“Hello, Orson,” said Peter. “What brings you to South Boston?”
“I missed the chamber music concert at the Gardner Museum.”
“He came to complain.” Danny Fallon took a gulp of beer. “As always.”
“I came to confer.” Orson Lunt held a 15 percent stake in Fallon Antiquaria and Fallon Salvage and Restoration, and whenever he visited the warehouse, he proclaimed that the collective IQ of South Boston had just gone up by five points.
“All I know,” Danny Fallon would answer, “is that the number of skinny old fags wearin’ carnations and three-piece suits just doubled.”
On that basis, Orson Lunt and Danny Fallon had become unlikely friends, one who clipped his white mustache twice a day, the other who never shaved on Sunday if he’d gone to mass on Saturday night; one tall and perfectly tailored, the other all neck and shoulders in a Sears work suit.
It had been twenty years since Orson Lunt had helped Peter sell the sugar urn, the only piece of the Revere tea set to survive. Then Peter had used the money to make restitution for the damage he had done trying to get it.
A few years later, after Evangeline had left him alone in Iowa, Assistant Professor Fallon’s car had broken down on the edge of a cornfield. An old farmer had let him use the phone. And Peter’s eye had been drawn to a shelf of books, including half a dozen volumes by Emerson and Thoreau and other Transcendentalists, all first editions, some of them signed. Peter had bought them on the spot for six hundred dollars.
Orson Lunt had brokered them for a profit of $60,000. Peter Fallon had found a new line of work. An old Iowa farmer had opened his mail one day to find more money than he had ever received at one time in his life. And Orson Lunt had decided to take a young partner.
Orson said, “I’m convincing your brother that this new contract in Sudbury will be an excellent opportunity. The Bleen-Currier-Whitney House is a treasure.”
“And Sudbury is a fuckin’ hour in traffic,” said Danny. “You don’t have to go out there. I do. Startin’ a week from Monday.”
“Good money,” said Orson. “And a good challenge.”
“Challenge, my ass,” answered Danny. “Time is money. Too far. Too expensive. From now on, we stay inside Route One twenty-eight.”
Peter popped a beer. “Let’s talk about something closer to home: Will Wedge.”
“Will Wedge”—Orson dabbed tomato sauce from his mustache—“another tenth-generation Yankee floating in a gene pool without tributaries. Loves to play Harry Harvard—”
“So do you,” said Danny through a mouthful of pizza.
“I play Orson Lunt, retired antiquarian, bon vivant, and man about town.”
“Give me more about Wedge,” said Peter.
Orson lifted another piece of pizza from the box. “Runs the family brokerage, Wedge, Fleming, and Royce. Serves on the boards of prominent financial and cultural institutions. . . .”
“You can make it sound like the social page,” said Peter.
Danny gave out with a “shit” as the Patriots fumbled.
“You know, Dan,” said Peter, “that’s why Mom stopped Dad from watching the games at home. It’s why we’re here on a Sunday afternoon.”
“So let me swear.”
“Yes,” said Orson. “Let him swear. It passes for conversation. Now . . . Wedge isn’t all social page. He has a brother, an old radical who’s still living the rebel’s life.”
“What’s his name?”
“Franklin. I once heard their mother, Harriet, say that however straight Will was, that was how far-out the brother was.”
“Far-out?” said Peter.
“Come on, Peter,” said Danny. “Even I know what that means. It means he’s a pinko commie dope-smokin’ hippie.”
“Where does he live?” asked Peter.
“Officially, somewhere in Vermont. He has a teaching appointment at a college up there. But from what I hear, he just follows the revolution. One week, he’s riding rafts for Greenpeace, and the next, he’s in New York, picketing trade conventions, and so forth. . . .”
“Sounds more interesting than Will,” said Peter.
“Not if you’re in a line of work like ours,” said Orson. “Now why this interest in the Wedge brothers?”
“Will’s daughter wrote a paper about a Puritan preacher named Thomas Shepard.”
“What are you onto? Shepard’s
Confessions
? I thought the Mass. Genealogical Society owned the manuscript.”
“It’s what’s in the
Confessions
and the diary.”
And from out on the warehouse floor came the sound of shouting.
Through the office windows, Peter saw a burly guy in a Boston Bruins jacket hurrying along a row of crates with Bobby Fallon calling after him, “Hey, you!”
