Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “Oh what a formidable task lay ahead of him in his unhappy tower in Verona, with the bitter salt of exile on his palate. Thinks he: How shall I sketch the bottom of the universe with this frail tongue? Thinks he: How shall I sing out my miraculous song? Yet Dante knows he must: to redeem his city, to redeem his nation, to redeem the future—and us, we who sit here in this reawakened chapel to revive the spirit of his majestic voice in a New World, we too are redeemable! He knows that in each generation there shall be those fortunate few who understand and see truly. His is a pen of fire with heart’s blood as his only ink. O Dante, bringer of light! Happy are the voices of the mountains and the pines that shall forever repeat thy songs!”

  Greene gulped down a deep lungful of air before narrating Dante’s descent into the final round of Hell: a frozen lake of ice, Cocytus, slick as glass, with a thickness found not even on the river Charles in the dead of winter. Dante hears an angry voice flare up to him from this icy tundra. “Look how thou steppest!” cries the voice. “Take heed thou do not trample with thy feet the heads of us tired, miserable brothers!”

  “Oh wherefore came these accusatory words to sting the ears of well-intentioned Dante? Looking down, the Poet sees, embedded in the frozen lake, heads sticking out from the ice, a congregation of dead shades—a thousand purple heads; sinners of the very basest nature known by the sons of Adam. What wrong is reserved for this frozen plain of Hell? Treachery, of course! And what is their punishment, their contrapasso, for the cold in their hearts? To be entombed wholly in ice: from the neck down—so that their eyes may forever view the miserable penalty called up by their wrongs.”

  Holmes and Lowell were overcome, hearts contorted in their throats. Lowell’s beard hung low while Greene, glistening with vitality, described how Dante clutches the head of the berating sinner and demands his name, cruelly twisting out shocks of his hair by their roots. Though thou strip off my hair, I will not tell thee who I am! One of the other sinners unwittingly calls by name for his fellow shade to stop his galling shouts, much to Dante’s satisfaction. He could now record the sinner’s name for posterity.

  Greene promised to reach bestial Lucifer—the worst of all Traitors and all sinners, the three-headed beast who is punisher and punished—in his next sermon. The energy that had charged through the old minister during the sermon drained rapidly when it was over, leaving only a pinwheel of color in his cheeks.

  Lowell struggled against the crowd in the darkened chapel, parting soldiers mingling and squawking in the aisles. Holmes chased behind.

  “Why, my dear friends!” Greene said cheerfully at the first sign of Lowell and Holmes. They shuttled Greene into a small chamber in the rear of the chapel, Holmes fastening the door. Greene took a seat on a board by a heating stove and held up his palms. “I daresay, fellows,” he observed. “With this dreadful weather and a new cough, I shan’t complain if we—”

  Lowell roared, “Tell us everything directly, Greene!”

  “Why, Mr. Lowell, I haven’t the most remote notion what you are driving at,” Greene said meekly, and glanced at Holmes.

  “My dear Greene, what Lowell means . . .” But Dr. Holmes could not maintain his calm, either. “But what in the devil were you doing here, Greene?”

  Greene looked hurt. “Well, you know, my dear Holmes, that I offer guest sermons at a number of churches around the city and in East Greenwich whenever I am asked and able. A sickbed is a dull place at best, and mine has grown anxious and painful in the last year, so I am more willing than ever when such requests arise.”

  Lowell interrupted. “We know of your guest preaching. But you were preaching Dante out there!”

  “Ah, that! It is a quite harmless amusement, really. Preaching to these woebegone soldiers was so challenging an experience, rather different from any I had known. In speaking with the men the first weeks after the war, especially when Lincoln was so treacherously killed, I found them plagued, in great numbers, with urgency by worries of their own fate and of the workings of the afterlife. One afternoon—sometime in the late-summer weeks—feeling inspired by Longfellow’s commitment to his translation, I introduced some Dantesque descriptions during my sermon and judged their effect rather successful. And so I began with general summaries of Dante’s spiritual history and journey. At moments—forgive me. Look how I blush to confess to you—I fancied I could teach Dante myself and that these brave young men were my pupils.”

