The Ancient Nine

by Ian K. Smith, M. D.

  I pulled out a long manila envelope next. Its edges had curled.

  “Don’t open that now,” Davenport said. “I want you to save that for when you’re back in your room. But make sure you open it alone, not even in the presence of Mr. Winthrop.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  Davenport looked away, then closed his eyes softly. “What I’ve lived so long to be able to pass on.”

  I looked at the nondescript envelope and felt its thickness. It contained paper.

  “There’s something else you need to see before you leave,” Davenport said.

  He lifted himself from the chair and made his way across the room. He moved slowly but with determination. As I followed him into the center, I looked at the high-backed chairs lined against the wall. They were like the hard wooden celebrant chairs found in the pulpit of an old English abbey, their arms linked to each other and fluffy blue velvet cushions propped up in their seats. Brass nameplates were attached to the high backs, and I recognized some of the names. There was Randolph Winthrop’s stall next to Collander Abbott’s, which was next to John P. Morgan Jr. Theodore Stickney’s nameplate hung above Uncle Randolph’s, which meant he was the new occupant of the stall. One lone chair set apart from the other eight, centered on the back wall. It was much bigger and more ornate with two crossed swords hanging above it. The Sovereign’s chair, I assumed. In the diagram, it had been marked with an S. John Astor’s nameplate was the first in the column, and Stanford L. Jacobs III sat on top.

  “Whatever happened after Abbott fell down the shaft?” I asked.

  “Samps panicked,” Davenport said. “Rightfully so, given the circumstances. He called the undergraduate president of the club, a guy named Sinclair Cripps. Cripps rushed over from his room, and when Samps told him what had happened, they got the graduate president on the phone, a mean sonuvabitch by the name of Earl Murdoch.” Davenport pointed at the end stall on the right wall. “That was Murdoch’s chair over there,” he said. “Murdoch showed up, and Samps begged them to call the police and tell the truth—that it had all been an accident and that Abbott had attacked him with a hammer. But Murdoch wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, he threatened Samps and made him promise never to mention a word of what happened to anyone or he would have him tried for murder. Samps was nobody’s fool. He knew he didn’t stand a chance as a black man against someone as powerful and vindictive as Murdoch. Regardless of the evidence, any jury in the country would’ve convicted this large, muscular black man of killing this small, rich white boy.”

  “So, what did he do?” I asked.

  “What any smart man would do,” Davenport said. “He wrote down an account of what happened that night, including his knowledge of the chamber and its contents, and found himself a sympathetic lawyer who agreed to take his case in the event the club or Abbotts ever pursued legal action against him.”

  “Did they go after him?”

  “They couldn’t. They’d risk exposing themselves and all their secrets buried back here. Murdoch got Collander Abbott on the phone that night, and together they cleaned everything up.”

  “Abbott knew what had happened the whole time?”

  “Of course, he did, and he was part of the cover-up.”

  That explained why there was so little press coverage, and why Collander Abbott had remained so silent even in the face of his own son’s death.

  “He put the Ancient Nine before his son,” I said.

  “He didn’t see it that way,” Davenport said. “His son was already dead. Mr. and Mrs. Abbott were truly crushed. They were never the same. But nothing was going to bring him back. Exposing the club and this chamber would bring only more turmoil. He kept his oath.”

  A mounted glass enclosure sat opposite the chairs. Davenport walked closer to the ropes surrounding the glass enclosure, beckoning me to follow him.

  “Don’t get too close,” he warned.

  When I was standing next to him, he tapped his foot on a small metal pedal in the floor, and suddenly the glass case was awash in light. Four spotlights in the ceiling shone down on a single piece of paper vertically suspended in glass, the base engraved with the words LONG LIVE THE GAS. Davenport didn’t have to tell me what I was looking at. Here at last were the missing pages of the 1604 first edition of The Christian Warfare. I leaned forward for a closer look.

  “No!” Davenport yelled, releasing his cane and throwing up his arm to block me. “Don’t get any closer than that! The alarm is still on.”

