The Resurrectionist: A Novel Part 4

"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 t.i.tle 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 d.a.m.n, 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 appet.i.te. "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. "G.o.d, G.o.d," 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 b.u.t.ter. "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 bas.e.m.e.nt?"

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 f.u.c.k'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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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."

OUTSIDE 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 gla.s.ses 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 doc.u.mentary 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 pa.s.sed 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.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 gla.s.ses, 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.

He sets it aside and looks up to see Janice standing at his shoulder, frowning down at the folders and his hands on them. From her own hand dangles a pair of white cotton gloves. She holds them out to him.

"Please put them on," she says. "To preserve the doc.u.ments."

Jacob pulls the white cotton, thin but pristinely clean, over his hands as Janice makes her way back into the stacks of cabinets. The second file, labeled Misc., seems more promising. He finds in it first a newspaper clipping advertising the school in the September 18, 1858, edition of the South Carolinian. It touts Dr. Frederick Augustus Johnston's name boldly at the top and in heavy typeface promises "Income Potential and Expeditious Advancement." Not the kind of recruitment currently in favor.

As he sets it aside he finds himself staring into the face of a black man sitting for a posed portrait, a daguerreotype. The man is sitting formally erect and dignified in spite of his rather dandified getup of a paisley cravat and matching pocket square carefully arranged in the pocket of his black coat. He holds a bowler hat on his lap, and one hand is draped over the gold handle of a walking stick. His beard is neatly clipped and flecked with gray; the portrait reminds Jacob of images he has seen of Frederick Dougla.s.s, although this man is less hirsute, his eyes more distant.

He turns the daguerreotype over. The photograph beneath it is a group portrait taken on the front steps of Johnston Hall, the same picture he has framed in his office, of the cla.s.s of 1860. In the back he notes the lone black face, caught on celluloid hurrying past the group, as though trying to dodge the camera's lens.

He is looking back and forth between the daguerreotype and the cla.s.s photo when Janice returns with a stack of slim ledgers, years printed on their spines in faded gilt. He sets a white fingertip on the black face.

"Janice, who is this man?"

She seems to stiffen slightly. "He was with the school for a number of years-1857 to 1866, I believe."

"In what capacity?"

"His duties were rather vaguely defined," she answers slowly. "It appears he was brought on as a general custodian. Over time he became an integral member of the staff, it seems. You'll find his record here," she says, and rests her small hand on the ledgers.

"Did he have a name?"

"Nemo Johnston."

"His name was Johnston?"

"He took the name of his owner, as was the custom."

Jacob looks at her for a long moment before he speaks again.

"Eighteen fifty-seven, you say."

"Before the war."

Jacob shakes his head slowly as he looks back at the daguerreotype, the group portrait. Context, he thinks. Context is everything. His skills as a diagnostician have grown rusty.

"But why stay on? I mean after the war?"

For answer Janice leans over and begins flipping through the other photographs in the folder, several of them showing Nemo Johnston in the anatomy lab and the other downstairs rooms of the old building. No cellar shots. There is one photograph in which he appears with his namesake in the lecture hall, Professor Johnston holding forth with a pointer in front of a skeleton, the slave and a young nurse looking on almost reverentially as Doctor Johnston addresses his students. Jacob pauses for a moment over the face of the nurse. It is turned in profile, but even so he sees that she was beautiful, with p.r.o.nounced cheekbones and eyes pale and luminescent in the morning light of the lecture room. Even in black-and-white, he can see that her hair was as fair as his own.

There is only one more photograph in the folder, and it arrests Jacob's attention immediately. Another one taken inside Johnston Hall, he quickly determines. At the borders of the frame he can make out stark white light shining down through the tall windows of the current bursar's office. But the men in the center of the photo seem swathed in shadow, the object on the table before the four students little more than a ma.s.s of darkness save for the bright gleaming bones the dissectors have laid bare of the ebony skin. Yet clearly no snapshot. This portrait was posed, the men dressed in dark frocks, each of them wearing a sort of Shriner's cap on which is embossed a skull over two crossed bones. The students are grinning like hunters posed over a trophy, shoulder-to-shoulder behind the dissecting table. One of them has spread an anatomy book-probably Gray's-across the cadaver's pelvis and is gesturing to another who holds a scalpel. The young man at the other end of the table is smirking, his hand over the cadaver's mouth.

