Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “Dante finds the Simoniacs within the pietra livida, the livid stone,” said Longfellow.

  A quivering voice interrupted. “Help you, gents?” The church sexton, who had first come upon Talbot roasting, was a tall, thin man in a long black robe, with white hair, or, more accurately, bristles, standing out in all directions like a brush. His eyes appeared to be staring wide, so that he looked permanently like the picture of a man seeing a ghost.

  “Good morning, sir.” Holmes approached, flipping his hat up and down in his hands. Holmes wished Lowell were there, or Fields, both natural authority mongers. “Sir, my friend and I must request leave to enter your interment vault below if we can trouble you for admittance.”

  The sexton made no indication of entertaining the idea.

  Holmes looked back. Longfellow was standing with hands folded over walking stick, placid, as though he were an uninvited bystander.

  “Now, as I was saying, my good sir, you see it is quite important that we . . . well, I’m Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. I have a chair in Anatomy and Physiology at the Medical College—really more a settee than a chair, for the breadth of its subjects. Probably you’ve read some of my poems in . . .”

  “Sir!” The squeaky sting in the sexton’s voice approximated a shriek of pain when raised. “Do you not know, guvnor, that our minister was of late found . . .” he stammered in horror and then recoiled. “I tended the grounds, and not a soul came in-er-out! Upon the Eternal, if it happened on my watch, I own it was a demon spirit without the need of physical convey’nce, not a man!” He stopped himself. “The feet,” he said with a glazed stare, and looked as though he could not go on.

  “His feet, sir,” Dr. Holmes said, wanting to hear it, though he knew precisely the destined lot of Talbot’s feet—knew of it firsthand. “What of them?”

  The four members of the Dante Club sans Mr. Greene had collected all newspaper accounts available on Talbot’s death. Whereas the true circumstances of Healey’s death had been concealed for several weeks before their revelation, in the newspaper columns Elisha Talbot was slain in every conceivable manner, with a sloppiness that would have made Dante, for whom every punishment was ordained by divine love, wince. Sexton Gregg, for his part, did not need to know Dante. He was a witness to and a carrier of the truth. In this way, he had the strength and simplicity of an old prophet.

  “The feet,” the sexton continued after a long pause, “were aflame, guvnor; they were chariots of fire in the dark vaults. Please, gents.” His head hung in dejection, and he gestured for them to leave.

  “Good sir,” Longfellow said softly. “It is the Reverend Talbot’s passing which brings us here.”

  The sexton’s eyes relaxed at once. It was not clear to Holmes whether the man recognized the silver-bearded visage of the beloved poet or whether he was calmed like the wild beast by the stirring quiet of Longfellow’s organ voice. Holmes realized that if the Dante Club were to make any progress with this endeavor, it would be because Longfellow had the same celestial ease over people through his presence that he had over the English language through his pen.

  Longfellow went on: “Though we possess only our words of promise to prove ourselves to you, dear sir, we ask for assistance. I pray you have faith without further evidence on our part, for I fear we may be the only ones who can truly make sense from what has occurred. More than that we must not reveal.”

  The vast, blank chasm stewed with mist. Dr. Holmes was fanning away the fetid air that stung his eyes and ears like pepper dust as they marched with small, cautious steps down to the narrow vault. Longfellow breathed more or less freely. His sense of smell was, advantageously, limited: It allowed him the pleasure of spring flowers and other agreeable aromas but screened out anything noxious.

  Sexton Gregg explained that the public vault extended underneath the streets for several city blocks in both directions.

  Longfellow shone a lantern against the slate columns, then lowered the light to examine the plain stone coffins.

  The sexton started to make a remark about the Reverend Talbot but hesitated. “You mustn’t think poorly of him, guvnors, if I tell you, but our dear reverend would walk along this vault passage for, well, not for church business, to be candid.”

  “Why would he come here?” Holmes asked.

  “A shorter route to get to home. Didn’t like it so much, m’self, say sooth.”

  One of the scattered paper bits, with the letters a and h, missed by Rey, was trampled under Holmes’s boot and sank into the thick soil.

