“That’s in the treasurer’s report,” said Prof. G. “We haven’t had that yet. We need to read the minutes from last year.”
Franklin looked around. “It’s just us, George. Let’s dispense with Robert’s Rules of Order. Will wants to give Harvard a house. I want to give Harvard hell. It’s as simple as that. It always has been.”
Will looked across the table at his brother. “Maybe we can reason this through.”
“Maybe,” said Franklin. “For all the high ideals that Harvard preaches, it’s all about power. If I hold a piece of Harvard property—one that represents hard reality in a spectacular dollar value and at the same time offers the ideal of one more Shakespearean look into the human heart—the powers of Harvard will be forced to negotiate.”
“Negotiate what?” asked Harriet, lighting her fifth cigarette.
“Harvard’s commitment to drop their tax-exempt status in communities where Harvard buys land and takes it off the tax rolls. That’s a good start.”
“You’ve been fighting that battle for years,” said Prof. G. “Harvard makes payment in lieu of taxes and they negotiate in good faith.”
“Yeah,” cracked Franklin, “like the federal government negotiating in good faith with some Central American country.”
Will said, “Still trying to change the world?”
“Little by little. Step by step.”
“I’ve done more good than you. I’ve seen to the management of this trust, so that it’s worth over thirty million now.”
Peter glanced at Evangeline and rolled his eyes. She gave him a little nod, as though she knew what he was thinking: this bunch could make her Pratt relatives look like a functional family.
Peter raised a finger. “Ladies and gentlemen, whatever you want to do with the money, you still have to find the book. And there are sharks circling.”
Evangeline looked at Dorothy. “A few have come very close.”
“Maybe,” said Franklin, “we should let them bite the expert.”
Peter grinned across the table at Franklin. “I’ve dealt with sharks before. I may be able to predict them a little bit better than the rest of you.”
“True.” Prof. G. reached into his pocket and pulled out a small red envelope and put it on the table. On it were written the words “a small gift of majestic proportion.” He said, “There’s mine, Harriet. I’ve saved it since 1946. Do you have yours?”
Harriet took out two envelopes. She slid one across the table to Will, the other to Franklin.
“There are three keys to three safe-deposit boxes that Victor Wedge left behind. One was given to your father, one was given to Jimmy. I got your father’s, and I was the executrix of Jimmy’s estate, too. The boxes were not to be opened until today. They may point the way toward the object that Victor Wedge found in 1936.”
“Perhaps you should give me the keys,” Peter said. “I may have the most expertise at finding this thing.”
And young Dorothy spoke up. “Why you?”
“Because it’s his business,” said Will Wedge, “and we’ve trusted him.”
“Yes,” said Harriet. “Although we’ll hope you and Evangeline don’t make the kind of mess you made when you tried to find that tea set.”
“If you find this thing,” said Franklin, “what’s to say you won’t go running off with it?”
“My word as a professional,” said Peter, “and my belief that if we find what we think we’re after, it should be seen by the world, which is not what your friend Keegan believes.”
“My friend Keegan?” said Franklin. “I haven’t seen that son of a bitch in thirty years.” His face reddened and he glanced at his mother, as if they had talked before about Franklin’s flight to Canada and the visit of a frightened girl to the Wedge house.
“Well, Keegan’s not to be trusted,” said Will.
“No shit,” said Franklin. “But we both knew that back in 1969, when he Xeroxed George’s personnel report in University Hall, then started buggin’ me about John Harvard’s small gift.”
And old Prof. G. laughed out loud, as if he had just solved a difficult equation. “So
that’s
how you found out.”
“It’s how we
all
found out,” said Will.
“And now, we may find the thing itself. But remember,” said Prof. G., “it’s been my position all along that this book should be in the alcove in Houghton with the original copy of
Christian Warfare.
”
“It should be in your own collection,” said Olga. “If you find it.”
“I agree with Olga,” said Franklin. “Remember the golden rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. If we hold the book, Harvard has to do business with us.”
Peter said, “First, you have to find it.”
“Yes,” said Prof. G. “Then we can reason together.”
And the meeting was suspended with the agreement that they would reconvene at the alumni tent in the Yard at noon the next day, by which time Peter hoped to have figured out the location of the book. He also told them not to pass any information to anyone. He figured that they would ignore him. In fact, he expected it.
