Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Healing is a living process, Holmes told his audience, greatly under the influence of mental conditions. He told them how it was often found that the same wound received in battle would heal well in the soldiers that have prevailed but would prove fatal in those who were just defeated. “Thus emerges that middle region between science and poetry that sensible men, as they are called, are very shy of meddling with.”

  Holmes looked out at the row of family and friends and at the empty seat reserved in case Wendell Junior had shown up.

  “My oldest boy received more than one of these wounds during the war, being sent home by Uncle Sam with a few new buttonholes in his congenial waistcoat.” Laughter. “There were a good many hearts pierced in this war, too, that have no bullet mark to show.”

  After the lecture, and the necessary amount of praise bestowed on Dr. Holmes, Longfellow and Holmes accompanied their publisher back to the Authors’ Room at the Corner to wait for Lowell. There, it was decided that a meeting of their translation club should be arranged at Longfellow’s house for the following Wednesday.

  The planned session would serve a dual purpose. First, it would allay any concerns of Greene’s as to the state of the translation and the odd behavior he and Houghton had witnessed, and so would minimize the risk of further interference of the kind that had cost them whatever information Bachi might have possessed. Second, and perhaps more important, it would allow further progress on Longfellow’s translation. Longfellow intended to keep his promise to have Inferno ready to send to the year’s final Dante Festival in Florence for the six-hundredth anniversary of the poet’s birth in 1265.

  Longfellow had not wanted to admit that he was unlikely to finish before the close of 1865 unless their investigations came upon some miraculous advance. Still, he had begun to work on his translations at night, alone, entreating Dante privately for wisdom in seeing through the baffling ends of Healey and Talbot.

  “Is Mr. Lowell about?” said a small voice, accompanied by a knock at the Authors’ Room door.

  The poets were exhausted. “I’m afraid not,” Fields called back with undisguised annoyance to the invisible questioner.

  “Excellent!”

  Boston’s merchant prince, Phineas Jennison, dapper as always in white suit and hat, slid inside and slammed the door behind him without ruffling a feather. “One of your clerks said you could be found here, Mr. Fields. I wish to speak freely about Lowell and would just as soon the old boy not be present.” He tossed his long silk hat onto Fields’s iron rack, his shiny hair going off to the left in a superb sweep, like the handrail of a banister. “Mr. Lowell’s in trouble.”

  The visitor gasped upon noticing the two poets. He nearly stooped down on one knee as he clasped the hands of Holmes and Longfellow, handling them like bottles of the rarest and most sensitive vintages.

  Jennison enjoyed spreading his vast wealth by patronizing artists and by refining his appreciation of belles lettres; and had never ceased to be overwhelmed by the geniuses he knew only because of his riches. Jennison helped himself to a seat. “Mr. Fields. Mr. Longfellow. Dr. Holmes,” he said, naming them with exaggerated ceremony. “You are all dear friends of Lowell’s, dearer than is my own privilege of acquaintance, for only through genius is genius truly known.”

  Holmes cut him off nervously. “Mr. Jennison, has something happened with Jamey?”

  “I know, Doctor.” Jennison sighed heavily at having to elaborate. “I know of these accursed Dante happenings, and I’m here because I wish to assist you in doing what is required to reverse them.”

  “Dante happenings?” Fields echoed in a broken voice.

  Jennison nodded solemnly.

  “The accursed Corporation and their hopes to rid themselves of that Dante course of Lowell’s. And their attempt to stop your translation, my dear gentlemen! Lowell told me all about it, though he’s too proud to ask for help.”

  Three muffled sighs escaped from under the respective waistcoats at Jennison’s elaboration.

  “Now, as surely you know, Lowell has temporarily canceled his class,” Jennison said, showing his frustration at their apparent obliviousness of their own business. “Well, it won’t do, I say. It does not befit a genius of James Russell Lowell’s caliber and must not be permitted without a fight. I fear Lowell is at imminent hazard of going to pieces if he starts down roads of conciliation! And over at the College, I hear Manning is gleeful.” He said this with grim concern.

