The Whenabouts of Burr (2 page)

Victor Gosport sometimes zigged and sometimes zagged; one day he spoke at a county fair in Delaware and the next he showed up at a high school in Lubbock, Texas; thence to the Methodist Home for the Aged in Skaneateles, next at Pershing Square; from there by helicopter to Orange County, till that moment an enemy stronghold—

Students of political scenes were baffled. Maybe Victor Gosport was, too. But he had faith in Dr. Dunstan Dutton. It was not Money which had brought this unassuming man to the service of the Democratic candidate, nor a desire to be a kingmaker, although he did (when pressed) describe himself as a “philosophical Democrat.” He did not even develop the winning strategy (if indeed it was the strategy which won the election, and not Luella and the triplets) for the pleasure of seeing if it would succeed. Dutton was motivated purely and simply by a political ambition, and his political ambition was a pure and simple one, indeed.

He wanted to be the Director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures. It was so arranged.

President Gosport was not a particularly deep and devious man; if anything, he was indeed too open and disingenuous for his own, and perhaps the country's, good. There was, however, one streak of cunning which was basic to his very nature, and it was this:
he did not trust the F.B.I. and he took steps to act behind its collective back.

“They all hate the President—whoever he is,” he said.

He said it quietly, and under circumstances which assured him that he was not going to be overheard or bugged. He said it to his college roommate, Nathan Hale (Nate) Swift, formerly of U.S.C.G.C.S.I. Det. L, more commonly known as Coast Guard Intelligence. “I wouldn't trust them pricks anymore than I could throw them,” he added, moodily, discussing his problem with Nate, while gloomily tugging his beard (he was the first bearded president since Benjamin Harrison). “I tell them I want something done—me, mind you: President of the United States—and that dumb prick Nephi Gundarson, I mean, J. Edgar was bad enough, but this new prick, wow! He says, ‘Well, we'll do what we can, Mr. President,' the prick. Then he either leaks it to the goddamn press, or else, would you believe it, Nate?
Nothing happens
!”

“The pricks,” said Nate, sympathetically.

The President meditated, a scowl upon his wholesome, craggy features. “Abe Lincoln never had these problems”, he said, after a while. “He wanted a man followed, or something, he just said to Alan Pinkerton, ‘Follow that man!' And old Pinkerton just said, uh, ‘Yes, Mr. President!' And that was
that
.
My
Secret Service, they couldn't follow an elephant's tracks in the snow, unless it had counterfeit money up its trunk…” His voice ebbed away, and again he tugged his beard.

Nate made a sympathetic sound. After a minute he asked, “But… Vic… what about all the Defense Department intelligence groups and the C.I.A. and, mmm, the… mmm…”

But all of these groups were diffuse, hierarchical; it was impossible to ask that a confidential mission be carried out by any of them on behalf of the President and remain confidential. “Either the guy is so low on the totem pole that a million guys above him have to know what he's doing, or he's so high on the totem pole that he can't possibly do it himself. If I say, ‘Follow that man!', it goes down on 8700 hunks of paper, it goes down on magnetic tape, it goes down on computer tape, it goes down on ticker tape and before you can
blink
, more people know about it than Carter has liver pills. By
that
time, the man I might have wanted to be followed is in Rio de Janeiro or some place, swinging it up.”

Nate said, softly, “I begin to see the problem, Vic.”

“Call me Mr. President,” the President said, absent-mindedly. And he went on to say that he could not assign members of his personal White House staff to any of these confidential tasks, because they were all known. Suppose the press were to ask, “Why was Presidential Aide Flanders Krum seen in Omaha last Tuesday, following a man?” How would it look? Congress would have its attention diverted and if there was one thing which the President did not want in such matters, it was to divert the attention of Congress.

