The Lost Constitution

by William Martin

  Then another question dawned on Peter Fallon. What in hell was he doing here? Sure, he was a treasure hunter, and he did well at it, because he was willing to get himself into trouble. He’d been chased, shot at, and forced to fight for his life more than once. And he didn’t like any of it.

  So he decided to go home and do what Bingo had suggested: call the FBI.

  BUT THE FBI called him first. Or called on him.

  They were waiting when he arrived at his office the next day.

  Two men with short haircuts and government-issue gray suits were standing over his secretary’s desk. One of them was asking questions. The other was reading the titles of the rare books in the locked cases.

  “Morning, boss,” said Bernice. “These gents say they’re from the FBI.”

  As the agents turned, Bernice made a face at Peter. What in hell is going on?

  She was in her sixties, wore her bleached hair in a beehive that was big in the sixties, and had worked for the Fallon family since the sixties. Her skirt did nothing to flatter her thighs, her pantyhose rubbed like fine-grit sandpaper when she walked, and her accent and attitude were South Boston smart-ass, not Newbury Street chic. But she could run an office, and she carried a Beretta in her purse. She was also Peter’s aunt.

  He handed her the bag of Dunkin’ Donuts and told her to get three cups of coffee. Then he invited Agents George Hause and Will Luzier into his office.

  Fallon Antiquaria occupied an L-shaped space on the third floor of an old Boston bowfront, above a gallery that was above a restaurant. The display room, with all the fine volumes in all the locked cases, was in the long section of the L. Peter’s office was where the bowfront bowed out.

  “So”—Peter seized the initiative—”was it one of your guys sitting in the car with the stove-in front end last night?”

  The agents looked at each other. Hause wore glasses and seemed to be in charge. Luzier was taller and took notes.

  Hause said, “Why were you casing Boston Street and Vartaby’s Flowers last night?”

  “I was following a lead.”

  “A lead?” asked Luzier. “On what? A rare book?”

  “I know it sounds crazy. A lead an inmate down at Cedar Junction gave me.”

  “Inmate?” said Hause, his face expressionless.

  And Peter told them everything that Bingo Keegan had told him. Then he described every detail of his trip to Dorchester.

  When he was done, Agent Hause said, “Why should we believe you?”

  “Because I’m a good American.” Peter could think of no other reason, and he liked the sound of that one.

  “A good American,” said Luzier, “even though you sell Arab books in here?”

  “Arab books?” said Peter.

  “In the display case. Something by someone called”—Luzier looked in his notebook—”Omar Khayyam.”

  “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam?” Fallon laughed. “It’s one of the classics of world literature.”

  Hause gave his partner a roll of the eyes; then he asked Fallon, “Where did Keegan get his information?”

  “He said it was ‘word on the street,’ “ answered Peter.

  “Word on the street?” Luzier looked at Hause. “If convicts are hearing about this, and they’re telling booksellers, the subjects may know that the secret is out. They may decide to speed things up. Or go underground.”

  “We should move.” Hause tapped a finger against his lip. “This will take an enormous amount of coordination in a very short time.”

  In the outer office, Bernice picked up the telephone.

  Luzier pointed a finger at her. “No calls.”

  “No calls?” she said. “Why?”

  “Never mind why. Just hang up the phone and … read a book.”

  Peter made a small gesture with his hand, as if to tell her it was all right. But he knew now that it wasn’t.

  Agent Hause took out his cell phone, placed a call, spoke softly.

  Meanwhile, Luzier said to Peter Fallon, “Who else knows about this?”

  “No one.”

  “Not even your wife?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Boyfriend?” Luzier raised an eyebrow and looked around again at the books.

  “Girlfriend,” said Peter. “She’s traveling.”

  Hause closed his phone and said, “Mr. Fallon, I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to come with us.”

  “Come with you? Why?”

