Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  The publisher had to know that these were men of letters, not of action (and getting on in years at that). This madness was what they read about, what they versified on for the nourishment of a longing audience, humanity in shirtsleeves, warriors entering into battles they could never win, the stuff of poetry.

  Fields’s mouth parted, but then he hesitated, like someone who tries to speak in a troubled dream but cannot. He seemed suddenly seasick. Holmes sighed sympathetically, telegraphing his approval of the demurral. But then Fields, looking with furrowed brow first to Longfellow and then to Lowell, leapt to his feet with a flourish and whispered Tennyson’s poem forward. Accepting what was to come:

  “‘. . . and tho’

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, . . .’”

  Are we strong enough to unravel a murder? Dr. Holmes wondered. Moonshine, that’s what it was! There had been two murders, horrendous stuff, but it could not be proven, thought Holmes, recruiting his scientific mind, that any more would follow. Their involvement could be uncalled-for or worse, hazardous. Half of him regretted ever having observed the inquest at the medical college, and the other half regretted having reported his discovery to his friends. Still, he could not stop himself from wondering: What would Junior do? Captain Holmes. The doctor understood life from so many vistas that he could move easily over and under and around a given situation. Junior, however, had the gift and talent of narrow determination. Only the narrow could be truly brave. Holmes clamped his eyes shut.

  What would Junior do? He thought about seeing off Wendell Junior’s army company in their shiny blue and gold as they left their training camp. “Good luck. Wish I were young enough to fight.” And so on. But he had not wished that. He had thanked heaven that he was no longer young.

  Lowell leaned toward Holmes and repeated Fields’s words with a patient softness and a voice of indulgence rare and heart-wrenching in him. “That which we are, we are.”

  That which we are, we are: what we choose to be. This calmed Holmes a bit. The three friends waiting for him had agreed. Still, he could walk away with his hands in his pockets. He drew in a deep asthmatic breath, the sort followed by an equally pronounced exhale of release. But instead of completing the motion, Holmes chose. He did not recognize his own voice, a voice composed enough to belong to the noble flame that spoke to Dante. He only barely recognized his reason for the decision that his words, Tennyson’s words, carried into existence: “‘. . . that which we are, we are,/One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find,’”—he paused—“‘and not to yield.’”

  “To strive,” Lowell whispered meditatively, methodically, studying the face of each of his companions in turn and pausing on Holmes’s. “To seek. To find . . .”

  The clock chimed the hour and Greene stirred, but there was no need for further intercourse: The Dante Club had been reborn.

  “Oh, a thousand apologies, my dear Longfellow.” Greene snorted himself awake over the unhurried peals of the old clock. “Did I miss much of anything?”

  CANTICLE

  TWO

  VIII

  In the low world of Boston, much was the same on the week the Reverend Talbot’s body was discovered. Unaltered was the triangle of streets where slums and public houses and brothels and cheap hotels had driven out those residents who could afford being driven out, where chalky steam gushed from pipes bending outward from glass- and ironworks, where sidewalks were littered with orange peels and filled with mirthful singing and dancing at odd hours. Hordes of black people were coming and going on the public horsecars: young ladies, laundresses and household servants, whose hair was caught up loudly in colored handkerchiefs, whose dangling jewelry made brash music; a black soldier or sailor in uniform might be seen, still a jarring sight. So too was a certain mulatto walking with notable poise along the streets, ignored by some, laughed at by others, glared at by the more wizened blacks, who in their wisdom knew that Rey was a policeman and thus unlike them in that regard as well as in his mixed race. Blacks had been safe in Boston, were even permitted schooling and public transportation alongside whites, and therefore they kept quiet. Rey, however, would stir up hatred if he made a wrong move or crossed the wrong person in his duties. The blacks had exiled him from their world for these reasons, and because these reasons were right, no explanation or regret was ever delivered to him.

