“It is a terrible number. But I am noticing the handwriting. It is good handwriting, no? Not the handwriting of your reports.”
“I judge the hand to be clear is all I can say.”
“I am telling you it is university man who wrote this.” From the moment he entered civic politics, Grisse had made a study of mimicking the handwriting of educated men. Hence, on this rare occasion, Grisse knew something that was beyond the inspector’s ken.
Shadduck appreciated this, and observed the councilman closely. “Do you reckon that the writer might be a Dublin Irishman with a gift for oratory, sir?”
“Irish? I am not knowing what is Irish.”
“Yet it has an amount of flair, don’t it? A style to it?”
“I do not know what you mean by this flair.”
“Never mind, sir. I will cogitate the matter on my own.”
It was now clear to Shadduck that the men who had murdered Topham were the men who held Dickens—which made for a knotty situation. Take your time with knots, or you will only tighten them, his mother would say. It would be a poor piece of policework if he were to resolve the murder of Henry Topham, only to kill Charles Dickens.
And great guns, if it ever became known to the press! Wars have been declared with less provocation than the murder of an eminent man on foreign soil.
Accepting that the same parties had committed both crimes, Shadduck judged that the two must have been joined up somewhere. Was it over a crime? Was one crime committed to evade discovery of the other? Possibly, but Shadduck thought not. When it came to the actions of desperate men, it was unwise to put to ingenuity what you could put to chance, or fate, or stupidity. In his experience, events had a natural way of coming together in patterns—curious patterns to be certain, but patterns nonetheless.
As for Councilman Grisse, recent events did not bode well for a second term. Above all, the kidnapping must not be made public, no matter what happened to the victim. In a sense, terrible to say, it might be the better outcome if Dickens were to be buried in an unmarked grave.
However unlikely it might seem, part of Grisse’s mind could not resist thinking that in some way Shadduck was responsible for all of it. That his overreaching had stirred up a hornet’s nest whose inhabitants were giving no end of trouble. Grisse had never been in favor of a professional police force. It was a recipe for abuse and wrongdoing in itself, to create a class of people whose business it is to ferret out crimes, bring every skeleton into the open—whatever the consequences to the city’s stability and repute.
Who, in the pursuing of happiness, has not committed a crime? And is it not possible that a great man may even have committed a great crime? For certain that is not a good thing, but it is the way of the world.
In Inspector Shadduck, the councilman had begun to glimpse the consequences of bringing a man into a police position who did not recognize that more harm could be done by destroying a prominent person, than by the crime he might have committed; that the enemy to be fought is not crime but chaos.
“I think we agree, Councilman, sir, that the matter of Mr. Dickens must be kept entirely private—for the safety of the victim.”
“Gott in Himmel I am hoping so!”
“The snarl is in the newspapermen, sir. If they get their snouts into it there will be no stopping them.”
“They are like wild animals for sure, they are sinking their teeth into anything and damning the consequence.”
“Sir, it has come to my attention that the doctor who signed Mr. Poe’s death certificate is currently here in the city. Thinking on Mr. Griswold’s experience, the hauntings and such, it is a possibility that Dr. Chivers and Mr. Poe entered into a blackmail scheme of some sort. As a precaution, I have asked the Baltimore force to proceed with digging up Mr. Poe’s grave.”
“Yet more blackmail, you are talking about. Inspector, I am thinking now that every man in Philadelphia is blackmailing someone else.”
“That is too big a thought for my mind, sir, though I reckon that to profit off a climate of fear is not unknown in the world. But that is not my point, sir. Once the press gets wind that they are exhuming Poe’s body, speculation will spread. I reckon we might feed them the notions we have discussed in this room—our suspicions of the doctor, that there is more than meets the eye—and will be handed a couple of days’ grace while they chaw over it.”
Councilman Grisse eyed the inspector with admiration and abhorrence. Learning so fast, settling on solutions so readily, Shadduck liked his work too much for the good of anyone.
POE TO BE EXHUMED
by Harrison Diggs, The Philadelphia Eagle
After due consideration the City of Baltimore has authorized Baltimore law enforcers to exhume the body of the author Edgar Allan Poe at once, at the request of the Philadelphia police. Sources close to the case suggest a possible connection with the Henry Topham murder. || “The situation is at a delicate stage, and there is no intended disrespect for the dead” said a senior official who asked not to be identified. “We will have more to say when the investigation is concluded.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
* * *
Philadelphia
Iwas awakened by six knocks on the door—too insistent for a servant, too heavy for a woman. This left two possibilities—the Irish or the Police.
Six o’clock in the morning. I rolled out of bed in my nightshirt, opened the drawer of my bedside table, and withdrew my loaded flatlock percussion pistol, a militia revolver I had purchased from the valet. (Anything, it seemed, can be purchased from the staff of a Philadelphia hotel, there is really no need to leave one’s room.)
“Who is there, please?”
I stood at the door with the barrel of my pistol extended before me. If the voice was Irish, I would open the door and shoot him. If it was the police, I would leave the door closed, and shoot myself.
“Putnam here, with important news.”
