Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “Exactly,” said Agassiz with the reluctant enthusiasm of a scientist with a terrible discovery to announce. “Coquerel reported this to the scientific journals, though few believed his evidence.”

  “But you did?” Holmes asked.

  “Most certainly,” Agassiz said sternly. “Since Coquerel sent me these drawings, I have studied medical histories and records of the last thirty years for mentions of similar experiences by people who did not know these details. Isidore Sainte-Hilaire recorded a case of a larva found inside the skin of an infant. Dr. Livingston, according to Cobbold, found several diptera larvae in the shoulder of an injured Negro. In Brazil, I have discovered on my travels that these flies are called the Warega, known as pest of both man and animals. And in the Mexican war, it was recorded that what people called ‘meat flies’ would leave their eggs in the wounds of soldiers left on the field overnight. Sometimes the maggots would cause no harm, feeding only on dead tissue. These were common blowflies, common macellaria maggots such as you are familiar with, Dr. Holmes. But other times the body would be ravished with swellings and there would be no saving what was left of the soldiers’ lives. They’d be hollowed out from the inside. You see? These were the hominivorax. These flies must prey on the helpless, people and animals: That is the only means of their offspring surviving. Their life requires ingestion of the living. Research is only now beginning, my friends, and it is very exciting. Why, I collected my first specimens of the hominivorax on my tour of Brazil. Superficially, the two types of blowflies are very much the same. You must look at the deep coloring; you must measure with the most sensitive instruments. That is how I was able to recognize your samples yesterday.”

  Agassiz dragged over another stool. “Now, Lowell, let us see your poor leg again, will you?”

  Lowell tried to speak, but his lips were shaking too violently.

  “Oh, don’t you worry now, Lowell!” Agassiz broke into a laugh. “So, Lowell, you felt the leetle insect on your leg, then you brushed it away?”

  “And I killed it!” Lowell reminded him.

  Agassiz retrieved a scalpel from a drawer. “Good. Dr. Holmes, I want you to slip that into the center of the wound, and then pull it out.”

  “Are you sure, Agassiz?” Lowell asked nervously.

  Holmes swallowed and knelt down. He positioned the scalpel at Lowell’s ankle, then looked up into his friend’s face. Lowell was staring, his jaw open. “You won’t even feel this, Jamey,” Holmes promised quietly, comfort just between them. Agassiz, though only inches away, kindly pretended not to hear.

  Lowell nodded and gripped the sides of his stool. Holmes did as Agassiz said, inserting the point of the scalpel into the center of the swelling on Lowell’s ankle. When he removed the scalpel, there was a hard white maggot, four millimeters at most, wriggling on the tip: alive.

  “There, that’s it! The beautiful hominivorax!” Agassiz laughed triumphantly. He checked Lowell’s wound for more and then wrapped the ankle. He took the maggot lovingly on his hand. “You see, Lowell, the poor leetle blowfly you saw had only a few seconds before you killed it so it had time to lay only one egg. Your wound is not deep and shall heal fully, and you shall be perfectly fine. But notice how the lesion in your leg grew with one maggot crawling inside of you, how much you felt it as it tore through some tissue. Imagine hundreds. Now imagine hundreds of thousands—expanding inside of you every few minutes.”

  Lowell smiled wide enough to send his mustache tusks to opposite ends of his face. “You hear that, Holmes? I’ll be fine!” He laughed and embraced Agassiz and then Holmes. Then he began to take in what it all meant—for Artemus Healey, for the Dante Club.

  Agassiz grew serious, too, as he toweled off his hands. “There’s one other thing, dear fellows. The strangest thing, really. These leetle creatures—they don’t belong here, don’t belong in New England nor anywhere in our vicinity. They are native to this hemisphere, that seems certain. But only in hot, swampier climates. I have just seen swarms of them in Brazil, but never would we see them in Boston. Never have they been recorded, by their correct name or any other. How they got here, I cannot speculate. Perhaps accidentally on a shipment of cattle or . . .” Agassiz lapsed into detached humor about the situation. “No matter. It is our good fortune that these critters cannot live in a northern climate such as ours, not in this weather and surroundings. They are not good neighbors, these Waregas. Luckily, the ones that did come here have surely died out from the cold already.”

  In the way that fear readily transfers itself, Lowell had entirely forgotten the certainty of his own doom, and his ordeal was now a source of pleasure that he had survived. But he could only think of one thing as he walked silently away from the museum alongside Holmes.

  Holmes spoke first. “I was blind to listen to Barnicoat’s conclusions in the newspapers. Healey did not die from a blow to his head! The insects were not just a Dantesque tableau vivant, some decorative show, so that Dante’s punishment could be recognized by us. They were released in order to cause pain,” Holmes said in rapid fire. “The insects were not ornament, they were his weapon!”

  “Our Lucifer wants his victims not merely to die but to suffer, as the shades do in Inferno. A state between life and death which contains both and is neither.” Lowell turned to Holmes and took his arm.

  “To witness your own suffering. Wendell, I felt that creature eating away inside of me. Ingesting me. Even though it might have only snacked on a small amount of tissue, I felt it as though it was running straight through my blood into my very soul. The chambermaid was telling the truth.”

  “By God, she was,” Holmes said, horrified. “Which means Healey . . .” Neither man could speak of the suffering they now knew Healey to have endured. The chief justice had been meant to leave for his country house on a Saturday morning and his body was not found until Tuesday. He had been alive for four days under the care of tens of thousands of hominivorax devouring his insides . . . his brains . . . inch after inch, hour after hour.

