The Ancient Nine

by Ian K. Smith, M. D.

  I heard them exchange greetings; then moments later Ashley walked into the living room. I was standing next to the door and yelled, “Happy Birthday!” when she walked in.

  A look of shock exploded behind her eyes. I expected her to laugh or smile, but she did neither. Instead, she bunched her forehead into a frown and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s your birthday,” I said. “I wanted to surprise you.” I rested my hand on her shoulder, but she knocked it away.

  “You didn’t ask if you could come over,” she said.

  “It wouldn’t’ve been a surprise if I did,” I said.

  “You should’ve asked me first,” she said, dropping her book bag to the floor. “I don’t like these kinds of surprises.”

  Ms. Garrett had been standing there quietly in the doorway. She finally stepped in and said, “Ashley, Spenser called me yesterday, and we thought this would be a nice way to celebrate your birthday since you’ve never had a party before.”

  “Well, it isn’t,” she said. “If everyone wasn’t so busy planning things behind my back, then I could’ve had something to say about how I wanted my birthday to be celebrated.”

  I was happy Ms. Garrett was standing there, because at the moment I was speechless.

  “Where are your manners, Ashley?” Ms. Garrett said firmly. “Birthday or no birthday, Spenser is still a guest in this house and you will treat him as such.”

  “This was a terrible idea,” Ashley said behind clenched teeth. “You don’t just go to a person’s house without asking.”

  I started feeling like someone had swung a bowling ball and hit me right in the gut. How could something that seemed so right end up being so wrong? I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and die.

  “I have a cake for you in the kitchen,” Ms. Garrett said.

  “And I brought you presents,” I said.

  But Ashley just stood there with her hands folded across her chest. She frowned at her mother, and then turned to me. “Thank you, Spenser, but I’ve had a long day, and I don’t want a cake or presents. I just want to be left alone.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, backing up out of the room. “I thought this would make you happy. I’ll go.”

  “Don’t, Spenser,” Ms. Garrett said.

  But Ashley didn’t ask me to stay and I could see it in her eyes that she wanted me gone. Maybe even out of her life altogether. Too embarrassed to prolong the agony, I quickly thanked Ms. Garrett, took a look at the presents sitting on the kitchen table, and raced down the steps and into the cold night. It wasn’t until I was outside that I realized tears were racing down my face in buckets.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS FOLLOWING the debacle with Ashley, Dalton and I agreed to meet in one of the draft studios of the Carpenter Center, one of the most controversial buildings on campus. Built by the French master architect Le Corbusier, it had been reviled by the traditionalists for its modern, geometric design, which lacked any connection at all to the classic Georgian brick buildings that characterized Harvard architecture. Critics had described it as “two elephants copulating,” but it was built for the visual arts, and given that group’s proclivity for all things eccentric and unique, they couldn’t have been more thrilled to call the peculiar-looking building home.

  We found a small unlocked room at the end of the floor squeezed between the janitor’s closet and the exit stairwell. A row of light boxes lined the back wall. Dalton took out the photo he found tucked away in a box in the basement of Wild Winds. It had been sticking out of a small book, the 1950 Delphic Club directory.

  “Let’s look at the photo first,” Dalton said. Dalton removed the black-and-white photo from an envelope in his backpack. The three torches were centered in the bottom edge. He brought the loupe to his eye.

  “I think they’re wearing some type of powder,” he finally said. “Their skin color is too perfect.”

  I looked over his shoulder and immediately counted the figures. There were nine of them.

  “There’s the reflection,” Dalton said. “I can just make out his forehead and one of his eyes. Something is covering the rest of his face.”

  He finally handed me the loupe. I started with the five men who were seated. They were all wearing dark clothes and ties with some type of decorative brooch clasping their capes in front of their necks. They held up lighted torches in their right hands. Their legs were all crossed the same, the right ankle over the left. Then I looked into their pale somber faces. I moved to the standing men who were dressed the same as those seated. They had torches held high in their right hands and their left hands resting on the right shoulders of the men sitting beneath them. No one smiled.

  I scanned the perimeter of the photo, picking out the face Dalton had mentioned in one of the windows. I knew right away it was a black man. He was mostly obscured by a rectangular object, but one of his eyes and part of his nose and mouth were visible. His muscular neck plugged into a broad shoulder. What was he doing there?

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Dalton said.

  I nodded. “This could be the Ancient Nine.”

  “And from the looks of it, they’re involved in some kind of ceremony.”

  “But why would they let someone photograph them?” I said. “It totally violates their secrecy.”

  “That’s true,” Dalton said. “But the secrecy isn’t violated if the person who photographed them already knew they existed.”

  My mind suddenly made the connection. “Moss Sampson?” I said, grabbing the loupe and looking at the photo again.

  “Bingo,” Dalton said. “He’d be the only one they’d trust. He was their enforcer, the protector of their secrets. He could be the one who killed Erasmus Abbott that night.”

  “So, they trust Sampson with everything,” I said. “But then he kills Abbott.”

