Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Sheldon swallowed hard. “So you will keep in mind my eagerness to continue through the Comedy?”

  Lowell put his arm on Sheldon’s shoulder and walked with him. “You know, my lad, there is a story that Boccaccio tells of a woman passing by a door in Verona, where Dante was staying during his exile. She saw Dante across the street and pointed him out to another woman, saying, ‘That is Alighieri, the man who goes to Hell whenever he pleases and brings back news of the dead.’ And the other replied, ‘Very likely. Don’t you see what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face? Owing, I daresay, to the heat and smoke!’”

  The student laughed loudly.

  “This exchange, it is said,” Lowell continued, “made Dante smile. Do you know why I doubt the story’s veracity, my dear boy?”

  Sheldon contemplated the question with the same serious expression he wore during their Dante classes. “Perhaps, Professor, because this woman of Verona would in all actuality not know of the contents of Dante’s poem,” he postulated, “as only a select number of people of his day, his protectors prime among them, would have seen the manuscript before the end of his life, and even then only in small installments.”

  “I do not for a second believe that Dante smiled,” Lowell answered with relish.

  Sheldon started to respond, but Lowell lifted his hat and continued on his way toward Craigie House.

  “Remember my eagerness, do!” Sheldon shouted after him.

  Dr. Holmes, sitting in Longfellow’s library, had noticed a striking engraving printed in the newspaper by the arrangement of Nicholas Rey. The illustration showed the man who had died in the courtyard of the Central Station. The notice in the newspaper referenced nothing of that incident. But it showed the straggly, sunken face of the leaper as he appeared shortly before the show-up, and asked that any information on the man’s family be reported to the office of the chief of police.

  “When do you hope to find a man’s family rather than the man himself?” Holmes asked the others. “When he’s dead,” he answered himself.

  Lowell examined the likeness. “A sadder-looking man I don’t believe I’ve ever seen. And this matter is important enough to involve the chief of police. Wendell, I believe you’re right. The Healey boy said the police have not yet identified the man who whispered to Patrolman Rey before throwing himself out the window. It makes perfect sense they would submit a notice to the newspapers.”

  The newspaper publisher owed Fields a favor. So Fields stopped by its office downtown. He was told that a mulatto police officer had placed the notice.

  “Nicholas Rey.” Fields found this strange. “With all that’s going on between Healey and Talbot, it seems a bit queer that any policeman would expend any energy on a dead loafer.” They were eating their supper at Longfellow’s. “Could they know there is some connection with the murders? Could that patrolman have some idea what it was the man whispered?”

  “It’s doubtful,” Lowell said. “Once he does, he could well be led to us.”

  Holmes was unnerved by this. “Then we must find this man’s identity before Patrolman Rey!”

  “Well, six cheers for Richard Healey then. We now know how it came to pass that Rey came to us with that hieroglyphic,” Fields said. “This leaper was brought in to show himself to the police with a horde of other beggars and thieves. The officers would have questioned them about Healey’s murder. We can conclude that this poor fellow recognized Dante, grew fearful, poured into Rey’s ear some verses in Italian from the very canto that inspired the murder, and ran off—a chase that ended in his fall from the window.”

  “What could he have been so afraid of?” Holmes wondered.

  “We can be confident he was not the murderer himself, since he was dead two weeks before the Reverend Talbot’s murder,” Fields said.

  Lowell tugged on his mustache thoughtfully. “Yes, but he could have known the murderer and feared their association. Probably knew him very well, if that was the case.”

  “He was frightened of his knowledge, just as we were. So how do we find out before the police who he was?” Holmes asked.

  Longfellow had been mostly silent through this exchange. Now he remarked, “We possess two natural advantages over the police in finding the man’s identity, my friends. We know the man recognized Dante’s inspiration in the terrible details of the murder and that, in his time of crisis, Dante’s verses came straightaway to his tongue. And so we can surmise that he was very likely an Italian beggar, well read in literature. And a Catholic.”