Although the people of the United States had elected a Democratic president, it (or they) had not elected a Democratic congress. A Republican congress had not exactly been elected, either; in fact, the balance of power was precariously being held by a trio of mavericks, ‘Two FOTs and a Freebi,” as Victor Gosport called them. One district in Vermont and one district in Texas had turned out their incumbents in favor of the candidates of the Fine Old (American) Traditions Party, whose platform included the designation of blueberry pie as the National Dish, and the abolition of federal income tax; while the solidly prosperous, mostly Caucasian, Silk Stocking District of Manhattan's Upper East Side had chosen to be represented in Washington by a candidate of the Free Black Independent Party, evidently thrilled by his promise to cut all their throats at the first opportunity.

“I've got a legislative program to get through Congress,” the President said. ‘I promised the American People. So I got to be careful that Congress doesn't get side-tracked by diversionary tactics, Nate. The F.B.I. and the other big Snoop Sections, they're all a bunch of spies, the pricks. Just love to embarrass me by leaking confidential info. And then what can I do about it? Nothing. No. I cannot trust them. I can trust you, Nate. Known you for years. Also, you were in Coast Guard Intelligence, one of the nation's top spook outfits. If I say to you, ‘follow that man', why, you are by God going to
follow
that man. Yourself, without letting the whole goddamn world know all about it, such as House Republican Leader Winthrop Scrannel and F.B.I. Director Nephi Gundarson, the pricks.”

They were speaking in a White House chamber the existence of which was unknown to the public; in it were such items as a parlor suite left behind by Mrs. Heber Votaw, President Harding's sister; God's own number of moldering trophies shot by Col. Roosevelt; Christmas presents which had met with the disapprobation of First Ladies Hayes, Garfield, Wilson, Hoover, and Truman; and five divans inlaid with mother-in-law-of-pearl and presented by an ousted claimant to one of the Trucial Sheikdoms during the Coolidge Administration. This was known as the Clutter Room, and Luella Gosport had obtained the key from the White House's Housekeeper on a pretext. President Gosport felt confident that it was not bugged.

Nate Swift ran his lean hand over his dark hair. “Mr. President,” he said, “I am willing to be of whatever service I can to you, both as an old American and a loyal friend—I mean, as a loyal American and an old friend.”

“I'm going to give you a note to Dr. Dutton, the new Director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures,” the President decided. “He's going to make you Field Observer.”

Swift, who had been leaning back, sat up straighter. The inlaid divan had been designed for shorter, softer bodies than his own. “The Bureau of Weights and
Meas
ures?
Field
Observer?”

The President smiled, pleased both at the thought of his idea and at his friend's reaction to it, which was puzzlement. “That's right. Principle of the Purloined Letter. You want to hide something, leave it laying right out in the open. It'll never be observed. Now, Nephi Gundarson may be a dumb prick, but he's after all not a hundred percent dumb. He'll be watching like a hawk to see what new appointees are going in what slots. But he hasn't got all the time in the world, so of course he'll concentrate on spook sections such as the C.I.A., N.S.A., D.D.I., and
so
on. Will he even
think
of looking into the Bureau of Weights and Measures? Will anybody? Of course not! That's what they call in Hollywood ‘the beauty part of it', you see.

“Nobody suspects the Bureau of Weights and Measures! And your title, Field Observer, well, that puts nobody up tight. Investigator, yes. Observer, no. You go anywhere—anywhere I send you, that is—and you look at anything and you report back to me. That is, of course, you can make some routine report for the archives of the Bureau, but that's all. Nobody will bother about it. F.B.I. has its informants planted all over the place, but not
there
!”

He got up, rubbing the base of his spine. “Think of it this way, Nate. What you'll be doing, you'll be helping to insure domestic tranquility and promote the general welfare. You'll take it, of course.”

They walked towards the door. “Of course, Mr. President,” said Nathan Hale (Nate) Swift.

