Harvard Yard (Peter Fallon)

by William Martin

  “Scavullo?”

  A short while later, Fallon and Scavullo leaned against one of the pillars at Widener and looked out across the Yard.

  Scavullo said, “We thought we might catch O’Hill this morning.”

  “English department says he left town.”

  “Not surprised. A copy of Anglorum Praelia disappeared yesterday from a locked case in the display room in Houghton.”

  “Locked case?”

  “He used a glass cutter. Put a notebook down and pretended that he was writing something, which is the way that it looked on a security camera. Reached in and took the book. Of course, he had worked in Houghton as a graduate student, and he knew the security procedures a little too well.”

  Fallon laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Scavullo.

  “If he was going to steal something, he should have gone to the effort of taking something valuable. It’s not even worth a thousand.”

  “Any idea why he went after it?”

  “It’s one of the books that was in John Harvard’s library,” said Peter. “But there’s something else from Harvard’s library, something lost for over three hundred years. It may have been the reason someone tried to kill me on the river, because it’s worth more than anything else in Houghton . . . maybe everything in Houghton.”

  “That would be tough. But I’m listening.”

  Peter looked across the Yard, to the steps of Memorial Church, where a heavyset guy sat reading a book and watching the library. “I think that guy is part of it. In the fall, he wears a Bruins cap. Now that it’s baseball season, he’s wearing a Red Sox cap.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Maybe,” said Peter. “But stupid. If we give his boss a little more rope, we might be able to track down a lot of the books that are lost. We might even connect him to Bertram Lee and O’Hill.”

  “Maybe O’Hill. But not Bertram Lee,” said Scavullo.

  “Why?”

  “He turned up dead in a men’s room in Key West this morning.”

  “Dead?”

  “He liked the nose candy. He also liked the Key West boys. It seems that the mixture of cocaine and anonymous sex was too much for his bookselling heart to take.”

  “I’d wait for the autopsy,” said Peter. “And by the way, did you ever ask this Assistant Professor O’Hill where he was on the morning that Ridley fell off his boat?”

  “He said he was in a tutorial session with a student.” Scavullo flipped open his notebook. “Dorothy Wedge. She’s a senior. The alibi checked out.”

  “She may have been lying.”

  “A student? Lie? Let me write that down.” He did, then closed the notebook again. “Now, what is this thing you’re going to help me to find?”

  “Just trust me. I need another week or two. By commencement.”

  Scavullo pointed his finger at Fallon. “You keep me posted.”

  “Every day,” said Fallon. “I’ll be glad to know I have protection, and keep jabbing your finger at me a little bit more. The guy who’s watching us deserves a show.”

  “Should I pull out my handcuffs?”

  “No. That’s a bit much. The finger will do.” Fallon grinned. “Now, beat it.”

  As soon as Scavullo left him alone on the steps of Widener, he took out his telephone and called Professor George Wedge Drake and congratulated him on the purchase of Anglorum Praelia.

  “Thank you. I hope you don’t mind that I set someone else on the trail of it, too.”

  “All’s fair in love and war,” said Fallon. “Thanks for giving me the chance. But let me give you a bit of advice.”

  “Yes?”

  “Stop payment on the check.”

  “But it was a wire transfer.”

  “Let me guess, to a numbered account in Switzerland.”

  “Well, yes. Why?”

  “Because the book you bought was stolen from Houghton.”

  Evangeline spent most of the afternoon in the archives, going through letters between Elizabeth Cary Agassiz and Dorothy Wedge Warren. She had been enjoying this kind of research, but not today. She was following a story that had gone past them, all the way to a frightened girl who was Dorothy’s namesake.

  So she decided to give the girl a call. She went back to her apartment, let herself in, put down her briefcase, and froze.

  A man in a black raincoat and scally cap was sitting in the folding chair by the window.

  “Who are you?” she blurted.

  At the same instant, the door slammed behind her and she screamed. A big guy in a Red Sox baseball cap was standing behind her.

