Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  The offender’s cohort ran at the sight of Manning.

  Manning grabbed the student from the stool. “Tutor! Tutor!”

  “Just a prank, I tell you! Now let me go!” The sixteen-year-old instantly looked five years younger, and, hooked by Manning’s marble eyes, panicked.

  He struck Manning several times and then sank his teeth into the man’s hand, which released its grip. But a resident tutor arrived and caught the student by the collar in the doorway.

  Manning approached with deliberate steps and a cold stare. He stared so long, looking increasingly small and feeble, that even the tutor became uncomfortable and asked loudly what he should do. Manning looked down at his hand, where two bright spots of blood bubbled up in the teeth marks between the bones.

  Manning’s words seemed to emerge directly from his stiff beard rather than his mouth. “Have him tell you the names of his accomplices in this endeavor, Tutor Pearce. And find out where he’s been drinking spirits. Then hand him to the police.”

  Pearce hesitated. “Police, sir?”

  The student protested, “Now, if that isn’t a scrubby trick, to call the police in a college matter!”

  “At once, Tutor Pearce!”

  Augustus Manning locked his door behind them. He ignored the fact that his breathing was heavy with fury as he resumed his place and sat up straight, with dignity. He picked up the New York Tribune again to remind himself of matters that were in desperate need of his attention. As he read J. T. Fields’s puff on the “Literary Boston” page, as his hand throbbed at the points where his skin was broken, the following thoughts, more or less, passed through the treasurer’s mind: Fields believes himself invincible in his new fortress . . . That same arrogance worn proudly by Lowell like a new coat . . . Longfellow remains untouchable; Mr. Greene, a relic, long a mental paraplegic . . . But Dr. Holmes . . . the Autocrat courts controversy only out of fear, not principle . . . The panic on the little doctor’s face as he watched what befell Professor Webster those many years ago—not even the murder conviction or the hanging, but the loss of his place, which had been earned in society by such a good name, by training and career as a Harvard man . . . Yes, Holmes: Dr. Holmes shall prove our greatest ally.

  II

  All over Boston, all through the night, policemen herded “suspicious persons” by the half-dozen, by order of the chief. Each officer eyed his colleagues’ suspicious persons warily as they registered them at the Central Station lest his own ruffians be adjudged inferior. Detectives in plainclothes, avoiding the uniforms, stalked upstairs from the Tombs—the underground holding cells—consorting in hushed codes and half-delivered nods.

  The detective bureau, derived from a European model, had been established in Boston with the aim of providing intimate knowledge of criminals’ whereabouts, and therefore most of the chosen detectives were former rogues themselves. However, there were no sophisticated methods of investigation with which they were armed, so detectives reverted to old tricks (their favorites being extortion, intimidation, and fabrication) to secure their share of arrests and warrant their salaries. Chief Kurtz had done all he could to make sure that the detectives, along with the press, thought the new murder victim a John Smith. The last problem in the world he needed now would be his detectives trying to connive money from the wealthy Healeys’ grief.

  Some of the gathered subjects were singing obscene songs or covering their faces with their hands. Others hurled curses and threats at the officers who brought them in. A few huddled together on wooden benches lining one side of the room. Every class of criminal was here, from high-tobers—the classiest crooks—down to window smashers, sneak thieves, and the prettily bonneted bludgets who lured passersby into alleys before their accomplices would do the rest. Warm peanuts were peppered down from above by pasty Irish urchins, who were kneeling at the public balcony, holding greasy paper bags, and taking aim through the rails. They supplemented these projectiles with a round of rotten eggs.

  “You heard anyone swelling about croaking a man? You listening here?”

  “Where did you get that gold watch chain, boy? This silk handkerchief?”

  “What’re you planning to do with this billy?”

  “How ’bout it? You ever try to kill a man, chum, just to see how it is?”

  Red-faced officers shouted out these questions. Then Chief Kurtz began detailing Healey’s demise, skating skillfully around the victim’s identity, but before long he would be interrupted.