The image, despite its medical accoutrements, reminds him of photos he has seen of lynchings. Except that in front of the table, smiling like a minstrel, his dark face split by teeth bared white, kneels Nemo Johnston. The slave holds up the cadaver's right hand-most of its fingers stripped of the flesh down to the bony knuckles-in a playful wave for the camera.

The poor, dumb b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Jacob feels a stirring of disgust in his stomach. He wonders what Adam would think of this, how he would interpret this photograph as any part of coming clean about the bones in the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"The Skull and Crossbones Club," Janice says. "That photograph is probably from the 1860s. Nemo Johnston was a sort of unofficial mascot for the club in its early years."

"I always thought Skull and Crossbones was just a legend. People talk about it, but n.o.body ever claims to be a member."

"Isn't that the nature of secret societies?"

"You think it's real?"

Janice shrugs. "There is scattered evidence in the record of Skull and Crossbones surfacing in some years. It's probably no more than an old boys' club now, but the South Carolinian mentioned members trying to suppress Abraham Flexner's report on the school at the beginning of the century."

"From what I know about Flexner, I can't say I blame them."

"Really? His report to the Carnegie Foundation was epochal. He transformed medical education in this country." Her eyes seem to light up talking about the man. "Abraham Flexner had a historian's soul."

Jacob stares down at the grisly photograph. "G.o.d knows what he would have made of this."

Janice almost smiles. "I am an archivist, Doctor Thacker, which means I am a completist. What good is the historical record if it is not complete?"

"I don't see any good coming out of any of this, Janice. In fact, an incomplete record sounds pretty good right now." Jacob sighs. "But I should have a file on it. Can I get copies of the photographs?"

"You have to sign them out."

"But I'm not taking them anywhere."

Janice merely closes her eyes and shakes her head. With her eyes still closed, she reaches out to a wooden box on the table, pulls a form from it, and pushes it across the polished surface to Jacob.

"I don't remember this from last time."

"The policy has changed."

Jacob looks at the form. It is nearly a page long, a triplicate carbon with copies beneath the original in canary and pink. "The whole thing?"

"The whole thing."

"This could take a minute," he says, and pulls his Waterman pen from his jacket pocket.

"Some things do," she says.

She waits patiently until the form is completed, then takes it and the file folders from him, back toward her desk, moving soundlessly over the carpet.

When he picks up the first of the ledgers he can see the need for the cotton gloves. It is bound in calfskin but fragile-looking, its pages yellowed and brittle with age. He tries to hold it carefully-not an easy task for a doctor, used to handling books like the Physician's Desk Reference and the Guide to Internal Medicine as mechanics do Chilton manuals.

He turns the pages slowly, following the faded ink from month to month. The script is delicate and precise, perhaps the hand of F. A. Johnston himself. Some of the expenditures are truly strange. A column labeled Poultry for most years, a $300 debit in 1857 for a gelding. Another column for Anat. specimnothing speens, the amounts paid out varying enough to make Jacob think the school sometimes found itself bargain cadavers one way or another. But most of it is pedestrian stuff, what he would find in this year's report: maintenance costs, materia medica and laboratory supplies, columns of tuition dollars brought in and salaries paid out. On the page for August he finds the purchase of Nemo Johnston, slave: the notation of an $800 loan from the Bank of Columbia, $700 of it marked down to a Robert Drake, the remaining $100 listed under Sundries. In the next year's ledger, Nemo merited a column of his own, with his own expenses. Eighty-five dollars for a house in Rosedale, $20 per quarter for "necessities." Telling indeed: beginning with 1858, there is no expense column for cadavers.

Jacob rubs his eyes as he scans through the stacked, open ledgers. It seems to him that the school's finances fluctuated wildly in the old days, a year or two of bounty followed by quarters that showed the school nearly going under. He sees that the school began to pay Nemo Johnston a small salary in 1861, well before emanc.i.p.ation, and that the salary rose every year. He can imagine why. Slave or not, they needed to keep him happy. And quiet.

He flips the pages back and forth, scanning each column again. He pauses over a page in the 1864 ledger, an itemized list of the curriculum-courses taught and stipends paid to the faculty for each of them. F. A. Johnston listed as preceptor for most, a few other names for chemistry, biology, surgery. Jacob rubs his eyes, then squints at the page. Anatomy, winter quarter, 1865: N. Johnston, preceptor. Jacob smiles. Doctor Johnston may have spent too much time in the operating room that day, inhaled a little bit of ether. But as Jacob looks forward to the spring and fall quarters of the year he sees N. Johnston listed again for each of the courses: no separate stipend paid, but the ex-slave's name put down as the instructor of record nonetheless.