  “What do you wish us to do, my dear Mr. Jennison?” asked Fields with a play at deference.

  “Urge him to screw up his courage.” Jennison demonstrated his point with a fist in his palm. “Save him from cowardice, or our city shall lose one of its strongest hearts. I have had another idea as well. Create a permanent organization devoted to the study of Dante—I myself would take up Italian to assist you!” Jennison’s flashy smile broke through, as did his leather money belt, from which he now counted out large bills. “A Dante association of some sort dedicated to protecting this literature so dear to you gentlemen. What say you? No one shall have to know of my involvement, and you shall give the fellows a run for it.”

  Before anyone could reply, the door to the Authors’ Room burst open. Lowell stood before them with a bleak look on his face.

  “Why, Lowell, what’s wrong?” Fields asked.

  Lowell began to speak but then saw him. “Phinny? What are you doing here?”

  Jennison looked to Fields for help. “Mr. Jennison and I had some business to conclude,” said Fields, stuffing the money belt into the businessman’s hands and pushing him out the door. “But he was just on his way out.”

  “I hope nothing’s wrong, Lowell. I shall call on you soon, my friend!”

  Fields found Teal, the evening shop boy, down the hall and asked for Jennison to be escorted downstairs. Then he barred the Authors’ Room door.

  Lowell poured a drink at the counter. “Oh, you won’t believe the luck, my friends. I almost twisted my head off looking for Bachi at Half Moon Place, and wouldn’t you know I come up with as little as I started! He was nowhere to be seen and nobody around knew where he could be found—I don’t think the local Dubliners would talk to an Italian if put in a sinking raft next to one and the Italian had a plug. I might as well have been off at leisure like all of you this afternoon.”

  Fields, Holmes, and Longfellow were silent.

  “What? What is it?” Lowell asked.

  Longfellow suggested that they have supper at Craigie House, and on the way they explained to Lowell what had happened with Bachi. Over the meal, Fields told him how he had returned to the harbormaster and persuaded him, with the help of an American eagle gold piece, to check the register for information on Bachi’s trip. The entry for Bachi indicated that he had purchased a discounted round-trip ticket that would not allow a return prior to January 1867.

  Back in Longfellow’s parlor, Lowell flopped into a chair, stunned. “He knew we had found him. Well of course—we let him find out that we knew about Lonza! Our Lucifer has slipped through our fingers like so much sand!”

  “Then we should celebrate,” Holmes said with a laugh. “Don’t you see what this means, if you were right? Come, you have the small end of your opera glass pointed toward everything that looks encouraging.”

  Fields leaned in. “Jamey, if Bachi was the murderer . . .”

  Holmes completed the thought with a bright smile: “Then we are safe. And the city’s safe. And Dante! If we have driven him out by our knowledge, then we have defeated him, Lowell.”

  Fields stood up, beaming. “Oh, gentlemen, I shall throw a Dante supper to put the Saturday Club to shame. May the mutton be as tender as Longfellow’s verse! And may the Moët sparkle like Holmes’s wit, and the carving knives be as sharp as Lowell’s satire!”

  Three cheers were given to Fields.

  All of this eased Lowell somewhat, as did the news of a Dante-translation session—the start of normal times again, a return to a pure enjoyment o
f their scholarship. He hoped they had not forfeited this pleasure by applying their knowledge of Dante to such repugnant affairs.

  Longfellow seemed to know what troubled Lowell. “In Washington’s day,” he said, “they melted the pipes of the church organs for bullets, my dear Lowell. They hadn’t any choice. Now, Lowell, Holmes, would you accompany me down to the wine cellar while Fields sees how work goes along in the kitchen?” he asked as he lifted a candle from the table.

  “Ah, the true foundation of any house!” Lowell jumped from the armchair. “Do you have a good vintage, Longfellow?”

  “You know my rule of thumb, Mr. Lowell:

  ‘When you ask one friend to dine,

  give him your best wine.

  When you ask two,

  the second best will do.’”

