“How is he?”
“Chauncey?”
“Pa?”
“Well, I come home to tell him how someone killed Nathan Liggett, with his long nose and his droopin’ money bags.” North chuckled. “Made Pa laugh … laugh out loud.”
“So,” said Will, “how is he?”
“Liggett? Dead.”
“No. Pa!” Will felt an invisible hand close around his throat. “How’s Pa?”
North pulled the cork out of the bottle on the table and filled two glasses.
“Pa?”
North pushed a glass toward his brother. “He got no more pain.”
And now Will felt a sinking in his chest, as if the hand were suddenly letting go, and the fiber of his torso could not hold his organs in place, so they collapsed into his gut as he collapsed into the chair opposite his brother.
“Doc Hines said it was a cancer. But you know what drove the stake in his heart.”
“What?”
“You was there.” North drained his glass. “The day they took him to prison was the day they killed him.”
After a moment, Will got up and took off his linen coat, buff-colored and cool. He folded it and put it in his pine chest of drawers. Then he undid the lace stock around his neck. Then he came back to the table, sat, and took a sip of the drink.
North said, “Seems you care more for your clothes than for all what’s been done to our family.”
“Pa’s gone. I suppose I expected it. But I can’t believe it.”
“Gone, all right. Killed by lawyers and politicians.”
“ ’Twas a cancer took him.”
“Don’t say that.” And from somewhere, North Pike produced his knife, swung it through the air, and drove it into the table. “Do not … say … that. It was the government killed him. The government you come here to make stronger.”
Will looked at the knife. It was still quivering. So was his brother.
Without making sudden movements, Will took the Madeira bottle and refilled North’s glass. He had learned at Conkey’s that one of the quickest ways to calm an angry man was to pour him a drink, and he had never seen it fail at the City Tavern, either.
North took a sip. Then he said, “The government killed him.” Then he grabbed the knife and drove it back into the table with enough force to split the board. “As sure as if they stuck this blade into his belly.”
“All I can tell you about the government”—Will took a swallow—”is that Rufus King and the others are doing something extraordinary.”
“Big damn word, little brother.”
“They’re finding a way for every state to get along, so that when something is everyone’s business, everyone can have a say in it.”
“Everyone? Every state?”
“Every state.” Will took another swallow and felt his gums begin to tingle.
North said, “I work for a man named Corliss, out of Newport…. Newport, Rhode Island, and nobody in Rhode Island—not Corliss, not his pretty daughter, no one—trusts anyone who’s come here to see that the big states tell the little states what to do.”
“Remember what Pa always said. This is a government of laws, and laws are made by men, and men might not always be what God intended them to be, but most are decent just the same.”
“Pa had a good heart. But after what we’ve seen, you’re a fool to believe that.”
“I’m a good American.”
“A fool!” North pulled the knife from the table again and fired it past Will’s right ear, so that stuck in the rafter just beyond. “And that’s what happens to fools who do foolish things to their neighbors.”
Will sat very still, wondering. How could he calm his brother now? He had tried drink. Perhaps an appeal to reason. So he went over to the dresser, opened the leather satchel, and slipped out the four long folio sheets that carried seven printed pages of text. He brought them into the light and said, “Look here. See what they’re thinking about, day and night. The first draft … the blueprint of the new government.”
“And the writing on it?”
Will saw Rufus King’s handwriting in one corner, Elbridge Gerry’s neat script in another, both in ink. Someone else had left pencil notes in the margin on another page. Will recognized the hand of Roger Sherman, and those of Gorham and Gilman, and John Langdon, too.
King had written “Rights” and a series of fragmentary ideas. Will read the first: “No law regarding religion; freedoms of press, speech protected; peaceable assembly respected….”
Meanwhile, North read aloud a comment from Gerry: “ ‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the Security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ “
North looked at his brother, “Does he mean that only the militia will have arms? Better not show this to the men who tried to take the Springfield arsenal.”
Will pointed to King’s notes. “The right to keep and bear arms must be discussed and defined.”
“What does that mean?” demanded North. “ ‘Discussed and defined’?”
Will shook his head. “It’s … it’s only a small part of the document. These handwritten articles may never even be included.”
“If I don’t like what’s handwritten, why should I like what’s printed? Why should any man in Rhode Island? Or any man in New England? Or any who values freedom?”
“Wait and see. These men are well-intentioned.”
“These men are rich men, fixin’ to do what rich men do.” North got up and pulled the knife out of the rafter.
“What is it that rich men do?” asked Will, keeping his eyes on the document.
“See to the rich.” North drove the knife into the table again.
“Maybe you’re right.” Will gathered up the pages, knowing that he never should have taken them out in the first place. He slipped them back into the satchel, which he slipped under his pillow. Then he refilled both glasses. “Let’s just drink.”
And the second time he tried it, drink seemed to work.
They finished the first bottle. Then North pulled the knife out of the table and raised it to eye level. He put his other hand on the table, fingers splayed wide, and dropped the knife. It struck between his thumb and index finger. “Missed. Guess I need more to drink.”
So Will pulled a bottle of port from beneath his mattress.