  “And then they pay off Sampson to keep their secrets protected, and he quietly disappears.”

  We both looked down at the photo again.

  “You think they’re sitting in the Delphic courtyard?” Dalton asked.

  “Maybe,” I said, looking at the picture again. “I was only there for about forty minutes before we left for the outing, so I don’t remember a lot. But the way this picture is taken and those columns in the background make me think they were sitting underneath the portico attached to the back face of the mansion.”

  “We need to be certain of the location,” Dalton said. “If we can confirm where this picture was taken, we might be able to confirm the location of the chamber.”

  “We can’t just walk back into the courtyard,” I said. “It’s locked and completely fenced in.”

  “But the Bureau of Study Counsel building isn’t,” Dalton said. “And its upper floors look over the Delphic courtyard. We just need to find a window with a view.”

  I thought about the article I had read on Vido Aras, the Dorchester man who almost got away with the Gutenberg Bible by hiding in the building near the end of the day. Once everyone left for the night, he emerged.

  “Where’s the book?” I said.

  Dalton reached into his backpack and pulled out a thin blue book with gold lettering.

  THE

  DELPHIC CLUB

  1950

  I pulled back the cover, and the first page contained an old black-and-white photograph of the mansion in winter. The black gate surrounding the mansion was much shorter than the one that guarded it now, and there weren’t any trees or shrubs hiding the first-floor windows. Piles of snow covered the sidewalk and street, and one of the gates of Harvard Yard was barely visible in the distance. The book began with a short foreword, followed by a list of three trustees. I recognized two of the names, Stanford L. Jacobs III and Collander Abbott. The last name was Guyton Jennings. The next several pages gave a detailed history of the club and how it had grown from the 1846 Charter of the Delta Phi Fraternity with a small rented room on Brattle Street into the exclusive Delphic Club and its mansion at 9
Linden Street.

  The next few pages described the responsibilities of the trustees who officially constituted the Delphic Trust. The trust not only held the title to the club property, but also held and managed the endowment funds. A detailed history spelled out how the trust funds were acquired and which members had made donations. A special provision had been set forth that the income earned from the endowment would be used to help defray the costs of membership fees for those students who might need assistance. The remainder would be used to cover land taxes and other operating expenses.

  “Turn to page eighty-three,” Dalton said.

  I flipped through the thick pages until I had settled on a listing of the classes of 1922 and 1923. I ran my finger down the list and was only halfway through the page before I spotted what had also caught Dalton’s attention. Robert Mead Swigert, Board of Governors 1915, 240 Park Avenue, New York City.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “Beats the hell outta me,” Dalton said. “But remember the RMS we were trying to figure out. Well, this fits perfectly.”

  “Yeah, but I’m sure if I looked through the rest of these names, I could find others with the initials RMS.”

  “You sure could,” Dalton said. “There are seven others.”

  “So why are you stuck on this name?”

  “Because of his street address,” Dalton said. “His is the only one with the number 240 in it, which makes it a perfect match for RMS 240.”

  I looked down at Swigert’s entry, wondering who this man had been and how or why he might be part of this mysterious poem that could unlock the answer to so many questions.

  37

  TUESDAY NIGHT WAS one of the most embarrassing nights of my athletic career. For the first time since I had been at Harvard, we played to a standing-room-only crowd. When I rode up to the back of the gym an hour and a half before game time, I could see people lined up all the way from the box office in front of the building, into the parking lot that ran up against the football stadium, and onto the sidewalk underneath the steps of Blodgett Pool. Seeing the massive waves of people entering the facilities complex sent the adrenaline surging. When I opened the back door where the players always entered, a rush of wet heat hit me in the face. The bleachers were packed all the way to the top row, and the band was already banging away, trying to keep the restless crowd entertained. This was only a scrimmage, but the Boston University Terriers had a six-foot-eight sophomore forward who was one of the best players in the country. He was so dominant that many were convinced he would skip out on his last two years of school and enter the NBA draft once the season was over.

  The energy in the locker room matched the intensity in the gymnasium. Run-DMC blasted out “My Adidas,” and guys punched their fists against the metal lockers. When Coach came in, everyone settled down. He scrapped his usual pregame routine of methodically reviewing our offensive and defensive plays, and instead spent twenty minutes sitting on a stool in the middle of a circle, talking in a low voice about what it was like growing up the son of a garbage truck driver in a community of doctors and lawyers and three country clubs. It was all about embracing a position of disadvantage rather than fearing it. “Underdogs play the game not for championships or trophies that end up dusty and forgotten on a shelf,” he said. “They play the game to protect their honor.”

  I looked around the room when he finished his speech, and I swear half the guys were tearing up or trying not to. I was somewhere in between.

  We went out on the court the most fired up we had ever been before a game. Even Morrissey, the smallest and most congenial guy on our team, was so charged up that in the lay-up line he kept looking across the other side of the court at the much taller and stronger BU players, talking trash about what we were going to do to them once the game started. We had to reel him in a couple of times, afraid he might start a melee before the first whistle had even blown. Our fans, normally quiet and mildly interested, were surprisingly boisterous as the band whooped them up by playing our fight song—“Ten Thousand Men of Harvard”—as courageously as they played it at the always-spirited ice hockey games. Even I got caught up in the moment and started believing that we could actually beat the Terriers.

