The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  “What?” asked Danny.

  “That I need to go back to Millbridge.”

  “What’s in Millbridge?” asked Antoine.

  “The lost Constitution. We’re going to get it, because boys, this is America. In America, we get up in the morning, we go to work, and we solve our problems. Tomorrow, we’ll solve ours.”

  THEY DISPERSED THAT night.

  Danny and his son went back to their house in Southie.

  “Be careful,” said Peter. “This Walter Stanley is unpredictable. But I think he’s more concerned about the ball game than he is about us.”

  “I have a good alarm system,” said Danny.

  “Yeah,” said Bobby. “Rex the Rottweiler. And Mom’s a light sleeper.”

  “And I have my homebodies,” said Antoine.

  “I have a credit card,” said Orson.

  Peter and Orson checked into the Seaport Hotel. They used Orson’s American Express, in case the police had gotten onto Peter’s trail.

  “One bed or two?” asked the expressionless young woman behind the counter.

  “Two,” snapped Peter.

  Orson covered his mouth and stifled a laugh.

  After they ordered room service, Peter called Josh Sutherland in Washington.

  “Do you have the draft?” asked Sutherland.

  “If I don’t, I will have seen it by tomorrow night. That will be enough. Is the Congresswoman still planning to be in the Bishop Media luxury box?”

  “Charlie Bishop is going to give her air time … one of those remotes before the game, with the reporter asking her about big doings in Washington. She has her sound bites all rehearsed. It’s nice when the liberal media bias works for you.”

  “Has she considered not going?”

  “Why?”

  “I think she may be in danger.”

  Sutherland laughed. “You’re an expert document-hunter, Fallon. Bring the document. Leave security to the security experts.”

  Peter then put a call in to a cell phone number that he had held onto for four months: FBI Agent George Hause. He warned Hause about Walter Stanley. And he added, “Once they’ve dusted the Old Curiosity in Portland, the police may want to talk to me. I’ll have answers tomorrow.”

  “What else am I supposed to do with this information?” asked Hause.

  “Have people at Fenway. Something is going to happen there tomorrow night.”

  AT DAWN THE next morning, Peter picked up Danny in South Boston. He wanted this to be a small operation. He didn’t think he’d need a lot of muscle, and if Danny was with him, he could tell people they were contractors working for Tommy Farrell.

  The last call he made before he left the hotel was to Farrell.

  The day came up clear and cool. The reds and golds were still flaring, though the foliage was already fading. Things had changed a lot in a week, and not just the leaves.

  It took them an hour. They passed through all those old towns like Milford and Hopedale. They went by the famous old Stanley Woolen Mill in Uxbridge. Then they came into Millbridge.

  They cruised past the mill once, to make sure that it was not being staked out. No cops, at least none that were obvious. Just some yellow police tape covering the plywood that now covered the entrance. This had been a murder scene just few days before.

  It was more likely that the police were watching Peter’s apartment in Boston, considering the phone messages he had gotten that morning. Detectives from the Boston Police, responding to requests from the Portland Police, wanted to talk to him. ASAP.

  If the cops were watching the mill from some hidden location, well, that was a chance they had to take. If they swooped in, he’d call George Hause right away.

  In the turnaround under the sugar maples, a car was waiting for them. Tommy Farrell was leaning against it. “I don’t know what you want to see me for.”

  “Bindle told me you always came on Sundays.” Peter pulled out a cylindrical leather map case and gave it a pat. “Just pretend that we’ve brought some architectural plans for you to look over.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “You’re the guy who has the key to the building. Right?”

  “Is that why you dragged me all the way up here?” asked Farrell.

  “Well, I think you should see what we we’re going to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Make this historical society rich.”

  “Rich? Hey, I own the fuckin’ building.”

  “You can fight it out with them. Just let us in.”

  Tommy Farrell gave them both a dog-tooth smile, as if to say that he was smarter than these two, and he’d go along until he swooped in and took what he wanted.

  Peter had seen that look before, from guys a lot smarter than Tommy Farrell.

  It was cold inside.

  Tommy flipped on the lights, which did nothing to warm it up.

  The room still smelled of must, moisture, and a past just barely breathing in the present.

  But the future was there, too. The past pointed the way. That’s what Peter had always believed.

  And he was looking right at it: the huge photograph above the book case: The Men and Women of the Mill, 1861 with the caption, “This is America. In America we get up in the morning, we go to work, and we solve our problems.”

  Beneath the photograph was a picture of Mr. Chory, standing in his bank, with the larger photograph on the wall behind him.

  If Evangeline had been there, Peter would have told her he was proud of her. She was learning how to do this work in spite of herself.

  She had remembered every detail of their first Millbridge trip, including the identity of the man in the small photograph that Bindle displayed beneath the big one. When she heard the motto, handed down through the generations, and coupled it with the judge’s story of the failed bank, she remembered the picture that once had filled the bank president with such pride. It gave her the hunch that Peter just had to play.

  Now to find out if the hunch paid off….

  “What are you guys looking for?” asked Farrell. “I don’t have all day.”

  “We’re looking for a lost first draft of the United States Constitution,” said Peter.