  Longfellow asked whether someone else could have entered the vault from above the street, the place where the minister would have exited.

  “No,” said the sexton definitively. “That door can only be opened from the inside. The police checked all the same, found no tamperin’. And there was no sign that the Reverend Talbot ever reached the door leading to the streets on that last evening he came through here.”

  Holmes pulled Longfellow back, out of earshot of the sexton. He talked in hushed tones. “Do you not think it significant that Talbot would use this as a shortcut? We must question the sexton some more. We still do not know Talbot’s simony, and this could be an indication!” They had found nothing to suggest Talbot was anything but the good shepherd to his flock.

  Longfellow said, “I think it is safe to say that walking through a burial vault does not qualify as a sin, inadvisable as it may be, don’t you? Besides, we know that simony must do with money—taking it or paying it. The sexton is as enamored of Talbot as the congregation, and too many questions about the minister’s habits would only dry up any information he has to volunteer. Remember, Sexton Gregg like all Boston, believes Talbot’s death to have been exclusively a product of someone else’s sin, not of his own.”

  “So how did our Lucifer gain his entry here? If the vault exit to the street only opens from the inside . . . and the sexton says he was in the church and saw nobody come through the vestry . . .”

  “Perhaps our rogue waited for Talbot to climb the stairs and exit the vault and then pushed him back underground from above the street,” Longfellow speculated.

  “But to dig a hole deep enough in the ground for a man to fit in so quickly? It seems more likely that our villain ambushed Talbot—dug the hole, waited, and then grabbed him, pushed him in the hole, doused the kerosene on his feet . . .”

  Ahead of them, the sexton came to a sudden stop. Half his muscles locked up and the other half shook violently. He tried to speak, but only a dry, mournful whimper emerged. By the extension of his chin he managed to indicate a thick slab sitting on the dirt carpeting the vault floor. The sexton ran back for the sanctuary of the church.

  The place was at hand. It could be sensed and smelled.

  Longfellow and Holmes together heaved with all their strength, to remove the slab. In the dirt was a round hole, big enough for a body of medium build. Stored by the slab and released by its removal, the smell of burning flesh attacked the air like the stench of rotted meat and fried onions. Holmes smothered his face with his neck cloth.

  Longfellow knelt and cupped a handful of dirt from around the hole. “Yes, you are right, Holmes. This hole is deep and well formed. It must have been dug in advance. The killer must have been waiting when Talbot entered. He gains entry, somehow eluding our jittery friend the sexton, and knocks Talbot cold,” Longfellow theorized, “positions him headfirst in the hole, and then performs his horrible act.”

  “Imagine the sheer torment! Talbot must have been conscious of what was happening before his heart gave in. The feeling of your flesh burning alive . . .” Holmes nearly swallowed his tongue. “I don’t mean, Longfellow . . .” He cursed his mouth for speaking so much and then for not taking a mistake quietly. “You know, I only meant . . .”

  Longfellow did not seem to hear. He let the dirt slide through his fingers. He gingerly lowered the bright flower bouquet to a spot near the hole. “‘Stay here, for thou art justly punished,’” Longfellow said,
quoting a verse from Canto Nineteen as though he were reading it from the air in front of him. “That is what Dante cries to the Simoniac he speaks to in Hell, Nicholas the Third, my dear Holmes.”

  Dr. Holmes was ready to leave. The thick air was nourishing a revolt in his lungs, and his misspoken words had broken his own heart.

  Longfellow, however, directed the halo of his gas lantern above the hole, which had been left undisturbed. He was not through. “We must dig deeper, below what we can see of the hole. The police would never think of it.”

  Holmes stared incredulously at him. “Nor would I! Talbot was put in the hole, not below it, my dear Longfellow!”

  Longfellow said, “Recall what Dante says to Nicholas as the sinner thrashes around in the wretched hole of his punishment.”

  Holmes whispered some verses to himself. “‘Stay here, for thou art justly punished . . . and keep safe guard over your ill-gotten loot—’” He stopped short. “Keep safe guard over your loot. But isn’t Dante just displaying some of his not uncommon sarcasm, taunting the poor sinner for his moneygrubbing actions in life?”

