Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “We’ll see. But right now, I’m doing no more phone calls for Harvard.”

  “After what happened last time, I’m surprised you’d even think about it.”

  “Well, I still wonder what really happened to Ridley.”

  “Anybody bothered you since?”

  “No. No Bingo Keegan. No conversations with Will Wedge. Not even a Christmas card. Nothing until Wedge sent me the invitation to this exhibition.”

  The Fogg Art Museum held most of Harvard’s paintings, a better collection than you could find in most medium-size cities. A banner outside proclaimed the new show: FACES FROM THE PAST. TREASURES OF THE HARVARD PORTRAIT COLLECTION.

  “Nice to get a little preview,” said Evangeline.

  “Well, those old families thought it was nice to give Harvard their paintings,” said Peter. “They got all the write-offs and their ancestors got spots on the walls. The Winthrops gave a dozen portraits, just as long as they were all enshrined in the Winthrop House library.”

  They went up the stairs to the second floor of the museum, turned, and there it was, the centerpiece of the show, displayed so that it could be seen even before you entered the gallery.

  Peter recognized the work of John Singleton Copley at a glance. It was all there . . . the confidence with which the subjects inhabited their space, the powerful light, the sense of realism that invested every detail and gave the painting psychological reality, too. Before he knew their names, Peter knew that the old man had been tough-minded and unyielding, and the young woman had inherited those qualities, adding a skill for making herself a general pain in the ass.

  “Reverend Abraham Wedge and his granddaughter, Lydia,” said Evangeline.

  They walked into the gallery, which was full of Harvard professors, a few students, and a lot of descendants sipping champagne and admiring their gene pool.

  Looking down from the span of Harvard history were two dozen faces, and as many opinions on the meaning of education, of society, of God Himself . . . or Herself. There was the stiff, primitive portrait of William Stoughton, unrepentant judge of witches . . . the magnificent full-length Copley of John Winthrop and his telescope . . . Anne Mowlson, Lady Radcliffe . . . Dorothy Wedge Warren, one of the Radcliffe Eight, in an oval portrait from the 1830s . . . official portraits of Harvard presidents. . . .

  Peter grabbed a glass of champagne and walked up to Abraham and Lydia and the tall guy admiring them. “Evening, Will. I like the little half smile on Lydia’s face.”

  “Why do you think she’s smiling?” said Will Wedge, not even turning to Fallon.

  “Maybe it’s the book on the table,” said Evangeline, stepping closer.

  Peter inclined his head to read the title. “I’ll be damned.”

  “It used to be a Bible,” said Wedge. “All my life, it was a Bible. Now . . .”

  The book looked to Peter like a quarto. It was open to the title page on which were written the words Love’s Labo . . . before the image trailed into the fold.

  Evangeline went over to a display panel just far enough away not to distract from the portrait, but close enough to draw the viewer’s attention. The caption read, “Restoration Renders Surprise.” Beneath it was a photograph of a conservator touching a brush to a crudely painted Bible in front of Reverend Abraham.

  “They restored most of the portraits for the show,” said Wedge, through clenched teeth. “Patched cracked frames, X-rayed, in-filled, and cleaned. And they found the play. It seems that someone had decided that a man who sponsored the anti-theater laws of 1767 should not spend eternity reading a play. So they painted a Bible over it.”

  “They did that sort of thing a lot back then,” said Peter.

  “I wish they hadn’t,” said Wedge.

  “So,” said Evangeline, “is it Lost or Won?”

  “I think we have to find out,” said Will Wedge. “Charlie Price will want to know, once he sees this. He’d be here tonight but he’s off on vacation. Hawaii or someplace.”

  A young woman came up to them, a reporter for the Boston Globe. She explained that she was doing an article on the show, and she was interested in visitor opinions.

  Peter could have refused, but it was easier to offer some vanilla remark, the kind she wouldn’t bother to use, once she talked to someone more interesting. So he said: “A restoration like this shows you just how interesting the past can be when you give it the attention it deserves. Our history is alive and kicking.”