  “That’s my nephew Jackie Pucks,” said the man. “Only now, we’re callin’ him Jackie Fastball. It’s baseball season.”

  “How did you get in here?” Evangeline’s knees were shaking, but she kept some swagger in her voice.

  Bingo Keegan did not stand. He barely moved. “I’m a business associate of your boyfriend. I like to associate with smart guys, especially guys from the neighborhood who make good, despite a few pretensions. By the way, did you like the wine?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Tell him that civilians are safe in this business, and thanks to his good sense regarding a B and E in Marblehead a few weeks ago, I have been able to see to his safety up until now, even when his opinions almost cut into a nice locket sale that I had a piece of. But, honey, we’re talkin’ about thirty million bucks here, so I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “Is he supposed to stop looking for the manuscript, then?”

  “If I was him, I’d look even harder.” Keegan stood and brushed past her.

  She heard the door open, and Keegan whispered into her ear, “But I’d remember who my friends are.”

  “A fair warning,” Peter said to her a few hours later.

  “My knees are still shaking,” said Evangeline.

  Peter put his arm around her. “Keegan may be taking control of things. Or he may have lost control.”

  “You’d best be careful, Peter.”

  “And you’d best stay close to me.”

  “Better I should stay close to Bernice. She’s packin’ heat.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t need it.”

  A few days later, Peter and Evangeline drove to Manchester-by-the-Sea with Will Wedge.

  Will looked as nervous and exhausted as his daughter. And he had about him an unfamiliar air of contrition. He apologized for doling out information and told them everything about his plan, most of which fell into line with what Franklin had told Peter in Harvard Yard.

  “But?” said Peter. “There’s always a but. You’re leaving something out.”

  Evangeline asked, “What about Charles Price?”

  “Price will give a thirty-million-dollar contribution to the building of Wedge House, if it includes the Charles Price Shakespeare Library, sitting for all the world to see, right there on the river, with the manuscript as the centerpiece.”

  “That’s a hell of a house library,” said Peter.

  “To build a new residential house for Harvard will cost fifty or sixty million. The rest of the money would come out of the final liquidation of the Wedge Charitable Trust. We’ll perpetuate our name for as long as Harvard is here and expand one of Harvard’s greatest resources.”

  “Why wouldn’t Price want his name on the house?”

  “He cares about the manuscript. If I find it, he’ll pay me for the privilege of putting it into the Price Library at Wedge House. He’ll get a nice tax write-off, and Harvard will go along because they get it all, one way or the other. If the play doesn’t exist, then I convince Price to make the contribution, so long as he gets his name on the library and gets to put all his Shakespeariana in there.”

  “And if Keegan gets it?” asked Evangeline.

  “That’s trouble,” said Will. “It goes into the booksellers’ underground. I suspect Price will be a player there, too.”

  “But it will be a cash sale for much
less,” said Fallon. “Twenty million tops, because he’ll never be able to show it publicly without having to fight Harvard for it.”

  “Basically,” Wedge explained, “we’re appealing to Price’s ego. He’s always imagined himself as some kind of Shakespearean hero, ever since we were freshmen.”

  “What about Franklin?” asked Evangeline.

  “My brother is the joker in any deck. We’d both like to find this thing, just to end the troubles that began back in 1969, just to exorcise the demons around the Wedge brothers . . . and all the people we’ve pulled into our circle.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  1968-1969

  THE DATE was Wednesday, November 6, 1968. The class was Government 154, The American Presidency.

  And this, thought Will Wedge, was why he had come to Harvard.

  He took a seat two places away from the prettiest girl in Longfellow Hall, put his coat on the chair between them, and opened his notebook.

  Professor Neustadt gave his students a little half smile, as if to say that he was going to enjoy the next hour, and he began: “Last night, we witnessed one of the closest popular votes in our history. But in the electoral college, Richard Nixon won, three hundred and two to Humphrey’s hundred and ninety-one. I would suggest that this plurality legitimizes the election and emphasizes the importance of the electoral college. . . .”

