The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  This brought the response that Martin Bloom was expecting, a kind of drunk’s high dudgeon, worth a laugh in the midday:

  “Bullshit. It’s all written right there. Right in the Constitution.”

  “Which article, Mike?” asked Doherty, taunting.

  “Well … I … er … it says advise and consent. And that’s what it means.”

  “So, you’ve read the Constitution?” asked Doherty.

  “I’ve more than read it,” said Mike Ryan. “My mother owned one.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Doherty. “Her very own Constitution?”

  “Damn right. Worth a fortune if we still had it.”

  Doherty laughed like what he was, a rent collector hearing another story. “I bet if your mother still had it, you’d be livin’ in luxury, instead of in some flophouse.”

  “Nah,” said Mike. “Once my wife died, I was bound for a flophouse and the bottom of a fuckin’ bottle.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pint, then his eye met Bloom’s, he restoppered the bottle. “I forgot. No drinkin’ in here.”

  “It’s all right,” said Martin. “But … you said you had a Constitution?” This was something he had not heard. “What did your mother do with it?”

  “She give it away. But it was real valuable, with the writin’ of the Founding Fathers on it and everything.”

  “The writing?” Now the rent collector was interested. He had sold enough material to know that writing made anything more valuable, if the right people had written it.

  “Writin’,” said Ryan. “Handwritin’. They all left their notes on it, before they changed it in the next version.” Then he jumped to his feet. “I gotta go. I need a drink.”

  “THERE WAS ONLY one version of the Constitution,” said Doherty after Ryan had left.

  “No,” said Martin. “There were three drafts. The first two are very rare.”

  “Something like that … with handwriting … worth what?”

  “A substantial lot of money.”

  Doherty leaned a little closer. “Who else do you think knows about this?”

  Bloom raised an eyebrow. “The question is, who else is paying attention to him?”

  “Who else beyond us?”

  “Us?” said Bloom.

  “We’ve been workin’ together. Right? I’ve been bringin’ stuff to you and you’ve been sellin’ it, no questions asked. Right? And I’ve been educatin’ myself. Right? And I asked that old bum the right questions. Right?”

  Right. Right. Right. And right.

  “So”—Doherty sat again on the edge on Martin’s desk—”do you like girls?”

  “Do I like girls? You think that because I’m single and dress well and don’t leer at every female who comes into the store, I’m a—”

  Doherty put up a hand. “If I’m gonna bring you leatherbound books to sell at inflated prices, and if we’re gonna keep pumpin’ that old drunk …”

  Martin Bloom made a decision. It would be better to have Paul Doherty with him than against him. “I like girls.”

  And they joined forces.

  After that, one or the other of them bought Mike Ryan lunch almost every day. They bought him beers at McGafferty’s, too. They encouraged him to take a shower now and then. They introduced him to a Laundromat where someone would clean and fold his dirtiest trousers.

  Mike Ryan responded to their friendship. That didn’t mean he sobered up. He liked to drink, and after sixty years of it, he said he had no plans to stop. But he liked to talk, too, and they listened.

  To get whatever information they could about this lost Constitution, they had to endure stories of funny passengers on the 5:25 to Boston, of his bar fights, of the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918, of the Great Flood of 1927, of his McGillis cousins in Millbridge. And one day, he told them about the hoity-toity

  Perkins family. “They found out they was no better than anyone else when the Depression squashed ’em. The rich die, too.”

  The guys would listen, buy him another drink, then go home and write it all down.

  From time to time, Mike Ryan would disappear, be gone for four days, five, a week … and Bloom and Doherty would begin to wonder if they had lost the thread that might lead them to the treasure. Then Mike would show up looking, as Martin said, “bearded, beaten, and bendered again.”

  He would explain that he had gone to Boston, to visit his mother, sister, and wife, “out to St. Joseph.” That was the cemetery. That was his only family.

  They would resume their routine, filling him with beer and pumping him for information. But Mike Ryan was wet-brained. He had spent most of his seventy-eight years killing gray cells, so the contours of the story changed from one telling to the next, but the details were too real to ignore.

