Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Bachi turned to him for a moment, his face burning, his grip tightening on his satchel as he tried to subdue his temper. The webbed lines had multiplied across his face over the last few years, and each small setback made him doubt the worth of his existence. “Amari Cani!” was all Bachi said. Arabella stared down confusedly. He had not taught her enough to understand that his pun on americani—Italian for “Americans”—would translate into English as “bitter dogs.”

  The horsecar at this hour, bound inward, packed people in like cattle headed for the abattoir. Serving Boston and its suburbs, the horsecars were enclosed two-ton compartments lined with enough places to hold around fifteen passengers. They were set with iron wheels on flat tracks and pulled by a pair of horses. Those who had managed to secure seats watched with detached interest as three dozen others, Bachi among them, struggled to fold into themselves, knuckling and bumping into one another as they reached for the leather straps hanging from the roof. By the time the conductor had pushed through to collect the fares, the platform outside was already filled with people waiting for the next car. Two drunkards in the middle of the overheated, unventilated compartment gave off a smell like an ash heap, and struggled to sing in harmony a song with words they did not know. Bachi curved his hand to his mouth and, seeing that nobody was watching, breathed into it and momentarily widened his nostrils.

  After arriving at his street, Bachi plunged down from the sidewalk into a basement complex of shadows in a tenement called Half Moon Place, happily expectant of the solitude that awaited him. But sitting on the last step down were, out of place without armchairs, James Russell Lowell and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.

  “A penny for your thoughts, signore.” Lowell wore a charming smile as he grabbed Bachi’s hand.

  “That would be filching a copper from you, Professore,” Bachi said, his hand hanging limp as a wet rag in Lowell’s clutch. “Lost your way to Cambridge?” He eyed Holmes suspiciously, but he sounded more surprised at their visit than he looked.

  “Not at all,” said Lowell as he took off his hat, showing his high white forehead. “And aren’t you acquainted with Dr. Holmes? We’d both like to have a few words, if you would.”

  Bachi frowned and pushed open his apartment door to the clanking welcome of pots hung on pegs directly behind the door. It was a subterranean room with a square of daylight dripping down from one half-window that found its way above the street. A musty odor rose up from clothes hanging at all corners that never quite dried in the dampness, imprinting Bachi’s suits with defeated wrinkles. As Lowell rearranged the pots on the door in order to hang his hat, Bachi casually slipped a pile of papers from his desk into his satchel. Holmes did his best to compliment the cracked decor.

  Bachi then put up a kettle of water on the hob of the chimney grate. “Your business, gentlemen?” he asked curtly.

  “We’ve come to request your help, Signor Bachi,” said Lowell.

  Wry amusement crept across Bachi’s face as he poured out the tea, and he grew cheerier. “What will you take with this?” He motioned to his sideboard. There were a half-dozen dirty tumblers and three decanters. They were labeled RUM, GIN, and WHISKEY.

  “Plain tea, thank you,” Holmes said. Lowell agreed.

  “Oh, come now!” Bachi insisted, bringing Holmes one of the decanters. To placate the host, Holmes poured as few drops of whiskey into the teacup as possible, but Bachi lifted the doctor’s elbow. “I think the bitter New England climate would be the death of us all, Doctor,” he said, “were it not for a drop of something warm inside every now and then.”

  Bachi pretended to consider tea for himself, then opted instead for a full glass of rum. The guests pulled up chairs, realizing simultaneously that they had sat in them before.

  “From University Hall!” said Lowell.

  “The College owed me at least that much, don’t you think?” Bachi said with stiff geniality. “Besides, where else could I find a seat so singularly uncomfortable, eh? Harvard men can talk as Unitarian as they wish, but they shall always be Calvinists up to the neck—they enjoy their own suffering, and that of others. Tell me, how is it you gentlemen found me here at Half Moon Place? I believe I am the only non-Dubliner for several square miles.”

  Lowell unrolled a copy of the Daily Courier and opened it to a page with a row of advertisements. One was circled.

