Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “I shall not part with it for one red cent!” Vane laughed heartily, his eyes seeming to go quite far back into his brain. “Must everything be done for the sake of money?”

  Vane proposed forty of Lowell’s autographs as sufficient payment. Fields raised an advisory eyebrow at Lowell, who sourly agreed. As Lowell signed his name down two columns of a notepaper—“A superior piece of goods,” Vane declared with approval of Lowell’s writing—Vane told Fields that Ross was a former newspaper printer who had moved to pressing counterfeit money. Ross had made the mistake of passing the money to a gambling ring that used the queer bills to cheat the local gambling hells, and had even used some pawnshops as unwilling fences for goods purchased with the money won from that operation (the word unwilling was pronounced with the utmost twist in the gentleman’s mouth, the tongue reaching up and over his lips, almost wetting his nose). It was only a matter of time before the schemes caught up with him.

  Back at the Corner, Fields and Lowell repeated all this to Longfellow and Holmes. “I suppose we can guess what was in Bachi’s satchel when he left Ross’s store,” said Fields. “A bag of queer bills as some sort of desperate arrangement. But what would he be doing mixed up in counterfeiting?”

  “If you can’t earn money, I suppose you must make it,” said Holmes.

  “Whatever brought him in,” said Longfellow, “it seems Signor Bachi found his way out just in time.”

  When Wednesday evening came, Longfellow welcomed his guests from the Craigie House doorstep in the old manner. As they entered, they received a secondary welcome in the form of a yelp from Trap. George Washington Greene confessed how much heartier his health had been after receiving word of a meeting and that he hoped they would now resume their regular schedule. He was as diligently prepared for their assigned cantos as ever.

  Longfellow called for the meeting to begin, and the scholars settled down into their places. The host passed out Dante’s canto in Italian and the corresponding proofs of his English translation. Trap watched the proceedings with keen interest. Satisfied with the accustomed orderly seating arrangements and his master’s comfort, the canine sentry settled down in the hollow under Greene’s cavernous armchair. Trap knew the old man harbored special affection for him that manifested itself in food from the supper table and, besides, Greene’s velveteen chair was positioned closest to the deep warmth of the study’s hearth.

  “A devil is behind here, who doth cleave us.”

  After taking his leave from the Central Station, Nicholas Rey tried to fight drifting off to sleep in the horsecar. It was only now that he felt how little rest he had been getting each night, though he had practically been chained to his desk by Mayor Lincoln’s orders with little to fill his day. Kurtz had found a new driver, a green patrolman from Watertown. In Rey’s brief dream set to the rough motions of the car, a bestial man approached him and whispered, “I can’t die as I’m here,” but even while dreaming, Rey knew that here was not a part of the puzzle left for him to solve on the grounds of Elisha Talbot’s demise. I can’t die as I’m. He was awakened by two men, hanging from the car’s straps, arguing about the merits of women’s suffrage, and then came drowsy decision—and a realization: that the beastly figure in his dream had the face of the leaper, though amplified in size three or four times. Soon the bell tinkled and the conductor shouted, “Mount Auburn! Mount Auburn!”

  Having waited for Father to depart for his Dante Club meeting, Mabel Lowell, who had recently turned eighteen, stood over his French mahogany writing desk, which had been demoted to paper storage by Father, who preferred to write on an old pasteboard pad in his corner armchair.

  She missed Father’s good spirits around Elmwood. Mabel Lowell had no interest in chasing after Harvard boys or sitting with little Amelia Holmes’s sewing circle and talking of whom they would accept or reject (except for foreign girls, whose rejection required no discussion) as if the whole civilized world were waiting to get into the sewing club. Mabel wanted to read and to travel the world to see in life what she had read about in books, her father’s and those of other visionary writers.

  Father’s papers were in a customary disarray that, while decreasing the risk of future detection, necessitated special delicacy, as the unwieldy piles could tip over all at once. She found quills worn down to stumps and many half-completed poems, with frustrating blots of ink trailing off where she wished to read more. Her father often warned her never to write verses, as most turned out bad and the good ones were as unfinishable as a beautiful person.

