Harvard Yard (71 page)

“If not today, then soon.”

Peter turned to the guy and thought he saw something familiar in the earring and ponytail. He took the leaflet, just to shut the guy up, and started walking again.

“Hey!” The guy followed them all the way to John Harvard’s statue. “Hey, Mr. Book Man!”

That was it. Franklin Wedge. Peter stopped and turned again. “I didn’t recognize you without your bathing suit.”

Franklin came closer. “I just got into town. I’m staying a few weeks.”

“Until the commencement meeting?”

“Yeah. The big one. The mother of all meetings.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Read the leaflet,” said Franklin, then he looked at Jimmy. “This must be your son.”

Peter introduced him and said that he had been admitted for the fall. “He hasn’t decided if he’s going or not.”

Franklin gave the boy a grin. “Remember, Harvard is many things to many people. Some think it’s the portal to riches and fame. Others think it’s a den of pompous self-congratulation and powermongering. And a few of us like to believe that beneath these elms, there is truth to be found, if you’re prepared to demand it.”

Jimmy shot a nervous glance at his father.

And Franklin burst out laughing. “The kid thinks I’m nuts, Fallon.”

“So do a few other people,” said Peter.

“I’ll bet you’re one of them. Just read the leaflet.”

Peter looked at it. “‘Stop Harvard expansion in the Riverside neighborhood.’”

“We’ve been fighting issues like that forever,” said Franklin.

“Who’s we?”

“The people with conscience.” Franklin looked at Jimmy. “You can be both. You can be a suit who makes money like your father and a man of conscience, too.”

“What’s so important about the Riverside neighborhood?” asked Peter.

“That’s where my brother wants to build Harvard’s newest residential house—Wedge House, named for all the Wedge iconoclasts and all the Wedge phonies, too. Nothing more than self-perpetuation. He’s decided that I’m not going to have any kids, and he only has one daughter, so the name dies with us.”

Jimmy glanced at his watch.

Franklin kept talking. He seemed like the kind who kept talking, even when no one was listening. “I want to do something important with money.”

And right there in the Yard, it was starting to come clear to Peter Fallon.

What better way to immortalize your name than to build a new undergraduate house? Harvard had planned to build an art museum on the corner of Western Ave. and Memorial Drive, overlooking the Charles, but the Riverside neighbors had resisted and Harvard had relented. Would Harvard be able to resist an undergraduate house, bought and paid for by alumni contributions, on the same spot?

Peter stepped closer to Franklin and said, “Wedge House would cost about fifty million. Does the trust have that much?”

“Hell, no.”

“Will wants to find the play, then, so that he’ll have all the money he needs?”

“Or some variation of that riff.” Franklin glanced back at the picket line circling in front of Massachusetts Hall.

Peter sensed Franklin’s impatience, so he tried to think the questions up fast. “And . . . and you’re trying to get the play first?”

“I’m just trying to do what’s right,” said Franklin. “Harvard has too damn much power. They’ve bought up hundreds of acres of land on the other side of the river and they’re planning what they’ll do with it fifty years from now, while most neighborhood people just want to pay their rents and maybe get a little relief on their property taxes.”

“Is that why you tore the last page out of Theodore Wedge’s diary?”

“It was gone when I read it. Nice work figuring that out, by the way.”

“Then it was your mother who did it?”

“I don’t know. Ask her. She’s back from England this week.”

Just then, the sound of the chanting rose in volume and intensity, because a television news crew had come into the Yard.

“TV,” said Franklin. “My brother will shit if he sees this on TV. He’s tried to keep it quiet as long as he could, just to keep the neighbors out of it. I got the whole story out of my mother last fall. Of course, I had to get her stoned first. . . .”

Peter saw his son’s eyebrows rise. So he said to Franklin, “You know, the university police won’t let them film in the Yard for long.”

“Then I’d better get back.” Franklin Wedge clenched his fist above his head and began to chant. “Save the ’Side! Save the ’Side! Harvard out of Riverside!”

“Like I told you,” said Peter to his son as they watched Franklin hurry back to the fray, “for every banker, lawyer, and businessman, Harvard makes at least one rebel.”

“Yeah. Cool,” said Jimmy. And he sounded as though he meant it.