  “And Longfellow knew nothing of this?” Holmes asked.

  “I wished to share the tidings of my modest experiment, but, well . . .” Greene’s skin was pale as he fixed his gaze into the flaming porthole of the heating stove. “I suppose, dear friends, I was a trifle embarrassed to profess myself a teacher of Dante next to a man like Longfellow. Only, don’t tell him so, if you please. It will only discomfit him, you know he doesn’t like to think himself different . . .”

  “This sermon just now, Greene,” Lowell interrupted. “It was entirely made up of Dante’s encounters with the Traitors.”

  “Yes, yes!” Greene said, rejuvenated by the reminder. “Isn’t it marvelous, Lowell? Soon enough I discovered that expressing a canto or two in its entirety held the attention of the soldierly quarter quite better than a sermon of my own frail thoughts, and doing so served well to arm me for our Dante sessions the following week.” Greene laughed with the nervous pride of a child who has reached some accomplishment unexpected by his elders. “When the Dante Club started Inferno, I began my current practice, preaching one of the cantos we were to translate in the next meeting of our club. I daresay I now feel quite prepared to take on this vociferous canto, for Longfellow has scheduled it for tomorrow! Normally, I would offer my sermon on Thursday afternoon, shortly before railroading back to Rhode Island.”

  “Every Thursday?” asked Holmes.

  “There were times when I was confined to bed. And the weeks that Longfellow canceled our Dante sessions, alas, I had no heart to speak of Dante then,” said Greene. “Then this last week, how wondrous! Longfellow has been translating at such a rapid, eager pace, I have stayed put in Boston and given a Dante sermon nearly every night for a week!”

  Lowell lunged forward. “Mr. Greene! Review in your mind every moment of your experience here! Were any of the soldiers especially set on mastering the contents of your Dante sermons?”

  Greene pushed himself to his feet and looked around him confusedly, as though he had suddenly forgotten their purpose. “Let me think. There were some twenty or thirty soldiers every session, understand, never all the same men. I’ve always wished I were better with faces. A number of them, now and again, did express admiration for my sermons. You must believe me—if I could aid you . . .”

  “Greene, if you don’t instantly . . .” Lowell began in a choking voice.

  “Lowell please!” Holmes said, assuming Fields’s usual role in taming his friend.

  Lowell emitted a billowing exhale and waved Holmes forward.

  Holmes began, “My dear Mr. Greene, you will aid us—tremendously, I know. Now, you must think fast for our benefit, dear friend, for Longfellow. Revisit all the soldiers you might have conversed with since starting this.”

  “Oh, hold.” Greene’s half-moon eyes opened unnaturally large. “Hold now. Yes, there was one specific inquiry directed at me by a soldier wishing to read Dante for himself.”

  “Yes! How did you reply?” Holmes asked, beaming.

  “I asked whether the young man was at all familiar with foreign languages. He suggested he was the sharpest brand of reader since early boyhood but only of the English language, so I encouraged him to take up Italian. I noted that I was helping to complete the first American translation with Longfellow, for which we had a small club at the poet’s home. He seemed quite enticed. So I urged him to look for news of the Ticknor and Fields publication early next year at his bookseller,” Greene said with all the zeal of one of Fields’s planted puffs in the gossip pages.

  Holmes paused for a hopeful
glance at Lowell, who urged him on. “This soldier,” Holmes said slowly. “Might he have given you his name?” Greene shook his head. “Do you remember what he looked like, my dear Greene?”

  “No, no, I’m terribly sorry.”

  “It’s more important than you can imagine,” Lowell entreated him.

  “I have but the foggiest recollection of the exchange,” Greene said, and closed his eyes. “I seem to remember he was rather tall, with a hay-colored mustache of the handlebar shape. And perhaps walked with a limp. But so many of them have become stumps of men. It was months ago, and I did not pay any special mind to the man at the time. As I say, I am not gifted at remembering faces—precisely why I’ve never written fiction, my friends. Fiction is all faces.” Greene laughed, finding this last statement enlightening. But the distress on the faces of his companions sagged into heavy stares. “Gentlemen? Pray tell me, have I contributed to some sort of problem?”