* * * *

The late Mr. Romeo Romero, an importer of the finer sorts of olive oil, antipasto, and tomato conserves, was proud of his Italian birth and his American citizenship: therefore he named his first-born son Amerigo Vespucci. His son was equally proud of both estates, and did not really disparage his own name. But noting that untutored American tongues often found it difficult to master all the syllables of it, soon came to call himself what most of his friends called him: to wit, simply
Ves
. The firm of Romero Associates was second to none in the field of insurance investigations, ranging from checking on applicants to looking into claims; arson, the firm did not care to handle, leaving it to well-known specialists in the field; but for all matters involving the oddly-named area of “inland marine” policies, the name of Romero was a byword, and this was hardly less so in cases of personal liability claims.

The nature of his work, the quickness of his mind, his natural zeal and indefatigability, resulted in his meeting not only the professional criminals, but magnates and their wives, stars of stage and screen, foreign nobility, men and women in every walk (or crouch) of life; he became aware, almost by second nature, of the little signs which most of us leave unnoticed, by which the crook so often gives himself away.

“I go into the office of the firm reporting the losses,” he explained once to Nate, over a cafe espresso at the Downtown Chess Club, “and my first question, well, it might be, ‘Who's been taking taxicabs who didn't used to?' Be surprised, Mr. Swift,”—it was not yet “Nate”—“You'd be surprised how many embezzlers, they never
think
of giving themselves away by, say, wearing the fancy clothes to work which they might have bought with their ill-gotten gains, yet somehow they just can't resist calling that taxicab once they leave the office.”

Nate looked up from the dissolving heap of cinnamon-sprinkled whipped cream atop the bitter liquid. “And then what?”

Romero shrugged. “Oh, I simply walk up to him and I say, ‘The firm is aware that somebody has abused its confidence to the tune of $17,000—or however much the firm has lost, and you'd be surprised how many of them aren't sure exactly what the figure is—but it would rather not prosecute if this can be avoided.' Nine times out of ten, they come clean.” He shrugged, sighed. “But… you know… nine times out of ten, it just got to be boring.”

His eyes glistened. “And then… then, five years back, it will be five years the 11th of April, my dear wife passed away. And after that, well, the taste just seemed to go out of almost everything…”

And it was not long after this great loss that Mr. Romero's son and daughter both married. It happened that both his son and his son-in-law were attached to the firm of Romero Associates, and got along well together. Romero the elder called them to him, and said, “Roger, Robert. Take over the business. You know more than I did at your age because you have had educational advantages which I didn't; also here you have a ready-made business, which I didn't; plus you have the old man to advise you when you get into trouble, which I didn't. This way you'll be able to keep the family together, provide for the children which you will have, with God's blessing, and bring them up well. Since Mom died, I don't know, somehow I can't keep my mind on the business the way I used to. Besides, I'm getting on in years and I deserve a little rest. Neither do I believe in keeping children tied to their elders' apron-strings, so to speak, male or female, the way some parents do. Look at Queen Victoria, for example, who should have abdicated years before she died, the way Queen Wilhelmina did, turned the country over to her son and daughter, or however it was; sensible woman.”

Also, he said to his son and his son-in-law, “Just pay me a small salary as Consultant, so you can justifiably keep my name on the letterhead, and a percentage of the gross—that way,” he now ceased speaking in retrospect and directed his comments entirely to Nate Swift; “That way, they don't get the idea that they're getting something for nothing, which in my opinion can corrupt young people quickly. So now everybody is happy,” he said with a sigh, “and I have no reason in the world to feel the least bit unhappy, which to tell you the truth, I do. Nonetheless.” And he sighed once again.

From such a chance meeting over the chessboard and coffee sprang that most unlikely and yet fruitful partnership which, on behalf (though clandestinely, yet honorably) of the President and, through him, the People of the United States, was to solve such matters as the affairs of the knifegrinder and the abbreviated state senator, the case of the foreign agent and the Jersey City pom-pom girl, the mixed-up matter of how the Armenian Ambassador was disentangled from the tuna net in San Pedro Harbor, and—to name but one more—the truly horrifying affair of Rev! Elmo Smith of Omaha (Nebraska) and the twenty-five piranha fish in the swimming pool of the Mayflower Hotel—stories for which the world is not yet prepared—

—and was now to be faced with the greatest challenge yet: to find the missing original parchment of the Constitution of the United States. And to return it… unharmed.