  “Hey, Chiefy.” A big black rogue coughed in bemusement, his bulging eyes fixed on the corner of the room. “Hey, Chiefy. What’s with the new darky booly-dog? Where’s his uniform? I don’t think you’re about to recruit nigger detectives. Or can I apply too?”

  Nicholas Rey stood up straighter at the laughter that followed. He felt suddenly conscious of his lack of participation in the questioning, and of his plainclothes.

  “Now, fellow, that ain’t no darky,” said a dapper string bean of a man as he stepped forward and surveyed Patrolman Rey with the look of an expert appraiser. “He looks to be a half-breed to me, and a mighty fine specimen at that. Mother a slave, father a plantation hand. That’s right, ain’t it, friend?”

  Rey stepped closer to the line. “How about answering the chief’s questions, sir? Let’s help each other out if we’re able.”

  “Handsomely said, Lily White.” The string bean held an appreciative finger to his thin mustache, which circled down from his lips to bracket his mouth, seeming to signal the start of a beard but dropping off abruptly before the chin.

  Chief Kurtz thrust his blackjack at the diamond stud on Langdon Peaslee’s breastbone. “Don’t rile me, Peaslee!”

  “Careful, won’t you?” Peaslee, Boston’s greatest safecracker, dusted off his vest. “That little luster’s worth eight hundred dollars, Chief, legitimately purchased!”

  Laughter from all sides, including some detectives. Kurtz should not have let Langdon Peaslee wind him up, not on this day. “I got a sense you had something to do with the round of safes blown on Commercial Street last Sunday,” Kurtz said. “I’ll bag you with breaking the Sabbath laws right now, and you can sleep in the Tombs with the other twopenny pickpockets!”

  Willard Burndy, a few spots down the line, guffawed.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something about that, my dear chief,” Peaslee said, raising his voice theatrically for the benefit of the whole meeting room (including the suddenly rapt groundlings up in the high seats). “It sure weren’t our friend Mr. Burndy over there, who could pull off anything like the Commercial Street run. Or did those safes belong to an old ladies’ society?”

  Burndy’s bright pink eyes doubled in size as he shoved men out of the way, clawing toward Langdon Peaslee and nearly igniting a riot among the rowdier crooks as he went, while the ragged boys above cheered and hooted. This entertainment held its own even against the secret rat pits that operated in North End cellars, and those charged twenty-five cents a head.

  As officers restrained Burndy, a confused man was pushed out of line. He stumbled wildly. Nicholas Rey caught him before he could fall.

  He was slightly built, his dark eyes handsome but worn, with a waywardness of expression. The stranger displayed a chessboard of missing and rotting teeth and emitted something like a hiss, releasing a stench of Medford rum. He either didn’t notice or didn’t mind that his clothes were coated in rotten egg.

  Kurtz marched down the reshuffled gallery of rogues and explained again. He explained about the man found naked in a field near the river, his body swarming in flies, wasps, maggots, eating into his skin, soaked in his blood. One of the present company, Kurtz informed them, had killed him with a blow to the head and carried him there to leave to nature’s blights. He mentioned another odd touch: a flag, white and tattered, planted over the body.

  Rey propped his disoriented ward to his feet. The man’s nose and mouth were red and irregular, overwhelming his thin mustache and beard. One of his legs was lame
, the casualty of a long forgotten accident or fight. His large hands shook in wild gesticulations. The stranger’s trembling increased at each detail thrown out by the chief of police.

  Deputy Chief Savage said, “Oh, this chap! Who brought him in, do you know, Rey? He wouldn’t give a name earlier when they were photographing all the new ones for the rogues’ picture gallery. Silent as an Egyptian sphinx!”

  The sphinx’s paper collar was all but hidden under his slovenly black scarf, wrapped loosely to one side. He stared emptily and flailed his oversize hands in the air in rough, concentric circles.

  “Trying to sketch something?” Savage commented jokingly.