  The company let out a collective peal of laughter, inflated by a consciousness of relief.

  “But we have four thirsts to quench!” Holmes objected.

  “Then let us not expect much, my dear doctor,” advised Longfellow. Holmes and Lowell followed him down to the basement by the light of the taper’s silver gleam. Lowell used the laughter and conversation to divert himself from the shooting pain radiating in his leg, pounding and traveling upward from the red disk covering his ankle.

  Phineas Jennison, in white coat, yellow waistcoat, and insistent wide-brimmed white hat, came down the steps of his Back Bay mansion. He walked and whistled. He twirled his gold-trimmed walking staff. He laughed heartily, as if he just heard a fine joke in his head. Phineas Jennison often laughed to himself in this way while rambling through Boston, the city he had conquered, every evening. There was one world remaining to obtain, one where money had severe limits, where blood determined much of one’s status, and this conquest he was about to fulfill, in spite of recent hindrances.

  From the other side of the street he was watched, watched step after step from the moment he left behind his mansion. The next shade needing punishment. Look how he walks and whistles and laughs, as though he knows no wrong and has known none. Step after step. The shame of a city that could no longer direct the course of the future. A city that had lost its soul. He who sacrified the one who could reunify them all. The watcher called out.

  Jennison stopped, rubbing his famously indented chin. He squinted into the night. “Someone say my name there?”

  No reply.

  Jennison crossed the street and glanced ahead with faint recognition and ease at the person standing motionlessly beside the church. “Ah, you. I remember you. What is it you wanted?”

  Jennison felt the man twist behind him, and then something pierced the merchant prince’s back.

  “Take my money, sir, take it all! Please! You can have it and be on your way! How much do you want? Name it! What say you?”

  “Through me the way is among the people lost. Through me.”

  The last thing J. T. Fields expected to find when he set off the next morning in his carriage was a dead body.

  “Just up ahead,” Fields said to his driver. Fields and Lowell stepped down and walked up the sidewalk to Wade and Son. “This is where Bachi went in before rushing to the harbor.” Fields showed Lowell.

  They had found no listing of the store in any of the city directories.

  “I’ll be hanged if Bachi wasn’t doing something shady here,” Lowell said.

  They knocked quietly without producing a response. Then, after a while, the door swung open and a man in a long blue coat with bright buttons brushed past. He was holding an overfilled box of assorted cargo.

  “Beg pardon,” Fields said. Two other policemen were approaching now, and they opened the doors to Wade and Son wider, pushing Lowell and Fields in. Inside was a lantern-jawed older man slumped on the counter, a pen still in his hand, as though he had been in mid-sentence. The walls and shelves were bare. Lowell inched closer. A telegraph wire was still wrapped around the dead man’s neck. The poet stared with fascination at how lifelike the man seemed.

  Fields rushed to his side and pulled his arm toward the door. “He’s dead, Lowell!”

  “Dead as one of Holmes’s carcasses at the medical college,” Lowell agreed. “No murder so mundane could be done by our Dantean, I’m afraid.”

  “Lowell, come!” Fields panicked at the growing number of police busying themselves studying the room, not yet taking notice of the two intruders.

  “Fields, there’s a suitcase beside him. He was getting ready to flee, just as Bachi did.” He looked again at the pen in the deceased’s hand. “He was trying to get done his unfinished business, I would rather think.”

  “Lowell, please!” Fields cried.

  “Very well, Fields.” But Lowell circled toward the corpse and stopped at the mail tray on the desk, slipping the top envelope into his coat pocket. “Come on then.” Lowell started to the door. Fields rushed ahead but stopped to look back when he did not feel Lowell’s presence behind him. Lowell had paused in the middle of the room with a frightening, pained expression on his face.

  “What is it, Lowell?”

  “My blasted ankle.”

  When Fields turned back to the door, a policeman was waiting with a curious expression. “We’d just been looking for our friend, Mr. Officer, whom we last saw enter this store yesterday.”

