The Lost Choice

by Andy Andrews

  “No,” Dylan answered.“Not yet. I have one more call to make; let me get to Ab—then we might really have something to talk about.”

  “Dylan!” Dorry said.“You have to—”

  “Just trust me on this. Where can we meet in the morning and how early?”

  “Well—,” Mark started.

  “How about the coffee shop right across from the museum?” Dylan pushed.“I’m gonna spend the night here.” “Seriously?” Dorry asked, raising her eyebrows at Mark, who still stood in the bedroom with the cordless phone.

  “Yeah, absolutely. I have to get to Abby, but other than that, I’m watching this computer all night. Can we say six o’clock?”

  “Whew!” Mark tossed a questioning glance at Dorry, who quickly calculated the timing of taking care of her child, then nodded.“Yeah,” he answered, “six will be fine.” “Okay, don’t be late. See you there,” Dylan said and hung up before the Chandlers could say good-bye.

  The next morning, Abby and Dylan were waiting outside the tiny restaurant when Mark and Dorry walked up the sidewalk at five minutes until six. Due to the early hour, the Chandlers had been able to park on the street just down from the coffee shop. As they greeted the younger couple, Dylan opened the door and said,“Hi, guys. Come on!”

  Abby hugged Dorry and said secretively, “Oh, gosh! I’d blurt everything out right now, but he’d kill me. We spent the night here . . . in the museum, I mean. I am sooo excited!” “You spent the night here too?” Dorry said as they took their jackets off and sat down at the farthest table from the door. Thanks to Dylan, there were already cups and an insulated pot of coffee on the table, which Dorry began pouring immediately.

  “Yes,”Abby said, now speaking to all of them.“I went to a movie last night with some friends, and when I got home, Dylan was in the parking lot of my apartment complex. I had forgotten to turn my phone back on when I left the theater. Once he showed me what you’re about to see . . .well, I went back to the museum and stayed. Perasi is still there.”

  “What then?” Mark said.“Don’t keep us in suspense any longer. What?”

  Dylan laid a manila envelope on the table, opened it, and reached inside. “Breathe deeply, children,” he said mysteriously and pulled a sheet of paper from the envelope.“What you are about to see will amaze and astound you.”

  “Didn’t I see you doing your magic act on a cruise ship?” Mark asked with feigned sincerity.

  “Hush,” Dorry commanded.“Go, Dylan.”

  Before he set the paper on the table,however, Dylan placed his hand over a part of it. When the page was displayed before them, Mark and Dorry saw that it was a computer printout, in color, of a painting. The painting, set in a gold gilded frame, was that of a warrior. Dylan’s hand covered a portion of the warrior’s image. “This painting belongs to a museum in Venice, Italy, and is part of a collection that once belonged to Charles VII of France.” He looked down at the paper under his hand and whispered,“Do you know who this is?”

  Dorry stared intently. The figure in the painting wore white armor and stood in front of an army. Dylan’s palm hid the warrior’s face and arms. As he slowly slid his hand to the top of the painting, the face of the armored figure was revealed first. Dorry saw that it was the face of a young girl and said cautiously,“Joan of Arc?”

  With those words, Dylan removed his hand from the rest of the painting. Dorry’s fingers flew to her mouth as she gasped.“I don’t believe it,” she said.“Mark, do you see?”He nodded.

  Both arms of the figure were held above her head. In her left hand, she held a sword. But in her right, the Maid of Orleans, Joan of Arc, the seventeen-year-old girl who led her king’s army to victory, held one of the relics. It was clasped tightly in her palm, but the image was unmistakable.

  “The museum’s director told me that the painting’s subject is, supposedly, the Battle for Orleans in 1429,” Dylan said. “I looked it up. She won.”

  “I don’t even know what to say,” Mark exclaimed.

  “Don’t say anything yet,”Abby said.“Just wait.”

  “There’s more?” Dorry said, looking quickly at Abby, then Dylan, and back to the painting of Joan.