  As they carefully made their way outside through groups of veterans, Lowell helped Greene step up into the carriage. Holmes had to rouse the cabman and horse, and the driver turned his lethargic horse’s head away from the old church.

  In the meantime, from behind a dingy window of the soldiers’-aid home, the sight of the fleeing party was swallowed whole by the sentinel eyes of the man the Dante Club called Lucifer.

  George Washington Greene was settled into a reclining armchair in the Authors’ Room at the Corner. Nicholas Rey joined them. The questions teased every bit of information from Greene about his Dante sermons and the veterans who eagerly came to hear them each week. Then Lowell launched into a blunt chronicle of the Dante murders, to which Greene could hardly conjure a response.

  As the details fell from Lowell’s mouth, Greene felt his secret partnership with Dante gradually wrested away from him. The modest pulpit in the soldiers’-aid home facing his spellbound listeners; the special place where Divine Comedy stood in his library shelf in Rhode Island; the Wednesday nights seated before Longfellow’s fireplace—all of these had seemed such permanent and perfect manifestations of Greene’s dedication to the great poet. Yet, as with everything else that had once been satisfactory in Greene’s life, all along there had been far more at hand than he could conceive. So much occurring independent of his knowledge and indifferent to his sanction.

  “My dear Greene,” Longfellow said gently. “You must not speak to anyone of Dante outside those in this room until these matters are resolved.”

  Greene managed to simulate a nod. His expression was of a man both useless and disabled, the face of a clock from which the hands had been torn. “And our Dante Club meeting that was planned for tomorrow?” he asked feebly.

  Longfellow shook his head sadly.

  Fields rang for a boy to escort Greene to his daughter’s house. Longfellow started helping him into his overcoat.

  “Never do that, my dear friend,” Greene said. “A young man does not need it and an old one does not want it.” He paused on the arm of the messenger boy as he stepped into the hall; he spoke but did not look back at the men in the room. “You could have told me what had happened, you know. Any one of you could have told me. I may not have the strongest . . . I do know I could have helped you.”

  They waited for the sound of Greene’s footfalls to die in the hallway.

  “If only we had told him,” said Longfellow. “What a fool I was to envision a race against the translation!”

  “Not so, Longfellow!” Fields said. “Think of what we now know: Greene preached his sermons on Thursday afternoons, directly before returning to Rhode Island. He would select a canto he wished to brush up on, choosing from the two or three cantos you had set as the agenda for the next translation session. Our blasted Lucifer heard the same punishment we were to sit down with—six days before our own group! And that left ample time for Lucifer to stage his own version of the contrapasso murder just a day or two before we transcribed it onto paper. So, from our limited vantage point, the whole farrago assumed the appearance of a race, of someone taunting us with the particulars of our own translation.”

  “What of the warning cut into Mr. Longfellow’s window?” asked Rey.

  “La Mia Traduzione.” Fields threw up his hands. “We were hasty to conclude it was the work of the murderer. Manning’s damned jackals at the College would surely stoop so low as to try to frighten us off the translation.”

  Holmes turned to Rey, “Patrolman, does Willard Burndy possess anything that can help us from here?”

  Rey answered, “Burndy says a soldier paid him for instruction in how to open Reverend Talbot’s safe. Burndy, assuming it was easy profit with little risk, went to Talbot’s house to scout the layout, where several witnesses happened to see him. After Talbot’s murder, the detectives discovered the eyewitnesses, and with the help of Langdon Peaslee, Burndy’s rival, they fixed their case against Burndy. Burndy is a lush and can barely remember any more of the killer than the fact of his soldier’s uniform. I wouldn’t trust his mind even for that if you hadn’t discovered the source of the murderer’s knowledge.”