  Will took notes, but mostly he enjoyed being at the center of things. Here was a man who had been an aide to Truman, an advisor to Kennedy, and a regular on the Easterrn Airlines Harvard shuttle, which got its name when JFK started bringing professors and their former students down to work for him. And now Neustadt was lecturing to Will about things that mattered as much to the nation as they would on the exam.

  Will had decided to take as many of the so-called Great Man courses as he could in his first semester. It seemed a good way to see what Harvard had to offer and a great way to attract girls.

  Like most Harvard freshmen, Will Wedge had an image of the image he projected that most girls would tell him was more fantasy than reality. He and his friends talked about “dropping the H-bomb” in conversation. Once they announced that they went to Harvard, girls were supposed to fawn. And once they announced that they were studying at the feet of, say, a Neustadt or John Kenneth Galbraith, girls were supposed to swoon.

  Of course, it didn’t work with Radcliffe girls, because from 1950 on, any ’Cliffie could take any class at Harvard. And it didn’t work with girls from other colleges, either, because the ones who knew who Galbraith was didn’t care.

  Nevertheless, Will would choose a seat near a girl, take notes, and cast sidelong glances at her, while Galbraith expostulated. Will might simply have read Galbraith’s book The New Industrial State, but in person, Galbraith delivered his opinions with a wry condescension toward just about everybody in national life, reserving special sarcasm for Nixon and Johnson, for the shapers of American policy in Vietnam, and for anyone foolish enough to suggest that the federal budget could be balanced or anyone misguided enough to try to do it.

  And this, thought Will, was why he had come to Harvard.

  He also took Humanities 7, Trends in Modern Drama, from Professor William Alfred, who called himself the faculty’s “resident Papist.” While Will picked a seat in the usual way, Alfred would arrive in Sanders Theater, his fedora pulled low, his green book bag slung over his shoulder, his three-piece suit artfully rumpled. He would sit at a table on the stage, take a text from the book bag, clip a microphone to his lapel, and speak to four hundred students as though he were chatting with one or two. When he talked about Aeschylus, he read passages in the Greek, and students who understood none of it were mesmerized. When he talked about character, he could turn a collection of words on a page into human beings as real as he was.

  And this, too, thought Will, was why he had come to Harvard.

  To meet his science requirement, he took Natural Sciences 10, Introduction to Geology, also known as Rocks for Jocks. The course was supposed to be easy, though Will was pulling the first C of his life. But there were plenty of girls to sit near, and one of the teachers was an assistant professor named Stephen Jay Gould, who not only could explain what the Appalachian geosyncline was but also peppered his lectures with witticisms and sarcastic asides, quite often about organized religion.

  And all of it, thought Will, was why he had come to Harvard: to hear opinions at the center of things, to hear the man who invented the term conventional wisdom pontificate on the wisdom of the moment, to hear the wisdom of the ages from Harvard’s resident Papist, to hear an irreligious young scientist challenge any wisdom but scientific truth, and then to go back to his room and think it all through for himself, and then to think about the girls.

  Will’s freshman year should have been a time to enjoy a sumptuous course catalog buffet and satisfy his intellectual appetites, just as Eliot had intended, all within academic boundaries that Lowell had drawn. But this was 1968, so the joy of learning, of dropping H-bombs, of growing up, was tempered by other things.

  Including Will’s brother, Franklin.

  After Neustadt’s class, Will usually crossed paths with his brother on the Delta, in the gloomy shadow of Memorial Hall, which had seen better days before a fire destroyed its wooden clock tower. Now, thought Will, it resembled nothing so much as a man who was depressed because his hat had blown away. And the buildings weren’t the only things that looked depressed the day after Nixon was elected. There were long faces everywhere.

  But as Franklin came out of Sanders Theater, he had a cheerful greeting for his brother. “Nixon’s the one, Willie. New president, same old bullshit.”