  I looked down at the ropes and around the glass enclosure, but I didn’t see any wires or cameras or anything, for that matter, that might indicate it had been alarmed.

  “It’s all infrared,” he said. “You get an inch closer, and we’ll both be dead within seconds. Once the alarm is triggered, it activates the pneumatic vacuum seal. In less than thirty seconds, the air gets sucked out of here and the rooms are sealed off. Once the process is activated, it can only be stopped by entering a code over there. He pointed his cane to a far wall. “I’m no longer fast enough to make it over there in time.”

  I backed up several feet from the ropes.

  “It’s been here the entire time,” I said. “And this is why you were the only person Reverend Campbell contacted about that passage from The Christian Warfare.”

  “Page five hundred forty-five on the front and five forty-six on the back,” he said. He picked up his cane and walked over behind the Sovereign’s chair. He opened a small compartment in the wall and pushed several buttons. “It’s all right now,” he said, walking back to me. “The alarm is disengaged.”

  I walked up to the glass enclosure and looked down at a piece of a legend more than three and a half centuries old.

  “Those pages changed my life forever and inspired me to seek justice for Samps,” Davenport said.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He told me all that had happened. They paid him a small fortune to leave. Then they asked me to take over back here. They doubled my pay, made me sign a stack of confidentiality papers, and agreed to send me to school. This single sheet of paper before you is what inspired my interest in theology. I not only wanted to understand the words themselves, but more important, their significance to nine men willing to commit murder to protect their secrets. I met Samps a few months later in the Commons. I didn’t know it would be a goodbye. He was dead two weeks later. They killed him. I never had any hard evidence, but there’s no doubt in my mind. I did some checking on my own. The police said there was no need to investigate his death. They claimed he suffered a heart attack during his sleep. The coroner’s office never performed an autopsy, even though it was customary to perform one for a sudden, unexplained death like that. I was persistent. I’ll never forget what the medical examiner said to me the morning I visited him. ‘We were notified of the death and that the body was coming in. It never arrived. When I checked back to find out what happened, I was told the body had already been cremated. Peculiar.’ That last word struck me. They killed him, and had it covered up. I will never be convinced otherwise.”

  I waited a moment to take it all in. I suddenly felt chilled. “Why are you still here after all these years?” I asked.

  “When you’ve seen what I’ve seen and heard what I’ve heard, you never really leave,” he said. “I’m here because of a promise I made to Samps. And I’m grateful to have lived long enough to fulfill that promise.”

  “You wanted me to find the chamber the entire time,” I said.

  “Very much,” Davenport said. “But it was also important to the Ancient Nine that you found it on your own. If I had given you the answers right away or helped too much, they would’ve known. Whether it was at Houghton or the Archives or the burial site at the old Abbott estate in Newport, you left a trail that proved you were doing it on your own. And in all honesty, I wanted to know for myself that you had true rigor, before I gave you what’s in that envelope.”

  I walked around the enclosure to see the ba
ck page. I recognized the words of the Creed and those engraved on Abbott’s urn. But even more telling were the words that had been handwritten inside the right margin. The ink had faded into the page, but the carefully formed letters of King James I were still legible.

  My Dearest Esmé:

  And shall I then like birde or beast forget

  For anie stormes that threatning heauen can send

  That obiect sweete, wheron my hart is sett

  Whome for to serue my senses all I bend

  My inward flame with colde it dothe contend

  The more it burnes, the more restrain’d it be

  No winters frost, nor sommers heate can end

  Or staye the course of constant loue in me.

  This was the hard evidence. King James I, one of the most powerful monarchs in history, a towering Christian leader who had the world’s most popular Bible translation named after him, admitted that he had a homosexual relationship with his older cousin, Esmé Stuart. While the admission itself was not a surprise, having it written in his own hand made it an extremely rare and valuable document.

  The lights in the room suddenly dimmed and the page evaporated in the darkness. Davenport was back at the wall, fiddling inside the compartment behind the Sovereign’s chair. As soon as he stopped, the entire east wall slid back. Without turning around, he said, “Join me.”