  His hands were sketching indeed—a map of sorts, one that would have aided the police immeasurably in the weeks to come had they known what to look for. This stranger had long been an intimate of the locale of Healey’s murder but not the richly paneled parlors of Beacon Hill. No, the man was sketching an image in the air not of any earthly place at all but of a murky antechamber into an otherworld. For it was there—there, the man understood, as the image of Artemus Healey’s death seeped into his mind and grew with every particular—yes, it was there that punishment had been meted out.

  “I daresay he’s deaf and dumb,” Deputy Chief Savage whispered to Rey after several thoughtful hand gestures failed to get through. “And at a real altitude, from the smell. I’ll bring him for some bread and cheese. Keep an eye on that Burndy fellow, won’t you, Rey.” Savage nodded toward the show-up’s incumbent troublemaker, who was now rubbing his pink eyes with his shackled hands, spellbound by Kurtz’s grotesque descriptions.

  The deputy chief gently separated the trembling man from Patrolman Rey’s stewardship and walked him across the room. But the man shook, weeping hard, then with what seemed like accidental effort hurled the deputy chief of police away, sending him headlong into a bench.

  The man then leapt up behind Rey, his left arm springing across Rey’s neck, his fingers hooking underneath Rey’s right armpit and his other hand knocking off Rey’s hat and locking on to his eyes, twisting Rey’s head toward him, so that the officer’s ear was trapped in the raw dew of his lips. The man’s whisper was so low, so desperate and throaty, so confessional, that only Rey could know words had been spoken at all.

  Happy chaos erupted among the rogues.

  The stranger suddenly released Rey and gripped a fluted column. He hurled himself hard around its circumference, catapulting ahead. The obscure hissed words ensnared Rey’s mind, a meaningless code of sounds, so jarring and powerful as to suggest more meaning than Rey could imagine. Dinanzi. Rey struggled to remember, to hear the whisper again, just as he struggled (etterne etterno, etterne etterno) not to lose his balance as he lunged for the fugitive. But the stranger had launched himself with such great momentum that he could not have stopped himself had he wanted to in this, his last moment of life.

  He crashed through the thick plane of a bay window. One loose shard of glass, shaped perfectly like a scythe, swiveled out in an almost graceful dance, catching the black scarf and slicing cleanly through his windpipe, flinging his limp head forward as he hit the air. He dropped hard through the shattered mass onto the yard below.

  Everything fell silent. Shavings of glass, delicate as snowflakes, popped under Rey’s blunt-toed shoes as he approached the window frame and stared down. The body unfurled over a thick cushion of autumn leaves, and the lens of the window’s shattered glass cut the body and its bed into a kaleidoscope of yellow, black, hectic red. The ragged urchins, the first down to the courtyard, pointed and hollered, dancing around the splayed body. Rey, as he descended, couldn’t escape from the blurring words the man had chosen for whatever reason to bequeath unto him as his last act of life: Voi Ch’intrate. Voi Ch’intrate. You Who Enter. You Who Enter.

  James Russell Lowell felt much like Sir Launfal, the grail-seeking hero of his most popular poem, as he galloped through the iron portal of Harvard Yard. Indeed, the poet might have looked the part of gallant knight as he entered today, high on his white steed and outlined crisply by the autumn colors, had it not been for his peculiar grooming preferences: his beard trimmed into a square shape some two or three inches below his chin, but his mustache grown out far longer, leaving it to hang below. Some of his detractors, and many friends, noted privately that this was perhaps not the most becoming choice for his otherwise bold face. Lowell’s opinion was that beards should be worn or God would not have given them, though he did not specify whether this particular style was theologically required.

  His imagined knighthood was felt with stronger passion these days, when the Yard was an increasingly hostile citadel. A few weeks earlier, the Corporation had attempted to persuade Professor Lowell to adopt a proposal of reforms that would have eliminated many of the obstacles faced by his department (for instance, that students receive half the number of credits for enrolling in a modern foreign language that they would for a classical language) but in return would have granted the Corporation final approval over all of Lowell’s classes. Lowell had loudly refused their offer. If they wanted to pass their proposal, they would have to go through the lengthy process of pushing it through the Harvard Board of Overseers, that twenty-headed Hydra.