  There was a strange sketch—a pencil sketch on lined paper. It was drawn with the stilted care one devoted, she imagined, to diagramming a map when lost in the woods or, she also imagined, when tracing hieroglyphics—drawn solemnly in an attempt to decode some meaning or guidance. When she was a child and Father traveled, he had always illustrated the margins of letters home with crudely drawn figures of lyceum organizers or foreign dignitaries with whom he had supped. Now, thinking of how those humorous illustrations made her laugh, she at first concluded that the sketch depicted a man’s legs, oversize ice skates on his feet and a flat board of some kind where his waist would otherwise start. Unsatisfied with the interpretation, Mabel turned the paper sideways and then upside down. She noticed that the jagged lines on the feet might represent curls of fire rather than skates.

  Longfellow read from his translation of Canto Twenty-eight, where they had left off at their last session. He would be glad to drop off the final proofs of this canto with Houghton and check it off the list kept at Riverside Press. It was physically the most unpleasant section of all Inferno. Here, Virgil has guided Dante into the ninth ditch of a wide section of Hell known as Malebolge, the Evil Pouch. Here were the Schismatics, those who had divided nations, religions, and families in life and now find themselves divided in Hell—bodily—maimed and cut asunder.

  “‘I saw one,’” Longfellow read his version of Dante’s words, “‘rent from his chin to where one breaketh wind.’”

  Longfellow took a long breath before moving on.

  “‘Between his legs were hanging down his entrails;

  His heart was visible, as was the dismal sack

  That maketh excrement of what is eaten.’”

  Dante had shown restraint before this. This canto demonstrated Dante’s true belief in God. Only one with the strongest faith in the immortal soul could conceive of such gross torment to the mortal body.

  “The filthiness of some of these passages,” said Fields, “would disgrace the drunkenest horse dealer.”

  “‘Another one, who had his throat pierced through,

  And nose cut off close underneath the brows,

  And had no longer but a single ear,

  Staying to look in wonder with the others,

  Before the others did his gullet open,

  Which outwardly was red in every part’”

  And these were men whom Dante had known! This shade with nose and ear cut off, Pier da Medicina of Bologna, had not harmed Dante personally, though he had fed dissension among the citizens of Dante’s Florence. Dante had never been able to remove his thoughts from Florence as he wrote his journey into the afterworld. He needed to see his heroes redeemed in Purgatory and rewarded in Paradise; he longed to meet the wicked in the infernal circles below. The poet did not merely imagine Hell as a possibility, he felt its reality. Dante even saw an Alighieri relative there among the ones cut apart, pointing at him, demanding revenge for his death.

  In the Craigie House basement kitchen, little Annie Allegra crept in from the hall, trying to rub the sleepiness from her eyes.

  Peter was feeding a bucket of coal into the kitchen stove. “Miss Annie, didn’t Mistah Longfellow see you to sleep already?”

  She struggled to keep her eyes open. “I wish to have a cup of milk, Peter.”

  “I’ll bring you one shortly, Miss Annie,” one of the cooks said in a singsong voice as she peeked in on the bread baking. “Happily, dear, happily.
”

  A faint knock drifted in from the front of the house. Annie excitedly claimed the privilege of answering it, always warming to tasks meant for the help, especially greeting callers. The little girl scrambled up to the front hall and pulled open the massive door.

  “Shhhhhh!” Annie Allegra Longfellow whispered before she could even see the handsome face of the caller. He bent down. “Today is Wednesday,” she explained confidentially, cupping her hands. “If you are here to see Papa, you must wait until he is through with Mr. Lowell and the others. Those are the rules, you know. You may stay out here or in the parlor if you like,” she added, pointing out his options.

  “I do apologize for the intrusion, Miss Longfellow,” Nicholas Rey said.