  “Yes, there is,” Dylan said as he reached into the envelope again. “Check this out.” He pushed a printed photograph across to Mark. Dorry shifted to get a good angle in order to view the picture. It was of four men. One was seated behind a desk, the others posing behind him. Plainly visible in the photograph, closer to the camera, in fact, than the men,was the object of the computer’s search. It was sitting on top of the desk.

  “Who . . . ?” Mark murmured as he carefully touched the relic in the picture with his finger.

  “Oskar Schindler,” Abby said. “Schindler’s List? Did you ever see the Spielberg movie?”Dorry nodded blankly.“That’s the real guy. He’s the one sitting at the desk.”To Dylan, she said,“Show them the rest.”

  Dylan removed a stack of prints from the envelope and began laying them one by one in front of Mark and Dorry. Schindler signing papers. Schindler with a uniformed Nazi. Schindler laughing. Eating. With a woman on his lap. Eight photographs in all. Every picture had the desk in it, and the object was featured prominently on the desk in every shot. Dylan lay one more down, a ninth picture. It was a candid photo of Oskar Schindler—with the relic in his hand.

  Mark and Dorry were dumbfounded. They couldn’t take their eyes off the evidence in front of them—evidence that the objects truly were valued for some reason and passed from person to person throughout the years.

  “Incidentally,” Dylan said as he sat with his arms crossed, waiting patiently for the Chandlers to come up for air, “a Web search registers 491,000 hits on Joan of Arc, and Perasi’s computer scanned 58,641 images of her in order to uncover the painting in Italy. Schindler was easier—27,900 hits and these nine shots showed up among 2,556 searched images.”

  “Wow,” Mark said.

  “Tell them, Dylan,”Abby prodded.

  “Tell us what?” Dorry demanded.

  “There’s more,” Dylan said.“We’ve only been running for two days, but the program has captured a big fish.”

  “Bigger than this?” Mark said, indicating the papers scattered over the tabletop.

  “I think so,” Dylan replied as he slid the manila envelope across the table, never losing eye contact with Mark.“You will too. Open it.”

  Hesitating only for a second, Mark lifted the flap of the envelope. Removing the one remaining sheet of paper, he saw that it was another printout of a color photograph— two photographs actually—printed side by side on the one page. The picture was a close-up front and back view of one of the relics. In the bottom right corner of each photo was the designation “Item 267—lot-4932881.pe.L/nfd.”

  Mark frowned. “The computer found . . . just a photograph of it?” he said. “By itself?”

  Dorry was initially confused, as well. Then, grabbing the page from her husband, she quickly examined it, looked up at Abby, and back at the photo.

  “Do you see?”Abby asked urgently.

  “I do,” Dorry answered.“What do we do now?”

  “What?” Mark said.“What do you see?”

  “Mark,” Dorry said, never shifting her gaze from the pictures. “This is not one of ours. This is another one.”

  Mark drew back and looked at Dylan. “Really?” he asked. “This is a totally different object?”

  “Yes, it is. See the edges,” Dylan said, pointing. “The script, at first glance, all kind of looks the same to me, but I knew it was a new object—new to us anyway—by the edges. Abby confirmed that the message is different too. Good pic. Very nice resolution. She was able to do the translation with the photograph.”

  Mark and Dorry swung their heads swiftly to Abby. “What does it say?” Dorry asked.

  “By your hand,” Abby said quietly, “the people shall be free.”

  “Free.” Mark closed his eyes.“Live. Fed.”He paused.“And now ‘free.�
��” Opening his eyes, he asked Dylan, “Where is this one?”

  “You’ll love this,” Dylan said.“It’s in the Smithsonian . . . in D.C. I couldn’t get in touch with anyone last night, but Ab fired off several e-mails to her counterparts there, and I have the phone numbers, of course. They open at nine.”He glanced at his watch. “That’s Eastern time . . . about forty minutes from now.”

  “This mean anything?” Dorry tapped a fingernail on the series of letters and numbers printed in the corner of the photograph.