  An Italian gentleman, a graduate of University of Padua, highly qualified by his manifold accomplishments, and by a long practice of tuition in Spanish and Italian, attends private pupils and classes at boys’ schools, ladies’ academies, etc. References: Hon. John Andrew, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell, Professor in Harvard University. Address: 2 Half Moon Place, Broad Street.

  Bachi laughed to himself. “Merit, with us Italians, likes to hide its candle under a bushel. At home our proverb is ‘A good wine needs no bush.’ But in America it must be ‘In bocca chiusa non entran mosche’: In a closed mouth, no flies enter. How can I expect people to come and buy if they do not know I have something to sell? So I open my mouth and blow my trumpet.”

  Holmes flinched from a sip of the strong tea. “John Andrew is one of your references, signore?” he asked.

  “Tell me, Dr. Holmes, what pupil looking for Italian lessons will call on the governor to ask after me? I suspect nobody has ever sent for Professor Lowell, in any case.”

  Lowell conceded the point. He leaned in closer to the overlapping piles of Dante texts and commentaries blanketing Bachi’s desk, promiscuously open at all angles. Above the writing desk dangled a small portrait of Bachi’s estranged wife, a considerate softness from the painter’s brush obscuring her tough eyes.

  “Now, how is it I could help you, even as I once needed your help, Professore?” Bachi asked.

  Lowell brought out another newspaper from his coat, this one opened to the likeness of Lonza. “Do you know this man, Signor Bachi? Or should I say did you know him?”

  Taking in the cadaverous face on the colorless page, Bachi sank into sadness. But when he looked up, he was angry. “Do you presume I would know every such ragged oaf of a man?”

  “The bishop at Holy Cross Cathedral presumed,” Lowell said knowingly.

  Bachi seemed startled and turned to Holmes as though surrounded.

  “You’ve borrowed some not insignificant amounts of money there, I believe, signore,” Lowell said.

  This shamed Bachi into candidness. He looked down with a sheepish smirk. “These are American priests—not like the ones in Italy. They have longer purses than the pope himself. If you were in my place, even priests’ money would not stink in your nostrils.” He drained his rum, threw his head back, and whistled. He looked again at the newspaper. “So you want to know something about Grifone Lonza.”

  He paused and then pointed a thumb at the pile of Dante texts on his desk. “Like you literary gentlemen, I have always found my pleasantest companions among the dead rather than the living. There is this advantage, that when an author becomes flat or obscure or simply ceases to amuse, one can always bid him ‘Shut up.’” He belabored these last words pointedly.

  Bachi rose to his feet and poured a gin. He took a large gulp, half gargling his words in the wash of liquor. “It is a lonely business in America. Most of my brethren who have been forced to come here can barely read a newspaper, much less La Commedia di Dante, which penetrates the very soul of man equally in all its despair and all its joy. There were a few of us here in Boston, years ago, men of letters, men of minds: Antonio Gallenga, Grifone Lonza, Pietro D’Alessandro.” He could not help but share a reminiscing smile, as though his current callers had been among them. “We would sit in our rooms and read Dante together aloud, first one and then the other, in this way progressing through the whole poem that records all secrets. Lonza and I were the last of the group who had not moved away or died. Now I am the only one.”

  “Come now, don’t despise Boston,” Holmes said.

  “Few are worthy to stay their wh
ole lives in Boston,” Bachi said with a sardonic sincerity.

  “Did you know, Signor Bachi, that Lonza died at the police station house?” Holmes asked gently.

  Bachi nodded. “I’ve heard vaguely about it.”

  Lowell said, eyeing the Dante books on the desk, “Signor Bachi, how would you respond if I were to tell you that Lonza spoke a line from the third canto of Inferno to a police officer before falling to his death?”

  Bachi did not seem at all surprised. Instead, he laughed carelessly. Most political exiles from Italy grew more virulent in their rectitude and turned even their own sins into signs of sainthood; in their minds, on the other hand, the pope was a wretched dog. But Grifone Lonza had convinced himself he had somehow betrayed his faith and had to find a way to repent his sins in the eyes of God. Once settled in Boston, Lonza had helped expand a Catholic mission connected with the Ursuline convent, certain his faith would be reported to the pope and would win him return. Then rioters had burned the convent to the ground.