Putnam. Large, young, bespectacled Putnam. In a sense, his presence came as a relief, for I had begun to sag under the accrued weight of my various fabrications. Putnam was the one man who knew my real identity, to whom I could tell, up to a point, the truth. I had no need to conceal my name, my position, nor to hide my association with Eddie—only my intention to kill him. As for Elmira Royster, he seemed to regard her as having no tactical significance.
I opened the door to admit the muscular fellow in a conspicuous vest and a tie that resembled the flag of a Balkan nation. “Please enter,” I said. “I shall ring for coffee.”
“Cripes, man, what are you doing with that thing?”
I looked at the weapon in my hand. “I bought it for my own protection, sir.”
“It appears to be loaded and ready to fire.”
“That it is. I did not know who was on the other side of the door.”
“I admire your optimism.”
“Optimism? How so?”
“In allowing yourself only one shot.”
With remarkable dexterity, Putnam produced from beneath his coat a four-shot pepperbox pistol with fluted barrels—an impressive firearm but one that required experience and training. “This is what I prefer,” he said. “Made in Belgium—you can’t beat the Belgians when it comes to rifling.”
“Was it provided as part of your line of work?” I asked, for I continued to suspect that he was a detective.
“It was my own purchase, not official issue. Why do you ask?”
“The fact that you can afford to purchase such a firearm on your own hook leads me to suspect that you are a Pinkerton man.”
Putnam appeared startled, which pleased me a good deal. “How so, sir?”
“So well dressed. So well equipped. And your use of the term official issue suggests that you work for a large firm.”
Putnam sagged visibly. As we would have said in Richmond, he had been snarled proper. “It is a new type of service, sir. I do not entirely comprehend the structure of it myself. I trained for the cavalry, but a
s a college man it was decided that I should assume other duties in the capital.”
Putnam returned the gun to its holster beneath his coat. “While I am not convinced of a relation between the disappearance of Mr. Dickens and that of your, er, wife, I am not ready to ignore it.”
“By which I take you to mean that your superiors are not ready to ignore it.”
Again, Putnam appeared slightly abashed.
The man was new on the job, that much was certain. He had the perpetually startled look I had seen on the faces of nineteen-year-old sons of landowners, recently promoted to captain, upon assuming dominion over the actions of a hundred and twenty men.
“Were you in the war, Mr. Putnam?”
Putnam appeared embarrassed. “No, sir, I missed it. My own fault really. College men were moved to a different sort of training. More political, you might say.”
“We live in a democracy, sir,” I said. “Everything is political.”
“I’m not sure I want to parse your meaning, sir. It might be construed as seditious.”
“You federal people alarm me, sir. You create more and more laws, more and more ways a man can go wrong. You’re like quicksand—a man finds himself sinking deeper and deeper.”
“I take it you are a Southerner, sir.” 1 am.
“Well, of course it is natural for you people to defend your way of life. But abolition is an inevitability—as an intelligent man surely you see that.”
“You weary me, sir, with your Yankee patronization, but never mind.”
Putnam produced a tattered notebook with a scuffed leather cover. “This is what I have come to show you. I discovered it among Mr. Dickens’s effects. It appears that the French housekeeper who admitted his Irish abductor is a member of a sect in Germantown. That is where I believe we will find Mr. Dickens—and, God willing, your, er, wife.”
And, I suspected, Eddie Poe as well. “Germantown, you say? That is south of here, is it not?”
“That is not your concern, sir. But you have my assurance that I shall keep you informed of developments.”
“Nonsense, sir. I am coming with you.”
“You are not, sir.”
“I am if you retain any hope of secrecy. Besides, I am a doctor. Knowing the Irish temperament, you will need one.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
* * *
Germantown, Philadelphia
The accommodations were not so bad as they might have been, but they were less than ideal. The room reminded Dickens of the ward of a shabby hospital, the rows of rope beds unoccupied but for two on either end. The rest were empty, with their blankets in a rumpled condition. Next to each bed, a grim, broad-brimmed hat hung on a peg. To Dickens, it looked as though the occupants of the room had simultaneously got up and gone to the privy, and would be back at any moment.
Seated on a bed with his back against the wall (there being no pillow), with nothing to read and nothing to smoke, Dickens pondered the preoccupied gentleman at the far end of the ward, who had ignored his arrival and had not spoken to him since. The inhospitable fellow had turned his end of the ward into a small office, with a bed and a table and a large quantity of paper, on which he wrote, as far as Dickens could tell, twenty-four hours a day.
When the one-eyed man and his young ruffians brought him up here, the only light in the room was the writing lamp. When Dickens awoke next morning (having slept surprisingly well in his clothes, on a strange bed), the first sound he heard was the scratching of his cellmate’s quill pen.
To his immediate left, above the door, was a grim clock, which uttered every tick with a kind of struggle. At a table beneath the clock sat something alive with skin of rust, possibly one of the women present at his arrival, in a rat-colored dress and a black bonnet.
“I bid you good morning, madam,” Dickens had said, but received no reply.
Should he be afraid for his own welfare? He supposed that he should; yet there had existed a certain unreality about the entire escapade, a strangeness that made it difficult to take things seriously—though he supposed that he would take them seriously enough if a gun were placed at his temple.