  Eventually, he told them of his arrest in Portland—”the first time I ever got picked up in this town”—and his defense by Gilbert Amory, the man suspected of killing Mike’s sister, the son of the man who had given the Constitution to Mike’s mother.

  “And there’s still Amorys livin’ here,” he said. “I been to visit them. I’m their uncle, I told them, but they didn’t believe it.”

  By they Mike meant the children of Aaron Amory.

  Tristam had stayed in Portland and followed his father’s footsteps into medicine. He and his wife, childless, still lived on Bramhall Hill, and he still walked to rounds every morning at the Portland Hospital.

  Daughter Dorothy had married into the Trask family of Bangor. She had one son, a Bangor lawyer named Carter.

  Martin Bloom visited both of them, posing as a book scout. He interviewed them and came away with nothing, though he was not certain if they knew nothing or if they knew enough to give him nothing.

  Martin and Paul Doherty also viewed all the other first drafts, starting with Nicholas Gilman’s, at the American Independence Museum in Exeter, New Hampshire. They visited the Massachusetts Historical Society to see Elbridge Gerry’s tiny, careful annotations. They went to the National Archives to study George Washington’s copy.

  They couldn’t find evidence of a lost Constitution. But soon, they were New England specialists in the so-called Critical Period between the end of the Revolution and the beginning of Washington’s presidency, when the nation was no nation at all but a collection of competing states loosely bound under the Articles of Confederation.

  IN THE EARLY seventies, most Americans thought they were living through a critical period of their own. On an August night in 1974, the crisis reached climax.

  Paul Doherty and Martin Bloom sat in front of a television in the lounge of the Portland Holiday Inn, chatting up a pair of secretaries from Boston.

  The girls were boarding the Nova Scotia ferry the next day, and Paul Doherty had designs on the blonde, but just for the night.

  Martin had little interest in the other one, so Paul Doherty had to remind him in the men’s room, “Partners help partners get laid. Just keep the ugly one busy while I see if I can get the blonde up to her room. I’ll do the same for you sometime.”

  But the secretaries, like everyone else in the bar, were riveted to the television rather than to the men buying the drinks.

  Tricky Dick was on the tube, and for once, said Bloom, he wasn’t lying.

  “I shall resign the presidency, effective at noon tomorrow….”

  From one table, a great cheer arose, but from most of the lounge, there was silence. By then, only a few people called themselves Nixon supporters—G. Gordon Liddy, Rabbi Baruch Korff, Paul Doherty, and Pat Nixon … maybe. But most people felt that they had just witnessed the climax of a national tragedy.

  “This is so terrible,” said the blonde. “I’m embarrassed to be an American.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Doherty, “seein’ Nixon run out of office like that. A bum rap.”

  “Bum rap?” said the other girl. “He should have been impeached.”

  “Yeah,” said the blonde.

  Paul Doherty, realizing that h
e was talking his way out of a night in the sack, began to fumble, “Well …”

  Bloom came to his rescue: “Ladies, we should be proud to be Americans tonight, because we’ve seen something amazing. If this had happened in any other country in the world, there’d be riots, armies in the streets … and we’ve just witnessed the handover of power without incident. The Constitution works.”

  The blonde said, “Yeah. I like that.”

  Doherty looked at Bloom and winked. Nice work.

  But not nice enough.

  The secretaries excused themselves to go to the ladies’ and never came back.

  So Doherty and Bloom, the Old Curiosities, as they were sometimes called behind their backs, showed up at McGafferty’s at the end of the night. Doherty was in a foul mood and getting ready to be a mean drunk. Martin, however, was relieved that he didn’t have to make more meaningless conversation with a woman he would never see again.

  McGafferty’s was no fern bar for secretaries. It was a place for neon Budweiser signs and clear-glass Miller longnecks, for cigarette smoke as thick as the Down East fog and burgers as thick as quahogs. And the ball game was usually on the tube.