  Several chattering young women holding baskets on their heads paused to look sideways at him, his beautiful bronze skin seeming to absorb all the lamplight as he went and carry it away. On the other side of the street, Rey recognized a bulky man loitering at the corner, a Spanish Jew, a notorious thief sometimes brought in for questioning to the Central Station. Nicholas Rey mounted the narrow stairs of his rooming house. His door faced the second-floor landing, and although the lamp was broken, he could see from the shadows that someone was blocking the way to his room.

  The week’s events had been unrelenting. When Rey first drove Chief Kurtz to see the Reverend Talbot’s body, the sexton had ushered Kurtz and some sergeants to the steps that led below. Kurtz had stopped and surprised Rey by turning back. “Patrolman.” He had motioned Rey to follow. Inside the burial vault, Patrolman Rey had required a moment of staring at the display, the body stuffed wrong side up into an uneven hole, before even noticing the protruding feet: inflamed, blistered, and distorted. The sexton told them what he had seen.

  The toes were ready to break off and fall from the pink, skinless, and misshapen extremities, making it difficult to distinguish between the ends of the feet that held the toes and the ends that, anatomically, would have to be called the heels. This detail—the burned feet, revelatory to the Danteans mere blocks away—was to the policemen merely insane.

  “Only the feet were set on fire?” Patrolman Rey asked, squinting, delicately touching, with just a fingertip, the charred, crumbling flesh. He pulled back at the smoldering heat still baking the flesh, half expecting his finger to be singed. He wondered how much heat the human body could conduct before losing its physical form entirely. After two sergeants carried away the body, Sexton Gregg, in his tearful daze, remembered something.

  “The paper,” he said, grabbing Rey, who was the only policeman left below. “There’s bits of paper along the tombs. They ain’t supposed to be there. He shouldn’t have been there! I shouldn’t have let him in!” He wept uncontrollably. Rey lowered his lantern and saw the trail of letters like remorse left unspoken.

  The newspapers would speak of both terrible murders—Healey’s and Talbot’s—so frequently that they became partners in the public mind—often referred to in street corner conversation as the Healey-Talbot murders. Had the public’s syndrome exposed itself in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s queer remark at Longfellow’s house the night Talbot was discovered? Holmes had been offering his expertise to Rey as nervously as a medical student. “Perhaps what sounds like a useless Latin prognosis can help catch this killer running about our city.” The word pierced Rey: killer. Dr. Holmes was assuming that the murders were executed by the same party. Yet there was nothing obvious to tie them into one, besides their respective brutishness. There was also the nakedness of the bodies and the neatly folded clothes stripped from them—but that had not yet been reported in the papers when Rey heard Holmes speak. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue on the part of the conceited little doctor. Perhaps.

  The papers supplemented the headlining murders with healthy doses of other senseless violence: garrotings, hold-ups, safe blowing, a prostitute found half-strangled steps away from a police station, a child discovered beaten to a living pulp in a Fort Hill boardinghouse. And there was the strange incident of a vagrant brought for questioning to the Central Station, who was permitted by the police to throw himself to his death through the window, in plain sight of the helpless Chief Kurtz. The papers clamored: “Do the Police have any responsibility fo
r the safety of citizens?”

  In the dark well of his rooming house, Rey had come to a stop mid-stair and made sure nobody was behind him. Hand on his billy club underneath his coat, he proceeded. “Only a poor beggar, good sir.” The man from whom these words emerged at the top of the stairs was easily recognizable once the angle revealed a pair of stringy trousered legs growing out from iron-heeled shoes: Langdon Peaslee, safecracker, nonchalantly buffing his diamond breast-pin with the wide cuff of his shirt.

  “Why, Lily White.” Peaslee grinned, showing a beautiful set of teeth sharp as stalagmites. “Have a shake.” He grabbed Rey’s hand. “Ain’t seen that prize phiz of yours since that show-up. Say, this wouldn’t be your room up here?” He pointed behind him innocently.