  Abby answered.“It’s a coding format that most museums use. It’s confusing because it’s not universal within the international community . . . but what is universal with us, you know? It’s like the metric system. America adopted it, but doesn’t use it. We support the metric system every inch of the way.” They all smiled. Continuing, Abby pointed and read,“Item 267—lot-4932881.pe.L/nfd. Here’s what it means. The item number is its designator within a specific lot, or grouping . . . in this case, lot number 4932881.”

  “Okay,” Dorry said.

  “The pe is for personal effects. That lets us know that the object was part of a person’s personal property. The number, 267, suggests that quite a bit of personal property was collected from the life of this individual. That leads me to believe that this was a person of some significance. You know what I’m saying? I mean . . . to have so much of one person’s stuff.”

  “Good point,” Dylan agreed.

  “What does the L stand for?” Mark prompted.

  “Loan,” Abby replied. “It is an item available for loan. The capital letter means that the piece is available for loan to schools, private institutions . . . just about anyone who will insure it. If a small l were in that spot,we would know that the object was available only for loan to museums.”

  “Finally, the nfd means ‘not for display.’” Abby squinted and shrugged her shoulders slightly. “This probably means that it has been set aside and is considered to be of lesser importance. But when you think about it,‘of lesser importance’ is a relative term. The Smithsonian owns 140 million individual items.”

  “You’re joking,” Mark said.

  “No, I’m not,” she responded. “Can you imagine the administrative load? The item identification, tagging, restoration, maintenance . . . the number of people required for an operation like they have is hard to comprehend!”

  Dorry held the copy of the photo up and spoke to Dylan. “Will we know today whose personal effects this came from?”

  “We’ll know in thirty minutes.”

  ELEVEN

  BOSTON—MARCH 1770

  IT WAS ONLY A SNOWBALL. NOT PARTICULARLY heavy, it was the approximate size and shape of a twelve-year-old boy’s hand. The throw itself, lobbed over the heads of those gathered, was certainly not of significant strength to provoke the reaction that followed. Its accuracy, however, was undeniable.

  Perhaps it was a rock, or an oyster shell from the street, that found its way into the packed wad of slushy ice, but when it hit Matthew Kilroy just below the ear, the rage he had kept in check for months was no longer controllable. His rifle was already up. All he had to do was pull the trigger. And that is exactly what he did.

  Hugh Montgomery, the man to Kilroy’s right, was the next to fire, discharging his weapon in concert with the man to his right. With a suddenness roused by panic, every man following the other, and in effect following no one, the British soldiers fired fourteen muskets in a space of less than five seconds, each finding its mark.

  In the cold, still, late afternoon of March 5, the thick gunsmoke refused to rise. Instead it hung like an evil spirit over the carnage and lent an air of stunned illusion to the colonists, who, for the moment, couldn’t believe what had happened, and the soldiers, who couldn’t believe what they’d done.

  Crispus Attucks had been the first to fall. A black man, Attucks had spent the last twenty years working whaling ships out of Boston. He crawled for a few feet before collapsing. Now he lay dead in the street with two musket balls deep in his chest. His eyes were still open, gazing sightlessly past the soldiers of the Twenty-ninth Regiment to the harbor, from which he would never sail again.

  Samuel Gray, a rope maker, was killed while carrying a one-hundred-foot roll of finished hemp on his shoulder. He died instantly from the effects of a bullet that entered his head at the hairline, just forward of his temple.

  Running at the first volley of shots, James Caldwell was cut down by two bullets in the back—proof enough to most that the British excuse of self-defense was a fabrication. Caldwell, a merchant seaman with a wife and child in Boston, died where he fell.

  Patrick Carr, thirty years of age, worked as a maker of leather breeches in a shop on Queen Street. When the initial shot rang out, he covered a child with his body. Firing from the balcony of the Custom House, a soldier shot him in the hip. The lead traveled an unruly path through his body, exiting his right side. Carr died in his bed two weeks later.