CHAPTER TWO

“It doesn't,” Amerigo Vespucci Romero said for what must have been the sixteenth time, “make any sense. I mean, forget about the fact that there's no way in the knowledge of the Human Race that such a replacement could have been accomplished; there is—and this is more important—no motive for anyone to have accomplished such a replacement. Motive is the thing, you know. There are all sorts of motives: greed, lust, fear, ambition, religious or philosophical fanaticism, hunger, rivalry, loyalty, anger, and a couple of Instinctive reactions. I forgot whether it's fashionable right now to admit that Homo sapiens is possessed of instincts.” He was pacing back and forth in his study waving his hand—the one not holding the coffee cup—emphatically at Nathan as he spoke.

“I have a thought on that,” Nathan Hale Swift said, balancing his coffee cup on his knee and staring into the fire. “An idea, you might say. It reminds me of something.”

“Hah?” Romero asked, stopping in mid-wave.

“It reminds me of something. Of college, actually.”

“How's that?”

“Well, you see… You know, the President and I were roommates in college…”

“You told me, maybe twenty-five times.
He
told me once, I remember.”

“Yeah. Well, in college we used to do things like that. I don't mean me, particularly; although I remember once or twice—there was the bell that kept ringing fourteen, and the bulldozer on the third floor of the ad-”

“Nate, what in hell are you talking about? I mean, if you don't mind my asking!”

“Practical jokes. College pranks. That's what this seems like to me, some kind of prank. What else?”

Ves shook his head. “The ‘what else' I agree with,” he said. “I would like to figure out what else. I admit I'm not up on my college pranks, but is someone—student or no—going to commit an impossible crime merely as a
joke
?”

“That's the point! That's the favorite kind. Like bricking over the end of a hall so that two rooms seem to disappear; or having a bulldozer suddenly appear in the third floor hall of the administration building; or making a four-ton bronze statue of the founder vanish from its pedestal in the middle of the night, leaving an equally massive nude couple in an—ah—embarrassing position in its place. That sort of thing.”

“
You
did that?” Ves asked, the astonishment evident in his voice.

“Youth,” Swift said apologetically.

“I never thought you had enough imagination,” Ves said. “But how does this help us to locate the Constitution?”

“I don't know,” Nate admitted. “But I can't think of anything else. I mean, look at it: someone broke into a constantly-guarded room, somehow without being seen, removed a document from a bronze, crystal-faced case—without, incidentally, disturbing the helium atmosphere—and replaced it with an identical document, of the same age, differing only in one signature. It's—”

“Same age?” Ves broke in to ask. “Same age? You mean, the phony, the replacement, is also two hundred and twenty—what?—six years old?”

“I didn't tell you? I guess not. Yeah. The paper is that old. Ink is the right composition and carbon-dates to the same age, plus or minus twenty percent. And the thing is written by hand, not photocopied; and, as best as our experts can tell, it's not a forgery.”

“What do you mean, it's not a forgery?” Ves demanded. “What is it then, if it's not a forgery? How can it be… Hello, Mrs. Montefugoni. Come in, come in.”

“New pot of coffee,” Mrs. Montefugoni said, bearing the tray before her as proudly as her eight-year-old self had borne the statue of the sacred lamb on feast day in the procession through the narrow streets of her native village. “And
tartes
for the Commissioner. The cream-fill ones, like he likes.” She set the tray down on the coffee table and replaced the empty silver coffeepot with the full silver coffeepot. “And your mail,” she added, indicating a clutch of envelopes on one side of the tray.

“Mail,” Romero repeated distractedly, picking up the envelopes and staring down at them. “Mail. Mrs. Montefugoni, why do you do this? I have asked you several times not to do this, but I can't seem to convince you. It isn't right, Mrs. Montefugoni. It is
my
mail, after all.” Swift looked at his friend intently, trying to figure out what he was talking about. Mrs. Montefugoni didn't look embarrassed, ashamed, frightened, or hurt; merely stubborn. “I told you,” she said. “Many times. It is for my sister's boy, Vincenti Gerabaldi. He is a collector. Only nine years old, you understand. And you get so many letters from foreign places—and you do not yourself collect . . .”