  But tonight, Nixon’s face was looking down, resigning in replay.

  Every drinker in the place was talking about Tricky Dick, including a loudmouth at the other end of the bar. Their loudmouth.

  They had pledged Mike Ryan to secrecy. But what could they expect? He was a drunk. Drunks ran their mouths. And on a night like this, when everyone was talking about the presidency and the Constitution, Mike Ryan had plenty to run on about:

  “Yeah … yeah … I could tell you boys a fuckin’ thing or two about the Constitution. I seen it in its original form.”

  “What’s the fuck does that mean?” asked a lobsterman working over a boilermaker and a plate of greasy onion rings.

  “What it means is that I had an original in my house years ago.”

  “And you’re drinkin’ in here?” asked someone else.

  When Doherty started toward the end of the bar, Martin grabbed him and said, “If we go over there, it’ll make him talk louder. We get him in private … and soon.”

  An hour later, an ossified Mike Ryan staggered out of McGafferty’s and started along the dark waterfront.

  Two guys stepped out of the shadows and grabbed him by the arms.

  “Hey! What the fuck … oh. Hi, fellas.”

  “Where you headed, Mike?” asked Doherty.

  “Up to Bull Feeney’s. Get myself a Guinness.”

  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough, old boy?” said Bloom.

  “How about if we walk you home?” added Doherty.

  “Wha … no … I need a drink.”

  “You know, Mike,” said Doherty, “you can’t tell everyone about our secret.”

  “Secret? Fuck you. I tell who I want what I want. And right now, I want a drink.”

  “Calm down, big boy,” said Doherty.

  They knew that Mike got more belligerent the more he drank.

  “I’m calm,” he said. “I’ll show you how fuckin’ calm I am.” He pulled his right hand out of Bloom’s grasp and swung at Doherty. He was big and slow, but the move was so surprising that he caught Doherty off the top of the head.

  Then he twisted his hand so that he was holding Doherty by the forearm, rather than the other way around. And he hit Doherty again, this time square in the face.

  Bloom grabbed Mike as he pulled back his right hand to deliver another blow, and Mike swung around with his left to smash Bloom.

  That was when Doherty hit him a cruel, quick shot, delivered with simple instinct and brutal skill. As if he had been shot in the spine, Mike Ryan collapsed, striking his head on the granite curbstone when he landed.

  He spasmed two or three times at their feet, then let out a long, wet rasp and was still.

  “Holy Christ!” cried Martin Bloom.

  A car went by on Commercial Street, its tires rumbling over the ancient cobblestones.

  Martin waited until it passed; then he knelt, looked closer, listened for breath. “Holy Christ. He’s dead. You killed him.”

  Doherty was holding his nose, holding back the blood. “Me? You had him by the arm. We both killed him.”

  “Well … should we call someone?”

  “Shit no. We should go home.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing.” Doherty grabbed Martin by the arm and dragged him up the street. “You utter a word of this, it means the end for both of us. So right now … a vow of silence.”

  Bloom’s eyebrows rose and fell, and he nodded.

  “We never let on that we were here. After we left McGafferty’s, we drove out to my place at Cape Elizabeth. You and me, talkin’ business through the night. Let’s go.”

  PUBLIC MEMORY OF an old drunk’s death did not last. The Portland police investigated for a while. The Portland newspaper did a piece. But there were other crimes, involving people of higher standing. Mike Ryan was soon forgotten.

  Some men confronted their guilt, repented of it, and hoped for forgiveness.

  Paul Doherty and Martin Bloom, men of very different attitudes and personal style, confronted their guilt by burying it. They had murdered a man and left him on the sidewalk to be discovered by the morning street sweeper. The best way to get on with things was to never speak of the man, his story, or the circumstances of his death again.

  They had been brought together by the dream of finding a national treasure. They had been bound together by the darkest secret two men could share.

  Sometimes, Bloom admitted to Doherty that he did not sleep well at night.