  “You’ve stumbled into something. You may have alerted the target in Boston. We have to take him down today. And other teams need to be alerted in other cities. The best way to be sure that you don’t reveal anything else, even inadvertently, is for you to … ah … spend the day with us.”

  BY EVENING, IT was over, and Peter Fallon was back in his condo on Marlborough Street, sitting slack-jawed before the television, just like everyone else in America.

  On the local station, a tape rolled over and over: an FBI SWAT team attacking a house on Boston Street with tear gas, which was answered with semi-automatic weapons fire from every window. A rocket-propelled grenade hit a police car. Boom.

  Click. Fox News. The anchorman was saying, “Federal and state agencies across the country have averted an Al Qaeda massacre planned for the Fourth of July. We now know that their targets were fireworks celebrations in the East, crowded airport ticket lines in the Midwest, and beaches in California.”

  Click. CNN: Another anchor speaking over footage of agents entering a storefront. “Before the action in Boston began, the FBI was moving on this grocery in Brooklyn, believed to be the nerve center of the plan.”

  Click. MSNBC: A reporter in front of the White House, saying that the FBI, “working on tips from within the American Muslim community, had been watching several locations across the country, preparing to interdict while observing Al Qaeda cells, hoping to learn as much as they could before the Fourth of July. However, an informant today made it plain to authorities in Boston that the cat was out of the bag.”

  That informant, Peter knew, was himself. He hoped that was all the identification he would ever receive.

  Click. ANN, the American News Network: the commissioner of the Los Angeles Police Department holding up an AR-15. “These weapons were bought legally over the last three months across the United States, then moved surreptitiously to central locations by couriers posing as florists, delivery men, even postal workers.” A reporter asked why they would not have kept the weapons dispersed until the day of attack. An FBI representative leaned into the microphone: “As with most Al Qaeda strikes, their operatives are kept in the dark until the last moment to protect the mission. Spreading the guns around would have spread the plan.”

  In a story this big, everyone had plenty of spectacular footage—the firefight in Boston; an attack on a Chicago warehouse; an explosion at a U-Haul storage facility in South Central Los Angeles; Middle Eastern men doing the perp walk in Brooklyn, in Boston, in half a dozen other cities.

  And in a story this big, everyone had an opinion. So at eight o’clock, the heads started talking and the cable cacophony began to rise. What had happened? Who was to blame? What could be done now to protect Americans?

  On Fox, analysts praised the actions of the FBI and called for more funding for police agencies. On MSNBC, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee defended the Patriot Act while a Democrat argued that the Patriot Act had nothing to do with good police work.

  And on ANN, the American News Network, Congresswoman Harriet Holden appeared on Rapid Fire with host Harry Hawkins, looked straight at the camera, and said, “I think that, in light of the horror that has been averted, it’s time to reconsider our gun laws. The Founding Fathers never imagined the kind of killing power that anyone—honest American or murderous terrorist—can now hold in his hands. Tomorrow, I will begin the legislative process that I hope will lead to the repeal of the Second Amendment.”

  “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms
?” said Hawkins. “You can’t be serious.”

  “You can’t be serious,” whispered Peter Fallon to himself.

  “I am deadly serious,” said the congresswoman. “If not for good law enforcement and the good consciences of American Muslims, we would be mourning thousands of our fellow citizens this July. And the massacre would have been perpetrated by weapons bought as legally and in some cases as easily as you or I would buy a dozen roses.”

  Peter Fallon clicked off the television. He had voted for Harriet Holden. She was his congresswoman. And she was setting off on a journey that, the day before, would have made Don Quixote look like a coldhearted realist.

  But now … he imagined editorial writers all over America rushing to their keyboards, writing pieces proclaiming that Harriet Holden was bringing Americans to their senses, while as many radio talk hosts were clearing their throats, getting ready to go after one more liberal attack on our freedoms.

  Whether Harriet Holden was right or wrong, right or left, the noise had only just begun, because firearms had been part of the American story since the beginning….