  A man with a harsh three-days’ growth over his face and a hat pulled down over his eyes and ears was lying at the foot of Holy Cross, one of Boston’s oldest Catholic churches, posed as inertly as a sacred statue. He was stretched in the most leisurely posture human bones allow on a sidewalk and eating his dinner from an earthen pot. A pedestrian passing asked a question. He did not turn his head or respond.

  “Sir.” Nicholas Rey knelt beside him, holding closer the newspaper likeness of the leaper. “Do you recognize this man, sir?”

  Now the loafer rolled his eyes just enough to look.

  Rey removed his badge from inside his coat. “Sir, my name is Nicholas Rey, I am a city police officer. It is important that I know this man’s name. He has passed on. He is in no trouble. Please, do you know him or someone who might?”

  The man stuck his fingers into his pot and plucked a morsel between his thumb and forefinger, then released it to his mouth. Afterward, he rolled his head in a short, untroubled negation.

  Patrolman Rey started down the street, where a row of noisy grocery and butcher carts lined the route.

  Only ten minutes later, a horsecar expelled passengers at a nearby platform and two other men approached the immovable loafer. One of them held up the same newspaper folded to the same illustration.

  “Good fellow, can you tell us whether you know this man?” asked Oliver Wendell Holmes affably.

  The recurrence was almost enough to break the reverie of the loafer, though not quite.

  Lowell bent forward. “Sir?”

  Holmes pushed the newspaper at him again. “Pray, tell us whether he looks at all familiar and we’ll be happily on our way, dear fellow.”

  Nothing.

  Lowell shouted, “Do you require an ear trumpet?”

  This did not get them very far. The man picked out a bit of unrecognizable food from his pot and slipped it down his throat, without, apparently, bothering to swallow.

  “Wouldn’t you know,” Lowell said to Holmes, who stood to the side. “Three days of this, and nothing. This man did not have many friends.”

  “We have already gone beyond the Pillar of Hercules of the fashionable quarter. Let us not yield here yet.” Holmes had seen something in the loafer’s eye when they held up the newspaper. He had also noticed a medal dangling from his neck: San Paolino, the patron saint of Lucca, Tuscany. Lowell followed Holmes’s stare.

  “Where are you from, signore?” Lowell asked in Italian.

  The interrogated party still stared implacably ahead, but his mouth dropped open. “Da Lucca, signore.”

  Lowell complimented the beauties of the named land. The Italian showed no surprise at the language. This man, like all proud Italians, had been born with the full expectation that everyone should speak his tongue; he who did not was little worthy of conversation. Lowell then renewed the questions regarding the man in the newspaper engraving. It was important, explained the poet, to know his name so that they might find his family and arrange a proper burial. “We believe this poor fellow was from Lucca too,” he said sorrowfully in Italian. “He deserves burial in a Catholic churchyard—with his own people.”

  The Luccan took some time to ponder this before painstakingly turning his elbow into a different position so he could point his morsel-plucking finger at the massive door to the church right behind him.

  The Catholic prelate who listened to their questions was a dignified though portly figure.

  “Lon
za,” he said, handing back the newspaper. “Yes, he has been here. I believe Lonza was his name. Yes—Grifone Lonza.”

  “You knew him personally then?” Lowell asked hopefully.

  “He knew the church, Mr. Lowell,” the prelate responded with a benign air. “We have a fund entrusted to us from the Vatican for immigrants. We provide loans and some passage money for those who need to return to their homeland. Of course, we can only help a small number.” He had more to say but stymied himself. “What is your business in looking for him, gentlemen? Why has his likeness been printed in the newspaper?”

  “I’m afraid he has passed on, Father. We believe the police have been trying to identify him,” said Dr. Holmes.

  “Ah. I fear you won’t find the congregants of my church or those around these neighborhoods very eager to speak with the police on any matter. It was the police, recall, who did nothing to seek justice when the Ursuline convent burned to the ground. And when there is a crime, it is the poor, the Irish Catholics who are harassed,” he said with the firm-jawed anger of a clergyman. “The Irish were sent to war to die for Negroes who now steal their jobs, while the rich stayed home for a small fee.”

