Beyond Rue Morgue Anthology

by Paul Kane

  “I have no way of telling—but he can’t be more than four or five years old. Have you got him here?”

  “Oh no; we had no conveniences for keeping him here. He is at a livery stable in the Rue Dubourg, just by. You can get him in the morning. Of course you are prepared to identify the property?”

  “To be sure I am, sir.”

  “I shall be sorry to part with him,” said Dupin.

  “I don’t mean that you should be at all this trouble for nothing, sir,” said the man. “Couldn’t expect it. Am very willing to pay a reward for the finding of the animal—that is to say, anything in reason.”

  “Well,” replied my friend, “that is all very fair, to be sure. Let me think!—what should I have? Oh! I will tell you. My reward shall be this. You shall give me all the information in your power about these murders in the Rue Morgue.”

  Dupin said the last words in a very low tone, and very quietly. Just as quietly, too, he walked toward the door, locked it, and put the key in his pocket. He then drew a pistol from his bosom and placed it, without the least flurry, upon the table.

  The sailor’s face flushed up as if he were struggling with suffocation. He started to his feet and grasped his cudgel; but the next moment he fell back into his seat, trembling violently, and with the countenance of death itself. He spoke not a word. I pitied him from the bottom of my heart.

  “My friend,” said Dupin, in a kind tone, “you are alarming yourself unnecessarily—you are indeed. We mean you no harm whatever. I pledge you the honor of a gentleman, and of a Frenchman, that we intend you no injury. I perfectly well know that you are innocent of the atrocities in the Rue Morgue. It will not do, however, to deny that you are in some measure implicated in them. From what I have already said, you must know that I have had means of information about this matter— means of which you could never have dreamed. Now the thing stands thus. You have done nothing which you could have avoided—nothing, certainly, which renders you culpable. You were not even guilty of robbery, when you might have robbed with impunity. You have nothing to conceal. You have no reason for concealment. On the other hand, you are bound by every principle of honor to confess all you know. An innocent man is now imprisoned, charged with that crime of which you can point out the perpetrator.”

  The sailor had recovered his presence of mind, in a great measure, while Dupin uttered these words; but his original boldness of bearing was all gone.

  “So help me God,” said he, after a brief pause, “I will tell you all I know about this affair; but I do not expect you to believe one half I say—I would be a fool indeed if I did. Still, I am innocent, and I will make a clean breast if I die for it.”

  What he stated was, in substance, this. He had lately made a voyage to the Indian Archipelago. A party, of which he formed one, landed at Borneo, and passed into the interior on an excursion of pleasure. Himself and a companion had captured the Ourang-Outang. This companion dying, the animal fell into his own exclusive possession. After great trouble, occasioned by the intractable ferocity of his captive during the home voyage, he at length succeeded in lodging it safely at his own residence in Paris, where, not to attract toward himself the unpleasant curiosity of his neighbors, he kept it carefully secluded, until such time as it should recover from a wound in the foot, received from a splinter on board ship. His ultimate design was to sell it.

  Returning home from some sailors’ frolic on the night, or rather in the morning of the murder, he found the beast occupying his own bedroom, into which it had broken from a closet adjoining, where it had been, as was thought, securely confined. Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the key-hole of the closet. Terrified at the sight of so dangerous a weapon in the possession of an animal so ferocious, and so well able to use it, the man, for some moments, was at a loss what to do. He had been accustomed, however, to quiet the creature, even in its fiercest moods, by the use of a whip, and to this he now resorted. Upon sight of it, the Ourang-Outang sprang at once through the door of the chamber, down the stairs, and thence, through a window, unfortunately open, into the street.

  The Frenchman followed in despair; the ape, razor still in hand, occasionally stopping to look back and gesticulate at its pursuer, until the latter had nearly come up with it. It then again made off. In this manner the chase continued for a long time. The streets were profoundly quiet, as it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. In passing down an alley in the rear of the Rue Morgue, the fugitive’s attention was arrested by a light gleaming from the open window of Madame L’Espanaye’s chamber, in the fourth story of her house. Rushing to the building, it perceived the lightning-rod, clambered up with inconceivable agility, grasped the shutter, which was thrown fully back against the wall, and, by its means, swung itself directly upon the headboard of the bed. The whole feat did not occupy a minute. The shutter was kicked open again by the Ourang-Outang as it entered the room.