  “Lonza, typically, rather than growing indignant, was shattered, certain he had done something deeply wrong sometime in his life to deserve these worst punishments from God. His place in America, in exile, became confused. He all but stopped speaking in English. It is my belief that part of him forgot how to speak it and knew only the true Italian language.”

  “But why would Signor Lonza recite a verse from Dante before jumping from the window, signore?” Holmes asked.

  “I had a friend back home, Dr. Holmes, a jovial fellow who operated a restaurant, who answered all questions about his food with quotes from Dante. Well, that was amusing. Lonza went mad. Dante became a way for him to live out the sins he imagined he had. He felt he was guilty of everything and anything proposed to him by the end. He never actually read Dante for the last few years, had no need. Every line and every word was fixed permanently in his mind, and to his terror. He had never memorized it intentionally, but it came to him as God’s warnings came to the prophets. The slightest image or word could make him slip into Dante’s poem—it could take days to pull him out sometimes, to hear him speak anything else.”

  “It does not surprise you that he would commit suicide,” Lowell remarked.

  “I do not know that that’s what it was, Professore,” Bachi snapped. “But it matters not what you call it. His life was a suicide. He gave up his soul for fear, little by little, until there was nowhere left in the universe but Hell. He stood on the precipice of eternal torment in his mind. It does not surprise me that he fell over.” He paused. “Is it so different from your friend Longfellow?”

  Lowell shot to his feet. Holmes quietly tried to mother him back down.

  Bachi persisted: “From what I understand, Professor Longfellow has drowned his suffering in Dante for—what is it?—three or four years now.”

  “What can you know of a man like Henry Longfellow, Bachi?” Lowell demanded. “To judge from your desk, Dante seems to have consumed you of late as well, signore. What exactly are you looking for in here? Dante was searching for peace in his writing. I venture to say you are after something not so noble!” He flipped through the pages roughly.

  Bachi swatted the book out of Lowell’s hand.

  “Do not touch my Dante! I may be in a tenement, but I need not justify my reading to any man, rich or poor, Professore!”

  Lowell flushed in embarrassment. “That is not . . . if you require a loan, Signor Bachi . . .”

  Bachi cackled. “Oh, you amari cani! Do you think I should take charity from you, a man who stood idly by while Harvard fed me to the wolves?”

  Lowell was aghast. “Now see here, Bachi! I fought hand over fist for your job!”

  “You sent a note to Harvard requesting they pay me severance. Where were you when I had nowhere to turn? Where was the great Longfellow? You have never fought for anything in your life. You write poems and articles about slavery and the murder of Indians and hope something will change. You fight what does not come near your door, Professore.” He broadened his invective by turning to the flustered Dr. Holmes, as though it were the polite thing to do to include him. “You’ve inherited everything in your lives and do not know what it is to cry for your bread! Well, with what other expectations did I come to this country? What should I complain of? The greatest bard had no home but exile. One day to come, perhaps, I shall walk on my own shores again, once more with true friends, before I leave this earth.”

  In another thirty seconds, Bachi drank two full glasses of whiskey and sank into his desk chair, trembling hard.

  “It was the intervention of a foreigner, Charles of Valois, that caused Dante’s exile. He is our last property, the last ashes of the soul of Italy. I shall not applaud as you and your worshipped Mr. Longfellow rip Dante from his rightful place and make him an American! Just remember, he shall always return to us! Dante is too powerful in his spirit of survival to succumb to any man!”

  Holmes tried to ask about Bachi’s tutoring. Lowell inquired about the bowler-hatted, checkered-waistcoated man whom he had seen Bachi approach anxiously in Harvard Yard. But they had extracted all they could from Pietro Bachi for now. When they emerged from the cellar apartment, it had grown viciously cold. They ducked under the rickety outer staircase, known by the tenants as Jacob’s Ladder, because it led to the somewhat better appointed Humphrey’s Place tenement above.