  “Yeah. Dad voted for Humphrey. You want to have lunch with me in the Union?”

  “No. Lunch at Adams House. Then I’m caucusing with the WSA. After yesterday, I think the Worker-Student Alliance will be the power group in the SDS. So we need to have a response to this fucking election.”

  “As if the world gives a shit about your opinions.”

  “I might get pissed at a remark like that, but I just scored this.” Franklin pulled a little Baggie from the pocket of his military fatigues. “No stems, no seeds.”

  Will looked around furtively, then whispered, “Where did you get that?”

  “A kid from South Boston. He doesn’t rip me off like the locals do. Fifteen bucks an ounce, instead of sixteen.”

  “Dad would kill you for that.”

  “Yet another reason. Come on. We’ll have lunch, caucus, get stoned. It’s time to loosen you up. Then we’ll go to a section of Soc. Rel. one forty-eight.”

  “The course with no lectures, no grades, and half the section leaders are SDS undergraduates?”

  “The best new course at Harvard. ‘Social Change in America.’ We teach ourselves . . . just the way it ought to be.”

  “Jesus,” said Will.

  “Did you know that Jesus was a communist?” said Franklin. “There’s a section on that, too. Along with sections on racism, the role of women in an oppressive society, César Chávez . . . I’m taking the imperialism section.”

  “You mean, like the British in India.”

  “No, dickhead. Like the fucking United States in fucking everywhere.”

  “But you have to get stoned before you go?”

  “Shit, yeah. It’s too depressing otherwise.”

  At least his brother showed a flash of humor once in a while. Most campus radicals never even smiled. So Will decided to have lunch with him. As for caucuses, dope, and Soc. Rel. 148, he’d pass.

  They were walking through the Yard, passing directly under the gaze of John Harvard’s statue. Coming toward them were two young men, one wearing a raincoat, the other a windbreaker, but beneath these, they were both wearing navy blue trousers, navy blue shirts and ties, and one of them was carrying a white officer’s hat under his arm, as though he was embarrassed to put it on in Harvard Yard.

  “Fucking ROTCies,” whispered Franklin to
his brother. “Watch this.”

  Will didn’t want a fight, and certainly not with a pair of students who spent afternoons honing military skills as part of their naval ROTC training.

  As Franklin passed, he made the sound of a pig, a loud snorting noise that caused the two young reserve officers to stop and turn. But the Wedge brothers kept walking, Will because he was too frightened to stop, Franklin because he knew enough to turn his snorting into a theatrical cough.

  When they reached the Porcellian Gate, Will said to Franklin, “I think I’ll pass on lunch.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a jerk . . . treating those guys like fascist pigs. They’re here on ROTC scholarships. It may be the only way they can come. They take a few extra courses and when they get out, they give their time to the military. Maybe we all should.”

  “Maybe we all will,” said Franklin, “if somebody doesn’t stand up to the military-industrial complex and stop this fucking war.”

  Will made a face. They were brothers. A face was all it took.

  Franklin said, “Listen, you skinny prep school snot in your blazer and your loafers, this place is married to the government. Half the professors are on the take—”

  “Like Uncle George?”

  “At least he knows what a mistake he made in 1945, but yeah. Prof. G. . . . all those fucking scientists. All the eggheads, ridin’ the Harvard shuttle twice a week, tellin’ the government how to fuck up the world.”

  “Dad rode the shuttle for years,” said Will.

  “Yeah, and he helped start a war.”

  “He didn’t work for Defense. He worked in the Treasury Department.”

  “You mean the money department, and it’s all about the money. Now he can stay home and make some real dough at Wedge, Fleming, and Royce. But if we can stop the Harvard shuttle and break the grip of the government around here, we should do it.”

  “ROTC is a scholarship program.”

  “If the army doesn’t have any officers, it can’t go and murder Vietnamese, so we shouldn’t train officers.” Then he turned on his heels and stalked off.