  Annie Allegra nodded prettily and, fighting back the renewed weight of her eyelids, slouched up the angled stairs, forgetting why she had made the long trip down.

  Nicholas Rey stood in the front hall of Craigie House among Washington’s portraits. He removed the bits of paper from his pocket. He would plead their help once more, this time showing them the scraps he had picked up from the ground around Talbot’s death site in hopes that there was some connection they might see that he could not. He had found several foreigners around the wharves who had recognized the likeness of the leaper; this reinforced Rey’s conviction that the leaper was foreign, that it was some other language that had been whispered in his ear. And this conviction could not help but remind Rey that Dr. Holmes and the others knew something more than they could tell him.

  Rey started toward the parlor but stopped before he made it out of the front hall. He turned in astonishment. Something had snagged him. What had he just heard? He retraced his steps, then moved nearer to the study door.

  “‘Che le ferrite son richiuse prima ch’altri dinanzi li rivada . . .’”

  Rey shuddered. He counted out three more soundless steps to the door of the study. “‘Dinanzi li rivada.’” He tore out a notepaper from his vest and found the word: Deenanzee. The word had taunted him since the beggar crashed through the station house window, spelling itself out in his dreams and the pumping of his heart. Rey leaned against the study door and pressed his ear flush with the cool white wood.

  “Here Betrand de Born, who severed a son’s ties with a father by instigating war between them, holds aloft his own dissevered head in his hand like a lantern, speaking to the Florentine pilgrim from his detached head and mouth.” That was the soothing voice of Longfellow.

  “Like Irving’s Headless Horseman.” The unmistakable baritone laugh of Lowell.

  Rey flipped over the paper and wrote what he heard.

  Because I parted persons so united,

  I now bear my brain parted—Alas!—

  From its beginning, which is in this body.

  Thus observe in me the contrapasso.

  Contrapasso? A soft nasal drone. Snoring. Rey became self-conscious and quieted his own breathing. He heard a scratchy symphony of scribbling nibs.

  “Dante’s most perfect punishment,” said Lowell.

  “Dante himself might agree,” replied another.

  Rey’s thoughts were too snowed under for him to continue trying to distinguish the speakers, and the dialogue fell together into a chorus.

  “. . . It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso—a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition. . . . Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering . . . the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him . . . just as these Schismatics are cut apart . . .”

  Rey stepped backward all the way to the front door.

  “School is done, gentlemen.”

  Books were snapped shut and papers rustled, and Trap began barking, unnoticed, out the window.

  “And we have earned some supper for our labors . . .”

  “What a very fat pheasant this is!” James Russell Lowell, with agitated zeal, was prodding a strange skeleton’s wide body and oversize flat head.

  “There is no beast whose insides he hasn’t taken apart and put together again,” Dr. Holmes remarked laughingly, and, Lowell thought, a bit snidely.

  It was early the morning after their Dante Club meeting, and Lowell and Holmes were in the laboratory of Professor Louis Agassiz at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Agassiz had greeted them and glanced at Lowell’s wound before returning to his private office to finish some business.

  “Agassiz’s note sounded interested in the insect samples, at least.” Lowell tried to appear nonchalant. He was certain now that the insect from Healey’s study had in fact bitten him, and he was deeply worried about what Agassiz would say of its terrible effects: “Ah, there’s no hope, poor Lowell, what a peety.” Lowell did not trust Holmes’s contention that this sort of insect could not sting. What kind of insect worth a dime does not sting? Lowell waited for the fatal prognosis; it would be almost a relief to hear it spoken. He had not told Holmes how much the wound had grown in size over the last few days, how often he felt it throb violently inside his leg, and how he could trace the pain hour by hour permeating all his nerves. He would not be so weak in front of Holmes.

  “Ah, do you like that, Lowell?” Louis Agassiz came in with the insect samples in his meaty hands, which always smelled of oil, fish, and alcohol, even after extensive washing. Lowell had forgotten that he was standing next to the skeleton display, which looked like a hyperbolic hen.

