Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Kurtz squinted. “Rewards? Detectives can’t accept rewards, by your own law. What rewards, Mayor?”

  The mayor snubbed out his cigar, pretending to think over Kurtz’s comment. “The aldermanic council of Boston, as we speak, will be passing a resolution authored by Alderman Fitch, eliminating the restriction on receiving rewards for members of the bureau of detectives. There will also be a slight increase in the rewards.”

  “An increase of how much?” Kurtz asked.

  “Chief Kurtz . . .” the mayor started.

  “How much?”

  Kurtz thought he saw Alderman Fitch smile before answering. “The reward will now be set at thirty-five thousand for the arrest of the murderer.”

  “God save the mark!” Kurtz cried. “Men would commit murder themselves to get their hands on that! Especially our blasted Bureau of Detectives!”

  “We do the job someone must, Chief Kurtz,” Detective Henshaw noted, “when nobody else will act.”

  Mayor Lincoln exhaled, and his whole face deflated. Although the mayor didn’t exactly resemble his second cousin the late President Lincoln, he carried the same skeletal look of indefatigable frailness. “I want to retire after another term, John,” the mayor said softly. “And I want to know that my city will look back at me with honor. We need to string up this killer now or all hell will break loose, can’t you see that? Between the war and the assassination, goodness knows the papers have lived off the taste of blood for four years, and I swear they’re thirstier than ever. Healey was in my college class, Chief. I do believe I am half expected to go into the streets and find this madman myself or, if not, to be hanged in the Boston Common! I beg you, let the detectives solve this and leave the Negro out of this business. We can’t suffer another embarrassment.”

  “I beg your pardon, Mayor.” Kurtz sat up straighter in his chair. “What does Patrolman Rey have to do with all this?”

  “The near riot at your show-up for Justice Healey.” Alderman Fitch was pleased to elaborate. “That beggar who threw himself out your precinct window. Stop me when this sounds familiar, Chief.”

  “Rey had nothing to do with that,” Kurtz said, balking.

  Lincoln shook his head sympathetically. “The aldermen have commissioned an investigation to look into his role. We have received complaints from several police officers that it was your driver’s presence that provoked the commotion to begin with. We have been told the mulatto had custody of the beggar when it happened, Chief, and some think, well, speculate, he might have forced him out the window. Probably accidentally . . .”

  “Blasted lies!” Kurtz reddened. “He was trying to calm things down, as we all were! That leaper was just some maniac! The detectives are trying to stop our investigation so they can get to your rewards! Henshaw, what do you know of this?”

  “I know that Negro can’t save Boston from what’s at hand, Chief.”

  “Perhaps when the governor hears that his prize appointment has disrupted the entire police department, he shall do what’s right and reconsider its wisdom,” the alderman said.

  “Patrolman Rey is one of the finest policemen I have ever known.”

  “Which brings up another matter while we’re here. We have also been made to understand that you are seen all over the city with him, Chief.” The mayor extended his frown. “Including the site of Talbot’s death. Not just as your driver but as an equal partner in your activities.”

  “It’s a certified miracle that darky doesn’t have a lynch mob follow him with paving stones every time he walks out on the street!” Alderman Fitch laughed.

  “We put in place every restriction on Nick Rey that the aldermanic council suggested and . . . I can’t see how his position has anything to do with this!”

  “We have a crime of terror upon us,” Mayor Lincoln said, aiming a stern finger at Kurtz. “And the police department is falling apart—that’s why it has to do with it. I shan’t allow Nicholas Rey to remain involved in this matter in any capacity. One more mistake and he shall face his discharge. Some state senators came to me today, John. They’re appointing another committee to propose abolishing all city police departments statewide and replacing them with a state-run metropolitan police force if we can’t finish this. They’re dead set. I shan’t see that happen under my watch—understand that! I won’t see my city’s police department pulled apart.”

  Alderman Jonas Fitch could see that Kurtz was too stunned to speak. The alderman leaned in and leveled his stare. “If you had enforced our temperance and anti-vice laws, Chief Kurtz, perhaps the thieves and scoundrels would have all fled to New York City by now!”