  “Hello, Mr. Peaslee. I understand you robbed the Lexington bank two nights ago.” Nicholas Rey said this to demonstrate that he had just as much information as the thief.

  Peaslee had left no evidence that would survive his lawyers in court and had thoroughly selected and fenced only untraceable valuables. “Why, tell me, who’s crack enough these days to heave a bank all alone?”

  “You, I’m certain. Have you come to turn yourself in?” Rey said with a serious face.

  Peaslee laughed sneeringly. “No, no, dear boy. But I do think these restrictions they put on you—what are they? No uniform, can’t arrest white men, so on—well, they are unfair, unfair indeed. But there are some conciliatory factors. You’ve become such close pals with Chief Kurtz, and that can go a ways to bringing someone to justice. Like the murderers of Judge Healey and Reverend Talbot, rest their souls. I hear the deacons of Talbot’s church are even now building up a subscription for a reward.”

  Rey started for his room with an uninterested nod. “I’m tired,” he said quietly. “Unless you have someone specific who must be brought to justice at the moment, you’ll excuse me.”

  Peaslee twirled a hand into Rey’s scarf and held him still. “Policemen cannot accept rewards, but a just citizen, like myself, most certainly would. And if some finds its way to a deserving copper’s door . . .” There was no reaction in the mulatto’s face. Peaslee showed his irritation, turned off his charm. He pulled the scarf tight like a dropped noose. “This is how that dumb beggar at the show-up met Old Grim, now, isn’t it? Listen close. There’s a fool about our city who can be made very guilty for killing Talbot, my dear prigger-napper. I’ll jacket him easily. Help me see to it, half the boodle will be yours,” he said bluntly. “Thick enough to choke a hog, then you can go your own way as you please. The floodgates are opened: Everything’s going to change in Boston. The war lined this whole place with money. These times are too dusty to walk alone.”

  “You’ll excuse me, Mr. Peaslee,” Rey repeated with stoic equanimity.

  Peaslee waited a moment, then lapsed into a defeated laugh. He brushed some imaginary lint from Rey’s tweed coat. “Just as well, Lily White. I should’ve known by looking that you wear a Joseph’s coat. It’s only I feel sorry for you, my friend, very sorry. The darkies hate you for being white and everyone else hates you for being black. Me, I judge a bloke by whether this is up to snuff.” He pointed to the side of his head. “Once I found myself in a country town in Louisiana, Lily White, where you could see the white blood in half the Negro children. The streets were full of hybrids. I imagine you’ve wished you lived somewhere like that, haven’t you?”

  Rey ignored him and reached for the latchkey in his pocket. Peaslee said he would do the honors. He pushed Rey’s door open with a single arachnid finger.

  Rey looked up, alarmed for the first time in their encounter.

  “Locks are my game, understand,” Peaslee said, cocking his hat boastfully. Then he pretended to surrender, turning up his wrists. “You can bag me for trespass, Patrolman. Oh, no, no, you can’t, can you?” A departing grin.

  Nothing was missing from the apartment. That last trick had just been a show of power by the great safecracker, in case any unwise notions ever visited Nicholas Rey.

  It was strange for Oliver Wendell Holmes being out with Longfellow like this, to see him pass among the common faces and sounds and wonderful, terrible scents of the streets, as though he were part of the same world as the man driving a horse team with a sprinkling machine to clean the street. Not that the poet had never left Craigie House the last few years, but his outside activities were concise, confined. Dropping off proof sheets at Riverside Press, dining with Fields at an unpopular hour at the Revere or Parker House. Holmes felt ashamed for having been the first one to stumble on something that could so inconceivably break Longfellow’s peaceful suspension. It should have been Lowell. He would never think to feel guilt at forcing Longfellow into the bricked-up, soul-confusing Babylon of the world. Holmes wondered whether Longfellow resented him for it—whether he was capable of resentment or whether he was, as he was with so many unsavory human emotions, immune.