  “Indeed, that is how I happen to read the line,” said Longfellow. “But Dante might be read to mean the statement literally. It could be argued that Dante’s phrase actually reveals that part of the contrapasso of the Simoniacs is that they are buried upside down with the money they immorally accumulated in life below their heads. Surely Dante could have been thinking of Peter Magus’s words to Simon in Acts: ‘May thy money go to destruction with thee.’ In this interpretation, the hole which holds Dante’s sinner becomes his eternal purse.”

  Holmes offered a medley of guttural sounds at the interpretation.

  “If we dig,” said Longfellow with a slight smile, “your doubts might be proven unnecessary.” He extended his walking stick to reach the bottom of the hole, but the pit was too deep. “I cannot fit, I suppose.” Longfellow gauged the size of the hole. Then he looked at the little doctor, who was wriggling with asthma.

  Holmes stood stock-still. “Oh but, Longfellow . . .” He looked down the hole. “Why did nature not ask me my advice about my features?” There was no point in arguing. Longfellow could not be argued with properly; he was too invincibly tranquil. If Lowell were here, he would have been digging in the hole like a rabbit.

  “Ten to one I crack a fingernail.”

  Longfellow nodded appreciatively. The doctor pinched his eyes closed and slid feet first down the hole. “It is too narrow. I cannot bend down. I do not think I can squeeze myself in to dig.”

  Longfellow helped Holmes climb out of the hole. The doctor reentered the narrow opening, this time headfirst, with Longfellow holding on to his gray trousers at the ankles. The poet had the easy grasp of a puppet master.

  “Careful, Longfellow! Careful!”

  “You can see well enough?” asked Longfellow.

  Holmes barely heard him. He raked at the earth with his hands, the moist dirt rising under his fingernails, at once sickeningly warm and cold and hard as ice. The worst was the odor, the festering stench of burning flesh that had been preserved in the tight abyss. Holmes tried holding his breath, but this tactic, coupled with his heaving asthma, made his head feel light, as if it might drift off like a balloon.

  He was where the Reverend Talbot had been; upside down, like him. But instead of punishing fire at his feet he felt the unflinching hands of Mr. Longfellow.

  Longfellow’s muffled voice floated down, a concerned question. The doctor could not hear inside his vague sensation of faintness and wondered idly whether a loss of consciousness would cause Longfellow to release his ankles and if he, in the meantime, might send himself tumbling through the core of the earth. He suddenly felt the danger they had put themselves in by trying to fight a book. The floating pageant of thoughts seemed to go on endlessly before the doctor hit something with his hands.

  With the feel of a material object, hard clarity returned. A piece of clothing of some sort. No: a bag. A glazed cloth bag.

  Holmes shuddered. He tried to speak, but the stench and the dirt were terrible obstacles. For a moment he was frozen in panic, then sanity returned and he kicked his legs frantically.

  Longfellow, understanding this was a signal, lifted his friend’s body from the cavity. Holmes gasped for air, spitting and sputtering as Longfellow tended to him solicitously.

  Holmes wriggled to his knees. “See what it is, for God’s sake, Longfellow!” Holmes pulled the drawstring wrapped around the discovery and tore open the dirt-encrusted pouch.

  Longfellow watched as Dr. Holmes released a thousand dollars of legal-tender notes over the hard burial-vault ground.

  And keep safe guard over your ill-gotten loot . . .

  At grand Wide Oaks, the estate of the Healey family for three generations, Nell Ranney led two callers through the long entrance hall. They were strangely withdrawn, their bodies forcibly businesslike but their eyes rapid and mobile. Making them stand out even more in the maid’s mind were their fashions, for two such outlandishly conflicting styles were rarely seen.

  James Russell Lowell, with a short beard and drooping mustache, wore a rather shabby double-breasted sack coat, an unbrushed silk hat made into a mockery by the casual suit, and in his necktie, done up in a sailor-knot, a type of pin that was no longer fashionable in Boston. The other man, whose massive russet beard cascaded in thick wiry rolls, removed his gloves, which were of a violent color, and pocketed them in his impeccably tailored Scottish tweed frock coat, below which was tightly strung, around his green-vested belly, like a Christmas ornament, a sparkling gold watch chain.