It was a short walk to the Cambridge Trust, current home of the safe-deposit boxes.
With the three envelopes, Peter and Evangeline headed for South Boston.
“I would imagine that there are phone calls being made at this very moment,” said Peter. “Will Wedge is calling Charlie Price.”
“Dorothy may be calling O’Hill,” said Evangeline. “Unless Keegan has killed him.”
“Keegan is too smart for that. He’s letting this play out as far as he can before he does anything to incriminate himself.”
“And wherever he can, he uses guys like Bertram Lee?”
“Lee was the middleman between a disgruntled young academic and anything-for-a-buck Bingo Keegan.”
“Disgruntled because he didn’t get tenure?”
“Right, and here he was, the grandnephew of a brave Harvard graduate named James Callahan, with a locket that proved an even more distant ancestor had saved the life of one of Harvard’s leading scions at Antietam. At some point, probably pretty early on after his arrival at Harvard, O’Hill must have looked up his great-uncle in the card catalog, just out of curiosity, and found a reference to the quarto of
Love’s Labours Lost.
O’Hill probably read the inscriptions, which no one had taken very seriously, and that got him curious. Who was Lydia? And more important, who was Burton Bones?”
“Was that before or after he started slicing pieces out of valuable Harvard books?” Evangeline asked.
“Probably before. But he would have gotten more serious about it all when he took on Dorothy Wedge as a student.”
“So, who do you think brought up the story of this manuscript?”
“Hard to say. Remember Prof. G.’s description of all the atoms in their own universes. Keegan had read Prof. G.’s personnel file. Lee had done business with Prof. G. and Price.”
Evangeline said, “So Keegan was probably telling Lee, from the time they first hooked up, long ago, to watch that old professor and try to figure out what this ‘small gift of majestic proportion’ might be.”
“Then, along comes O’Hill. First, they do business on stolen manuscripts and cut plates. Then they figure out that there’s a deeper connection. O’Hill probably shows Lee the locket. You know, everything has a price. And there’s a piece of the story for Lee and Keegan—a guy with a locket picture of Dorothy Wedge Warren,” said Peter.
“And the appearance of a commonplace book that probably came out of the attic of Townsend House and was sold last summer begins to make everything speed up,” she said. “But why would they decide to sell the locket when they did?”
“I think O’Hill could smell Scavullo closing in on him, so he figured he might as well unload as much as possible while he could. He tried to kill me because he knew that I might kill that sale, which I almost did. And he pushed Ridley from the boat, because Ridley had brought a professional into the hunt.”
“You don’t think Keegan did that?” she asked.
“He has some dumb guys working for him. But he’s not that dumb. It takes a guy who thinks he’s very smart to do something that dumb and get away with it.”
“And how did Lee get tied up with Keegan?”
“Bertram Lee, who dressed like the middle-aged model from the Ralph Lauren catalog, loved his cocaine. Bingo probably supplied dope and Lee supplied lots of illegal, stolen stuff of very high value, which is spread about private libraries all over the world now.”
“Did Keegan kill him?” she asked.
“Maybe. Or maybe it was the drugs. Or O’Hill. He and Keegan may have decided that they don’t need a middleman. If O’Hill can find the manuscript, he and Keegan can do business directly. And Charles Price will write that big cashier’s check. Of course, O’Hill may disappear, and so will the manuscript.”
“But you’re in the way?” she said.
“I don’t think that the world should be denied another work of Shakespeare, if it’s out there. It’s one of history’s treasures.”
Peter drove the BMW into the Fallon Salvage and Restoration Yard, and Danny closed and locked the gate.
Peter parked inside the warehouse, where Danny’s son, Bobby, was waiting with a Savage 720 shotgun in his hand.
Peter got out of the car and said to Bobby, “What are you—goin’ on a pigeon hunt or something?”
“Protection,” said Danny, stepping inside and picking up his own shotgun. “If Keegan wants to come in here with his guns blazing, he’ll have M-sixteens.”
“So,” said Peter, “don’t waste your time with shotguns. Is Orson here?”
From the office came Bernice’s voice. “We’re both here, and I’m packin’, too.”