  She wrote it down, asked his name, then went wandering off.

  Wedge said to Evangeline, “Back to your question—Lost or Won?”

  Peter said, “Do you see how, beneath the title, Copley has put in a dramatis personae, just for a little more detail? I recognize some of the names but not all of them.”

  “And on that basis you conclude . . . what?” asked Evangeline.

  Will Wedge said, “I conclude that you quiet down. Old Prof. G. and Olga just came in. He’s going to have plenty to say about this as it is.”

  Peter turned and shook Prof. G.’s hand. “How’s the book collecting, Professor?”

  “Slow and pleasant, as always.” The old man looked at the painting. “My . . . my. I haven’t seen this in years. Very interesting.”

  While the old man went over and read the article, Olga asked him, “Mr. Fallon, have you had any luck with that Anglorum Praelia that we asked about back in the fall?”

  “I know that Orson has been looking into it,” said Peter. “He’s—”

  “My God,” said Prof. G., almost as though he couldn’t keep the words from escaping. “It’s . . . it’s true.”

  “What?” asked Peter. “What’s true?”

  The old professor looked at Fallon and the others and gave out with a little laugh. “Who could imagine that Copley was such a jokester, putting a play in front of old Reverend Abraham.”

  “Oh, yes, a jokester,” said Will, and he added one of those big, honking laughs of his own.

  Afterward, Peter and Evangeline went to Rialto, an upscale restaurant in the Charles Hotel.

  “Try the soupe de poisson,” he said.

  “In our day,” she said, “we got clam chowder at Cronin’s. No soupe de poisson.”

  Peter looked out at the white lights on the trees in front of the hotel. “No Rialto, either. And no Charles Hotel . . . God, we sound like old farts.”

  “Late forties is old-fartdom to most of the kids in Cambridge,” she said. She was wearing a black turtleneck and a touch of red lipstick, which brought out the blond highlights in her hair. She looked to Peter like anything but an old fart.

  He smiled across the table and said, “Tonight I got an infusion of youth.”

  “The painting?”

  “If Love’s Labours Won made it to 1780, we are back on the trail. You saw how Will Wedge was acting, how surprised that old professor seemed.”

  “Peter, it’s more likely Love’s Labours Lost, and when Copley painted in a dramatis personae—which he didn’t intend you to read as if you were going to play one of the parts, by the way—he made up a few names.”

  “Considering what it would mean, and how much it would be worth, I think we should proceed as if it’s Love’s Labours Won.”

  She sipped her water and looked at him.

  “So,” he said after her look hung there for a moment, “are you going to help?”

  “I’m starting a book about the Radcliffe Eight, Peter. That nice oval portrait of Dorothy Wedge Warren, I can see that on the cover. That’s my focus right now. But . . .” She took another sip of water. “But the holidays did make me feel awful old.”

  “The first Christmas after your divorce is a bad one,” he said.

  “You got that right.”

  The wine arrived just in time, a Jean Brocard Chablis. Peter toasted, “To keeping our youth.”

  “To finding it again.” Evangeline sipped her wine. “Of course, Lydia Wedge was young in that painting. Now she’s up in the Old Burying Gro
und.”

  Peter whistled softly. “If researching the lives of dead Wedges is going to do this to you, go back to researching villas in Tuscany or bars in Key West.”

  Evangeline drank a little more wine. “I can’t do a lot to help you, you know.”

  “Just do your research,” he said. “Every forty or fifty years, the Wedges drop a clue, like Hansel and Gretl dropping bread crumbs. That painting was like a whole loaf.”

  “After the grandfather died, Lydia came back and lived another fifty years,” said Evangeline. “She left a few more bread crumbs. I’ll show you one after we eat.”

  “Another appetite whetted,” he said. “I’m feeling like I’m back in my twenties.”

  “So”—she opened the menu—“let’s eat like we were in our twenties.”

  “You mean red meat?” asked Peter.