  The sailor, in the meantime, was both rejoiced and perplexed. He had strong hopes of now recapturing the brute, as it could scarcely escape from the trap into which it had ventured, except by the rod, where it might be intercepted as it came down. On the other hand, there was much cause for anxiety as to what it might do in the house. This latter reflection urged the man still to follow the fugitive. A lightning-rod is ascended without difficulty, especially by a sailor; but, when he had arrived as high as the window, which lay far to his left, his career was stopped; the most that he could accomplish was to reach over so as to obtain a glimpse of the interior of the room. At this glimpse he nearly fell from his hold through excess of horror. Now it was that those hideous shrieks arose upon the night, which had startled from slumber the inmates of the Rue Morgue. Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter, habited in their night clothes, had apparently been arranging some papers in the iron chest already mentioned, which had been wheeled into the middle of the room. It was open, and its contents lay beside it on the floor. The victims must have been sitting with their backs toward the window; and, from the time elapsing between the ingress of the beast and the screams, it seems probable that it was not immediately perceived. The flapping-to of the shutter would naturally have been attributed to the wind.

  As the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L’Espanaye by the hair (which was loose, as she had been combing it), and was flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The screams and struggles of the old lady (during which the hair was torn from her head) had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of blood inflamed its anger into frenzy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl, and imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired. Its wandering and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with horror, was just discernible. The fury of the beast, who no doubt bore still in mind the dreaded whip, was instantly converted into fear. Conscious of having deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds, and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation; throwing down and breaking the furniture as it moved, and dragging the bed from the bedstead. In conclusion, it seized first the corpse of the daughter, and thrust it up the chimney, as it was found; then that of the old lady, which it immediately hurled through the window headlong.

  As the ape approached the casement with its mutilated burden, the sailor shrank aghast to the rod, and, rather gliding than clambering down it, hurried at once home—dreading the consequences of the butchery, and gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman’s exclamati
ons of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings of the brute.

  I have scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped from the chamber, by the rod, just before the breaking of the door. It must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes. Le Bon was instantly released upon our narration of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend, could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two, about the propriety of every person minding his own business.

  “Let them talk,” said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. “Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in the solution of this mystery, is by no means that matter for wonder which he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna—or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has ‘de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas.’” 1

  1 Rousseau, Nouvelle Héloïse.

  THE SONS OF TAMMANY

  By

  MIKE CAREY

  My name is Thomas Nast. I’m sixty-two years old, and to be honest I don’t expect to be able to hold up my hand after another year’s seasonal turnings and returnings to say I’m sixty-three. I’m dying, at long last. And death dissolves all the bonds of obligation except the ones I owe to God. That being the case, I feel like I’m free at last to talk about the events of August 1870, which formerly I had held back from doing on account of they implicate a whole lot of people in a whole lot of queasy doings, and I couldn’t really back up what I was saying with anything you might count as actual proof.

  But when a man’s staring straight down the barrel of his nunc dimittis, and the writing’s not just on the wall but on the face that stares back at him out of the mirror, he stops fretting about the legal niceties and starts to think about setting the record straight. Which is what I aim to do.

  In 1870, I was residing in New York City and working as an artist and cartoonist on that excellent periodical, the Harper’s Weekly, under the editorship of George Curtis. I counted Curtis as a friend as well as an employer. But when he called me into his office on the morning of August 13th of that year, he was wearing the boss hat rather than the friend one.

  Curtis gave me a civil nod and gestured me into one of the two visitor chairs. Already ensconced in the other chair was a man of a somewhat striking appearance. Although, having said that, I’m going to show myself a weak sister by admitting that I can’t really say what it was about this gentleman that was so singular.

  He was a good deal older than I was, and he’d seen enough summers to get a slightly weather-beaten look around his cheeks and jowls. He was kind of short and dumpy in his build, which was neither here nor there, but he had one of those half-hearted little mustaches that looks like it’s about to give up and crawl back inside, and to be honest that was sort of a point against him in my book. If a man’s going to go for a mustache, he should go all-in for one, say I, and Devil take the hairiest. He was toying with a cane that had a carved ivory handle in the shape of a lion’s head—an effete sort of a gewgaw for a man to be playing with. And he had a suit with a waistcoat, and the waistcoat had a pattern to it. In my experience, that doesn’t speak to a man’s moral seriousness.

  I guess, thinking about it, it was the eyes that were the selling point. They were a dark enough brown to count for black, and they had a sort of an augur-bit quality to them. It was the most startling thing. Like when this gentleman looked at you, looking wasn’t really the half of it, and maybe you needed a whole other verb.

  “Tommy, this here’s Mr. Dupin,” Curtis said. “Visiting from Paris. Not the Texas one, t’other one, over in France.”

  “Well, it’s good to meet you, Mr. Dupin,” I said, taking the collateral of the eyes against the rest of the stuff that was on offer. Curtis pronounced the name “dupan,” which I estimate is French for “out of the pan,” as in the thing you bail out from before you end up in the fire. Which wasn’t a bad name at all for this particular customer, as things transpired.