Peter wasn’t living with Evangeline, but they were spending more and more time together. And he was at her apartment that evening, with a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet open and a flowchart in front of them.

There was a line drawn from the quote on Lydia’s headstone to a photo of Victor Wedge at the Tercentenary to a copy of the Copley portrait of Lydia and Abraham to a copy of the inscription on the First Folio of
Love’s Labours Lost
that Victor Wedge had donated to Harvard. There was another line that ran from a miniature portrait of Dorothy Wedge Warren, back to a card that said “Bertram Lee meets O’Hill on Widener steps,” another card that said “Bingo Keegan,” and now, Peter was pinning the only leaflet he had ever saved under the name of Franklin Wedge.

“There has to be a controlling intelligence,” said Evangeline.

Peter laughed. “Not according to our friend the physics professor. We are all spinning in space and time, little molecules bouncing off one another. That’s what’s going on here. A lot of people in the past hoped they’d have some control over something—their own lives, the lives of the people around them, the life of Harvard, and in the process, they all dropped little pieces of information.”

“And Ridley picked up some of it, and Keegan picked up some of it. . . .”

“And Bertram Lee, and O’Hill, and old Prof. G. And they may have intersected, maybe not.”

“Well, if you can see all that, maybe you’re the controlling intelligence.”

Peter clinked her glass. “Or us.”

The conversation was interrupted by the electric zap of the apartment buzzer.

They looked at each other, and Evangeline shrugged.

So Peter threw a sheet over their chart and Evangeline answered the buzzer.

“This is Dorothy Wedge.”

A few moments later, Will Wedge’s daughter was in the apartment, sitting on the futon sofa. She accepted a glass of the wine and made a face. “Tastes sour.”

“White Burgundies can be that way,” said Fallon, “if you’re not used to them. What can we do for you?”

The girl looked as though she hadn’t slept in nights. Usually, kids her age could absorb all sorts of punishment from term-paper deadlines to drinking contests, sleep a few hours, and look beautiful again. But something more was bothering her than the simple life of the twenty-two-year-old. She said, “This afternoon, I went through the stacks to Assistant Professor O’Hill’s office and heard loud voices. Someone was saying to him, ‘If you can’t come up with more books, you’d better find more information, because the buyer is going to decide by commencement.’”

“‘The buyer’?” said Fallon. “Of what?”

She gave him a scowl, as though she were too tired for good manners. “The play, of course.”

“O’Hill came to you about it, didn’t he? He asked if he could be your tutor.”

“Yes. But I . . . I had always liked him. And he was a very popular teacher. In one of our early tutorial sessions, he said he had been putting together a scenario and wanted me to help him on it, perhaps even write about it. That’s when he directed me to the Shepard diary. But he became very angry with me when I went to Ridley Royce. He said I had gone outside of the academic community. But . . . Bob O’Hill never stays angry at me for too long.”

“Bob?” The way she said that got Evangeline’s attention.

The girl shot a glance at Evangeline, as if to say she had just revealed a bit too much.

“What else did this man say to O’Hill?” asked Peter.

“He said that Keegan was happy with the sale of the locket. It showed O’Hill’s good faith and brought the rats into the open. . . . Mr. Fallon, my
father
bought that locket.”

“Against my advice.” Fallon looked at Evangeline. “It sounds as if O’Hill is the one who descends from somebody named Callahan.”

Dorothy said, “He told the man that he didn’t need to show any more good faith. He wanted out of this. The man told him that he was in too deep, and if he tried to back out, they’d tell Peter Fallon who it was who came after him on the river.”

Peter said, “Can you describe the man who was threatening O’Hill?”

“I think O’Hill called him ‘Lee.’”

“I’m curious,” said Evangeline. “How did you get so close and hear so much?”

“His door was closed, and I tiptoed,” she said.

“Tiptoed?” said Fallon. “Why?”

Dorothy sipped her wine and looked down at the rug. “Sometimes I like to surprise him. My thesis is done. . . . I’ll be graduating soon. And Bob is so much more mature than Chad Street, and he’s about to leave Harvard—”

“Leave?” said Evangeline.

“O’Hill didn’t get tenure,” said Peter. “I think it made him mad, so instead of lecturing about books, he started stealing them and fencing them through Bertram Lee. And whatever he’s been doing, he’s been getting in deeper and deeper. That’s what Dorothy heard this afternoon.”