  “Actually, I was a vegetarian in college.”

  “Maybe that’s why you feel old. Have a steak.”

  When they were filled and satisfied and just a little drunk, they went for a walk. The wind had settled into one of those gentle snowfalls that deadens the traffic noise, even in Harvard Square.

  They strolled along Brattle Street, past the century-old Brattle Theater, where the Humphrey Bogart cult had been born in the fifties. Next door, separated by a narrow alley and dwarfed by the theater, was a yellow clapboard house with white trim and black shutters, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

  “This was William Brattle’s house,” said Peter. “Once, his gardens reached all the way to the river. The Brattle Theater, the Charles Hotel . . . all part of Brattle’s spread. He was exiled in the Revolution, like Abraham Wedge.”

  “At least his house survived,” she said.

  “A thread in the tapestry of time. You find a lot of those around here.”

  A little farther along, they came to what was called Architects Corner, where Walter Gropius and José Luis Sert had left their mark. The famous Design Research building shimmered in four stories of glass and golden light.

  “This was where the Wedge house was,” said Peter. “What do you think Lydia would say now?”

  “Maybe we should ask her.” And Evangeline led Peter up Church Street.

  Soon, they were slipping into the ancient burial ground beside the Unitarian Meeting House. The traffic growled in the street, but the graveyard was shadowed and dark, something from another time, with a core of silence that let them hear the snow falling, almost flake by flake, on the granite slabs and headstones.

  With the little flashlight she carried in her purse, Evangeline led Peter to a far corner of the cemetery and a simple headstone: LYDIA WEDGE TOWNSEND, 1750-1842.

  “I was here this afternoon. I should have my head examined for showing you this, but”—Evangeline pointed her light at the stone—“another bread crumb.”

  Fallon read the inscription. “Seek truth through the years, but seek it for all, / Bestow knowledge freely to those who may call / Make this your goal till a century turns, / And the Bard will applaud as humanity learns.”

  “‘The Bard,’” she said. “When it’s capitalized, it means Shakespeare, doesn’t it?”

  “I think Lydia is telling us to keep looking.”

  They came out of the Old Burying Ground, feeling younger all the time.

  She slipped an arm into his. “I’ve rented a studio on Memorial Drive . . . for when I come up to do research.”

  “A studio in Cambridge, a co-op on the East Side . . . sounds like you won your divorce.”

  “Nobody wins a divorce. You know that. But no more divorce talk,” she said.

  She’d sublet a place in a big stone building across the river from Harvard Stadium. Except for an air mattress in the corner, there was not a stick of furniture, not even a lamp.

  So Peter flipped on the overhead light in the little kitchen and an educated Cambridge cockroach went scuttling.

  “Put that out,” she said. “Come over and look at the river.”

  The snow was dancing in the orange streetlights and the headlight beams and in the bright lights of the athletic complex across the river.

  She took off her coat and put it on the windowsill. He threw his onto the mattress. Then he came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.

  “Promise me one thing,” she said, without turning around.

  Before she could say any more, he leaned forward and kissed her neck.

  She took a sharp breath and inclined her head so that he could kiss a little higher, the way he used to kiss the places he knew she liked, and he liked, too.

  As he kissed, he inhaled Shalimar. She had been wearing it when they first met, and it intoxicated him now as it had when they were in their twenties.

  And then she turned, took his face in her hands, and kissed him.

  Soon enough, their clothes were dropping onto the floor and they were falling together onto the air mattress.

  “This is yours, right?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I slept on it last night.”

  And that was all they said until they had completed a little tour of youth.

  When it was over and they were returning to reality, she said, “Falling into bed was not part of the plan.”

  “It wasn’t a bed. It was an air mattress. And . . . you wanted me to promise you something.”

  “Don’t push me further than I want to go, Peter. I left you once because I thought you were crazy. We’re not even together now, but I’ll leave you again.”