  “Only he ain’t a mister,” Curtis added, scrupulous as you’d expect a good editor to be. “He’s a Chevalier.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Means he’s got a horse stashed somewhere, as I understand it.”

  “Good job,” I said. “With that waistcoat, he may need to access it in a hurry.”

  “Monsieur,” the little man said in a waspish voice, “I speak excellent English, and I thank you for the compliment. I can, if you wish, give you the address of my tailor.”

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary,” I told him. “I think one of those things in the world at any one time answers the purpose pretty well.”

  The Frenchman surprised me by laughing at that—and it was a big, loud horse-laugh, too, not the little snigger you’d expect would come from underneath that lamentable mustache. “Perhaps you are right,” he said. “One at a time. Yes.”

  And then Curtis got to the point, which was that Mr. Du-Frying-Pan wanted to see something of New York while he was here. What’s more, he carried letters of introduction from a job lot of people who were (as you might say) the human equivalent of big guns on big limbers, and could blast Curtis and me and Mr. Harper and the subs’ desk and Uncle Tom Cobley and all into the Hudson if we didn’t show their friend Dupin a good time.

  “So I thought perhaps he could come with you today when you go to sketch the bridge,” Curtis wound up.

  I knew that was where he was aiming at, so I took it in my stride. “I think that’s a swell idea,” I said. “Sure. Mr. Dupin, come and see my city. She’s something to see. George, you want to come along?”

  “Oh no,” Curtis said hurriedly. “I’m tied up every which way here, and I won’t see daylight this side of Tuesday. You guys go and have a good time. Lunch is on Mr. Harper, so long as you don’t get into a second bottle... And you can take a cab to get down there.” He waited a decent length of time—maybe a slow count of five—before adding, “Trolley car will bring you back.”

  “And what is it you do, way over there in Paris, Mr. Dupin?” I asked, as we toiled down the stairs. The Equitable Life Building, which they’d just finished building over on Broadway, had its very own hydraulic elevator, but every time I mentioned that to Curtis he walked the other way.

  “What do I do?” Dupin repeated doubtfully.

  “Yeah. What’s your motive and your métier? What’s the singular thing that you pursue?”

  “Ah.” The little man’s face lit up with understanding, but then it closed down again as he took that question over the threshold of his ruminations and worried it some. “The truth,” he said at last. “The truth is what I pursue.”

  “Really? There any profit to be had in that?”

  He gave out with that belly laugh again. “No. Not usually.”

  We waited for a cab on the corner of 41st Street right next to Peason’s cigar store. Mr. Du-Griddle-Tray kept taking sideways glances at the cigar store Indian as though he might be looking to pick a fight. “That there is Tamanend, of the Lenape nation,” I told him. “He’s widely known in these parts, despite having turned up his toes back in sixteen-ought-eight.”

  The Frenchman’s answer surprised me. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. Because of the Society of St. Tammany, to which many members of New York’s current civic administration belong.”

  I gave him a nod, and probably my face showed him that I was impressed. “One up to you, Dupin. That
’s the connection, all right. The Great Wigwam, they call it—the Tammany Hall, down on 14th Street. And it’s got its share of famous patrons, like you say. Our illustrious mayor, Oakey Hall. Judge George Barnard, who doles out wisdom to the city benches. Hank Smith, who’s the president of the Police Commission. Oh, there’s a whole ring of them.”

  I didn’t mention the Grand Sachem, William “Boss” Tweed, in the same way that you don’t speak of the Devil—in case you turn around and find him breathing over your shoulder.

  “Political corruption,” Dupin mused. “It is a scourge.”

  And yes, it is. But this was my city we were lambasting, and I don’t care to see my city, good-time girl though she may be, roughly handled by a stranger. So I changed the subject and talked about the bridge instead. And not long after that, we managed to hail a cab.

  In deference to Du-Sausage-Cutter’s hind parts I picked out a Duncan Sherman, which had a sprung undercarriage and a horse with something of an imperturbable nature. Truth to tell, we could have made better time walking—but you’ve got to push the boat out when you’ve got a guest to entertain, and besides it was setting in to rain a little. On a rainy day, Fifth Avenue is a lot more fun to ride down than to walk down.

  As we rode, I carried on waxing lyrical about the bridge. “Over yonder,” I said, pointing, “to the east of us, those buildings you see are not a part of the fair city of New York. They belong to our neighbor polity, Brooklyn, which like New York is a thriving metropolis, home to close on half a million people. It’s got just as many warehouses and factories and refineries as we do, and we’d like nothing better than to increase the ties of mutual amity and profit between the two cities. Only trouble is, there’s sixteen hundred feet of water laying between them. It would need a bridge longer than any in the world to cross that gap.”

  “That would seem to be an insuperable problem,” said Dupin, who knew what was required of a straight man.