  Only then would Doherty speak of their crime. “We released an old drunk from his pain. What’s done is done. So sleep. Or get laid. Or get drunk yourself once in a while. You’ll get a chance to make amends some day.”

  For years, they concentrated on building their business. Bloom developed contacts among other booksellers. Doherty did the scouting across New England, which in the 1970s was a happy hunting ground for the antiquer, the rare book man, the document sleuth. They even found a first public printing of the Constitution from 1787 and bought it for $25,000. A deal.

  Along the way, Paul Doherty married three times in thirteen years.

  Once for each presidential election, he said. He made the mistake of marrying a Republican the year Carter was elected, so he heard three years of complaints and divorced. He married a Democrat the year Reagan was elected, so he heard three more years of complaints and divorced again. Then, just before the 1984 election, he married a Republican, thinking that this was the one. It lasted less than a year.

  Through all of this, Martin Bloom remained a bachelor. He had his lady friends, and people whispered that he had a few boyfriends, too. But his answer, after each Paul Doherty divorce: better to remain single than to marry the wrong woman.

  “I’ve given up women,” Doherty announced after the third divorce was finalized in January of 1987. “Given up marrying them, anyway.”

  “So what will you do with your time now?” Bloom was studying the catalogue called Antiquaria, put out by Orson Lunt and his new young partner, Peter Fallon.

  “Oh, don’t know.” Doherty sat in the edge of Bloom’s desk and began to swing his leg. “It’s the bicentennial year of the United States Constitution, you know.”

  Bloom kept his head down, his eyes on the catalogue.

  Doherty kept talking. “Remember when I used to tell you that you’d get the chance to make amends someday? This is the year, when everyone’s interested in the Constitution.”

  “You mean, you want to interest them in a first draft with annotations?”

  “If the owner decides to surface because of all the publicity,” said Doherty, “we should be there.”

  Martin Bloom looked down at an item in Antiquaria: A handwritten letter from James Madison to Alexander Hamilton regarding Federalist Paper # 13.

  “How in the hell did they g
et that?” said Bloom. “The young guy, Fallon, he said any time he came across material that related to this area, he’d let me know.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” said Doherty. “You’ve been thinking about this for more than ten years. So have I. Let’s see if we can find it. It’ll be good for the country. Good for the bottom line.”

  Good indeed. They’d make a bundle if they commissioned the sale for someone else. They’d make a fortune if they could buy it for short money and sell it outright. The one question they wrestled with: how much to tell? Play it vague or come right out and say what it was?

  They had two targets. They decided that one would not be sophisticated enough to know what he had, even if they told him. The other would be too smart to fool.

  THEY TRACKED THEIR targets through Maureen Ryan, who had worked for the once-mighty Perkins family, and whose only living relatives had worked at a dying mill in the dying town of Millbridge, Massachusetts.

  Martin Bloom went to see Buster McGillis on a brilliant February day, with the snow drifts deep and the temperature in the twenties and everybody wondering if winter would ever end.

  But first, Martin could not resist a stop at the mill. He pulled in under a crescent of bare trees. No one else was there. The thunder of the looms, a sound that had rumbled down the valley and deafened workers for over a century, was stilled forever. The mill had closed.

  That meant Buster McGillis was out of a job. That might make him an easy mark … if it turned out that he or his ancestors were the ones who had the lost Consititution.

  Buster was waiting in front of his Greek Revival mansion, a past-its-prime ark that once must have seemed majestic. Four two-story Doric columns supported the temple front, though all of them looked to be rotting. Waterstains dripped down the side, where a drainpipe had come loose. A pair of cheapjack ranch houses flanked the ancient mansion like Warhols flanking a Winslow Homer.

  Bloom had been hoping to get inside, but Buster was ready to go.

  “You the book guy?” asked Buster.

  “Martin Bloom. Nice to meet you.” He offered his hand.

  Buster had a powerful grip and a big belly beneath a St. Cosmas K. of C. Windbreaker. He lit a cigarette and said, “Let’s go down to the diner. Down to my fiancée’s place.”