Stickney’s finishing of the oath was followed by the soft applause of gloved hands. More chairs were dragged across the floor, along with the sound of champagne corks being popped.
Jacobs’s voice took over again. “Ted, these words I shall soon say to you must be memorized and never written down. Never forget them, for they will guide you in the spirit of the Order. There was a moment of silence before Jacobs said, “A son of Waldorf, not far from the Rhine. Brother in the Gas of standing quite fine. Downed off Newfoundland in waters icy and wide. Now stands as our protector with loyalty and pride. RMS 240.”
The chatter quieted as Stickney slowly repeated the same poem Dalton had found inside the succession book—the same poem we had spent the last several weeks on, trying to decode its meaning without any success. I listened carefully to see if Jacobs would give a full explanation of its meaning. Instead, I heard, “A toast to our newest member.” It was the distinctive voice of Charles Thorpe rising above the sound of clinking glasses. The room filled with commotion as the men congratulated the newest Knight.
Laughter and animated conversations ensued; then suddenly the noise disappeared. I kept my ear pinned to the vent, but there was only silence. What could they be doing? I couldn’t even hear their footsteps on the hardwood floor. For thirty minutes I strained to hear anything, but it was as if they had suddenly vanished.
I quietly rose to my feet, then tiptoed to the library. The door was still locked. I knelt and looked through the keyhole. Nothing. The lights were still off, the candles had been snuffed, and the room was completely empty.
I returned to the TV room and took my position at the vent. I was scared as hell someone might come in and catch me there, but I was too close to back away. If necessary, I would pretend I had fallen asleep. I would do whatever it took, but I wouldn’t be stopped now. In the quiet darkness, I waited for the slightest movement from the other room. For three long hours, I heard nothing but the hollow sound of air blowing through the metal vent. Then I heard voices. But they were distant, not close as they were before. I ran to the balcony next to the library and looked out the large bay window and into the courtyard. That’s where I saw them, shaking each other’s hands and walking toward the exit on the northern side of the mansion. But they were in regular clothes with jackets and hats. Gone were the tuxedos, capes, and top hats. I was completely confused. How did I miss them walking out of the library? I should’ve heard some sort of commotion as they left.
I ran back to the library and tried the doorknob. Locked. How was this possible? I looked through the keyhole. Empty. The candles were gone, the smoke had cleared, and the chairs had been returned to their original places, as if no one had been there. When I felt certain the club was completely empty, I sneaked downstairs and out the back door.
* * *
“HELLO.”
“Dalton, wake up!” I said.
“Spenser?”
“I just got back from the club.”
“What the hell? It’s almost four o’clock in the morning. What were you doing there so late?”
“I think I saw the Ancient Nine tonight!”
“What are you talking about? How the hell is that possible?”
I told him about finding the lights on in the library, hearing voices, how they were dressed, Stickney’s initiation, the poem, and their disappearance for several hours.
“And you’re certain the library was locked?” Dalton said.
“A hundred percent. They didn’t leave through that door.”
There was a long pause before Dalton calmly said, “It’s gotta be in there, Spense. There’s no other explanation. The chamber must be somewhere off that library.”
* * *
THAT WEEKEND WAS Princeton–Penn weekend. Unlike other Division I schools, most of our games were played on the weekends to reduce the time we missed from classes. So, we played in pairs based on geographic proximity. Yale and Brown played on the same weekend, as did Cornell and Columbia. Dartmouth, which is in Hanover, New Hampshire, is the closest to Cambridge, so they were our partners.
We resented being treated like a high school varsity team, but there was nothing we could do. The big conference teams flew around the country in commercial planes while we piled into chartered buses with seats that barely reclined, driving through the icy New England countryside staring through frost-covered windows.
However, the Princeton–Penn trip was always the best of these sojourns. Not only was Princeton’s field house enormous, but the stands were always packed too, and the campus was fanatical about their Tigers. This year included a bonus. Model and actress Brooke Shields had just graduated, but it was rumored she still attended many of the home games. Even the coaches seemed excited about the possibility of catching a glimpse of the leggy Calvin Klein model, though they’d never admit it.
After the Princeton game on Friday, we usually ventured to Philadelphia, where we played Penn Saturday night in the Palestra, one of basketball’s oldest and most storied arenas and the site of the first NCAA championship in 1939. Penn fans always packed the musty gymnasium, standing in unison as they sang their fight song, which ended with a salute to the Penn banner hanging from the rafters.
Ashley picked me up in her mother’s little Bug and drove me to the Cage, where the buses were waiting. She had baked me a small canister of chocolate chip cookies and made several of my favorite roast beef and cheese sandwiches for the long ride to Princeton. She had applied to BU, Tufts, and UMass and was expecting to hear the decision on her acceptance on Friday or Saturday, so I gave her an extra kiss for luck, then boarded the bus.
These were our two biggest games of the year. Princeton was in first place, and we were only one game behind. Penn was a close third. Coach boarded the bus with Matilda, an old broom that had been around since the forties, and held her up for us all to see. No need to explain to us. When Matilda had been taken down from her display case in the lobby of Briggs, that meant we were expected to sweep the weekend and return to Cambridge sitting on top of the Ivies.