  “Hang Burndy! Hang ’em all!” Lowell cried. “Can’t you see, men? This is in our sights. We’re so close on Lucifer’s path that we can’t help but step on his Achilles’ heel. Think of it: The erratic pacing between murders now makes perfect sense. Lucifer was no Dante scholar after all—he was but a Dante parishioner. He could only kill after hearing Greene preach on a punishment. One week Greene preached Canto Eleven as his text—Virgil and Dante sitting on a wall to get accustomed to the stench of Hell, discussing Hell’s structure with the coolness of two engineers—a canto that features no specific punishment, no murder. Greene then took ill the next week, didn’t attend our club, didn’t preach—no murder again.”

  “Yes, and Greene was ill once before that during our time translating Inferno, too.” Longfellow turned a page in his notes. “And once after that. There was no murder in those periods, either.”

  Lowell continued, “And when we put a pause in our club meetings, when we first decided to investigate after Holmes’s observation of Talbot’s body, the killings stopped cold—because Greene had stopped! Until we had our ‘respite’ and decided to translate the Schismatics—sending Greene back to the pulpit and Phinny Jennison to his death!”

  “The killer’s putting the money under the Simoniac’s head now comes into plain daylight, too,” Longfellow said remorsefully. “That was always Mr. Greene’s preferred interpretation. I should have noticed his readings of Dante in the particulars of the murders.”

  “Do not bring yourself down, Longfellow,” urged Dr. Holmes. “The murders’ details were such that only an expert Dantean would have known them. There was no way to have guessed Greene was their unwitting source.”

  “I’m afraid, however well-intentioned my reasoning,” replied Longfellow, “that we’ve made a grave error. By our accelerating the frequency of our translation sessions, our adversary has now heard as much Dante from Greene in a week’s time as he would over the span of a month.”

  “I say put Greene back in that chapel,” Lowell insisted. “But this time we make him preach on something other than Dante. We watch the audience and wait for someone to become agitated, then we nab our Lucifer!”

  “It is far too dangerous a game for Greene!” said Fields. “He is not up to the trick. Besides, that soldiers’-aid home is half–closed up, and the soldiers are probably dispersed throughout the city by now. We haven’t time to plan anything of the kind. Lucifer could strike at any moment, against anyone who, in his distorted vision of the world, he believes has transgressed against him!”

  “Yet he must have a reason for those beliefs, Fields,” replied Holmes. “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”

  “We know now that the killer required at least two days’ time, sometimes more, after hearing a sermon to prepare his murder,” said Patrolman Rey. “Is there a chance we can predict potential targets now that you know the portion
s of Dante Mr. Greene has shared with the soldiers?”

  Lowell said, “I fear not. For one thing, we have no experience by which to guess how Lucifer would react to this recent flurry of sermons as opposed to a single one. The canto of the Traitors we just heard would be most prominent in his thoughts, I suppose. But how could we possibly guess what ‘Traitors’ might haunt the mind of this lunatic?”

  “If only Greene could better recall the man who approached him, who inquired about reading Dante for himself,” Holmes said. “He wore a uniform, had a hay-colored handlebar mustache, and walked with a limp. Yet we know what physical strength was shown by the murderer in each of the killings, and what swiftness of foot—seen neither by man nor beast before or after the murders. Wouldn’t a disabling injury render that unlikely?”

  Lowell rose and headed for Holmes with an exaggerated limp. “Might your gait not turn soft as this, Wendell, if you wished to hide suspicions of your strength to the world?”

  “No, we haven’t seen any evidence of our killer hiding at all, only of our inability to see him. To think that Greene would have looked into the eyes of our demon!”

  “Or into those of a thoughtful gentleman struck by the force of Dante,” Longfellow suggested.

  “It was remarkable to see how excitedly the soldiers anticipated hearing more Dante,” Lowell admitted. “Dante’s readers become students, his students zealots, and what begins as a taste becomes a religion. The homeless exile finds a home in a thousand grateful hearts.”

  A light rapping and a soft voice from the hall interrupted.

  Fields shook his head in frustration. “Osgood, please manage it yourself for now!”

  A folded paper skated in under the door. “Just a message, if you please, Mr. Fields.”

  Fields hesitated before opening the note. “It’s Houghton’s seal. ‘Given your earlier request, I trust you would be interested to know that proofs from Mr. Longfellow’s Dante translation appear to have indeed gone missing. Signed, H. O. H.’”