  ONE

  August 1786

  “WHERE’S YOUR MUSKET, WILL?“

  “In the house.”

  “It should be in your hand.”

  “But it’s the sheriff and his men comin’ out of those woods.”

  “It’s an unjust government comin’ to take your rights. Go get your musket.”

  Will Pike stood his ground instead. He studied the woods. He glanced up at a hawk making perfect circles in a perfect blue sky.

  And for a moment, he was a boy again, daydreaming that he could see what the hawk saw: the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont to the north; the flatlands of Connecticut and Rhode Island spreading south; the steeples of Boston, tiny on the eastern horizon; and beyond them, the sharp-etched green islands in the Gulf of Maine.

  Then the hawk seemed to stop in midair. Then it swooped, pouncing in a burst of feathers and fur on some hapless field mouse working its way home.

  Will wiped his palms on his leather jerkin. He was as rawboned as any seventeen-year-old, but his eyes were already set in the permanent squint of one who studied the world quietly, who thought hard before he spoke and even harder before he acted.

  His brother, North, was six years older and, it seemed, twice as big, over six feet tall, over two hundred pounds, big face scarred from fights, big hands scarred from fishhooks, big shoulders callused from the harness he wore when he plowed his father’s fields.

  North had marched with Washington’s army. He had fished on the Grand Banks. He had cut trees in the great woods. Will had not seen much more of the world than the circle of earth beneath the circle of sky drawn by that hawk.

  They stood that morning on the sloping ground in front of their father’s little house. Rock walls ran everywhere, segmenting the small farm into smaller fields, each of which looked as if it had been sown with rocks in the hope of growing more rocks.

  “Where’d Pa go?” North kept his eyes on the men riding up the road.

  “Inside,” said Will.

  “Went to get his musket, I hope.”

  Will glanced toward the house. He could not believe that his father was leaving them to face this alone.

  The sheriff reined his horse and looked down at North. “Well … the prodigal brother. When did you get back?”

  “When I heard you was plannin’ to arrest my Pa.” North held his musket at his hip. “I’m loaded with ball and buck, Chauncey. I’ll take down the lot of you with one shot.”

  Will wanted to slip into the house and coax his father out, but he feared that if he moved, North would start shooting. So he stayed put and hoped that no one would see his knees shaking.

  “Now, boys …” Sheriff Chauncey Yates had a big belly and a broad face better suited to grins and good spirits than the scowl he wore. “The court says your father’s to spend six months in the Hampshire County House of Correction for nonpayment of debts to Mr. Nathan Liggett of Springfield.”

  “Damn the courts,” said North. “And damn Nathan Liggett. Damn you, too, Sheriff. And while we’re doin’ our damnin’, damn the damn state for taxin’ us at thirty damn percent, so we don’t have the money to pay any other damn bills.”

  “It’s happenin’ to farmers all over,” said the sheriff. “The state has to tax property to pay war debts. And farmers has more real property than most.”

  “But farmers don’t have hard coin,” said Will, “and the state won’t take barter.”

  “Nor merchants neither,” added North.

  “Because merchants is squeezed by Boston creditors,” said the sheriff, “and they’re squeezed by European suppliers.”

  “So men like our Pa get squeezed by lawyers,” said North.

  “Yup.” The sheriff swung a leg and dismounted. “Makes you wonder why we fought the damn Revolution in the first place.”

  North gave the sheriff a grin. “Time for another uprisin’, I’d say.”

  “I have a court order”—the sheriff patted his pocket—”all fit and proper-like. It’s my job to execute it.”

  “I’ll die first.” North raised his musket. “And you before me.”

  With a sudden clattering of wood, leather, and metal, every deputy leveled a musket at the Pikes. And for a moment, there was quiet.

  The breeze rustled in the trees. A horse snorted. Another pawed the ground.

  Then North said, “Seems we has a stand-off.”