Princeton, as always, was a hard-fought game. They ran their traditional slow-down offense, full of quick passes and backdoor cuts, a methodical game plan that lulled opponents into passivity before going on the attack. We ran the opposite kind of offense, lots of running and fast breaks, quick shots and monstrous slam dunks in the open court. Brooke Shields was seated in the middle of their student section, another weapon of distraction in her tight Calvins and black cowboy boots. She had a gaggle of girls around her who were equally leggy and beautiful, prompting several of our guys to openly question their choice of colleges.
We played them even until the half, and during the third quarter the score remained tight. Mitch was having an unbelievable game with more than twenty points and ten rebounds and no sign that any of their big men could stop him. Geilton had shut down their point guard, who was averaging close to eighteen points a game, and both head coaches had already gotten technical fouls for arguing calls with the referees. We ended the fourth quarter tied and headed into a contentious overtime period that almost erupted into a bench-clearing brawl when one of their bruisers undercut Mitch as he went up for a dunk. The Princeton player was ejected from the game, Mitch sat out for a couple of minutes while our trainer had to retape his ankle. He returned and continued to punish them down in the low post. Geilton won the game for us on a buzzer-beating three-pointer that their head coach, Pete Carill, hotly contested but the referees held up. It was thrilling not just to win the game, but also see their typically obnoxious fans quietly file out of the arena with their Princeton banners dragging and their heads hung low. Brooke, however, looked just as beautiful in defeat.
Saturday night, the Palestra was jumping the minute we walked into the building. It was still more than an hour away from game time and most of the stadium’s seats were already filled. Their band played everything from James Brown’s “Gonna Have a Funky Good Time” to Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and their
cheerleaders led the growing crowds through a round of spirited fight songs. We were still riding high from last night’s overtime win at Princeton and walked onto the court with more confidence than I had ever seen in my teammates. There was a hunger in their eyes and a determination in their clenched jaws, and I knew long before the opening tip-off that we were going to win that game.
I had the best game of my career that night, hitting double digits in both points and assists, and Mitch continued his tear, racking up another twenty-point game and fifteen boards. Everyone seemed to be having career nights, with little Morrissey even getting in on the action and picking up eight points and two steals. By the time the final buzzer sounded, the boisterous Quaker fans had been silenced and we swept our way back to the bus with Matilda. We pulled out of Philly late that night sitting in first place for the first time since I had been at Harvard. I wondered if Reverend Campbell was already on the phone gloating over our victory with his cousin at Princeton.
* * *
WHEN I CRAWLED into my room after the six-hour bus ride home, the light was blinking on my answering machine. Ashley was speaking so quickly that I could barely understand what she said. The gist of it was that she had gotten into both UMass and Boston University, and both schools had offered scholarships that would cover most of her tuition. I went to sleep that night feeling life just couldn’t get any better.
43
“THE WAY TO get into the chamber is probably buried in one of those damn books,” Dalton said.
We had just sat down to French toast and hickory-smoked bacon at Leo’s Place. It was late Sunday morning and the winter’s first snowfall had just descended on our sleeping campus.
“Why are you so certain our answer is in one of the books?” I asked.
“Because it’s been right in front of us the entire time, and we’ve completely missed it,” Dalton said. “It’s all about books and literature and religion.”
I scooped up a healthy serving of French toast wedges, dipped them in the pool of syrup, and took a big bite.
“Think about it,” Dalton said. “A rare seventeenth-century religious book, two missing pages, a succession manual, a code buried within a poem, and an induction ceremony in the library. This is all about books.”
“There must be five thousand books or more in that library,” I said. “It could take me weeks to go through all of them. For you to help, I’d have to sneak you upstairs when no one else was around, then pray like hell we don’t get caught.”
Dalton looked up from his plate and smiled. “Start praying.”
After I returned to my room, I pulled up the blinds to let in what little sun cut through the heavy clouds. Percy had gone to meet Hartman at Quincy House, and only the hissing steam of the old heaters emanated from the common room. I sat back on the couch and thought about what was in store for us later that night. Getting into the club wouldn’t be a problem, but making sure no one else came in while we were there would be a real challenge. If I got caught sneaking Dalton upstairs, at the very least I’d be kicked out, but then I thought about Erasmus Abbott and realized that might be the smallest of my worries.
* * *
AT TWO O’CLOCK in the morning, while the rest of the campus was ensconced in heated rooms and down comforters, Dalton and I met at the bottom of Linden Street clad in dark sweat suits and black skullcaps pulled down just above our eyes. We walked to the Delphic and down the alleyway to the servants’ entrance. Dalton brought an industrial flashlight, and I brought two candles and matches just in case the batteries went dead.
I unlocked the creaky door to the back hallway. Once inside, I punched the alarm code in the keypad. As the old floorboards cracked under our feet, we worked our way down the hallway, through the kitchen, then up the back stairs to the third floor. The mansion was empty, so we quickly moved through the dark hallways and spacious rooms, and finally into the library. I locked the door behind us and wedged one of the chairs underneath the knob for added security.