  Then one afternoon Lowell was given advice by the president that made him realize the board’s demand for approval over all classes had been a lark.

  “Lowell, at least cancel that Dante seminar of yours and Manning may well improve things for you.” The president grabbed Lowell by the elbow confidentially.

  Lowell narrowed his eyes. “That’s what this is? That’s all they’re after!” He turned with outrage. “I shall not be humbugged into bending to them! They drove Ticknor out. By God, they made Longfellow resent them. I think every man who feels like a gentleman ought to speak out against them, nay, every man who hasn’t passed his master’s degree in blackguardism.”

  “You think me a great churl, Professor Lowell. I don’t control the Corporation any more than you do, you know, and it is like talking through a knothole to them most days. Alas, I am just the president of this college,” he chortled. Indeed, Thomas Hill was just the president of Harvard, and a new one at that—the third in a decade, a pattern resulting in Corporation members stockpiling far more power than he possessed. “But they believe Dante an improper part of your department’s development—that is plain. They will make an example of it, Lowell. Manning will make an example of it!” he warned, and grabbed Lowell’s arm again as though at any moment the poet would have to be steered away from some danger.

  Lowell said he would not suffer the fellows of the Corporation to sit in judgment of a literature of which they knew nothing. And Hill did not even try to argue this point. It was a matter of principle for the Harvard fellows that they knew nothing of the living languages.

  The next time Lowell saw Hill, the president was armed with a slip of blue paper on which was a handwritten quotation from a recently deceased British poet of some standing on the subject of Dante’s poem. “‘What hatred against the whole human race! What exultation and merriment at eternal and immitigable sufferings! We hold our nostrils as we read; we cover up our ears. Did one ever before see brought together such striking odors, filth, excrement, blood, mutilated bodies, agonizing shrieks, mythical monsters of punishment? Seeing this, I cannot but consider it the most immoral and impious book that ever was written.’” Hill smiled with self-satisfaction, as though he had written this himself.

  Lowell laughed. “Shall we have England lord over our bookshelves? Why did we not just hand Lexington over to the redcoats and spare General Washington the trouble of war?” Lowell glimpsed something in Hill’s eye, something he sometimes saw in the untrained expression of a student, that made him believe the president could understand. “Till America has learned to love literature not as an amusement, not as mere doggerel to memorize in a college room, but for its humanizing and ennobling energy, my dear reverend president, she will not have succeeded in that high s
ense which alone makes a nation out of a people. That which raises it from a dead name to a living power.”

  Hill tried hard not to sway from his purpose. “This idea of traveling through the afterlife, of recording Hell’s punishments—that’s downright harsh, Lowell. And a work like this so inaptly titled a ‘Comedy’! It’s medieval, it’s scholastic, and . . .”

  “Catholic.” This shut Hill up. “That is what you mean, Reverend President. That it’s all too Italian, too Catholic for Harvard College?”

  Hill raised a sly white eyebrow. “You must own that such frightful notions of God could not be sustained to our Protestant ears.”

  The truth was Lowell was as unfriendly as the Harvard fellows toward the crowding of Irish papists along the wharfsides and in outlying suburbs of Boston. But the idea that the poem was some kind of edict from the Vatican . . . “Yes, we rather condemn people for eternity without the courtesy of informing them. And Dante calls it a commedia, my dear sir, because it is written in his rustic Italian tongue instead of Latin and because it ends happily, with the poet rising to Heaven, as opposed to a tragedia. Instead of endeavoring to manufacture a great poem out of what was foreign and artificial, he lets the poem make itself out of him.”

  Lowell was pleased to see that the president was exasperated. “For pity’s sake, Professor, do you not think there is something at all rancorous, something malevolent, on the part of one to inflict merciless tortures on all who practice a list of particular sins? Imagine some man in public life today declaring his enemies’ places in Hell!” he argued.

  “My dear reverend president, I am imagining it even as we speak. And do not misunderstand. Dante sends his friends down there, too. You may tell that to Augustus Manning. Pity without rigor would be cowardly egotism, mere sentimentality.”