The Whenabouts of Burr Read Online Free Page B

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—
    â€”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
    â€œIt 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œHah?” Romero asked, stopping in mid-wave.
    â€œIt reminds me of something. Of college, actually.”
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œWell, you see… You know, the President and I were roommates in college…”
    â€œYou told me, maybe twenty-five times. He told me once, I remember.”
    â€œYeah. 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-”
    â€œNate, what in hell are you talking about? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking!”
    â€œPractical 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 ?”
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œ You did that?” Ves asked, the astonishment evident in his voice.
    â€œYouth,” Swift said apologetically.
    â€œI never thought you had enough imagination,” Ves said. “But how does this help us to locate the Constitution?”
    â€œI 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—”
    â€œSame age?” Ves broke in to ask. “Same age? You mean, the phony, the replacement, is also two hundred and twenty—what?—six years old?”
    â€œI didn’t tell you? I guess not. Yeah. The paper is that old. Ink is the right composition and carbon-dates to the same