  Holmes wanted to say: Not my Wendell Junior, my good Father. But, in fact, Holmes had tried to convince Junior to do just that.

  “Did Mr. Lonza wish to return to Italy?” Lowell asked.

  “What anyone wishes in his heart, I cannot say. This man came for food, which we give on a regular basis, and a few small loans to keep afloat if I recall correctly. If I were Italian, I might well wish to return to my people. Most of our members are Irish. I fear the Italians do not feel so welcome among them. In all Boston and its surrounding areas, there are fewer than three hundred Italians, by our approximation. They are a very ragged lot, and require our sympathy and charity. But the more immigrants from other countries, the fewer jobs for the ones already here—you understand the potential trouble.”

  “Father, do you know if Mr. Lonza had family?” asked Holmes.

  The prelate shook his head contemplatively, then said, “Say, there was one gentleman who was sometimes a companion to him. Lonza was something of a drunkard, I’m afraid, and needed watching. Yes, what was his name? A peculiarly Italian name it was.” The prelate moved to his desk. “We should have some papers on him, as he too received some loans. Ah, this is it—a language tutor. He received some fifty dollars from us over the last year and a half. I remember he claimed to have once worked at Harvard College, though I would tend to doubt that. Here.” He sounded out the name on the paper. “Pietro Bak-ee.”

  Nicholas Rey, questioning some ragged children splashing at a horse trough, saw two high hats exit buoyantly from the Holy Cross Cathedral and disappear around the corner. Even from a distance, they looked out of place in the crowded dinginess of the area. Rey walked to the church and called for the prelate. The prelate, hearing that Rey was a police officer searching for an unidentified man, studied the newspaper illustration, looking over and then through his heavy gold-bowed spectacles before placidly apologizing.

  “I’ve never seen this poor fellow in my life, I’m afraid, Officer.”

  Rey, thinking of the two high-hatted figures, asked whether anyone else had been in the area to ask about the unidentified man. The prelate, replacing the file of Bachi in his drawer, smiled blandly and said no.

  Next, Patrolman Rey went to Cambridge. A wire had been received at the Central Station detailing an attempt, in the middle of the night, to steal Artemus Healey’s remains from his coffin.

  “I told them what would come from public knowledge,” Chief Kurtz said of the Healey family with unbecoming vindication. Mount Auburn Cemetery had now put the body into a steel coffin and hired another nighttime caretaker, this one armed with a shotgun. On a hillside not far from Healey’s gravestone was the portrait statue erected over the Reverend Talbot’s site, paid for by his congregation. The statue had a look of pure grace that improved on the minister’s actual face. In one hand the marble preacher held the Holy Book and in the other a pair of eyeglasses; this was a tribute to one of his pulpit mannerisms, a strange habit of removing his large eyeglasses when reading text from the lectern and replacing them when preaching freely, instructively suggesting that one needed sharper vision to read from the spirit of God.

  On his way to look over Mount Auburn for Chief Kurtz, Rey was stopped by a small commotion. He was told that an old man, who roomed on the second floor of a nearby building, had been absent for more than a week, not an unexpected period of time, as he sometimes traveled. But the residents demanded something be done about an offensive smell emanating from his room. Rey knocked and considered breaking through the fastened door, then borrowed a ladder and placed it outside. Climbing up, he raised the window to the room, but the horrible smell from inside almost sent him tumbling down.

  When the air had traveled out sufficiently to allow him inside, Rey had to hold himself against a wall. It took several seconds for him to accept that there was nothing to be done. A man stood erect, his feet dangling near the floor, with a rope around his neck that was hooked overhead. His features were stiffened and decayed beyond normal recognition, but Rey knew the man, from his clothes, and from the still bulging, panicked eyes, to be the former sexton of the nearby Unitarian church. A card was later found on the chair. It was the calling card Chief Kurtz had left at the church to be given to Gregg. On the back of this, the sexton had written a message to the police, insisting he would have seen any man who might have entered the vaults to kill Reverend Talbot. Somewhere in Boston, he warned, had arrived a demon soul, and he could not continue fearing its return for the rest of them.