  That pipe dream lasted about as long as a Miami rain shower. The humiliation started at the opening buzzer. One of their shorter players jumped up against our seven-footer for the tip-off and not only did he win control of the tap, but converted it into an immediate fast break and a two-handed reverse dunk that even our fans couldn’t help but cheer. And the rest of the game was all downhill from there as they tortured and decimated us on our own court in front of what felt like half the population of Boston. By halftime, they had more than doubled our score, and we sat in the locker room dazed and embarrassed by the pounding. It was the first time I had ever felt like taking off my uniform and surrendering. Basketball had been an important source of pride for me, especially since my mother had always told me how proud my father would’ve been to see his son play and love the game as he had. Tonight was an embarrassment for me on a much more visceral level.

  The second half started off better than the first because they played their second team and we kept in our first. Coach continued to rant and scream on the sidelines like a lunatic, and our fans started cheering for anything, regardless of how small, that went well for us. Mitch blocked the shot of a guard almost half his size, something that he should’ve been able to do blindfolded, and judging by the crowd’s wild applause, you would’ve thought he just made a half-court shot backwards.

  Coach pulled me after my fourth foul, and as I sat on the bench seething, my eyes drifted into the bleachers. That’s when I spotted her. Ashley was sitting there in the middle of the crowd, composed and beautiful and expressionless. I wished I could’ve shriveled up and died right there. I was praying that she had just walked in, but I knew damn well that she had seen every second of our beating. Our eyes met across the gym, and I slumped in my seat as if that would make me invisible. It was the first time I had seen or heard from her since the birthday disaster.

  The final horn sounded, and we limped into the locker room on the wrong side of a fifty-point thrashing. Coach was too embarrassed and upset to talk to us, so he sent Zimowski in, who made a valiant effort to remain positive. But nothing he said really mattered. It was like telling a painter who had lost both his hands in an accident that at least he still had his arms.

  I took my time showering and changing, hoping that Ashley would get tired of waiting and leave. She didn’t. She was sitting by herself on the bottom bleacher when I walked out of the locker room. She greeted me with a kiss on the lips.

  “Maybe we should lose more often,” I said, walking her out the back door and into the cold. She wrapped her arm around mine as we headed toward the river. The crowds had dissipated, and the grounds were empty.

  “You played hard,” she said.

  I knew she was trying to lift my spirits, but those were the most dreaded words an athlete can hear after a bruising defeat.

  “We got crushed, Ashley,” I said. “You don’t have to sugarcoat it. Doesn’t make it any better. Just call it like it is.”

  “But you never gave up,” she said.

  The second most dreaded set of words.

  “Please, Ashley, we played like shit,” I said. “I know you’re trying to be supportive, but sympathy isn’t gonna change the fact that we just got our heads handed to us on our own court in front of thousands of people. The papers are gonna kill us tomorrow.”

  “Then what do you want me to say?”

  “The truth.”

  “That you sucked.”

  “Yes.”

  “That you guys looked like children playing against men.”

  The brutal honesty felt good. “Yes.”

  “And that I could’ve played better than half your team.”

  I stopped at the foot of Anderson Memorial Bridge. “Now, let’s not get carried away,” I said. “We agr
eed on honesty, not creativity.”

  We walked up to the top of the bridge and stopped to look along the river. The night was clear, and we could see all the way to the Citgo sign towering above the buildings of downtown Boston. A small stream of cars raced along Storrow and Memorial Drives, and the Harvard houses on the banks of the Charles lit up the dark sky. Hundreds of small windows glowed like rows of prayer candles burning at the altar. A lone sculler glided his boat in the black water. His movements were rhythmic and efficient, perfectly matching the tranquility of the still night.

  “You’re being too hard on yourself,” Ashley said. “BU is a top Division One team. How do you expect to compete with a school that offers athletic scholarships?”

  “That’s a tired excuse, and you know it,” I said. “Tonight was an absolute embarrassment. I don’t care how much better another team is, there’s no reason to play like we did. They came into our house and made us look like a high school team. We’re not gonna win every game, but I be damned if we have to play like a bunch of pansies. That’s why I’m so mad. We played like we knew we couldn’t win.”

  She ran her hand over my head, and it felt good having her touch me like that. “I’ve never seen you so angry before,” she said. “I thought you were going to hit the ref when he called that fourth foul on you.”

  “Trust me, I thought hard about it,” I said.

  We stood there silent for a moment, the sound of the water slapping against the concrete posts of the bridge. The cut of the wind made my eyes water. I spotted the lights of a helicopter in the distance as it swept over the downtown skyline.

  “At least you looked cute in your shorts,” she said, wrapping her arm around my waist and squeezing me. “A couple of the girls next to me were talking about you the entire game. I didn’t know you had such a big fan club.”