The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Teal had once met a safecracker named Willard Burndy during his nights at back-alley public houses. Teal did not have trouble tracking Burndy down at one of these taverns, and though infuriated by Burndy’s drunkenness, Dan Teal paid the thief to tell him how to steal one thousand dollars from Reverend Elisha Talbot’s safe. Burndy talked and talked about how Langdon Peaslee was taking over all his streets anyway. What harm would it do to teach someone else how to open a simple safe?

  Teal used the fugitive-slave tunnels to cross into the Second Unitarian Church, and he watched Reverend Talbot as he excitedly descended each afternoon into the underground vault. He counted Talbot’s steps—one, two, three—to see how long it took him to cross to the stairs. He estimated Talbot’s height and made a mark on the wall with chalk after the minister left. Then Teal dug a hole, precisely measured, so that Talbot’s feet could be free in the air when he was buried headfirst, and he buried Talbot’s dirty money beneath. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, he grabbed Talbot, took his lantern away, and poured the kerosene oil on his feet. After he punished Reverend Talbot, Dan Teal had a cloudy certainty that the Dante Club was proud of his work. He wondered when the weekly meetings were held at Mr. Longfellow’s house, the meetings Reverend Greene had mentioned. Sundays, no doubt, Teal thought—the Sabbath.

  Teal asked around Cambridge and easily found the big yellow Colonial. But looking into the window on the side of Longfellow’s house, he did not see signs of any meeting taking place. In fact, there was a loud uproar from inside soon after Teal pressed his face against the window, for the moonlight had caught the buttons on his uniform and now glowed. Teal did not want to disturb the Dante Club if it was gathered, did not want to interrupt the guardians of Dante while they were on duty.

  How bewildered Teal was when Greene again failed to show at his post at the soldiers’-aid home, this time without forwarding any excuse of illness! Teal asked at the public library where he might take lessons in the Italian language, for Greene’s first suggestion to the other soldier had been to read the original in Italian. The librarian found a newspaper advertisement from a Mr. Pietro Bachi, and Teal called on Bachi to begin lessons. This instructor brought Teal a small armload of grammar books and exercises, mostly ones that he had written himself—these had nothing to do with Dante.

  Bachi at one point offered to sell Teal a Venetian century edition of the Divina Commedia. Teal took the volume, bound in hard leather, in his hands, but had no interest in the book, regardless of how Bachi rambled on about its beauty. Again, this was not Dante. Fortunately, soon after this, Greene reappeared at the soldiers’-aid pulpit, and there came Dante’s astounding entrance into the infernal pouch of the Schismatics.

  Fate had spoken loud as cannon thunder to Dan Teal. He, too, had witnessed this unforgivable sin—splitting apart and causing schisms within groups—in the person of Phineas Jennison. Teal had heard him speaking of protecting Dante at the offices of Ticknor & Fields—urging the Dante Club to fight Harvard—but had also heard him condemning Dante at the offices of the Harvard Corporation, urging them to stop Longfellow and Lowell and Fields. And Teal led Jennison, by way of the fugitive-slave tunnels, to the Boston harbor, where he took him by the point of his saber. Jennison begged and cried and offered Teal money. Teal promised him justice and then cut him into pieces. He wrapped the wounds carefully. Teal never thought of what he was doing as killing, for punishment required a length of suffering, an imprisonment of sensation. This was what he found most assuring about Dante. None of the punishments witnessed were new. Teal had seen them all in large and small ways in his life in Boston and on the battlefields across their nation.

  Teal knew that the Dante Club thrilled at the defeat of its enemies, for suddenly Reverend Greene offered a flurry of ecstatic sermons: Dante came upon a frozen lake of sinners, Traitors, among the worst sinners the journeyer discovers and announces. So were Augustus Manning and Pliny Mead sealed in ice as Teal watched in the morning light, clothed in his second lieutenant’s dress uniform—just as a uniformed Teal had watched Artemus Healey, the Neutral, writhe naked under his blanket of insects and had watched Elisha Talbot, the Simoniac, squirm and kick his flaming feet, his damned money now a cushion under his head, and had watched Phineas Jennison quiver and shake as his body hung shredded and snipped.

