The Ancient Nine

by Ian K. Smith, M. D.

  “Did you read the entire journal?”

  “Hell no. I was scared we were gonna get caught. But she showed me the part where he talked about the Gas House. And there was one section about trying to figure out the location of a secret room. Then he wrote in the margins how he hoped his uncle would admit the truth about the room and be nice enough to give him a chance to see it.”

  “This is huge,” I said. “You’re saying there’s definitely a secret room at the Delphic.”

  “I’m not saying it; he did.”

  “Do you still see that girl anymore?”

  “Not for a few years. Her parents got a divorce and sold the summerhouse. Last I heard, she was down at Princeton, rowing crew.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Katie. Katie Huntington. Her grandfather, P. J. Huntington, just donated a hundred million dollars to the school, half of it in Impressionist paintings. That family’s been in the Delphic since it was built.”

  * * *

  I TRIED REACHING Dalton all day, but he wasn’t answering his phone. I wanted to tell him what I had learned from Percy about Huntington and the Delphic’s secret room. I stopped by Eliot on the way to practice, but his roommates said they hadn’t seen him since early that morning. I left a handwritten message for him to call me urgently when he got back. I jumped on my bike and raced across the bridge. Coach was a stickler for punctuality, and he blew his whistle at precisely four o’clock. If you weren’t dressed and on the court, you were considered late, which meant after practice you owed him three wind sprints for every minute, and each one had to be run under twenty seconds or you had to do them all over again. He ran Markus Hollenstein, our seven-foot center, so hard one night that he collapsed in his own vomit behind the bleachers. That afternoon, it took half the damn team to carry Markus over to the training room, where the doctor hooked him up to an IV and had to dump six liters of saline into his veins to rehydrate him.

  When I got into the gym, things were unusually quiet. Typically, a few of the guys would be on the court early, practicing their dribbling, jumping rope, or shooting baskets. But today no one was on the floor. I walked into the locker room, and Mike Geilton, our captain, was standing up at the chalkboard while everyone else sat staring at their lockers.

  “Coach is in a really bad mood today,” he said. “Lavietes went to the AD and told him if we didn’t win it all this year, he was gonna withdraw all his support.”

  Roy Lavietes was a former hoopster who lived in Connecticut and made a fortune in the concrete business. He must’ve been somewhere in his eighties, but he was a die-hard basketball fan and easily our most supportive booster. He had already pledged ten million dollars for a new arena to be built under his name, and another ten million dollars if we brought home the championship trophy while he was still alive. One thing I had learned about Harvard was that it almost never responded to whiny student complaints or pressure from the media, but money always got the attention of University Hall. And Lavietes had buckets of it.

  “So, everyone be cool today,” Geilton said. “No horsin’ around. Play the whistle and hustle between drills. He’s gonna be looking for anything to punish us today, so let’s not give him any excuse.”

  That was our plan after we gathered in a huddle and left the locker room. For the first half of practice, we stuck to our strategy and things worked out perfectly. Coach was in a foul mood, just as Geilton had predicted. He kicked out a handful of old men who always sat and watched our practices, telling them that today was a closed-door session. When Coach was really pissed, he did just the opposite of what you’d expect. Instead of screaming like a tyrant, he’d keep really quiet, which made everyone in the gym nervous. He had very little to say, speaking up only to criticize a play or call one of us a name. Even the assistant coaches were on edge, cutting us angry looks and not letting us take our usual water breaks. Their jobs were tied to Coach’s, so they were threatened too.

  We had fifteen minutes left to practice, and the women’s team, which was practicing after us that week, was already stretching on the sidelines. Their appearance was always a good sign, because it meant practice was winding down and we had only a couple of easy drills left before surrendering the court. But then Coach blew the whistle and called for us to line up for Box Out. We all looked at each other. He was going to put us through the most physically torturous drill at the end of a long practice.

  Box Out is a rebounding drill. One player goes up against another player, and they fight like two rabid dogs to see who will come out alive with the basketball. We line up in a single line, and then one player is called out to take on the rest of the team one man at a time. Coach throws the ball at the rim, purposely missing, and the two players pull and scratch and do almost anything else to get the rebound. The defensive player is responsible for boxing out—which means keeping the guy on offense from getting the ball. The defender must get three rebounds in a row before he’s relieved of his duty. Once he accomplishes this, another player gets called out to defend the basket and rebound the ball. Sounds like a simple drill, and it is. But if you don’t find success early, fatigue makes it exponentially more difficult. The cruelty of this game lies in the fact that you must get three rebounds consecutively or start all over. The defender is out there the entire time, while everyone else stays refreshed, rotating to the back of the line with each rebound.

  The smaller guys who were at an inherent disadvantage especially hated this drill. Coach knew this. The defender would be throwing elbows, kneeing people in the groin, even landing an elbow to the gut if he could get away with it. It once took Tom Morrissey, the smallest guy on the team, twenty-five minutes to get three consecutive rebounds. By the time he was done, he had a bloody nose, scratches all over his neck, and a sprained thumb. He missed the entire next week of practices, which seemed to gratify Coach even more.