The hockey fan reached the front door and kept going, as if he didn’t hear a thing.
Now Peter and Danny were out of the office, moving across the floor. Bobby reached the front door and shouted another “Hey, you!”
The Bruins fan pointed at himself:
Who? Me?
“Yeah! You!” shouted Bobby. “I know you . . . Jackie Pucks.”
“Jackie McShane’s my name. Want me to spell it for you?” And before Bobby could say more, Jackie McShane was driving off . . . in his brown Toyota.
“What’s going on?” Danny asked.
“He came in just after Uncle Peter . . . poked around, worked his way to a crate of faucet handles by the office door, picked up every one, looked ’em over, and kept peekin’ in the office the whole time.”
“Maybe he was interested in the football game,” said Danny.
“Looked to me like he was snoopin’,” said Bobby.
Peter watched the Toyota spinning away. “Do you know him?”
“He’s a bum,” said Danny. “Works for Hanrahan Wrecking. He hangs out at the Risin’ Moon. They call him Jackie Pucks because he likes hockey. They say he breaks legs for Bingo Keegan.”
“Bingo Keegan,” said Orson, “South Boston’s latest self-styled Robin Hood.”
“Big trouble,” said Danny. “Drug dealin’, loan sharkin’, fencin’ stolen laptops—”
“Art theft, too,” said Orson. “A lot of people think Keegan was behind the robbery at the Gardner Museum years ago.” Orson shook his head. “Rembrandt’s
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,
gone forever.”
“Keegan would be about fifty-eight now, wouldn’t he?” asked Peter. “Five foot nine, gray hair, favors a scally cap and a black raincoat?”
“Have you done somethin’ to piss him off?” asked Danny.
“I don’t know. But I know who to ask.”
“Bingo Keegan?” said Ridley Royce. “Who’s he?”
“Trouble. Hanging around me since I started hanging around you. Why?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Ridley.
They were having dinner at a sushi bar near Harvard Square. Ridley was drinking saki, Peter a Sapporo tall.
“I’m guessing,” said Ridley, “that ‘Bingo’ isn’t his given name.”
“His mother named him James. But when he was a kid, he got caught rippin’ off the bingo game at Gate of Heaven. They say the nickname irritates the hell out of him. And he’s not someone you want to irritate.”
“Should we order some spider rolls?”
“Don’t change the subject,” said Peter. “What does some local thug have to do with this? And why do you think that a play by Aeschylus is worth so much?”
“If I knew the answers, I wouldn’t have called you in the first place.”
“I called
you.
What’s going on, Ridley?”
“I’m just putting it together myself, Peter. This Keegan guy is a new wrinkle.”
Peter sat back. “All right. What have you put together? What do you know?”
Ridley sipped at his saki. “I don’t think the play is
by
Aeschylus.”
“Why not? Shepard said it was by Aeschylus.”
“But he also talked about a ‘modern’ play, a play that John Harvard had owned.” Ridley took another sip of saki, studied the cup for a moment, like an actor playing a scene. “Who were the ‘modern’ playwrights of that time, Peter? Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare.”
“But—”
“Have you ever been to Stratford-on-Avon?”
Peter took a deep breath. “Ridley, the words
Stratford-on-Avon
to a rare-book dealer are like the word
Yahweh
to an old Hebrew. Not to be trifled with.”
“But you’ve
been
there? You’ve walked from Shakespeare’s birthplace to the house where Katherine Rogers was born? John Harvard’s mother?”
“It’s right up the street. They call it Harvard House. It’s a museum.”
“And you’ve been to London? To St. Saviour’s, the Southwark Cathedral, where they have the statue of Shakespeare and the chapel where John Harvard was baptized?”
“You have my attention, Ridley. Enough with the travelogue.”
“Peter, the Harvards and the Shakespeares were neighbors in Stratford, and they probably did business in Southwark. The English make a big deal of it.”
“But John Harvard was a Puritan,” answered Peter. “And Dunster told Nicholson that no modern play came back in the trunk of books Isaac Wedge sent ahead. It’s right in the diary, printed by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.”