  But then came Lowell and Fields, and Holmes and Longfellow—and not to reward him! Lowell had fired his gun at Teal, and Mr. Fields had cried out for Lowell to shoot. Teal’s heart ached. Teal had assumed that Longfellow, whom Harriet Galvin adored, and the other protectors who gathered at the Corner embraced the purpose of Dante. Now he understood that they did not know the true work needed from the Dante Club. There was so much to complete, so many circles to open in order to make Boston good. Teal thought of the scene at the Corner when Dr. Holmes fell into him—Lowell had followed from the Authors’ Room, yelling, “You have betrayed the Dante Club, you’ve betrayed the Dante Club.”

  “Doctor,” Teal said to him when they met in the slave tunnels. “Turn around now, Dr. Holmes. I was coming to see you.”

  Holmes turned so his back was facing the uniformed soldier. The muted blaze from the doctor’s lantern shakily lit the long channel of the rocky abyss ahead.

  “I guess your finding me is Fate,” added Teal, and then ordered the doctor forward.

  “Dear God, man,” Holmes wheezed. “Where are we going?”

  “To Longfellow.”

  XX

  Holmes walked. Though his view of the man had been brief, he knew him at once as Teal, one of the night creatures, as Fields called them, from the Corner: their Lucifer. Now he noticed, looking back, that the man’s neck was as muscular as a prizefighter’s, but his pale green eyes and almost feminine mouth seemed incongruously childlike and his feet, probably a result of hard marches, supported his body with the eager perpendicular posture of an adolescent. Teal—this mere boy—was their enemy and opposite. Dan Teal. Dan Teal! Oh, how could a wordsmith like Oliver Wendell Holmes have missed that brilliant stroke? DANTEAL . . . DANTE AL . . . ! And, oh, what a hollow sound was the memory of Lowell’s booming voice at the Corner when Holmes had run into the killer in the hallway: “Holmes, you have betrayed the Dante Club!” Teal had been listening in, as he must have done at the Harvard offices too. With all the vengeance stored up by Dante.

  If Holmes was slated for final judgment now, he would not bring Longfellow and the others into it. He stopped as the tunnel sloped downhill.

  “I’ll go no farther!” he announced, trying to shield himself with an artificially bold voice. “I shall do what you ask of me but will not involve Longfellow!”

  Teal responded with a flat, sympathetic silence. “Two of your men must be punished. You must make Longfellow understand, Dr. Holmes.”

  Holmes realized that Teal did not want to punish him as a Traitor. Teal had come to the conclusion that the Dante Club was not on his side, that they had abandoned his cause. If Holmes was a traitor to the Dante Club, as Lowell had unwittingly announced to Teal, Holmes was friend to the real Dante Club: the one that Teal had invented in his mind—a silent association dedicated to carrying through Dante’s punishments into Boston.

  Holmes took out his handkerchief and brought it to his brow.

  At the same moment, Teal latched a strong hand on to Holmes’s elbow.

  Holmes, against his own expectations, without forethought or plan, hurled Teal’s hand away with such force that Teal was knocked into the rocky cavern wall. Then the little doctor launched into a flying run, gripping his lantern with both hands.

  With laboring breath he scurried through the dark and winding tunnels, glancing behind him and hearing all kinds of noises, but there was no way to determine what came from inside his head and his heaving chest and what existed outside himself. His asthma was a chain attached to a ghost’s leg, dragging him back. When he came upon some sort of underground cavity, he threw himself inside. There, he found an army-issue fur-lined sleeping bag and so
me scraps of a hard substance. Holmes cracked it with his teeth. Hard bread, the kind the soldiers had been forced to live on during the war: This was Teal’s home. There was a fireplace made from sticks, and plates and a frying pan and a tin cup and a coffee boiler. Holmes was about to run off when he heard a rustle that made him jump. Raising his lantern, Holmes could see that farther back in the chamber, Lowell and Fields sat on the floor, their hands and legs tied, gags in their mouths. Lowell’s beard slumped down into his chest and he was perfectly still.

  Holmes tore the gags from his friends’ mouths and tried to unsuccessfully untie their hands.

  “Are you hurt?” Holmes said. “Lowell!” He shook Lowell’s shoulders.