Then Nate noticed that the upper right hand corners of three of the envelopes had been neatly cut off. “Stamps!” he said.

“
Si
,” Mrs. Montefugoni said. “
Si
. He collect the stamps. And he is very serious, you know. He soak the stamps in some special thing to take them off the paper. And he does not paste them in the, you know, album. At first, when he first get the album, he pasted the stamps in over their pictures—you know they have these little pictures in the book, the album—with white paste. Then he find out he was wrong. Now he uses these tweezers and these little gummy things to stick them in the book. He is very serious.”

“A collector!” Nate said, a gleam in his eye.

“But couldn't you wait until I open the letters,
then
rip the stamps off?” Ves complained.

“That must be it!” Nate said, slapping the table.

“What you mean, ‘rip',” Mrs. Montefugoni demanded. “I cut neat with scissors. You rip open letter, destroy stamp.”

Nate poured a fresh cup of coffee and leaned back, gloating. “Of course! Who else?”

“They're
my
letters,” Ves said, weakly fighting a rearguard action.

“Document collector?” Nate wondered aloud. “Autograph collector?”

“Stamp collector,” Ves explained. “A nine-year-old stamp collector. Mrs. Montefugoni, perhaps we could reach a compromise. Listen: I promise to open the envelopes carefully and save the stamps for your sister's boy if you will only, please, bring me my mail in its pristine, uncut form.”

“No, the Constitution, Ves. That must be it! A collector! A Goddam—excuse me, Mrs. Montefugoni—collector.”

“No need to use the bad language,” Mrs. Montefugoni said, raising her head to a martyric angle. “You no want me to cut off stamps—ever so neat with snips like I do—then I not evermore cut them off. You rip off envelopes like you want. I find some substitute perversion for my sister's boy Vincenti Gerabaldi.” She left the room with a full head of steam.

“She'll pout for days, now that she has an excuse,” Romero said. “I'll end up having to raise her salary. Try to stay, if not pure of heart, at least clean of mouth in Mrs. Montefugoni's presence, Nate. You'll end up costing me money. A collector, hah?”

“What else?”

“That's debatable logic.”

“Nonsense, it's the best logic in the world. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, must be true.' Sherlock Holmes said that. Something like it, anyway.”

“But you haven't eliminated anything. All you've done is come up with a label for the thief, and a possible motive. Still nothing about how this impossible crime was accomplished.”

“Well,” Swift insisted, “it gives us a direction in which to look, anyway, and that's progress.”

“What did you mean before, it's not a forgery?” Romero asked. “How can the substitute be not a forgery—not be a—you know—I think I've been around Mrs. Montefugoni too long. Just because the paper and ink are roughly as old as the original Constitution should be, doesn't mean that it's not a forgery. We could have a careful, clever forger. Or, contrariwise, it could be an ancient forgery. That thing might have been sitting somewhere for two hundred years waiting for someone to pull this practical joke.”

“The signatures are real, Ves. At least as far as our experts can tell.” Nate Swift spoke slowly and calmly, as though he were relaying quite ordinary information.

“Identical with the ones on the original?”

“No. As you know, no two real signatures are identical. There's always a variance in the way anyone signs his name. Well, these are
not
identical with the original, but are in every case consistent with the way the man signed his name at that period of his life to a degree which, the experts assure us, no human could have duplicated so consistently.”

“Even the Burr signature?”

“Even. Isn't it a hell of a thing? You know, if word of this gets out to the public, there'll be rioting in the streets. Particularly in the universities. They haven't had a good excuse to riot in the universities for the past ten years, and they're getting restless for lack of exercise.”

“Computers,” Romero said firmly.