“Who’s ‘the buyer’ Lee refers to?” asked Evangeline. “Price?”

“Maybe,” said Peter. “Or Lee doesn’t know because he’s working through a fence of his own.”

“Keegan?”

“Bingo.”

Evangeline considered that for a moment, then she turned to Dorothy and said, “I wouldn’t go tiptoeing around Assistant Professor O’Hill for a while, no matter how you feel about him.”

“Why did you come to us?” asked Peter.

“You’re the only ones my father trusts in this business.”

The next morning, Peter Fallon walked down Avery Street, one of those Boston side streets that always seemed to be dark, even in late May. He could always tell if Bertram Lee’s Anthology Bookshop was open as soon as he came around the corner. If it was, the book bins would be out and people might be picking over the “hardcovers for a buck” collection. If it was closed, the sidewalk would be deserted.

The book bins were out. And Lee was, too.

His partner, Mr. Freitas, a dour man with a fringe of gray hair and a sallow complexion, greeted Fallon, although that might have been too strong a word. “You? What do you want?”

“Joseph Freitas, professor emeritus of English, Boston University. What a pleasant greeting,” said Fallon. “Gotten your hands on any more of Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelves?”

“We’re busy here.”

Anthology Books was not quite the “appointment only” shop that Fallon had created. The antiquarian books were in a locked room on the second floor. Downstairs was all used books, cataloged into sections, priced to sell. And there was nobody there. Boston had recently lost other used-book stores to rising rents and declining interest, but Lee and Freitas had held on. Fallon wondered for how much longer.

“I won’t take any of your time. I’m here to see Lee.”

“He’s on a little vacation.”

“Vacation? Now?”

“We had a nice sale. Beat you to a copy of
Anglorum Praelia
. Sold it to your old professor. So Bertram decided to take a week in Key West.”

“Gettin’ hot in Florida.”

“He likes the heat.”

“Then he should have stayed in Boston.”

Mr. Freitas shrugged.

Half an hour later, Fallon was in Widener Library, deep in the stacks.

He took the elevator down to the study carrels at the rear.

It was silent in the stacks, except for the whoosh and thunk of distant elevators, which was like the breathing of the library itself. But O’Hill wasn’t there. So Fallon had no chance of surprise.

He took out his cell phone and made a call to O’Hill’s home number. Dorothy had given it to him. No answer. So he called the English department and learned that Assistant Professor O’Hill had been called out of town and would not be back until just before commencement.

So . . . what the hell.

Fallon had a pocketknife, and he had a few skills that he still remembered from the old neighborhood. He slipped the blade and popped the lock. The office was very small. The sun was pouring in.

There was a bookshelf above the desk. It contained books that might have been of some importance to O’Hill’s own work, including his dissertation on seventeenth-century sermons. And whenever Peter thought about reading things like that, he was glad he wasn’t an academic.

He supposed he should not have been surprised to see that among the volumes was a copy of William Blake’s
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience.

He always carried his own cotton conservator’s gloves in the inner pocket of his sport coat—white, thin, delicate. He put them on and opened
Experience.

In the place where the poem “Tyger! Tyger!” should have been, with Blake’s engraving of a tiger in a forest, there was a blank space and at the binding, a neatly razored edge.

And then he noticed a copy of
Treasure Island,
by Robert Louis Stevenson. That had nothing to do with the seventeenth-century sermons that O’Hill was supposed to be writing about. But it did contain important engravings by N. C. Wyeth, and all had been razored out.

Peter realized that many of these books had been on Scavullo’s list—items that Ridley Royce had offered to sell through a fence from Eliot House. O’Hill had typed the information on Ridley’s computer himself, then deleted it, probably after he dumped Ridley from his boat. Framing Ridley and Fallon also seemed to be part of O’Hill’s plan.

Either that or someone was framing O’Hill by planting the books. And there was a copy of
New England Reveries,
by Lydia Wedge Townsend. Fallon opened it and saw that O’Hill had put Post-it notes over half a dozen poems, “John Hicks and Other Heroes,” “Standing on Firm Ground,” “The Bell Ringer of Harvard Hall,” and many others.