  Of the five who were killed, only Samuel Maverick was guilty of more than shouted words. He had actually thrown snowballs at the soldiers. A tall seventeen-year-old, he was an apprentice to Hiram Greenwood, an ivory turner, and should have been at work. He had disobeyed his mother’s explicit instructions to stay well away from the Custom House on King Street where the British soldiers were barracked. Samuel’s mother was a widow and depended on her only son for companionship and income. Samuel was mortally injured by a shot through his stomach. The musket ball was removed from his back, but he died in his mother’s arms the following morning.

  Six other men and boys were also severely wounded and being tended by the crowd that had gradually gathered its wits and was returning. Their rifles spent and seeking to avoid being hung immediately, the soldiers quickly retreated toward Custom House. They were intercepted by Benjamin Burdick, a Bostonian by birth, who walked directly up to the soldiers and spit at the feet of Thomas Preston, the captain of the Twenty-ninth. “I want only to see faces that I may swear to in front of God,” Burdick said and spit again.

  “Move along,” Preston ordered. “This fight has ended.”

  “Remember this day, sir,” Burdick responded.“This fight has just begun!”

  And so it would be. For most of a decade, the cautious hospitality extended to the British by its American colonies had been rolling inexorably downhill. Encumbered by debt accrued during the French and Indian War, the king sought to balance Great Britain’s accounts by using his “American children” as an income source.

  The Stamp Act, passed by the British Parliament on March 22, 1765, was only one example of the king’s strategy for plunder. This was a straightforward tax on newspapers, almanacs, wills, bills of sale, licenses, pamphlets—even playing cards and simple receipts! A constant parade of proclamations, acts, and decrees began to impose impossible financial burdens on businesses and families alike. The colonial fury was not due to the amount of taxation the British were attempting to collect. Their anger revolved around the question of whether King George had the right to tax them at all. The power to levy taxes indiscriminately, they all agreed,was a power that might well be used to destroy them.

  In response to growing unrest, the king openly used taxes to finance regiments of British infantry,moving them permanently into Boston neighborhoods for the “safety” of the local people. In February 1768, Samuel Adams of Massachusetts created a pamphlet urging the colonists to rebel against this “protection” and the taxation without representation, which succeeded in convincing the merchants of Massachusetts and New York to begin a boycott of all British items. Soon after, British warships arrived in Boston Harbor.

  Philadelphia joined the boycott of British goods in March 1769, and in May, responding to a speech by George Washington, Virginia added itself to the list of colonies boycotting all things British. By October, that list had grown to include New Jersey, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. In response, King George sent additional troops.

  When, at last, a re
giment of soldiers—members of an unwanted occupying force—finally fired upon unarmed civilians, it was as inevitable as it was horrifying. Forever known as the Boston Massacre, the event became a touchstone— a rallying point—for a nation struggling with its own birth. Benjamin Burdick was correct in his assessment of that moment’s historical significance: The fight had just begun.

  PHILADELPHIA—JUNE 27, 1776

  The older of the two men had closed his eyes in an effort to fully concentrate as his friend’s voice filled the carriage, spilling out the open windows and mingling with the sound of the horse’s hooves striking the cobblestone street. He frowned slightly and, as politely as he could manage, interrupted. “Stop right there. Brilliant, certainly . . . and absolutely wonderful as it is . . . but if I may . . .”

  Speaking carefully and with the utmost respect, he indicated a choice of words with which he disagreed. “There at the beginning of the second paragraph . . . I concur that, yes, truths are ‘sacred and undeniable.’ But, in my opinion, the sentence cries out for a simpler, more forceful term.” He paused.“Try . . . self-evident. ”

  The younger man, reading the words he had so painstakingly written, was seated with the pages balancing in his lap as the carriage driver steered the horse over yet another very large bump. He considered the suggestion for a moment, then indicated his agreement with a grunt as he made a mental note to change the phrase. “Thank you, John,” he said. “Proceeding . . . I’ll begin again with the second paragraph.

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . .” He glanced briefly at his friend who, swaying in the seat facing him, nodded his acceptance of the change, “. . . that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.