  I stood up and followed him toward the missing wall. When we crossed the threshold, the room flooded with light. I stood there speechless for several minutes, trying to take in all that was before me. Describing it as breathtaking would be just a start. The room was not only twice as large as the chamber, but it was also the most decadent construction I had ever seen in my life. The walls were made of gold in which jewels were embedded throughout the entire room. Gold figurines ran along the entire border of the elaborately designed vaulted ceiling, gleaming with candelabras that bounced light and gold in one fiery glow. Each wall had a large painting gloriously perched in its center so that observers would be dazzled by their size and baroque frames. The floor was a complicated pattern of mosaics in gold and amber hues. Save for the two fancy tables and a few uncomfortable but expensive-looking chairs, the room was otherwise empty.

  “This is what they’ve really fought to protect all these years,” Davenport said, his voice echoing off the walls.

  “A gold room?” I said.

  Davenport chuckled softly. “Much more than that,” he said. “Come, let’s sit. I’m tired.”

  We moved deeper into the room and sat on two of the chairs. They were stiff, but the seat cushions molded around my body, making it surprisingly comfortable.

  “Filled with real horsehair,” Davenport said. “No detail was spared when they built this room.”

  “This doesn’t seem real,” I said.

  “In a way it isn’t, but in other ways it is,” Davenport said. “What do you know about World War II?”

  “Very little,” I said. “I studied some of it in high school in Mr. Muchanski’s history class, but a lot of it I’ve already forgotten.”

  “This room is a replica of the fabled Amber Room,” Davenport said. “The real Amber Room has been missing since 1944. Another masterpiece lost to civilization. King Frederick William I, King of Prussia, had it built and installed in his home, the Charlottenburg Palace. He then gave it to Russia’s Peter the Great in 1716. It was a peace offering. The room had amber wall panels, ornate gold leaf designs, and semiprecious stones. It was an international sensation. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in World War II, he commanded his soldiers to steal the room, along with many other artworks, and take it back to Germany. It’s never been seen again. One of the great art mysteries of the modern era.”

  “Why did they build this replica?” I asked.

  Davenport pointed his cane toward the portrait of a man imperiously staring down on us. His eyes were dark, his jowl full, and his shoulders broad. He looked important and mean, a man who was accustomed to getting his way. I imagined his voice was deep and somber.

  “That man is John Pierpont Morgan Jr,” Davenport said. “He was obsessed with art as most of the wealthy were at the time. Art was a way to show status. People couldn’t see what was sitting in your bank account, but they could definitely see what was hanging on your walls. The Morgan family was right up there with the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. They were obsessed with art and historical treasures. Morgan wanted to replicate the room that had captured the world’s admiration for centuries. So, long before the original room went missing, he built his version here next to the chamber. Some say he spent ten million dollars in materials alone. Doesn’t sound like a whole lot of money in today’s terms, but back then it was an astronomical sum to pay for just a room.”

  I studied Morgan’s portrait, but was still having a difficult time trying to comprehend why someone would spend so much money and go through so much effort to build a room so grand, only to be hidden behind the walls of an old mansion.

  “Is it true this building was one of the first to have lights in Cambridge?” I asked.

  “Correct,” Davenport said. “His father was friends with Thomas Edison. This friendship is why the family’s New York City estate became the first electrified residence in the world. Morgan’s money built all of what you see around you.”

  “But why build it hidden here when he could’ve built it anywhere in the world?” I said.

  “Because he regarded this as the safest place for his secrets,” Davenport said. He pointed to the wall on the left. “Let’s go take a look at that painting.”

  We made our way across the room. The odd painting was intensely colorful. A partially visible house sat on the left side of the frame and the vast expanse of the canvas was covered with bright flowers and trees with serpentine trunks. A barely clad Jesus figure with his arms stretched as if on the cross was prominently placed in the middle of the painting. Directly underneath his hanging feet was a pale-faced woman completely covered in a blue robe. His feet almost touched her head.