“A bottle under the bed,” said North. “My brother’s becomin’ a man.”
Will filled both glasses and raised his. “To Pa.” He threw back another long swallow, hot and sweet. And a sob burst out of him. It shocked him, as if an animal had leaped out of a burrow in his belly. Then he surrendered to the grief, and he felt the better for it, as he would have vomiting up bad meat.
North put a big scarred hand on Will’s forearm; then he dragged a dirty sleeve across his face, because he was crying, too.
But they did not cry long. They may have been the sons of a dead father. But as their father would have told them, they were men, too, and men did not cry.
So they drank some more and ended the night pissing onto the manure pile from the loft door.
WILL DID NOT awaken until he heard the stable boy mucking the stalls below. The sunlight was on his face … and in his eyes. After eight o’clock!
He popped up in bed, and a hammer-on-anvil pain struck him on the top of the skull. He dropped back onto the pillow and groaned because his eyeballs were pressing into his brain … or was his brain forcing his eyeballs out of their sockets?
He could not tell, but something was forcing its way up from his stomach, too, something foul and burning. He made it to the loft door in time to drop a long stream of vomit onto the manure pile.
Then he sat back on the rough-board floor, grief once more clutching his chest while port and Madeira throbbed in his head….
His father was gone. And his brother was …
He vaguely remembered North cutting into a hay bale, spreading it and …
He staggered back t
o the room. There was the hay on the floor … empty bottles on the table … his pillow in the sunlight … and no North. He snatched the pillow off the bed … no leather satchel, either. He almost vomited again.
Then he saw the satchel on the chest of drawers and said, “Thank God.”
Had he left it there after all? His mind was still foggy. He opened it and there were letters … papers … one sheet of the first draft, without annotations … another … and …
He sat on the edge of his bed and tried to force his head clear of grief, anger, and popskull pain, so that he could face the reality: His brother had taken the annotated draft.
What would he tell Rufus King? Or Washington? That his brother had stolen the papers because … why? He wished to impress a Rhode Island shipper who had a pretty daughter? In the hands of the Rhode Island opposition, a first draft could be a potent tool when the time came to ratify the new plan.
If Will did not get it back, and soon, his reputation was ruined, and the future of the country might be in jeopardy. Washington had said as much the day before.
Then Will noticed something else on the chest of drawers: a watch, and beneath it, a note: “You say you are a good American. I am too. Americans should see what goes on here. I am sorry if this causes you trouble. I don’t do it for money. If I did I would not leave you the watch. It’s gold. I give it to Pa. He liked it. His eyes were bad, so he never read the initials.”
The letters “N.L.” were engraved into the watch. Nathan Liggett.
RUFUS KING WAS already at the dining room table, perusing his copy of the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser. “Ah, Good morning, Will. Slept late. Slept well, I hope?”
Will put the satchel on the table and said that, no, he had not slept well and did not feel well, either. “Something I ate, sir, or perhaps drank.”
“Perhaps.” King looked at the colorless complexion and bloodshot eyes, nodded as if he had seen such things before, and excused Will from his duties for the morning. “Drink some hot tea. Make it strong. It will make you vomit. By afternoon, you should feel better.”
By afternoon, Will Pike felt worse than he ever had in his life.
After strong tea and more vomiting, he had dragged himself down to the dock and discovered that the Pretty Eve, registered to Thornton Corliss of Newport, Rhode Island, had sailed at dawn with a load of Pennsylvania pig iron.
Will rushed back to the boarding house, packed his bag, and wrote a note that he placed on Rufus King’s pillow.
Dear Sir: It is with extreme humiliation that I inform you of the theft of the annotated draft. I have suspicion as to the thief, so I go in pursuit. I pray that I am able to restore it to you before your private deliberations are made public. I pray as well that I am able to restore my reputation, if not in the eyes of the world, at least in the eyes of a man who has shown me such respect and taught me so much.
Will Pike fled Philadelphia on the afternoon coach.
As it rocked north on the Post Road, he cursed his brother and prayed that he could reach Newport more quickly by land than his brother could reach it by sea. And the motion made him want to vomit again.
SIX
PETER AND EVANGELINE APPROACHED Newport late in the afternoon.
They were coming from the west, so they crossed Narragansett Bay on two majestic bridges—the Jamestown, then the Pell. They were traveling east, so the sky ahead of them was darkening and the water was cool blue. It was drive time, so the syndicated talker named Kelly Cutter was on the radio. It was Sunday, so the show was on tape.
“Why do you listen to her?” asked Evangeline. “To see all sides,” said Peter. “And sometimes, she’s right.”
Kelly was saying, “It’s simple folks. The liberal elite …”
“Elite, my ass,” said Evangeline. “She went to Yale, and she’s whining about the elites. What a phony.”
“… thinks that their agenda is more important than your freedom. It’s always that way. And why? Because they want everyone beholden to the government. It’s the only way they can stay in power.”
“Now what does that have to do with gun control?” asked Evangeline.
Peter pulled out his cell phone. “Call her. She loves to get some liberal sweetie on the phone and fight with her.”