  Nell was slow to leave the room even while Richard Sullivan Healey, the eldest son of the chief justice, greeted his two literary guests.

  “Forgive my chambermaid’s behavior,” Healey said after ordering Nell Ranney away. “She was the one who found Father’s body and took him inside the house, and since then, I’m afraid she examines every person as though he could be responsible. We worry that she imagines almost as many demonish things as Mother does these days.”

  “We were hoping to see dear Mrs. Healey this morning if you please, Richard,” said Lowell very politely. “Mr. Fields thought we might discuss with her a book of memorial tributes to the chief justice that could be made up by Ticknor and Fields.” It was customary for relatives, even distant cousins, to make personal calls to the family of the recently deceased, but the publisher required a pretense.

  Richard Healey bunched his bulky mouth into an amiable curve. “I fear a visit with her won’t be possible, cousin Lowell. Today is one of her bad days. She is confined to bed.”

  “Why, do not say she is ill.” Lowell leaned forward with a trace of morbid curiosity.

  Richard Healey hesitated with a series of heavy blinks. “Not physically, or so according to the doctors. But she has developed a mania that I fear has worsened over the last weeks, so it may as well be physical. She feels a constant presence on her. Pardon me to speak vulgarly, gentlemen, but a crawling across her very flesh for which she insists she must scratch and dig into her skin, no matter how many diagnose imagination as the culprit.”

  “Is there anything we might do to assist her, my dear Healey?” asked Fields.

  “Find Father’s murderer.” Healey chuckled sadly. He noticed with some unease that the two men responded to this with steely looks.

  Lowell wished to see where the body of Artemus Healey had been discovered. Richard Healey balked at this strange request, but attributing Lowell’s eccentricities to his poetic sensibilities, he escorted the two visitors outside. They went out the back doors of the mansion, past the flower gardens and into the meadows that led down to the riverbank. Healey noticed that James Russell Lowell walked with a surprisingly quick, athletic stride for a poet.

  A strong wind blew particles of fine-grain sand into Lowell’s beard and mouth. With the rough taste on his tongue, a catch in his throat, and the image of Healey’s death in his mind, Lowell was transported by a v
ivid idea.

  The Neutrals of Dante’s third canto choose neither good nor evil and thus are despised by Heaven and Hell alike. So they are placed in an antechamber, not even Hell proper, and here these cowardly shades float naked following a blank banner, for they had refused to follow a course of action in life. They are stung incessantly by gadflies and wasps, their blood mingles with the salt of their tears, and all this is mopped up at their feet by loathsome worms. This putrid flesh gives rise to more flies and worms. Flies, wasps, and maggots were the three types of insects found on Artemus Healey’s body.

  To Lowell, it showed something about their killer that made him real.

  “Our Lucifer knew how to transport these insects,” Lowell had said.

  It had been a gathering at Craigie House the first morning of their investigation, the small study inundated with newspapers and their fingers spotted with ink and blood from turning too many pages. Fields, reviewing the notes Longfellow had been compiling in a journal, wanted to know why Lucifer, as Lowell had named their adversary, would choose Healey for the Neutrals.

  Lowell pulled thoughtfully on one of his walrus tusks. He was in full pedagogical mode when his friends became his audience. “Well, Fields, the only shade Dante singles out in this group of the Lukewarm, or ‘Neutrals,’ is the one who made the great refusal, he says. This must be Pontius Pilate, for he made the greatest refusal—the most terrible act of neutrality in Christian history—when he neither authorized nor stopped the crucifixion of the Savior. Judge Healey, likewise, was asked to deal a grave blow to the Fugitive Slave Act but instead did nothing at all. He sent the escaped slave Thomas Sims, barely a boy, back to Savannah, where he was whipped until he bled and then paraded with his wounds before the town. And old Healey growled all the while that it was not his place to overturn Congress’s law. No! In the name of God, it was the place of us all.”