One thing was certain: between the locked door, the slits for windows, and their rusted chaperone by the door, it was entirely pointless to think of escape.
“I beg your pardon, madam, but might I visit the privy?”
The thing nodded at the pitcher on the floor next to his bed. Beside it was a commode.
“Ah yes. Quite so. Excellent.”
Squatting beside the bed, shielded by an upraised blanket, he remembered the children’s quarters in the workhouse where such indignities were a constant condition.
For Dickens, the silence was hardest to bear. As a man who made sense of things by saying them aloud, he required discourse in the way that a lamp requires kerosene. Without another mind to share his impressions of the past hours, he was at a loss to make any sense of them at all.
And how curious it was! Who were these people—the young ruffians in long coats, the Irish, the odd-looking women? Not to mention Miss Genoux, whose company he had so much enjoyed and who had betrayed him so casually. He could envisage her rolling cigarettes by the guillotine, the tumbrel rolling in—with Dickens a passenger.
And what to make of his fellow prisoner, the writer—if that is in fact what he was? For all Dickens knew, his companion might have been a scrivener, copying documents at halfpenny a page.
Mortifyingly, it occurred to him that upon his arrival in this hospital or whatever it was, he had responded to his silent companion like a cartoon Englishman by not speaking unless spoken to—after all, they had not been formally introduced. At last it occurred to him that, when one is held hostage, or whatever it was, surely one might hurdle the usual formalities and exchange a greeting.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said after clearing his throat rather more loudly than he had intended. “This is terribly forward of me but I wonder if I might ask you for the time.”
“Eight twenty five,” replied the writer, without looking up from his desk. “It says so on the clock.”
“Of course. That large, clanking thing over the door. Forgive my ignorance, but would that be morning or evening?”
The gentleman stood, crossed to one of the slit windows, peered out, and returned to his table. “Evening, suh, I believe.”
“Quite. Thank you very much, indeed. Well and good then. Actually, to be perfectly frank, I wonder if I might be so bold as to introduce myself: Charles Dickens is my name.”
The scratching of the pen stopped, and the gentleman at the table turned in his direction. “I am aware of that, suh. I am Edgar Allan Poe.” He turned back to his work and the scratching resumed.
“Well, God bless my soul! By heaven, now I recognize you, sir. You had me confused, without your mustache. Come to think of it, Mr. Poe, weren’t you supposed to have died?”
“That is true, suh. And in a sense, I did.”
“Ah. As a metaphor, perhaps.”
“Perhaps. I am, after all, breathing, at present.” The scratching continued, like a small rodent trying to escape from a paper box.
“Quite. Excellent, then. Top drawer.”
It was clear to Dickens that Poe was in low spirits, for he had often fallen into a similar condition himself. “I dare say I am familiar with your work, sir. ‘The Raven’ is a stunning piece, words beyond meaning, pure music, really. And of course your tales as well—an impressive body of work, though I am surprised that you haven’t tried your hand at a novel.”
“There is no money to be had in it, suh,” replied Poe. “A tale might be bought by a magazine, but a novel will not be bought at all— unless the author has the means to publish it himself.”
“Ah yes, of course. Well, I am with you there, in fact I have stated it publicly—indeed, I seem to have fallen into some disfavor in America as a result…” Dickens stopped abruptly as a thought occurred to him. “If I may ask, Mr. Poe, does my position on cop
yrights have something to do with my present circumstance?”
“Nothing whatsoever. In America, everything comes down to money, suh. It is the national language.”
“Sadly, I tend to agree. I salute you, Mr. Poe. for having made the most of a fallow field.”
“Did I? Well, yes, I suppose I did. It would have been different had I been able to secure an English readership.”
“Do you mean that your countrymen might then have sat up and taken notice?”
“Precisely, suh. For an artist in America, to have been born here is in itself evidence of inferiority. However, by writing something mildly shocking, one can easily become infamous as well. Invisibility to infamy, with no pause for renown.”
Momentarily it occurred to Dickens that they were talking about Poe the author as though he were in fact deceased—as though the man seated before him was not Poe but a ghost, looking back upon his life on earth …
Dickens glanced at the clock, then at the thing seated by the door who could with little alteration pass as an Egyptian mummy; now his glance fell on the rows of hats—whatever had happened to their owners? he wondered. Then with a shudder it occurred to him. This is not unlike a tale by …
“God bless my soul,” he said aloud.
“Perhaps now you remember,” continued Poe with a sigh of weariness. “I wrote you a letter in forty-six, and we corresponded briefly. You did me the favor of accepting a short tale I had written for possible publication in England. Not to chastise you, Mr. Dickens, but I have not heard from you since.”
Poe’s accent surprised Dickens, for he had never thought of the man as a Southerner. However, there was no Southern cordiality in his voice at present. “Ah. Ah yes. I believe it was entitled ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’“
“And what was your opinion of it, suh?”
“Forgive me, Mr. Poe, but is that why I have been brought here? It seems like a deal of trouble, to kidnap a man in order to discuss a manuscript.”
Not Quite Dead Page 26