“Don't be silly, Ves. Every time anything happens that you don't like or disapprove of, you blame it on computers.”

“Sure, look here: you say they say that no human could have duplicated the signatures. Nonetheless they
were
duplicated. By your logic, I have eliminated the impossible and computers are left.”

“You haven't eliminated anything,” Nate told him. “You've only added one to the list.”

“List?”

“Last night, before I was authorized to come over here and get your help, we kicked the problem around and made up a list of possible solutions.”

“We?”

“Yes. You know: me, and the President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Interior, and the Director of the Bureau of Weights and Measures.”

“Quite a kaffeeklatch,” Romero said. “What did you decide?”

“I don't think ‘decide' is quite the right word,” Swift told him. “The Secretary of State thinks it's Chinese submarines.”

“Chinese…”

“…Submarines. Yes.”

“How—”

“He never said. The Secretary of the Interior has decided that it's the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. They're the ones who possess the Secret Power.”

“What secret power?”

“They've never said. I suppose if they did, it wouldn't be secret.”

“Who does the President think did it?”

“The Republicans.”

“Of course. Any other theories?”

“People from the far future, who came back to this time period to rescue the Constitution from an imminent disaster.”

“Hm. You know, that one has merit. At least we don't know that it's impossible. Whose idea?”

“The President's twelve-year-old daughter, Emily.”

“Well, at least we'll soon know if it's true.”

“How's that?”

“We merely await the cataclysm. Meanwhile, as we wait, anything else?”

“Nothing as useful as that batch.”

“What about your immediate superior, Dr. Dutton?”

“He tends to think it's the Republicans, except that he allows for the possibility that it's Democrats out to get him. He also mentioned the Vice President.”

“The Vice President. The Vice…”

“He pointed out that Aaron Burr was once Vice President. You must understand that Dr. Dunstan Dutton is a firm believer in the Great Cypher. He believes that no one can write a document without encrypting his name, address, political philosophy, and waist measurements into the text. He has already proven by cryptology that
King Lear
was written by Isaac Asimov and the Pentateuch was written by Avram Davidson. Dr. Dutton believes in simultaneous creation. Don't ask me, because I don't know.”

“Nate, I fear we'll have to leave the administration out of our planning. I don't, somehow, feel that they'll be of any great assistance.

Swift put down his coffee cup and squared his shoulders. “Then it's just you and I,” he said. “We two against the Unknown Enemy!”

Ves Romero stared at him. “Nate,” he said, “sometimes you frighten me.”

“Ah, Ves,” Nate said, staring at the wall sadly. “I am the last of the Romantics, and no one understands me any more. Like the dinosaurs, I have outlived my time. I'm a relic of a dead and distant past.”

“I haven't seen many dinosaurs around recently,” Ves said. “And besides, you're only half my age. Maybe a few years more. I have no idea what you're talking about. Also, I have no idea what you think you're talking about What are you talking about?”

“No matter,” Nate said. “No matter. Ah, Cyrano, I salute you!” He drew an imaginary sword and pressed it against his nose. Quietly, barely audibly, he began to hum the
Marseillaise
.

Ves pulled a pad of paper toward himself and took a felt tip pen from his shirt pocket. “Let us,” he suggested, tapping the pen on the palm of his hand, “analyze the imponderables. Let us list the impossibilities, and see if we can get a clear idea of just what it is that we have to solve.”

“Very well,” Nate said, pouring himself another cup of Mrs. Montefugoni's special coffee, “list away. I love lists.”

“First of all,” Ves began, “there's the theft and replacement. Clearly impossible, as it was done without breaking the seals or violating the helium atmosphere.”

“A good beginning,” Nate said.

“Then there's the document itself—the new document, that is. A forgery so good that the experts can't tell, except for the self-evident fact that it has to be a forgery.”

“Why?” Swift asked.

“What?”

“Why? Why does it have to be a forgery? What if it is a real document? Suppose there were two copies, and Aaron Burr signed the first. Then, for some reason, Alexander Hamilton signed the second and the first disappeared.”