  “Honey”—he pulled her on top of him—“we may have eaten like we were in our twenties, and played like it, but if you think I’d risk my life like I did when I thought that finding a lost tea set was the road to salvation, forget it. I’m older and wiser.”

  “Are you?”

  “Well, maybe not. But I’m a father.”

  “Detective?” said Peter Fallon. “I didn’t know Harvard had detectives.”

  It was the next morning. Peter had come into the office feeling better than he had in months. Now there was a detective outside. What could he want?

  Bernice ushered him in. He was about five-eight, with dark eyebrows and a Robert De Niro mole on his cheek. Beneath the bomber jacket he showed the thick neck and sloping shoulders of a power lifter. He flipped his badge and introduced himself. “John Scavullo.”

  Peter invited him to sit. “I thought university police just sent kids back to their rooms when they drank too much and kept people from parking in the Yard.”

  “Uniforms do that,” said Scavullo. “I’m in the criminal investigation division.”

  “I didn’t even know they had one. There’s crime at Harvard?”

  Scavullo smiled. He did not look as if he laughed much. “Anytime you bring a lot people together in one place, you’ll have crime, no matter how smart they are. We enforce laws and university policy on drugs, thefts, assaults, vandalism. . . .”

  “Like the tradition of kids pissing behind John Harvard’s statue?”

  “Tradition to some, misdemeanor to others.”

  “Misdemeanors I can understand. But felonies?”

  “There aren’t a lot because we’re good at what we do. But bad things happen, sometimes. And sometimes in the libraries. Book thefts, for example.”

  Fallon sat back and folded his arms. He saw where this was going. He decided to let Scavullo do the talking.

  “Our security in the library is excellent, but over the years, we’ve had thefts by students who wanted books so that they could underline them instead of taking notes . . . thefts by students who wanted the best books for themselves so they would get the only A’s . . . thefts by people who know that a book of engravings is worth more if it’s cut up and the engravings are sold separately . . . thefts by people who erased library marks on rare volumes, so that an honest bookseller like yourself would buy it.” Scavullo looked into the outer office. “You may have bought stolen books you don’t even know about.”

  “There’s no stolen prop
erty in those cases,” said Peter, keeping his tone flat neutral, saving indignation for later.

  “We know you’re honest. And you made good on the stolen Second Folio you bought a few years back.”

  “At great hardship . . . so, what do you want with me?”

  “You have some interesting friends.”

  “It’s an interesting business.”

  Scavullo took an envelope from his inside pocket, took two photographs from the envelope, and placed them in front of Fallon. “Look at those.”

  First was a photo of Fallon going into Ridley’s house.

  “That,” said Scavullo, “would be on the day you went poking through his computer. We were watching Ridley’s house.”

  “Because you think he was murdered?”

  “No. State police said it was an accident. But they also looked over his computer and found the names of people we suspect of stealing and fencing books.”

  “Such as?”

  “Assistant Professor O’Hill, for one. And O’Hill has dealings with a bookseller named Bertram Lee.” Scavullo handed Fallon a photo. “Here you are, moments after Lee and O’Hill have parted company, meeting Lee on the steps of Widener.”

  “Do you always have people taking the tours, in case I come by with my son?”

  Scavullo said, “We weren’t watching you. We were watching Lee.”

  “This was taken in October,” said Fallon. “It’s March. What took you so long?”

  “We thought we’d just keep an eye on you. Study your catalogs, just to see what you’ve been selling.”

  For the second time, Fallon decided to say nothing.

  Scavullo took out three more photographs. They had been taken by a telephoto lens. They showed Bertram Lee, on a city street, in heated conversation with a man in a black raincoat, scally cap, and dark glasses. In one, Lee was holding up a locket.

  “These were taken this week,” said Scavullo. “We don’t know what’s going on here, but that’s Bingo Keegan, as you know. We think he’s the distribution point for a lot of stolen material—art, Oriental carpets, rare books. In his world, everyone pays cash and nobody pays sales tax.”

  “A denizen of what some have called the booksellers’ underground.”