  In the early morning, the offices of Ticknor & Fields pulsed with anonymous shop boys—some just barely boys and others with gray heads—as well as with junior clerks. Dr. Holmes was the first member of the Dante Club to arrive. Pacing the hall to whittle away his earliness, Holmes decided to sit in J. T. Fields’s private office.

  “Oh sorry, my good sir,” he said as he detected someone in there, and began to close the door.

  An angular, shadowed face was turned toward the window. It took Holmes a second to make him out.

  “Why, my dear Emerson!” Holmes smiled widely.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, his profile aquiline and his body long in blue cloak and black shawls, broke from his reverie and greeted Holmes. It was a rarity to find Emerson, poet and lecturer, away from Concord, a small village that had for a time rivaled Boston in its collection of literary talents, especially after Harvard had banned him from speaking on campus for declaring the Unitarian Church dead during a divinity-school address. Emerson was the only writer in America who approached the renown of Longfellow, and even Holmes, a man at the center of all literary doings, was tickled when he was in the author’s company. “I’ve just returned from my annual Lyceum Express, arranged by our Maecenas of modern poets.” Emerson raised a hand over Fields’s desk as though giving a blessing, a vestigial gesture from his days as a reverend. “The guardian and protector of us all. I’ve just some papers to leave for him.”

  “Well, it is about time you should come back to Boston. We have missed you at the Saturday Club. An indignation meeting was nearly convened to call for your company!” Holmes said.

  “Thankfully, I shall never be so well liked.” Emerson smiled. “You know, we never make time to write to gods or friends, only to attorneys, who wish to collect debt, and the man who will slate our house.” Emerson then asked after Holmes.

  He answered with long, winding anecdotes. “And I have been thinking of writing another novel.” He made his task prospective, because he was intimidated by the force and swiftness of Emerson’s opinions, which often made everyone else’s seem all wrong.

  “Oh I wish you would, dear Holmes,” Emerson said sincerely. “Your voice cannot fail to please. And tell me about the dashing captain. Still a lawyer-to-be?”

  Holmes laughed nervously at the mention of Junior, as if the subject of his son were inherently comical; this was not quite true, as Junior lacked any sense of humor altogether. “I tried my hand at the law once but found it was much like eating sawdust without butter. Junior wrote good verses, too—not as good as mine, but good verses. Now that he lives at home again, he is like a white Othello, sitting in our library rocker impressing the young lady Desdemonas about him with stories of his wounds. Sometimes, though, I believe he despises me. Do you ever feel this from your boy, Emerson?”

  Emerson paused for a solid few seconds. “There is no peace for the sons of men, Holmes.”

  Watching Emerson’s facial gestures while he spoke was like watching a grown man cross a brook on stepping-stones, and the cautious selfishness in this image distracted Holmes from his anxieties. He wanted the conversation to keep going but knew that meetings with Emerson could end without much warning.

  “My dear Waldo, might I ask you a question?” Holmes really wanted to ask advice, but Emerson never gave any. “What did you think of us, Fields and Lowell and I, I mea
n, assisting Longfellow with his translation of Dante?”

  Emerson raised a frosted eyebrow. “If Socrates were here, Holmes, we could go talk with him out in the streets. But our dear Longfellow, we cannot go and talk with. There is a palace and servants and a row of bottles of different-colored wines and wineglasses and fine coats.” Emerson bent his head in thought. “I think sometimes of the days I read Dante under Professor Ticknor’s direction, as you did, yet I cannot help but feel Dante is a curiosity, like a mastodon—a relic to put in a museum, not in one’s house.”

  “But you once said to me that Dante’s introduction to America would be one of the most significant achievements of our century!” Holmes insisted.

  “Yes.” Emerson considered this. He liked to take all sides of an issue whenever possible. “And that also is true. Still, you know, Wendell, I prefer the society of one faithful person to an association of rapid talkers, who more than anything else seek admiration from one another.”

  “But what would literature be without associations?” Holmes smiled. He had the integrity of the Dante Club under his guard. “Who can tell what we owe to the mutual admiration society of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson with Beaumont and Fletcher? Or to that where Johnson and Goldsmith and Burke and Reynolds and Beauclerc and Boswell, most admiring of all admirers, met by the fireside of a parlor?”