  Holmes thought of Edgar Allan Poe, who had written an article entitled “Longfellow and Other Plagiarists,” accusing Longfellow and all the Boston poets of copying every writer, living and dead, including Poe himself. This was at a time when Longfellow was helping keep Poe alive through loans. An infuriated Fields forever banned any of Poe’s writings from appearing in Ticknor & Fields publications. Lowell barraged newspapers with letters conclusively demonstrating the New York scribbler’s outrageous errors. Holmes became consumed with the idea that every word he wrote was indeed a theft from some better poet before him, and in his dreams it was not uncommon for the ghost of some old dead master to appear to demand his poetry back. Longfellow, for his part, said nothing publicly, privately attributing Poe’s acts to the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong. And remarkably enough to Holmes, Longfellow genuinely mourned Poe’s melancholy death.

  Both men were carrying flower bouquets under their arms while they traveled into the part of Cambridge that was less a village, more a town. They walked around Elisha Talbot’s church, looking with each step for the location of the terrible demise of Talbot, stooping under trees and feeling the ground between grave markers. Several passersby asked for autographs on handkerchiefs or inside hats—often from Dr. Holmes, always from Longfellow. Though the nighttime would have granted welcome anonymity, Longfellow had decided it would be best if they appeared as mourners visiting the churchyard rather than overdressed resurrection-men looking for a body to steal.

  Holmes was thankful that Longfellow had assumed leadership in the days since they had agreed to . . . What had they agreed to do, with Ulysses’ fiery words singeing their tongues? Lowell said investigating (always with an outward-thrust chest). Holmes preferred calling it “making inquiries,” and did so pointedly when speaking to Lowell.

  There were of course the few Danteans besides themselves who had to be accounted for. Several were spending time in Europe, on either a temporary or permanent basis, including Longfellow’s neighbor Charles Eliot Norton, another former student of the poet’s, and William Dean Howells, a young acolyte of Fields’s, appointed envoy to Venice. Then there was Professor Ticknor, seventy-four, holed up in his library for three decades of solitude; and Pietro Bachi, who had been an Italian tutor under both Longfellow and Lowell before being fired by Harvard; and all of the past students of Longfellow’s and Lowell’s Dante seminars (and a handful more from Ticknor’s time). Lists would be made and private meetings scheduled. But Holmes prayed they would uncover an explanation before they made fools of themselves in front of people whom they respected and who had, at least up to the present, respected them in return.

  If there had been a death scene on the outside grounds of the Second Unitarian Church of Cambridge, it was not to be found today. Then again, if their speculations were accurate and there had been a hole in the yard where Talbot was buried, the church deacons would have covered it up with fresh grass hurriedly. A dead preacher set upside down out front would not provide the best advertisement for a congregation.

  “N
ow, let us look inside,” Longfellow suggested, seemingly at peace with their complete lack of progress.

  Holmes followed closely in Longfellow’s steps.

  In the rear vestry, where the offices and changing rooms were located, there was an oversize slate door against one wall, but it did not connect to another room, and there was no other wing of the church.

  Longfellow removed his gloves and ran a hand over the cold stone. A bitter chill was behind it.

  “Yes!” Holmes whispered. The chill crept inside of him when he opened his mouth to speak. “The vault, Longfellow! The vault down below . . .”

  Until three years ago, many of the area’s churches had maintained interments underground. There were lavish private vaults that could be purchased by families, as well as inferior public ones housing any member of the congregation for a minimal fee. For years, these burial vaults were considered a prudent use of space for crowded cities with spreading churchyards. But when Bostonians dropped dead by the hundreds from yellow fever, the Board of Public Health declared the cause the proximity of decaying flesh, and new vaults beneath church grounds were strictly prohibited. Families with enough money to do so relocated casketed loved ones to Mount Auburn and other newly fashioned bucolic resting places. But tucked away beneath the ground, the “public”—or poorer—portions of the vaults were teeming. Rows of unmarked coffins, decrepit tombs, subterranean potter’s fields.