  Pietro Bachi, Italian gentleman and graduate of the University of Padua, grouchily nurtured all opportunities open to him in Boston as a private tutor, though they were scarce and disagreeable. He had tried to obtain another university position after his dismissal from Harvard. “There may be room for a plain teacher of French or German,” the dean of one new college in Philadelphia said, laughing, “but Italian! My friend, we do not expect our boys to turn out opera singers.” Colleges up and down the Atlantic anticipated as few opera singers. And governing academic boards were quite occupied enough (thank you, Mr. Bakey) managing Greek and Latin to consider instruction in an unnecessary, unseemly, papist, vulgar living language.

  Fortunately, a moderate demand materialized in certain quarters of Boston by the end of the war. A few Yankee merchants were anxious to open ports with as many language skills as they could purchase. Also, a new class of prominent families, enriched by wartime profits and profiteering, desired above all else that their daughters be cultured. Some thought it wise that young ladies obtain basic Italian in addition to French in the event that it might seem worthwhile to send them to Rome when their time came to travel (a recent fashion among blossoming Boston beauties). So Pietro Bachi, his Harvard post unceremoniously stripped from him, remained on the lookout for enterprising merchants and pampered damsels. The latter required frequent replenishment, for the singing, drawing, and dancing masters held far too much appeal to them for Bachi to lay permanent claim to the young ladies’ hour-and-a-quarter pouches of time.

  This life appalled Pietro Bachi.

  It was not the lessons that tormented him so much as having to ask for his fees. The americani of Boston had built themselves a Carthage, a land stuffed with money but void of culture, destined to vanish without a trace of its existence. What had Plato said of the citizens of Argigentum? These people build as if they were immortal and eat as if they were to die instantly.

  Some twenty-five years earlier, in the beautiful countryside of Sicily, Pietro Batalo, like many Italians before him, had fallen in love with a perilous woman. Her family was of opposite political entrenchment from the Batalos, who fought vigorously against papal control of the state. When the woman felt Pietro had wronged her, her family was only too happy to arrange for his excommunication and banishment. After a series of adventures wi
th various armies, Pietro and his brother, a merchant, who desired freedom from the destructive political and religious landscape, changed their name to Bachi and fled across the ocean. In 1843, Pietro found a Boston that was a quaint town of friendly faces, different from what would emerge by 1865, when nativists were seeing their fear of foreigners’ rapid multiplication realized, and windows filled with the reminder FOREIGNERS NEED NOT APPLY. Bachi had been welcomed into Harvard College, and for a time he, like young Professor Henry Longfellow, had even boarded in a lovely section of Brattle Street. Then Pietro Bachi found passion unlike any he had known in the love of an Irish maiden. And she became his wife. But she found supplementary passions shortly after marrying the instructor. She left him, as Bachi’s students said, with only his shirtsleeves in his trunk and her hearty keenness for drink in his throat. There began the steep and steady decline in the heart of Pietro Bachi . . .

  “I understand she is, well, shall we say . . .” His interlocutor dug for a delicate word as he hurried after Bachi: “. . . difficult.”

  “She is difficult?” Bachi did not stop descending the stairs. “Ha! She does not believe I am Italian,” Bachi said. “She says I do not look like an Italian!”

  The young girl appeared at the top of the stairs and sulkily watched her father wobble after the diminutive instructor.

  “Oh, I’m sure the child does not mean what she says,” he was declaiming as gravely as possible.

  “I did so mean it!” the little girl screeched from her mezzanine stage at the stair landing, leaning so far against the walnut banister that it looked as if she might fall onto Pietro Bachi’s knitted hat. “He does not look at all like one, Father! He is far too short!”

  “Arabella!” the man shouted, then turned back with an earnest yellow-stained smile—as though he washed his mouth with gold—to the shimmering candlelit vestibule. “I say, wait a moment more, dear sir! Let us take this occasion to review your fee, shall we, Signor Bachi?” he suggested, eyebrow pulled back tight as a trembling arrow waiting on its bow.