  “He knocked us cold and brought us here,” Fields replied. “Lowell was cursing and shouting at Teal when he was tying us up here—I told him to shut his blasted mouth!—and Teal knocked him out again. He’s just unconscious,” Fields added prayerfully. “Isn’t he?”

  “What did Teal want from you?” Holmes asked.

  “Nothing! I don’t know why we’re alive or what he’s doing!”

  “That monster has something planned for Longfellow!”

  “I hear him coming!” Fields cried. “Hurry, Holmes!”

  Holmes’s hands were trembling and dripping in sweat, and the knots were tied tight. He could barely see.

  “No, go. You must go now!” Fields said.

  “But another second . . .” His fingers slipped again from Fields’s wrist.

  “It’ll be too late, Wendell,” Fields said. “He’ll be here. There’s no time to free us, and we wouldn’t be able to get Lowell anywhere like this. Get to Craigie House! Forget us now—you must save Longfellow!”

  “I can’t do this alone! Where’s Rey?” Holmes cried.

  Fields shook his head. “He never came, and all the patrolmen stationed at the houses are gone! They’ve been taken away! Longfellow’s alone! Go!”

  Holmes dived out of the chamber, running through the tunnels faster than he had ever run, until ahead he saw a distant spark of silver light. Then Fields’s command grew in his mind: GO GO GO.

  A detective unhurriedly descended the dank stairs to the basement of the Central Station. Groans and harsh curses could be heard through the bricked-up halls.

  Nicholas Rey jumped up from the hard floor of the cell. “You can’t do this! Innocent people are in danger, for God’s sake!”

  The detective shrugged. “You really do believe everything you dream up, don’t you, moke?”

  “Keep me in here if you like. But put those patrolmen back at those houses, please. I beg you. There is someone out there who will kill again. You know Burndy didn’t murder Healey and the others! The murderer’s still out there, and he’s waiting to do it again! You can stop him!”

  The detective looked interested in letting Rey try to persuade him. He tipped his head in thought. “I know Willard Burndy’s a thief and a liar, that’s what I know.”

  “Listen to me, please.”

  The detective gripped two bars and glared at Rey. “Peaslee warned us to keep an eye on you, that you wouldn’t mind your business, that you wouldn’t stay out of the way. I bet you hate being locked up with no way to do anything, nobody to help.”

  The detective took out his ring of keys and waved it with a smile. “Well, this day’ll be a lesson to you. Won’t it, moke?”

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow emitted a series of short, barely audible sighs as he stood at his writing desk in his study.

  Annie Allegra had suggested any number of games they could play. But the only thing he could do was to stand at his desk with some Dante cantos and translate and translate, to lay down his burden and cross through that cathedral door. In there, the noises of the world retreated and became an indistinguishable roar and the words lived in eternal vitality. There, in the long aisles, the translator saw his Poet in the stretch of gloom and he strove to keep pace. The Poet’s step is quiet and solemn. He is clothed in a long, flowing garment, and upon his head he wears a cap; on his feet are sandals. Through congregations of the dead, through hovering echoes flying from tomb to tomb, through lamentations below, Longfellow could hear the voice of the one who drove the Poet onward. She stood before them both, in the unapproachable, coaxing distance, an image, a projection with snow-white veil, garments as scarlet as any fire, and Longfellow felt the ice on the Poet’s heart melt as the snow does on mountain heights: the Poet, who seeks the perfect pardon of perfect peace.

  Annie Allegra looked all about the study for a lost paper box she needed to properly celebrate the birthday of one of her dolls. She came upon a newly opened letter from Mary Frere, of Auburn, New York. She asked whom it was from.

  “Oh, Miss Frere,” Annie said. “That’s lovely! Will she be summering near us in Nahant this year? It is always so lovely to have her near, Father.”

  “I don’t believe she will.” Longfellow tried to offer a smile.

  Annie was disappointed. “Perhaps the box is in the parlor closet,” she said abruptly, and left to recruit her governess for help.

  A knock struck the front door with an urgency that froze Longfellow. Then it came even harder, with demand. “Holmes.” He heard himself exhale.

  Annie Allegra, bored Annie Allegra, left her governess and cried out her claim to the door. She ran to the door and pulled it open. The chill from outside was enormous and embracing.