Dalton lit the long candles, which flickered in the draft seeping through the chattering windowpanes. “When you checked this place, did you look behind the books?” he asked. “If they didn’t go through the windows or a door, they had to go through the ceiling or behind the walls.”
“I guess,” I said. “But I’m not sure. I just heard them through the vent in the TV room.”
“I’ll start on the upper level while you start down here,” Dalton said. “Look for any book that has something to do with Germany or whose author’s initials are RMS. Read each title carefully. They wouldn’t have made it easy.”
For the next two hours, we removed and replaced the books, flipping through the pages, running our hands along the back of the shelves to see if there was a secret compartment or faux wall. As we pored over everything from early Russian literature to French poetry born out of the Revolution, our weary arms and strained eyes faithfully kept to the mission. When we had gone through half the shelves and had come up empty-handed, we took a break on the sofa.
We were feeling defeated, not saying much as we looked around the darkness. The silence was occasionally punctured by the stress sounds of twisting tree branches fighting the howling winds. Then I saw it. I wasn’t certain until I aimed the flashlight at the painting.
“What are you doing?” Dalton said.
“Follow me,” I said, getting up and walking over to the mantelpiece.
When we were standing in front of the portrait, I asked, “Do you know who that is?”
“No clue, nor do I give a damn,” he said. “We have several more thousand books to go through, and the sun will be up in a few hours. I couldn’t give two shits about some old portrait.”
“That’s John Jacob Astor IV,” I said. “He was one of the early members. I saw his name in one of the old club directories. He was the recording secretary in 1885 and 1886.”
Astor was dressed in a gray wool topcoat with a black fur collar. He was standing on the bow of a ship looking into the turbulent water with a pensive expression on his face. He had a long nose, a thick black mustache that was slightly curled at the ends. Long, well-groomed sideburns dropped beneath his ears.
As I further scrutinized the painting, I saw the three letters that had been haunting us for weeks and felt a jolt of electricity shoot through my body. There, along the starboard side of the ship and barely legible: RMS. The name that followed those three letters, which was barely visible, provided the breakthrough: Titanic. It all started to come back. The RMS Titanic. What most people didn’t know was that RMS stood for Royal Mail Steamer, something I discovered when I wrote a sixth-grade school report on the Titanic. The Titanic had been built as the largest moving object ever created to carry passengers and mail across the Atlantic.
Dalton stood too far away to notice the faint letters in the bottom of the painting.
“It was here the entire time, and I missed it,” I said. “‘A son of Waldorf not far from the Rhine.’”
I walked to the bookcase adjacent to the door and pulled a volume of the 1938 Encyclopedia Americana and the second volume of the 1968 edition.
“Are you going to let me in on the big secret?” Dalton said.
“When I was down at the New York dinner, we passed by this fancy hotel,” I said, flipping through the 1938 encyclopedia. “Tons of people in tuxedos and ball gowns were outside getting into limousines. Claybrooke said it was called the Waldorf Astoria. The Waldorf part caught my attention, but I didn’t pay any attention to the Astoria. I meant to look it up when I came back, but forgot about it.”
There wasn’t an entry for the Waldorf Astoria, but I found several entries for the Astor family. I looked at the second entry for John Jacob Astor IV. I found what I read aloud:
American capitalist and inventor, fourth of the name, nephew of John Jacob the third, and son of William: b. Rhinbeck, N.Y., 13 July 1864; d. at sea (Titanic wreck) 15 April 1912. He was graduated from Harvard in 1988. He was the manager of the Asto
r properties in America; a director in many banking companies, and member of various clubs and social organizations. He built in 1897 a very costly hotel, the Astoria (named after the famous fur settlement of 1811), on Fifth avenue, New York, adjoining the Waldorf built by his cousin, William Waldorf, the two being joined as the Waldorf-Astoria.
I picked up the 1968 volume and read from that one.
In the Spanish-American War, Astor made his yacht available to the U. S. Navy, outfitted an artillery battery at a cost of over $100,000, and served in Cuba as a lieutenant colonel. Besides the Astoria, he built the Knickerbocker and St. Regis hotels, New York City Landmarks. He actively directed the family fortune and was a director of such companies as Western Union, Equitable Life Assurance, the Illinois Central Railroad, and the Mercantile Trust Co. He died on April 15, 1912, when the steamship Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in mid-Atlantic. Soon after the catastrophe, his wife, who had been saved from the Titanic, gave birth to an heir, John Jacob Astor 5th.
“Genius,” Dalton said. “Astor also fits the second line perfectly: ‘Brother in the Gas of standing quite fine.’”
I pointed to the portrait. Along the starboard side of the ship were the letters RMS.
I walked over to the bookcase where I had first started my search and rummaged through the pile of books on the floor until I found an odd, oversized bundle of pages. It wasn’t exactly a book, but the pages had been bound tightly together. I brought it over to Dalton who recognized my point immediately when he read the top of the page.
The Ancient Nine Page 40