  Emerson straightened the papers he had brought to Fields in order to show that the purpose of his visit was completed. “Remember that only when past genius is transmitted into a present power shall we meet the first truly American poet. And somewhere, born to the streets rather than the athenaeum, we will come upon the first true reader. The spirit of the American is suspected to be timid, imitative, tame—the scholar decent, indolent, complaisant. The mind of our country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. Without action, the scholar is not yet man. Ideas must work through the bones and arms of good men or they are no better than dreams. When I read Longfellow, I feel utterly at ease—I am safe. This shall not yield us our future.”

  When Emerson left, Holmes felt he had been entrusted with a sphinx’s riddle to which only he could provide an answer. He felt decidedly possessive about the conversation; he did not want to share it with the others when they arrived.

  “Is it really possible?” Fields asked his friends after they had discussed Bachi. “Could this beggar Lonza have been so overcome that he would see the poem strung over all life?”

  “It would not be the first or last time that literature mastered a weakened mind. Think of John Wilkes Booth,” Holmes said. “As he shot Lincoln, he cried out in Latin, ‘Thus always to tyrants.’ That’s what Brutus says while murdering Julius Caesar. Lincoln was the Roman emperor in Booth’s mind. Booth, recall, was a Shakespearean. Just as our Lucifer is a master Dantean. The reading, the comprehending, the analyzing that we do every day did what we secretly hope for in ourselves—worked through the bones and muscles of this man.”

  Longfellow raised his eyebrows at this. “Only, it seemed to have done so involuntarily with Booth and Lonza.”

  “Bachi must be hiding something he knows about Lonza!” Lowell said with frustration. “You saw how reluctant he was, Holmes. What do you say?”

  “It was like stroking a hedgehog,” Holmes admitted. “After a man begins to attack Boston, when he gets bitter about the Frog Pond or the State House, you may be sure there is not much left of him. Poor Edgar Poe died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of talking, so sure as you find a fellow reduced to this, you had better stop lending him money—for he is on his last legs.”

  “The jingle man,” Lowell muttered at the mention of Poe.

  “There was always a dark spot in Bachi,” Longfellow said. “Poor Bachi. The loss of his job only made him more wretched, and no doubt he views our part in his desperation unkindly.”

  Lowell did not meet Longfellow’s eyes. He had deliberately not related the specifics of Bachi’s tirade against Longfellow. “I think good gratitude a scarcer thing in this world than good verses, Longfellow. Bachi has no more feelings than a horseradish. It could be that Lonza was so afraid at the police station because he knew who killed Healey. He knew Bachi was the culprit—or perhaps he even helped Bachi kill Healey.”

  “The mention of Longfellow’s work on Dante did touch him off like a lucifer match,” Holmes said, but he was skeptical. “The murderer must be a man of great strength to have carried Healey from the bedroom to the yard. Bachi can barely stumble straight with his regiment of liquors. Besides, we have come across no connection between Bachi and either of the victims.”

  “We have no need of one!” Lowell said. “Remember, Dante places plenty of people in Hell whom he never met. Ser Bachi has two ingredients stronger than a personal connection with Healey or Talbot. First: a sterling knowledge of Dante. He is the only one outside our club, besides I suppose old Ticknor, with a level of understanding that rivals our own.”

  “Granted,” said Holmes.

  “Secondly, motivation,” Lowell continued. “He’s as poor as a rat. He finds himself abandoned by our city and finds solace only in drink. His occasional jobs as private tutor are all that keep him afloat. He resents us because he believes Longfellow and I sat on our hands when he was fired. And Bachi would rather see Dante ruined than rescued by treacherous Americans.”

  “Why, my dear Lowell, would Bachi choose Healey and Talbot?” Fields asked.

  “He could have chosen anyone he pleases, so long as they fit the sins he decides to punish and Dante could eventually be exposed as the source. So he could ruin the name of Dante in America before the poetry takes hold.”

  “Could Bachi be our Lucifer?” Fields asked.