“Wonderful,” said Peter. “We can have a shoot-out.”
Then Evangeline got out the other side of the BMW.
And Danny Fallon grinned. He always grinned around the beautiful Yankee girl. “I heard you were around again. You haven’t changed a bit.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
In the office, Peter said, “Don’t be worried about Keegan. He won’t do anything tonight. Tomorrow is when he’ll go after this thing.”
“Assuming,” said Orson, “that we can figure it out for him.”
Peter dropped three ancient envelopes on the table. “This is the way that we do it.”
There were three poems in the envelopes. They were titled “John Hicks and Other Heroes,” published in 1775; “The Telltale Tread,” 1783; and “Colors Spil’t Upon the Marsh,” 1840.
“It looks as if O’Hill was on the right track,” said Peter. “He had a book of her poems.”
Then he read them aloud. First was “John Hicks”: “‘Oh noble is the man who dies to save his fellow man . . .’”
The poem extolled the Cambridge patriot who sacrificed himself and in effect saved the Wedge lineage.
“The Telltale Tread” began “The story’s told, of that dire night, / when tea was mixed with brine, / Of men who’d not alarm their wives and so with knotted sheets / dropped from their homes to ground below / And went upon their charge . . .”
This poem described an ancient legend—that John Hicks came home that night and couldn’t climb back in the window. Fearing the noise of the telltale tread on the stairwell, he took off his boots. The next morning, his wife accused him of wandering to some other woman’s bed, although six children slept in their house. Then she went to the door where he had left his boots, found that they were filled with tea leaves, and all was forgiven.
The last poem began “I once stood here, and looking out, would see a spreading marsh / Birds of black and red of wing and mallard ducks once flew / Where now rise homes and wharves for coal / To darken history’s hue . . .” And on it went, describing a world that Lydia Wedge Townsend found far less beautiful than the world she saw when first she came back to America in 1783.
“So,” said Peter. “Hicks House?”
Orson went to his briefcase. “I came prepared, in case it was in a Harvard building.” He pulled out a copy of Bainbridge Bunting’s
Harvard: An Architectural History.
There was Hicks House, a little white Dutch Colonial that was now a library connected to the red brick mass of Kirkland House.
“Lydia admired the bravery of Mr. Hicks; she liked the story of the telltale tread,” said Peter.
“And she bemoaned the way that the world changed around that house after forty or fifty years,” said Orson. “She would have bemoaned it all even more if she knew that Harvard had moved the house a block from its previous spot.”
Evangeline said, “That last poem might also mean that she decided to move the play, because the world was looking so different; she had to find a safer spot for it.”
“It could,” said Orson, “and if the house was moved and rehabbed when they turned it into the library, who knows what kind of structures they may have lost?”
“A shitload, probably,” said Danny Fallon. “So you can yap about it, or go and see if it’s where you think it is.”
Orson flipped to the back of the Bunting book, read a few citations, including one that mentioned an extensive article from the 1932 Cambridge Historical Society
Proceedings.
Orson said, “I know someone who might have that.”
“Only you would,” said Evangeline.
Orson was on the phone for about twenty minutes, then came back with this: “They moved the house in the twenties. It was originally on the site of the Indoor Athletic Building, which the kids now call the Mac—”
“Malkin Athletic Center,” said Peter.
“Right,” said Orson. “But here’s the important quote. ‘Not much of the John Hicks finish remains, due to the changes the house has suffered, but the front staircase, with its sturdily turned balusters and pendent acorns, has attracted much attention from architects. Its details are believed to be original.’”
“Now can we go?” asked Danny.
“No,” said Peter. “In the morning. We’ll need a couple of pinch bars, a Sawzall, hammer, and nails. And the Fallon Salvage and Restoration Truck.”
“Why don’t you hang out a sign?” asked Danny.
“That might not be a bad idea. Now, I have a few calls to make.”
The next morning, Peter went to Weld Hall, a dormitory in the Yard.
One suite was filled with clothing racks and top hats. In one of the bedrooms, Peter put on the morning coat that he had rented, the traditional uniform of striped trousers and swallow-tailed coat worn by all members of the Committee for the Happy Observance of Commencement.