Kelly’s cool voice began to rise. “Liberals created the welfare state because once people stand on their own two feet, they don’t need welfare, so they don’t need liberals, so liberals lose power. We’ve seen that for seventy-five years. And now the liberals want to take our guns. Why?”
“So the only ones who’ll have guns are liberals?” said Evangeline to the radio.
Kelly was answering her own question. “So the only ones who’ll have guns are the government.”
“Do we have to listen to this?” asked Evangeline.
“Let her finish,” said Peter. “She’s funny.”
“She’s full of shit.”
“That way, when something bad happens, we have to pick up the phone and call the government. ‘Help! Help! There’s a robber in my house. Quick! Get me Barney Frank! He’s not there? Well, get me another congressman. A Democrat congressman.’ “
“It’s Democratic.” Evangeline clicked off the radio. “When it modifies a noun, it’s Democratic. It’s an adjective. It’s in the dictionary. Why do these rightie stooges think they can piss us off by doing that?”
“Because they do,” Peter said. “Kelly sits up there in her Vermont studio and talks trash and takes calls and pisses people off all over America.”
“Well, I am pissed off. And I have a headache. A carsick headache.”
“Cheer up. Lunch in the Litchfield Hills, dinner in Newport, maybe a nice stroll along the Cliff Walk … what can be bad?”
“That we have to do it all in a single day.”
“I have the sense we’re on to something. I don’t want the trail to go cold.”
“I’m a travel writer. I write about Vermont bed-and-breakfasts and bouillabaisse in Provence. I’m not on to anything.”
“Famous last words.”
She opened the glove compartment. “Do you have any Advil in here?”
He reached into a side pocket on his door and pulled out a tin of aspirin. “Here.”
She took the pills with the last swallow of her Evian.
“So aren’t you the least bit curious?” Peter asked. “We couldn’t meet the seller because he’s dead, so we met the seller’s agent and the buyer.”
“And one knew more than he was telling, and the other was lying,” she said.
“Right. You think Bindle has more up his sleeve, and Cottle is after more than documents relating to the birth of the nation. So let’s meet someone else who has an interest in the proceeds of that Knox letter—the seller’s closest relation—and see what you think about him.”
They were coming to the end of the Pell Bridge. They could see the old town and wharves to their right. But they did not notice the black Chrysler Sebring that had followed them from western Connecticut.
IN SUMMER OR fall, Newport oozed people. It oozed history, too, year round.
Even with the traffic speeding along America’s Cup Avenue and the tourist buses and the cruise ships disgorging gawkers in tank tops and Tevas, Peter Fallon felt time itself flowing along the boulevards and side streets, bubbling up through the manhole covers, reacting in the air with molecules of fried food and exhaust, so that every breath of today carried a scent of the past, whether people knew what they were inhaling or not.
And it wasn’t just the Gilded Age, when the rich built their monuments in a world with no income tax. There was an earlier Newport, too. You could find it in Colonial House, where Royal governors ruled and George Washington dined; in the handsome homes around Trinity Church, which boasted the oldest steeple in America; at Touro Synagogue, the oldest temple; or at the waterfront, where the Triangle Trade—molasses to rum to slaves—had once set one of its legs.
Now, the offices of
Farrell Development were on one of the wharves, overlooking the boat slips and seafood restaurants.
An operator.
That was Peter’s Fallon’s first impression of Tommy Farrell:
About forty. Green golf shirt showing the simian slope of his shoulders. The slung-forward chest and belly suggesting he had spent plenty of time swinging hammers on his own jobs. Black trousers, no pleats, thin waist. Black hair combed straight back. A young face, skin as tight as a grape and shiny, too, as if he had just shaved. And one of those dog-toothed smiles—all lips and choppers, not a bit of motion around the eyes.
Yes … an operator.
They made their way through a little reception area to a space that seemed larger than it was because a floor-to-ceiling window overlooked the harbor.
Peter and Evangeline sat on the sofa. On the wall behind them were elevations for what looked like a strip mall. On the opposite wall was a huge aerial photo of the Pike-Perkins Mill complex.
Tommy dropped into the chair behind his desk and picked up the phone. “Can I get you anything?
“No thanks,” said Peter.
“You sure? I own the wharf so the Snappin’ Scallop—that’s the restaurant—they take good care of me. How about some oysters-on-the-half and a few beers?”
“Sounds good,” said Peter, “but—”
“Business first.” Tommy hung up the phone.
“I’d like a Diet Coke,” said Evangeline.
Tommy got up and took one from the little refrigerator in the corner. “Glass?”
“No thanks,” she said. “I’m a can girl, myself.”
Peter chuckled to himself. She was a Riedel glass girl. She was also a neat freak. A place for everything, everything in its place. Better a clean can than a dirty glass.
Tommy sat again and glanced out the window, all casual, all cool, a good way to act when you were praising yourself. “Best thing I ever did, buyin’ this wharf. Rent on thirty slips, the restaurant, a sail-making shop, and I can look out any time and watch for the nice chicks around the raw bar down there.”
Evangeline wiped off the can and popped the top. “Do you see any now?”
The Lost Constitution Page 8