  Today, we knew the drill would be an all-out war. We were already tired, and the coaches in their foul moods wanted to see nothing less than blood. The first three guys were in and out, and Coach warned the rest of us that if we were trying to take it easy on the defender, we would run after practice until our guts were hanging out of our mouths. We became instant enemies.

  Paul Mitchell, a six-foot-seven freshman from Long Island, New York, was up next. Mitch had been an all-star forward at Friends Academy and one of our most highly touted recruits in years. He also happened to be the son of the most successful black CPA in the country, a millionaire businessman who played golf with senators and poker with Fortune 500 CEOs. The older Mitchell had grown up a poor boy in Jamaica and, after moving to the States with his seven brothers and sisters, clawed and hustled his way to the top of the corporate world. Though the Mitchells lived a life of luxury like no other black family I had ever met, Paul inherited his father’s toughness. He was a ferocious competitor and fearless protector of his honor.

  Mitch quickly disposed of the first two offensive players, grabbing the rebound easily before preparing to take on the third. But the ball took a bad bounce, and Mitch lost the rebound he needed to get out of the circle. And it went like this for the next fifteen minutes, each battle wearing him down to the point that he was barely able to move his legs. The girls were now standing around, watching, anxious to take the court, and Coach was still throwing that ball up, yelling at Mitch to fight like a man and get the damn rebound. Miraculously, Mitch got a second wind, and a couple of lucky bounces of the ball and he had nabbed his second rebound in a row. I was up next. I liked Mitch. In fact, he was my closest friend on the team. But I knew that if he got that third rebound on me, Coach would have my head in a sling. Mitch wore goggles in the tradition of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and when he was sweating and tired, they’d fog up and sit askew on his face. I looked in his eyes and could see him begging for me to let him get that third rebound. I had made up my mind to do so and risk one of Coach’s cursing sessions. Coach threw the ball, which hit the corner of the rim and backboard and shot to the
right of us. I let Mitch get a good jump on me, but when he almost had the ball in his hands, he slipped on a wet part of the floor, his legs buckled, and his tired body slid to the ground. I had no choice but to pick up the ball, which meant his torture would start all over again.

  Mitch stayed there on the ground, stretched on his back, gasping to catch his breath. Everyone else, the girls included, started shouting encouragements at him, knowing Coach was going to keep him out there until he was broken. He blew the whistle on Mitch, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Get up and be a man, you fuckin’ pussy!”

  The rest of us froze instantly when we heard that. Mitch was the kind of guy you could mess around with and even poke fun at occasionally. Unlike a lot of big guys, he was a pretty good sport about things. But there were a couple of things he didn’t tolerate from anybody, and one was being called a pussy. Coach had not only said it, but he did it in front of all of us, including the women’s team. I prayed like hell that Mitch would swallow his pride just once. But when he got to his feet, his shirt half torn, his goggles now dangling around his neck, he walked over to Coach and said, “What did you just say to me?”

  “I called you a fuckin’ pussy,” Coach said. Then Coach did something I had never seen him do even when he was in the middle of his worst meltdown. He looked up and pushed Mitch in the chest and knocked him back a couple of feet. Everything from there went in slow motion. Mitch clenched his right fist. Then Geilton and Markus, who were standing closest to Mitch at the time, lunged forward to hold him back. Coach turned his head slightly to say something to the rest of us, and when he turned back toward Mitch, the blow caught him square on the side of his face.

  It reminded me of one of those replays of boxing knockouts in which one guy lands a direct hit and the other guy’s face seems to bend around the glove. Well, that’s exactly what happened to Coach. His whistle flew out along with a couple of teeth inside a thick squirt of blood. Then his knees wobbled, and before anyone could reach him, he crumpled to the ground, his face lying in a pool of bright red blood.

  There was instant pandemonium. Markus and Geilton stopped Mitch from continuing his charge. The assistant coaches dropped to their knees to help Coach, and someone yelled out to run and get the trainer. I stood there paralyzed, wondering if Coach had been knocked unconscious and worried that Mitch had just cost himself a Harvard degree. Half of us huddled around Coach, the other around Mitch. The door flew open and two trainers ran into the gym with their medical kit and several bags of ice.

  After working on him for half an hour, they finally carted Coach off to the training room and the rest of us walked Mitch into the locker room. No one said much of anything, including Mitch, who at that point realized the gravity of his situation. Everyone showered and dressed in silence, and instead of heading over to Kirkland House with the rest of the team, I rode back to Lowell for dinner, still in shock. I made it into the dining hall just as they were locking the kitchen door.

  “We’re closed,” a voice called out from the other side of the counter.

  I looked up into the face of Ashley Garrett. I couldn’t help but smile.

  “It would have to be you,” she said.

  “Tonight’s my lucky night,” I said.

  “Why would you come in one minute before the kitchen closes?”

  “Basketball practice ran late tonight.”

  “You play basketball? I’d love to see that.”

  “Damn right, I hoop. And don’t sound so surprised.”

  “I just can’t imagine you getting dirty, on the ground diving for loose balls.”