  Annie started to say something, but Longfellow could sense from the study that she was frightened. He heard a mumbling voice that did not belong to any friend. He stepped into the hall and turned to face a soldier’s full regalia.

  “Send her away, Mr. Longfellow,” Teal requested quietly.

  Longfellow pulled Annie into the hall and knelt down. “Panzie, why not finish that part of your piece we talked about for The Secret.”

  “Papa, the part? The interview—?”

  “Yes, why not finish that part right away, Panzie, while I am engaged with this gentleman.”

  He tried to make her understand, his widened expression signaling “Go!” into her eyes, same as her mother’s. She nodded slowly and hurried to the back of the house.

  “You are needed, Mr. Longfellow. You are needed now.” Teal chewed furiously, loudly spat out two scraps of paper onto Longfellow’s rug, and then chewed some more. The supply of bits of paper in his mouth seemed inexhaustible.

  Longfellow clumsily turned to look at him, and he understood at once the power that came from inhabiting violence.

  Teal spoke again: “Mr. Lowell and Mr. Fields—they have betrayed you, they have betrayed Dante. You were there, too. You were there when Manning was to die, and you did nothing to help me. You are to punish them.”

  Teal put an army revolver into Longfellow’s hands and the cold steel stung the soft hand of the poet, whose palms still had traces of a wound from years earlier. Longfellow had not held a gun since he was a child and had come home with tears in his eyes after his brother taught him how to shoot a robin.

  Fanny had despised guns and war, and Longfellow thanked God that at least she did not see their son Charley run away to battle and return with a bullet having passed through his shoulder blade. For men, all that makes a soldier is the gay dress, she used to say, forgetting the weapons of murder that the dress conceals.

  “Yes sir, you’re going finally to learn to sit quiet and act like you’re meant to, contraband.” The detective had a laughing glimmer in his eyes.

  “Why are you still here then?” Rey had his back facing the bars now.

  The detective was embarrassed by the question. “To make sure you learn my lesson good, or I’ll knock your teeth out, you hear?”

  Rey turned slowly. “Remind me of that lesson.”

  The detective’s face was red, and he leaned against the bars with a scowl. “To sit quietly for once in your life, moke, and let life to those who know best!”

  Rey’s gold-flecked eyes were sadly downcast. Then without allowing the rest of his bo
dy to betray his intentions, he shot out his arm and clamped his fingers around the detective’s neck, smashing the man’s forehead into the bars. With his other hand, he pried open the detective’s hand for the ring of keys. Then he released the man, who now grasped at his throat to restore his breath. Rey opened the cell door, then searched the detective’s coat and drew out a gun. Prisoners in surrounding cells cheered.

  Rey ran up the stairs into the lobby.

  “Rey, you’re here?” Sergeant Stoneweather said. “Now, what’s happening? I was stationed, just as you like and the detectives came around and told me you were ordering everyone off their posts! Where you been?”

  “They locked me in the Tombs, Stoneweather! I need to get to Cambridge at once!” Rey said. Then he saw a little girl with her governess on the other side of the lobby. He rushed over and opened the iron gate separating the entrance area from the police offices.

  “Please,” Annie Allegra Longfellow was repeating as her governess tried to explain something to a confused policeman. “Please.”

  “Miss Longfellow,” Rey said, crouching down next to her. “What is it?”

  “Father needs your help, Officer Rey!” she cried.

  A herd of detectives tore through the lobby. “There!” one shouted. He took Rey by the arm and threw him against a wall.

  “Hold, you son of a bloody bitch!” Sergeant Stoneweather said, and cracked his billy club against the detective’s back.

  Stoneweather called out and several other uniformed officers ran in, but three detectives overpowered Nicholas Rey and caught both his arms, pulling him away as he struggled.

  “No! Father needs you, Officer Rey!” Annie cried.

  “Rey!” Stoneweather called out, but a chair came flying at him and a fist landed in his side.

  Chief John Kurtz stormed in, his usual mustard coloring flushed purple. A porter carried three of his valises. “Worst damned train ride . . .” he began. “What in God’s name!” he screamed to the whole lobby of policemen and detectives after he had assessed the situation. “Stoneweather?”