“Go with me on this, Peter.” Ridley leaned closer. “Harvard’s parents weren’t big Puritans, just God-fearing English folk. What if they had a play by their friend Will, a quarto, maybe, and it ended up in their son’s collection? And then someone, for some reason, decided to steal it before the Puritans who ran the college destroyed it—”
“Rank speculation.”
“Maybe . . . but isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Speculate?”
Peter couldn’t deny it. Ridley might be drinking too much saki. And he talked so fast that he could barely keep up with himself. And in the overhead light of the sushi bar, his hair plugs looked as ridiculous as tufts of grass growing out of his forehead. But he was right. Speculation was at the heart of the business.
“All right,” said Peter. “Let’s assume for a minute that it’s a Shakespeare quarto—and not Aeschylus.”
“Quartos are pretty rare, right?”
“Right,” said Peter. “A folio was printed on one large piece of paper folded once to make four pages. A quarto got its name because there were four leaves, to make eight pages, then the pages were cut. The book was much smaller, from six-by-six inches up to six-by-nine. So someone could carry it around, almost like a paperback. Books like that don’t last. So
rare
is the word
.
”
“So if there’s a quarto out there, it’s worth . . . what?” Ridley threw back a shot of saki. “A million bucks?”
“Hold on, Ridley. You’re getting ahead of yourself. Let me look a little more, ask a few more questions. Starting with this: Why are you bothering my old girlfriend?”
“I don’t want to steal her from you.” Ridley chuckled. “It’s just that Evangeline descends from the Howells. And Katharine Nicholson, Isaac’s girlfriend, married a Howell. I want to look into that gene pool.”
“Under the heading of ‘no stone unturned’?”
Ridley took his chopsticks out of their paper wrapping, split them, rubbed them together. “We turned over a few stones at the game, didn’t we? I watched what went running. Will Wedge went running right up to your boat this morning.”
“I figured you were using me yesterday. I’m not surprised.”
“I’m a producer. I use everybody. And I wanted you to meet the rest of the cast.”
“Including the mystery guest who followed me home?”
“He’s a mystery to me, too.”
Then the meal came, and they turned their attention to tekka maki and maguro and brain-steaming wasabi.
They had both parked on Mount Auburn Street. Peter made sure that no one followed them. No guys in Bruins jackets. No Bingo Keegans. He also made sure that Ridley could drive, despite the saki.
“The sushi soaked it all up,” said Ridley.
“You ate enough to bait a longline.”
“Speaking of which, I’m going fishing in the morning. Want to join me? Nothing more fun than chasing stripers in my Grady White.”
“No, thanks. I’m on another kind of fishing expedition now.”
Ridley got into the car, then rolled down the window. “Peter, I’ve been failing for ten years . . . at everything. If fishing’s all I have to get me out of bed in the morning, I’d rather
sleep
with the fishes. Help me find that play.”
Peter leaned closer to him. “This didn’t start with a term paper, did it?”
“It did for me. I think it did for Will’s daughter, too. But I get the feeling that there are other people after this thing, too.” Ridley took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Peter. “This is from the commonplace book of John Wedge, Isaac’s son. It’s some kind of quote. This is what really got me interested.”
Peter looked at the quote, three lines of blank verse and beneath it, a parenthetical remark, all in a tight little scrawl. “Where did you get this?”
But Ridley was already driving off. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
On Sunday night, Peter found a parking spot right away. No one followed him home. And there were no surprising e-mails waiting for him. But there was still some port to finish and enough questions in his head to keep him awake.
First, he sent Orson Lunt an e-mail:
Come to the office in the morning. I want to pick your brain about commonplace books and Shakespeare in Puritan New England.
Then he went to a bookshelf and pulled down a volume of
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
a series of short biographies of all Harvard men up to 1775. If he was going to start this quixotic search by investigating the Wedges, Sibley might point the way. So he turned to Isaac Wedge, member of the Class of 1642:
Born, 1620, d. 1693. A veteran of the English Civil Wars, a minister to the Indians west of Boston. Married Rebecca Watson, daughter of Indian minister, 1648. In 1656, he became tutor in the Indian college opened in Harvard Yard. But the college failed. So he moved to Sudbury and took up farming. In the year 1674, he became one of the first alumni to give another generation to the college. . . .
1674-1682
T
HE
W
ORDS
were written in Ecclesiastes and were imprinted on the soul of Isaac Wedge:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.