  “Must he be our Lucifer?” Lowell said, wincing as he grabbed his ankle.

  Longfellow said, “Lowell?” He looked down at Lowell’s leg.

  “Oh, no worries, I thank you. I might have smashed myself against an iron stand the other day at Wide Oaks, now that I remember it.”

  Dr. Holmes leaned forward, motioning for Lowell to roll up his trouser leg. “Has this grown in size, Lowell?” The red abrasion had gone from the size of a penny to the size of a dollar coin.

  “How should I know?” He never took his own injuries seriously.

  “Perhaps you should pay as much attention to yourself as to Bachi,” Holmes scolded. “It doesn’t look like it’s a healing wound. Quite the contrary. You simply banged it, you say? It does not seem infected. Has it been bothering you at all, Lowell?”

  Suddenly, his ankle felt much worse. “Now and again.” Then he thought of something. “It is possible that while I was at Healey’s, one of those blowflies made its way into my pants leg. Could that be it?”

  Holmes said, “Not that I could imagine. I’ve never heard of a blowfly of that kind being able to sting. Perhaps it was some other kind of insect?”

  “No, I should know. I flattened it like an oyster out of season.” Lowell grinned. “It was one of those I brought you, Holmes.”

  Holmes considered this. “Longfellow, has Professor Agassiz returned from Brazil?”

  Longfellow said, “Just this week, I believe.”

  “I suggest that we send the insect samples you recovered to Agassiz’s museum,” Holmes said to Lowell. “There is nothing he doesn’t know about nature’s beasts.”

  Lowell had had more than enough on the topic of his own well-being. “If you must. Now, I propose to follow Bachi for a few days—assuming he hasn’t already dropped dead from drinking. See if he leads us somewhere revealing. Two of us shall wait outside his apartment with a carriage while the others wait here. If there are no objections, I shall lead the team to watch Bachi. Who shall come with me?”

  Nobody volunteered. Fields nonchalantly pulled out his watch chain.

  “Oh, come now!” Lowell said. He clapped his publisher on the shoulder. “Fields, you’ll come.”

  “I’m sorry, Lowell. I had to promise Oscar Houghton an afternoon dinner with L
ongfellow and myself for today. He received a note from Augustus Manning last evening warning him to cease printing Longfellow’s translation or risk the loss of Harvard’s business. We must do something quickly or Houghton shall bend.”

  “And I have a speaking engagement at the Odeon on the latest developments in homeopathy and allopathy that could not be canceled without severe financial loss to the organizers,” Dr. Holmes said preemptively. “All are welcome to come, of course!”

  “But we may have just turned a corner here!” Lowell said.

  “Lowell,” said Fields. “If we allow Dr. Manning to overtake Dante while we are busy with this, then all our translation work, all that we have hoped for, shall be for naught. It shall only take an hour to assuage Houghton, and then we can do as you say.”

  That afternoon, the deep smell of steaks and the muffled content sound of midday meals came to Longfellow as he stood in front of the stone Greek façade of the Revere House. A meal with Oscar Houghton would be an hour’s grace at least from talk of murder and insects. Fields, leaning on the driver’s box of his carriage, was instructing his driver to return to Charles Street—Annie Fields had to get to her Ladies’ Club in Cambridge. Fields was the only member of Longfellow’s circle to own a private carriage, not only because the publisher had the greatest abundance of wealth but also because he valued the luxury above the headaches caused by moody drivers and sickly horses.

  Longfellow noticed a pensive lady veiled in black crossing Bowdoin Square. She held a book in her hand and ambled along slowly, deliberately, eyes downcast. He thought of the days when he would encounter Fanny Appleton on Beacon Street, how she would nod politely, never stopping to speak with him. He had met her in Europe while immersing himself in languages to prepare for his professorship, and she was pleasant enough to the professorial friend of her brother’s. But back in Boston, it was as if Virgil were whispering in her ear the advice he tendered to the pilgrim in the round of the Neutrals: “Let us not speak, but look, and pass.” Denied conversation with the beautiful young woman, Longfellow found himself crafting a character of a beautiful maiden in his book Hyperion that was modeled after her.