  “What do you know about basketball?” I said.

  “My first cousin was the captain at Rindge and Latin. He plays for Memphis now.”

  Cambridge Rindge and Latin School was the former home of NBA star Patrick Ewing and one of the best high school basketball programs on the East Coast. It had sent several players to the NBA and made a star of its head coach, who went on to become a well-regarded college coach at St. John’s. By association alone, her cousin was in good company.

  “Can you play?” I asked.

  “Second team all-state my senior year,” she said. “I messed up my ankle halfway through the season.”

  “Let’s close it down, Ashley,” a man called out from the back of the kitchen. “I want to get home at a decent hour tonight.”

  “So, what will it be?” she said to me. “Pizza or meat loaf?”

  I looked at both of them and said, “Some real pizza at Tommy’s and when we’re done, dessert at Emack and Bolio’s. I’m buying.”

  “Are you asking me out on a date?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Then I won’t go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because after five minutes of stepping foot on this campus, I promised myself I would never date one of you Harvard men.”

  “Fair enough. Have you eaten yet?”

  “We don’t eat until the kitchen closes.”

  “Do you want to eat what’s left in these trays?”

  She looked down at the dry pizza and hardened edges of the lumpy meat loaf. “Not really.”

  “Well, since both of us need to eat, how about we agree to meet at Tommy’s and sit next to each other and have a little conversation if the mood strikes. Not a date. A meeting.”

  She thought it over for a few seconds, then said, “I could live with that, but I’ve got to clean up my station first.”

  “I’ll meet you there in thirty minutes,” I said.

  “And I can’t be out long,” she said. “I have a paper due tomorrow. And no funny stuff.”

  “I promise,” I said, crossing my heart.

  “Good.” She smiled. “My brother still has friends that live around here. And they hate snobby Harvard people, so you’re on notice.”

  I ran back to my room and jumped in the shower. I felt like the luckiest kid alive.

  * * *

  “SO WHY ARE YOU so aloof?” I asked. We were sitting at Tommy’s, a greasy spoon in the middle of campus that had the best New York–style pizza in all of Cambridge. One TV monitor was showing an old black-and-white movie. The other was turned to a hockey game. A blues song scratched from the tired jukebox leaning in the corner. It was early for Tommy’s, which usually didn’t start rocking till after midnight, so Ashley and I had our choice of seats.

  “I’m not aloof,” Ashley said. “I just don’t fall for you preppie types and your I’m-greater-than-God bullshit.”

  “I’m the farthest thing from a preppie,” I said.

  “Yeah, and the pope isn’t Catholic.”

  “I’m from the South Side of Chicago. Trust me, there aren’t any preppies living on my side of the city.”

  “It doesn’t matter where you’re from,” she said. “Just being here at Harvard gives you preppie credentials.”

  I decided to change the subject since I wasn’t going to win that debate. “So why would a smart and pretty girl like you want to work for Harvard’s dining services?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to work here,” she said. “But I need the job. The hours are flexible, and so far I’ve been able to tolerate it. But who knows how long that will last.”

  Our pizza was ready, a large pie with veggies on her side and pepperoni on mine. The two-liter soda came half price with the pizza.

  “So, tell me about your school,” I said. “I don’t know much about it.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to,” she said between bites. “It’s a community college in a part of the city you have no reason to visit. Not the best school around, mostly commuters and part-time students. But it’s affordable. If I keep my grades up this year, I’ll be able to earn a scholarship and transfer to UMass or BU.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Poli-sci.”

  “So that explains the Locke book.”

  “You thought I was just picking it up to impress you?”

  “Never,” I said
, shaking my head. “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

  “Maybe the same reason you don’t have a girlfriend.”

  “I never said that I didn’t.”

  Ashley pushed back from the table and started reaching for her coat.

  “Only kidding,” I said, grabbing her arm. “I’m completely single.”

  “Tall and a half-decent smile,” she said. “I’d think latching on to a girl here would be easy for you.”

  “Who said it isn’t?”

  “Then why aren’t you dating anyone?”

  “Let’s just say I’m in a recovery phase of my dating life.”

  “Sounds like an ex-girlfriend problem.”

  “You can say that. She’s dating my biggest high school rival.”

  “Do you still like her?”

  “Not like I used to.”

  “Then maybe it’s time to move on.”

  “That’s why I’m sitting here with you.”

  “Not so fast, Harvard Man. This is just a meeting, remember? Nothing more.”

  I looked at her sitting there beautiful as ever in that stained uniform. We both knew this was the start of something special.

  * * *

  I HAD JUST fallen asleep after reading the same paragraph in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals four times when my phone rang. I looked at the clock on my nightstand. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. It could only be one person.

  “It’s me,” Dalton said.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I said. “I called you at least five times today. I even went to your room and left a note.”

  “I spent all day at the archives warehouse of the Boston Police Department.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Checking out Dunhill’s story.”

  “How did you get access to the files?”

  “The Emperor invites the commissioner over to dinner once a year. Says it’s good to be friendly with those who protect us.”