  And from the house came a voice: “There’ll be no stand-off. You Pike boys stand down. Nobody’ll do any dyin’ on my account.”

  Will Pike turned to see his father in the doorway, and after relief poured over him, he filled with a son’s pride.

  George North Pike had chosen to dress that day not in the threadbare smallclothes of a bankrupt farmer but in the uniform of a captain in the Massachusetts Artillery. It did not fit him so well as it had when the war ended, for an ague of the stomach had taken twenty pounds off his frame. But the uniform had its effect. No deputy would point a weapon at the blue-and-buff.

  The elder Pike strode out of the house, as if determined to show his best face. He stopped beside his sons and said, “Sheriff, my boys think we’ve traded bad masters in Britain for worse masters in Boston.”

  “Damn right,” said North, the only man still pointing a musket at anyone.

  “But,” said George North Pike, “I’ll not rebel against the country I fought for.”

  He lifted the musket from North’s hands, blew into the pan, and sent up a little cloud of priming powder. He tossed the gun back to his son.

  Then he said, “My boys been raised right, Chauncey. They know that this is a government of laws, and laws are made by men, and men might not always be what God intended them to be, but men like you and me, we’re decent, just the same.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment, Captain,” said Chauncey Yates. “Now will you mount the horse we brought for you?”

  George North Pike tugged at his waistcoat and looked at his sons. “Boys, the livestock been sold off, but we still have our land. So tend to it while I’m gone.”

  “We’ll go with you,” said North.

  “We’ll help you get settled,” added Will.

  “No.” Their father mounted the horse. “I’ll not have you see me in stripes just yet. Let me try them on first.”

  And the Pike brothers watched their father ride away at the head of that little group, as though he were their leader rather than their prisoner.

  Then North spat and said, “Time for an uprisin’.”

  THERE WAS NOT much to the town of Pelham. On the west were rocky farms, a tavern, a Congregational meetinghouse at the crossroads. Then the east-west road dipped down to a plank bridge that crossed the Swift River, a narrow stream that lived up to its name even in the driest summers. Just beyond, the road rose toward more rocky farms. But right at the bridge was Conkey’s Tavern.

  That was where
the Pike brothers headed come sundown.

  “A man shouldn’t go to bed dry,” said North, “especially on a day like this. So let’s wet our throats and dream of wet quims, which be a bit scarce hereabouts.”

  “Is that why you went wanderin’ after the war?” asked Will. “For the quims?”

  “Once you’ve marched with the Continental Army, coaxin’ corn out of a rocky hillside don’t hold much attraction. And once you’ve sampled a few of the ladies who follow an army, coaxin’ a kiss from a neighbor girl ain’t quite enough to slake your thirst for somethin’… wet and juicy.”

  Will thought every night about things wet and juicy, and he envied his brother’s knowledge. He had never yet inspired any of the neighbor girls to kiss him, not that there were many.

  And for certain there were none at the tavern, which was full of loud voices and strong opinions and the strong smells of men who spent their days sweating hard under a hot sun. But when the Pikes entered, it was as if the stifling air were blown off by a wind, cold and ominous.

  One by one, then group by group, men fell silent and turned. None had quarrel with the Pikes. But the Pikes reminded them of what they all faced—heavy taxes, a Boston government more responsive to the needs of merchants than of self-sufficient farmers, and financial ruin.

  When the room was dead quiet and all eyes were on the Pikes, North announced, “Time for an uprisin’, boys.”

  In an instant, they were crowding around, offering condolences and congratulations. Word of George North Pike’s pride, even in disgrace, had already spread.

  Daniel Shays, who farmed a plot as bad as the Pikes’, swept two mugs of flip from the bar and gave one to each of them. “Your pa’s a good man.”

  “A good man indeed,” said Doc Hines. He set the broken bones of Pelham and, as Town Moderator, set the political discussion as well.

  North looked around and asked, “So who’s to lead the uprisin’? You, Dan’l?”