  “No shit.” Farrell dropped his tough-guy act. “I’ve been trying to find that thing forever.”

  Peter noticed Danny slip his hand into his jacket pocket.

  Farrell kept talking, as though the guy behind him wasn’t even worth looking at. “If you guys think it’s in here, I’m layin’ claim to it right now. Because this building is mine, and possession is—”

  Tommy Farrell stopped in midsentence when Danny’s sap took him square in the back of the head and dropped him like a sandbag.

  “Fuckin’ guy talks too much,” said Danny.

  Peter turned again to the photograph; then he looked at his brother.

  “Let’s do it,” said Danny.

  They lifted the picture off the wall and laid it out on the table.

  There was a little label on the back that said, “Gift of Hannah Chory, 1988, at the opening of the Millbridge Historical Society Museum at the Pike-Perkins Mill.”

  “That was the banker’s daughter,” said Peter.

  It looked as if the picture had been reframed at some point. Though the original mat remained, the paper backing was new.

  With a penknife, Peter cut the backing and lifted it off.

  Nothing.

  There was cardboard beneath the paper, fitted neatly into the frame and held in place with little metal grommets.

  Peter had a small scissors on his knife. He used it to flip out each grommet. Then he pulled out the sharpest blade and slid it into the corner of the frame.

  “Be careful,” said Danny.

  Peter gave his brother a look. “Do I tell you to be careful with your trowel?”

  “C’mon, lift it up.”

  “I will … carefully,” said Peter. The cardboard came up, came off. Beneath it should have been mat board,
protecting the backing of the photograph.

  Instead, there was a sheet of yellowed paper. “Is this it?” asked Danny.

  Peter looked at his brother. In this last moment of anticipation, he forgot everything he had been through, everything he expected to go through, and said, “Danny, I love this job.”

  “Try bricklayin’ sometime and you’ll love it even more. Is this it?”

  Peter pointed out the impression of the print on the back of the paper. “Do you see that? And that?” There was a splotch where ink had leeched through.

  “Is this it? Because if it is, let’s grab it and go before this big bastard wakes up.”

  Peter wiped his hands down the front of his shirt. He wished he had curator’s cotton gloves with him. But he couldn’t think of everything. Then he gently lifted a sheet out of the frame and turned it over.

  “Yes, Danny. This is it.”

  It looked exactly like the Gerry draft, a folio sheet with large type offset right, leaving an ample left margin for annotations.

  “Holy shit,” said Danny.

  “Holy indeed.”

  Sometimes, things went just that easily.

  Sometimes, you found what you were looking for.

  Of course, before you found it, you had to factor human frailty into the equation. In this case, the president of a failing bank, trying to save something of what his father had built before the tide took it all. Jack Chory had hidden a national treasure behind a photograph. Not a photograph of enormous value because the sheriff might have confiscated it when the bank failed, but an image that had significance for the banker and his family and for the people of the town of Millbridge, too.

  Peter carefully slid the four sheets out and laid them on the table.

  The preamble lacked poetry; the articles were far different in their arrangement. But there were notations, in ink, in several different hands.

  But he could feel those men of New England, thinking and arguing and imagining America into existence, right there in the handwriting.

  He read: “No law regarding religion; freedoms of press, speech protected; peaceable assembly respected….”

  And there, beneath the initials “E.G.”: “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.”

  A smoking gun? So to speak.

  And there, the thoughts of Rufus King: “The right to keep and bear arms must be discussed and defined.”

  And there, another hand, initialed J.L. for John Langdon, a few scrawled thoughts: “Separation of Church and State paramount. Right to keep and bear arms important….”

  Clinton Jarvis was not going to like that. It put the lie to everything in his forged first printing.

  Charles Bishop wouldn’t be too happy either. Neither would the boys from Maine, because while Gerry laid out the amendment as it was adopted, Rufus King had done some thinking out loud on the draft.

  “Now what?” said Danny.

  Peter gathered up the sheets, rolled them together, and slid them into the map case. “Let’s go to the World Series.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  AT A QUARTER TO eight, Peter Fallon stood on the corner of Brookline Avenue and Yawkey Way, in front of the Red Sox ticket office.

  If he wanted a public place for insurance, this was the corner, because at the moment, this was the center of Boston and the hub of the baseball universe.

  The Red Sox had made it into the World Series for the second time in the same decade, a feat they hadn’t accomplished since they shipped Babe Ruth to New York. So there was a current in the air, a static charge so strong it could have run the huge lights that made Fenway Park an island of daylight in the dark streets around it.

  Peter had his cell phone in his pocket. He had his brother stationed across the street, beside the Red Sox Parking Lot on Brookline Avenue. And he had Antoine, in a Red Sox hoodie, scanning the crowd from the opposite corner.

  Yawkey Way ran roughly parallel to the third baseline. Turnstiles at both ends street made it a pedestrian mall on game nights. Once inside the turnstiles, fans could visit the souvenir shops and buy the Red Sox hat with the World Series insignia on it. Or they could buy a sausage or a program. Or they could push through Gate A, into the Escher maze of ancient concrete ramps, platforms, and tunnels that led to the inner sanctum itself.