  After listening to their story, the policeman decided to write it down in his memorandum book. “That friend’s name was again, sir? The Eyetalian?”

  “Bachi. B-a-c-h-i.”

  When Lowell and Fields were permitted to leave, Detective Henshaw and two other men from the detective bureau had arrived with the coroner, Mr. Barnicoat, and dismissed most of the policemen. “Bury him in the paupers’ cemetery with the rest of the filth,” said Henshaw when he saw the body. “Ichabod Ross. Waste of my good time. Could still be having my breakfast.” Fields lingered until Henshaw met his eyes with a watchful glare.

  The evening paper contained a small piece on the killing of Ichabod Ross, a minor merchant, during a robbery.

  On the envelope that Lowell had pilfered was written VANE’S TIMEPIECES. It was a pawnshop on one of the less desirable streets of East Boston.

  When Lowell and Fields entered the windowless storefront the next morning, they came upon a huge man, no less than three hundred pounds, with a face as red as the most seasonal tomato and a greenish beard filling out his chin. An enormous set of keys dangled from a rope around his neck and clanked whenever he moved. “Mr. Vane?”

  “Dead to rights,” he replied, then his smile froze as he looked up and down the questioners’ clothing. “I’ve already told those New York detectives I didn’t pass those queer bills!”

  “We’re not detectives,” said Lowell. “We believe this belongs to you.” He placed the envelope on the counter. “It’s from Ichabod Ross.”

  An enormous smile slithered into place. “Well, ain’t that nice. Oh cow! Thought the old man would be jammed without settling with me!”

  “Mr. Vane, we’re sorry for the loss of your friend. Do you know why Mr. Ross would be dealt with in such a manner?” Fields asked.

  “Oh? Curiosity seekers, are you? Well, you have not brought your pigs to the wrong market. What can you pay?”

  “We just brought you your payment from Mr. Ross,” Fields reminded him.

  “Rightfully mine!” said Vane. “Do you deny it?”

  “Must everything be done for the sake of money?” balked Lowell.

  “Lowell, please,” Fields whispered.

  Vane’s smile froze again as he stared ahead. His eyes doubled in size. “Lowell? Lowell the poet!”

  “Why, yes . . .” Lowell confessed, a bit thrown off.

  “‘And what is so rare as a day in June?’” the man said, then lapsed into laughter before continuing.

  “‘And what is so rare as a day in June?

  Then, if ever, come perfect days;

  Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,

  And over it gently her warm ear lays;

 
Whether we look, or whether we listen,

  We hear life murmur, or see it glisten.’”

  “The word in that fourth line is softly,” Lowell corrected him with some indignation. “You see, ‘softly her warm ear lays . . .’”

  “Never tell me there is not a great American poet! Oh, the God and the Devil, I have your house, too!” Vane announced, producing from below his counter a leather-bound Homes and Haunts of Our Poets and digging through it to the chapter on Elmwood. “Oh, I even keep your autograph in my catalog. Next to Longfellow, Emerson, and Whittier, you are my top-priced seller. That rascal Oliver Holmes is right up there, too, and would be higher still if he didn’t put his name to so many things.”

  The man, who had flushed a Bardolphian hue from the excitement, unlocked a drawer with one of the dangling keys and fished out a strip of paper on which was signed the name of James Russell Lowell.

  “Why, that is not my signature at all!” Lowell said. “Whoever wrote this can’t put pen to paper! I demand you hand over all fraudulent autographs of all the authors in your possession at once, sir, or you shall hear from Mr. Hillard, my attorney, by the end of today!”

  “Lowell!” Fields pulled him away from the counter.

  “How well I shall sleep tonight knowing such a fine citizen has illustrations enough in that book to map out my home!” Lowell cried.

  “We need this man’s help!”

  “Yes.” Lowell straightened his sack coat. “In church with saints, in the tavern with sinners.”

  “If you please, Mr. Vane.” Fields turned back to the proprietor and snapped open his wallet. “We want to know about Mr. Ross and then shall leave you be. How much will you accept to convey your knowledge?”