-steam, though, he will register no complaint.

He takes the elevator to the top floor, fanning himself with his portfolio as the elevator climbs. The doors open to the mortuary hush of the archives, and he steps out onto the deep carpet directly in front of the curator, Janice Tanaka, whose desk faces the elevator doors as though in preparation for an attack from those quarters. She looks over the top of her glasses and her eyes seem to narrow when she recognizes Jacob.

It has been nearly a year since Jacob was last on this floor. Just before McMichaels kicked off the capital campaign, he charged Jacob with putting together a photographic retrospective of the school's physical plant through the ages. Because McMichaels would not be satisfied with photocopied images from the school history book, Jacob had had to spend a long weekend here arranging photographic duplications of the original materials. He'd realized early in the weekend that Janice Tanaka was like a terrier over forms and paperwork; he'd left the building late Sunday night reeling from her intensive supervision—as if not only the school's documentary past but its very history were solely her domain.

After a second's hesitation, Janice's face relaxes from its wary expression and she rises to greet him, a full foot shorter than Jacob, which always inclines him to stoop when they shake hands. He remembers the story that Janice's father enlisted in the U.S. Army just prior to World War II (good timing, he has always thought) and ended up stationed at Fort Jackson, fifteen miles east of the university, where Janice was born. Janice is as American as he is, but he can never help feeling that there is some reserve of samurai in her, some native allegiance passed down in the genes, that views
him
as the foreigner every time they meet. And now that he has once again broached her kingdom, he supposes it is so in some way.

“Hello, Janice.” He speaks too loudly; his voice booms out in the quiet room like a football booster's at a tailgate party.

“Doctor Thacker,” she says quietly, precisely. “How may I help you?”

Jacob's voice is lower when he speaks again. “I need some information on the administration building's history.”

Janice looks almost chastened. “Were the photographs not satisfactory?”

“Oh yes, fantastic. What I'm looking for now is a little less public-oriented,” he says, thinking,
Interior stuff
.
Subterranean, even.
“This is sensitive, Janice. I'll have to ask for your discretion on this. I'm trying to find out some background on anatomy instruction in the building. Dissection. How it was done back in the day.”

Jacob thinks he can almost see her eyes, behind the glasses, beginning to tick off files.

“You'll need primarily nineteenth-century materials,” she says.

“I hope that's all.”

“Yes,” she says, nodding, and moves off to a wall of file drawers and begins pulling one out. It requires a bit of a heave from her; the drawer finally trundles out a yard or more, revealing a neat row of folders that he is certain are arranged with meticulous precision. He takes a seat at one of the oak tables set perpendicular to the filing cabinets, opens his portfolio, and flips until he reaches a blank sheet.

Janice returns with a handful of manila folders and sets them on the table. He glances at the label on the first of them—
1850s: Curricula
—and opens it. It contains mostly administrative minutiae, course syllabi and enrollment records, grade reports and a small sheaf of recorded minutes from faculty meetings, set down in a flowing hand in ink that seems well along in the process of fading from the paper.