  A red-faced Bachi thrust his head from his half-window, so he seemed to be growing out from the ground. He wriggled out up to his neck and called out drunkenly.

  “You want to talk of Dante, Professori? Keep an eye on your Dante class!”

  Lowell shouted back, demanding to know his meaning.

  But the sash of the window was immoderately slammed closed by two quivering hands.

  X

  Mr. Henry Oscar Houghton, a tall and pious man with a Quaker-style half-beard, reviewed his accounts in the orderly congestion of his counting-room desk, which glowed under a dim moderator lamp. Through his tireless devotion to small details, his enterprise, the Riverside Press, located on the Cambridge side of the Charles River, had become the leading printing firm for many prominent publishing companies, including the most prominent, Ticknor & Fields. One of Houghton’s messenger boys knocked on the open door.

  Houghton did not budge until he finished inking and blotting a number into his cost book. He was worthy of his hardworking Puritan ancestors.

  “Come in, boy,” Houghton finally said, looking up from his work.

  The boy delivered a card into Oscar Houghton’s hand. Even before reading it, the printer was impressed by the heavy, inflexible paper. Reading the handwriting under the lamp, Houghton stiffened. His tightly guarded peace was now thoroughly interrupted.

  Deputy Chief Savage’s police carriage rolled up and expelled Chief Kurtz. Rey met him on the steps of the Central Station.

  “Well?” asked Kurtz.

  “I’ve discovered that the leaper’s first name was Grifone, according to another vagrant, who claims to have seen him by the railroad sometimes,” said Rey.

  “There’s one step,” said Kurtz. “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said, Rey. About these murders as forms of punishment.” Rey expected this to be followed by something dismissive, but instead Kurtz let out a sigh. “I’ve been thinking of Chief Justice Healey.”

  Rey nodded.

  “Well, we all do things we live to regret, Rey. Our own police force battled back mobs with billy clubs during the Sims trial from the courthouse steps. We hunted down Tom Sims like a dog and after the trial transported him to the harbor to be sent back to his slave master. You follow me? This was one of our darkest moments, all from Judge Healey’s decision, or lack thereof, not to declare Congress’s law invalid.”

  “Yes, Chief Kurtz.”

  Kurtz seemed saddened by his thoughts. “Find the most respectable men in Boston society, Patrolman, and I should say you have a good chance they have not been saints, not in our times. They have wavered, have t
hrown their weight into the wrong war chest, have let caution overstep courage, and worse.”

  Kurtz opened the door to his office, ready to continue. But three men in black greatcoats were standing over his desk.

  “What goes on here?” Kurtz called to them, then looked around for his secretary.

  The men parted, revealing Frederick Walker Lincoln sitting behind Kurtz’s desk.

  Kurtz uncovered his head and bowed forward slightly. “Your Honor.”

  Mayor Lincoln was completing a lazy, final stroke on a cigar behind the broad wings of John Kurtz’s mahogany desk. “Hope you don’t mind we made use of your rooms while waiting, Chief.” A cough mangled Lincoln’s words. Next to him sat Alderman Jonas Fitch. A sanctimonious grin seemed to have been carved on his face for some hours, at least. The alderman dismissed two of the greatcoats, members of the bureau of detectives. One remained.

  “Stay in the anteroom please, Patrolman Rey,” Kurtz said.

  Kurtz cautiously took a seat across from his desk. He waited for the door to close. “What is this about, then? Why have you congregated those scoundrels here?”

  The one remaining scoundrel, Detective Henshaw, showed no particular offense.

  Mayor Lincoln said, “I’m certain you have other police matters that have been neglected during these times, Chief Kurtz. We’ve decided that these murders shall be turned over to your detectives for resolution.”

  “I won’t allow that!” Kurtz said.

  “Welcome the detectives to do their jobs, Chief. They are equipped to solve such matters as this with speed and vigor,” Lincoln said.

  “Particularly with such rewards on the table,” said Alderman Fitch.

  Lincoln frowned at the alderman.