  At the Boylston Street end of the mall, television lights illuminated the platform where the guys from American Sports Network were doing their pre-game broadcast.

  At Peter’s end, the crowd was piling up around the turnstiles as the trains and trolleys disgorged fans at Fenway and Yawkey Station and Kenmore Square. A line snaked out of the main ticket office and around the corner onto Brookline Avenue. Another knot of people jumbled up in front of 4 Yawkey Way, the VIP entrance. Even people who were connected had to push and shove.

  There was a brass band playing, and big-screen televisions, brought in for the Series, were showing the ASN feed to all the fans. People were laughing and shouting and shuffling toward the turnstiles or standing on the curbs beneath the street lamps, scanning the crowd for familiar faces, like the brother-in-law who had the tickets or the date who was about to have the night of her life. Cops stood on stoops and sat on horses that looked like big placid rocks in the middle of the crowd. And there were young men moving faceless and hooded through the mob, muttering as they went, “Tickets, anyone need tickets?” or “Anyone sellin’? Who’s sellin’?”

  Whenever a scalper came near, Peter held his map case even tighter.

  He had been waiting forty-five minutes. If he hadn’t been so nervous, he’d be getting bored. So he was watching one of the big screens and listening to the baseball analysts discuss the game. Then they threw it to their correspondent on their sister station, ANN.

  Cut to the host of Rapid Fire, Harry Hawkins, in the Bishop Media Box:

  “The first pitch is about forty-five minutes away, Steve, and the excitement is building. We have a fascinating crowd here in the box, so let’s meet a few.”

  Hawkins gestured for the camera to follow him. It went past a big-screen TV that, for a moment, showed an image of the same big screen within another big screen, like a barber’s mirror showing the same image to infinity. Then the camera went past the sofas, the bar, past knots of people already in the box having pre-game cocktails and—was that Kate Morgan and Kelly Cutter talking to Tommy Farrell?

  All day long, Farrell had been leaving threatening phone messages.

  Then the camera was moving toward a wall of glass, then through the sliders, out to where two rows of red and blue seats seemed to be floating above the grandstand. The best seats in baseball. Ten seats to every box.

  Charles Bishop was waiting for his interview. It was plain that he had been in the television business a long time, because he knew how to stage a scene: himself in the foreground, and behind him the ballpark—the grass, the shadowed walls, the ancient crannies that outfielders cursed—glimmering in hues of green like a multifaceted emerald.

  “Mr. Bishop, it’s a great night,” said Hawkins.

  “Opening night of the World Series. One of the great nights in American life.”

  “And you say that you’re going to have an announcement tonight?”

  “That’s right, Harry. On a night that should be a national holiday, I’m hoping to reveal a national treasure. My gift to the nation after a blessed life.”

  Peter had already called and told Don Cottle that the Constitution was in hand.

  On the screen, Peter noticed a young man behind Bishop: Josh Sutherland, dialing a telephone. As it if it had been cued, Peter’s phone rang. It was Sutherland.

  “I can see you on TV,” said Peter.

  Sutherland glanced at the camera, then turned his back like a good political operative, a man behind the scenes. “Bishop keeps asking about you. You’d better be here before eight ten.”

  “Why? What happens at eight
ten?”

  “The National Anthem. Steven Tyler’s singing. When he screams, ‘and the home of the brave!’ the F-16s will do their flyover. They’re coming in from the north, low and loud, right over the left field wall.”

  “Scripted to the second,” said Peter.

  “We cut from Steven Tyler to Harriet Holden with her hand over her heart in the front row of the upper deck, framed so that you can see her and the F-16s, too.”

  “Does she know that those planes carry weapons?”

  Josh Sutherland kept talking as if he didn’t notice the sarcasm. “She knows she’ll be linked with Boston’s rock ‘n’ roll prince and with symbols of American power, in the same visual sentence. A sister in the family of cool and a gun-control Democrat who wells up when she sees some good military hardware.”

  “Is she going to well up on cue, too?”

  “She’s in the ladies room now, practicing.”

  “The female Ronald Reagan.”

  “It’s images, Fallon. That first draft completes the picture. Get it up here.”

  “I guess this is what Kelly Cutter means about the liberal bias in the media.”

  “Fuck Kelly Cutter,” said Josh. “I can’t believe she’s in this box.”

  “It’s the Bishop philosophy,” answered Peter. “ ‘Come, let us reason together.’ It’s what America is all about, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “Kelly doesn’t reason with anybody. I don’t know why she showed up with that lesbian daughter of Bishop’s, unless …” Sutherland paused. “Jesus. Kelly Cutter and Kate Morgan?”

  Peter could see the stories a smart political operator might leak to the press. He said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be worrying about Kelly Cutter. I’d be worrying about putting Harriet Holden out there in the front row.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re just making her a target.”

  “She’s been a target since this fight began. There couldn’t be anyplace safer than in the middle of this crowd.” Click.

  PETER PUT THE phone back into his jacket pocket and looked around.

  More people, more pushing. He moved to a lamppost and leaned against it, as though he were holding onto a tree in the wind.