  Agassiz said proudly, “The consul at Mauritius brought me two skeletons of the dodo while I was traveling! Isn’t it a treasure?”

  “Do you think it was good to eat, Agassiz?” Holmes asked.

  “Oh yes. What a peety we could not have the dodo at our Saturday Club! A good dinner has always been humanity’s greatest blessing. What a peety. All right then, are we ready?”

  Lowell and Holmes followed him to a table and sat down. Agassiz carefully removed the insects from vials of alcohol solution. “First business, tell me. Where you did find these special leetle critters, Dr. Holmes?”

  “Lowell did, actually,” Holmes answered cautiously. “Near Beacon Hill.”

  “Beacon Hill,” Agassiz echoed, though they sounded like entirely different words in his thick Swiss-German accent. “Tell me, Dr. Holmes, what do you think of these?”

  Holmes did not like the practice of asking questions intended to produce wrong answers. “’Tis not my line. But they are blowflies, right, Agassiz?”

  “Ah yes. Genus?” Agassiz asked.

  “Cochliomyia,” Holmes said.

  “Species?”

  “Macellaria.”

  “Ah-ha!” Agassiz laughed. “They do look like that if you listen to books, don’t they, dear Holmes?”

  “So they’re not . . . that?” Lowell asked. It looked as though all blood had drained from his face. If Holmes was wrong, then the flies might not be harmless.

  “The two flies are physically almost identical,” Agassiz said, then gasped in a way that cut off any response. “Almost.” Agassiz made his way over to his bookshelves. His broad features and plenteous figure made him seem more successful politician than biologist and botanist. The new Museum of Comparative Zoology was the culmination of his entire career, for finally he would have the resources to complete his classification of the world’s myriad unnamed species of animals and plants. “Let me show you something. There are about twenty-five hundred species of North American flies we know how to name. Yet from my estimation there are now ten thousand fly species living among us.”

  He laid out some drawings. They were crude, rather grotesque depictions of men’s faces, their noses replaced by bizarre, darkly scribbled holes.

  Agassiz explained. “A few years ago, a surgeon in the French Imperial Navy, Dr. Coquerel, was called to the colony on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, South America, just north of Brazil. Five colonists were in the hospital with severe and unide
ntifiable symptoms. One of the men died soon after Dr. Coquerel arrived. When he flushed the body’s sinuses with water, three hundred blowfly larvae were found inside.”

  Holmes was baffled. “The maggots were inside a man—a living man?”

  “Don’t interrupt, Holmes!” Lowell cried.

  Agassiz assented to Holmes’s question with a heavy silence.

  “But the Cochliomyia macellaria can only digest dead tissue,” Holmes protested. “There are no maggots capable of parasitism.”

  “Remember the eight thousand undiscovered flies I’ve just spoken of, Holmes!” Agassiz rebuked him. “This was not the Cochliomyia macellaria. This was a different species altogether, my friends. One we had never seen before—or didn’t want to believe existed. A female fly of this species had laid eggs in the patient’s nostrils, where the eggs hatched and the larvae developed into maggots, eating right into his head. Two more of the men on Devil’s Island died of the same infestation. The doctor saved the others only by cutting out the maggots from the noses. Macellaria maggots can only live on dead tissue—they like corpses best. But the larvae of this species of fly, Holmes, survives only on living tissue.”

  Agassiz waited for reactions to show on their faces. Then he went on.

  “The female fly mates only once but can lay a massive number of eggs every three days, ten or eleven times in their monthlong life cycle. A single female fly can lay up to four hundred eggs in one sitting. They find warm wounds on animals or humans to nest in. The eggs hatch into maggots and crawl into the wound, tearing through the body. The more infested is the flesh with maggots, the more other adult flies are attracted. The maggots feed on the living tissue until they drop out and, some days later, become flies. My friend Coquerel named this species Cochliomyia hominivorax.”

  “Homini . . . vorax,” Lowell repeated. He translated hoarsely, looking at Holmes: “Man-eater.”