  “Klimt,” Davenport said, his eyes poring over the painting in awe as if he had just seen it for the first time. “Gustav Klimt. One of the greatest Austrian painters to have ever lived. Also a true cultural revolutionary during his time. What you’re looking at is his famous Country Garden with Crucifix. Painted in 1911 or 1912.”

  “What makes it so famous?” I asked.

  “Beyond its artistic value and it being one of his classic landscapes, this is considered by the rest of the world to be a lost masterpiece.”

  “Lost?”

  “Goes back to World War II,” Davenport said. “The Nazis were losing badly and knew the end was near. Stalin and the Soviets were punching through the German lines surrounding Berlin. The German forces were in a dramatic retreat. Immendorf Castle was in the southern part of Vienna. It had been captured and controlled by the German SS, who had turned its large rooms into a safe haven for valuable art they had looted throughout the war. Hitler wanted to build a museum that had the greatest collection of masterpieces in the world. Among the hundreds of stolen paintings stored at Immendorf, thirteen had been Klimt’s. As the Germans were surrendering the war to the Allied forces, an SS unit blew up the castle upon their retreat just to be spiteful. A massive trove of art treasures, including the Klimt paintings, were destroyed. This is one of them.”

  “So, if the original was destroyed, then this is a reproduction, right?”

  “No, this is the original. It was never destroyed. What the Germans destroyed was a reproduction.”

  “So how did the original end up here?” I asked.

  Davenport turned and slowly walked across the room to another painting. I followed. “Not too close,” he said, putting his arm up to stop me. “It’s best when you stand a few feet away. You can take it all in better that way. This is truly the pièce de résistance.”

  It was a landscape of a busy city square with vivid images. It looked like time stood still. A group of me
n huddled in one corner, a man and his dog nearby. A child played not too far away, while others walked through the square. The buildings looked old but sturdy, the center one a bell tower stabbing the sky.

  “Canaletto,” Davenport said. “One of the most revered Venetian painters of the eighteenth century. This one is the Piazza Santa Margherita. It was once owned by a Jewish art dealer in the Netherlands before the Nazis invaded and stole it.”

  “How did this one get here?” I asked.

  Davenport walked me back across the room, where we returned to the ornate chairs. His body was tired, but there was so much life in his eyes. He took a deep breath and leaned back.

  “Mr. Collins, I need you to listen carefully,” he said firmly. “The secrets in this room have been buried for decades because of their darkness and the power of the men they involve. You are young, but you must understand the weight of the information I’m about to share.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Morgan’s father was an industrious man with his hands in all kinds of businesses, from railroads to electricity. He made money any way he could, and the more he made, the more he wanted. Junior inherited not only his father’s fortune, but also the drive to be wealthy almost beyond measure. His pursuit of wealth led him to alliances with some of the most morally corrupt men in the world.

  “Morgan’s companies as well as other prominent American companies basically funded the Nazis. This is not something many people want to talk about. But these companies—Morgan’s being the lead—provided loans and other types of assistance to a young revolutionary by the name of Adolf Hitler. This small unknown young man had begun rising to power after what most Germans thought were unfair concessions they were forced to make at the end of the First World War. Without getting into all the details, a director of one of Morgan’s banks, a guy by the name of Charles Dawes, created a plan to help Germany pay back the war reparations they had agreed to pay for their role in the war. Germany was given as much as two hundred million dollars in loans, half of which was provided by Morgan’s banks. In effect, Morgan and others in the American finance industry stabilized Germany’s failing economy. Money continued to flow over to Germany, and some of that money was channeled into the Nazi Party to finance an increasingly popular Hitler, who was championing German purity and extreme nationalism. Morgan’s banking company was not only paid significant interest on these loans, but they also bought great control of most of German industry, ironically, owning or funding the very same companies that built tanks, planes, and munitions that would be used against our Allied forces in World War II. Morgan knew where his money was going, but turned a blind eye to it in the name of profit.”