  Holmes looked into the glass jar of insect samples they had taken back from Agassiz. “Lowell, there is something I must say. But I do not wish to call up a row with you.”

  “Pietro Bachi.”

  Holmes nodded tentatively.

  “This does not seem to fit with what we know of him, does it?” Lowell asked. “This knocks all our theories into a cocked hat!”

  “Think of it: Bachi was bitter; Bachi was hot-tempered; Bachi was drunk. But such methodical, profound cruelty. Could you see this in him? Honestly? Bachi might have tried to stage something to show the mistake of bringing him to America. But to re-create Dante’s punishments so utterly and completely? Our mistakes must be thick throughout, Lowell, like salamanders after the rain. And a new one creeps out from under every leaf we turn over.” Holmes waved his arms frantically.

  “What are you doing?” Lowell asked. Longfellow’s house was only a short walk and they were due back.

  “I see a free coach up ahead. I want a look at some of these samples again under my microscope. I wish Agassiz had not killed this maggot—nature will tell the truth all the better for its not being put to death. I do not believe his conclusion that these insects will have already died out. We may learn something more about the murder from these creatures. Agassiz will not listen to the Darwinian theory, and this obstructs his view.”

  “Wendell, this is the man’s vocation.”

  Holmes ignored Lowell’s lack of faith. “Great scientists can sometimes be an impediment in the path of science, Lowell. Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles, and the first whispers of a new truth are not caught by those in need of ear trumpets. Just last month, I was reading in a book on the Sandwich Islands about an old Fejee man who had been carried away among foreigners but who prayed he might be brought home so that his brains might be beaten out in peace by his son, according to the custom of those lands. Did not Dante’s son Pietro tell everyone after Dante’s death that the poet did not mean
to say he really went to Hell and Heaven? Our sons beat out their fathers’ brains very regularly.”

  Some fathers more than others, Lowell said to himself, thinking of Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior as he watched Holmes climb into the hackney cab.

  Lowell started hurriedly for Craigie House, wishing he had his horse. Crossing a street, he staggered backward with sudden vigilance at what he saw.

  The tall man with the worn face and bowler hat and checkered waistcoat—the same man Lowell had seen watching him intently while leaning against an elm tree on Harvard Yard, the very man he had witnessed approaching Bachi on campus—this man stood out at the busy marketplace. That might not have been enough to hold Lowell’s interest in the aftermath of Agassiz’s revelations, but the man was conversing with Edward Sheldon, Lowell’s student. In fact, Sheldon was not merely speaking but barking up at the man, as though he were ordering a recalcitrant domestic to perform some neglected chore.

  Sheldon then took his leave in a huff, wrapping himself tightly in his black cloak. Lowell could not at first decide whom to follow. Sheldon? He could always be found at the College. Lowell decided he had to pursue the unknown man, who was making his way into a knot of pedestrians and carriage traffic along the roundabout.

  Lowell ran through some market stands. A marketman pushed a lobster in Lowell’s face. Lowell swatted it away. A girl passing out handbills stuffed one into the pocket of Lowell’s coat skirt. “Flyer, sir?”

  “Not now!” cried Lowell. In another moment, the poet spotted the phantom across the way. He was stepping into a crammed horsecar and waiting for change from the conductor.

  Lowell ran for the back platform as the conductor rang his bell and as the vehicle started down the tracks toward the bridge. Lowell had no trouble catching up with the lumbering car by jogging along the tracks. He had just secured his hand on the stair railing of the rear platform when the conductor turned around.

  “Leany Miller?”

  “Sir, my name is Lowell. I must speak to one of your passengers.” Lowell edged one foot onto the raised back stairs as the horse team accelerated.

  “Leany Miller? Are you back to your tricks already?” The conductor produced a walking stick and started to hammer at Lowell’s gloved hand. “You shan’t blot our fair cars again, Leany! Not under my watch!”

  “No! Sir, my name is not Leany!” But the thrashing of the conductor made Lowell release his grip. This sent the poet feet first onto the tracks.

  Lowell shouted over the hoof falls and ringing bells to persuade the irate conductor of his innocence. But then it dawned on him that the ringing bell was coming from behind, where another horsecar was approaching. As he turned to see, Lowell’s pace was slowed and the horsecar ahead of him gained distance. With no alternative but to find his heels trampled by the oncoming horses, Lowell jumped off the tracks.

  At Craigie House at that moment, Longfellow led into his parlor one Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the late president and one of the three Dante students from Lowell’s 1864 term. Lowell had promised to meet them at the house after seeing Agassiz, but he was late, so Longfellow would start Lincoln’s interview himself.

  “Oh dear Papa!” Annie Allegra said as she skipped in, interrupting. “We are almost finished with the latest number of The Secret, Papa! Wouldn’t you like to see it in advance?”

  “Yes, darling, but I’m afraid I’m occupied at the moment.”

  “Please, Mr. Longfellow,” said the young man. “I’m in no hurry.”

  Longfellow took up the handwritten periodical “published” in installments by his three girls. “Oh, it seems one of the best you’ve ever done. Very fine, Panzie. I’ll read it from beginning to end this evening. Is this the page you drew up?”

  “Yes!” Annie Allegra answered. “This column, and this one. And this riddle too. Can you guess what it is?”

  “The lake in America as big as three states.” Longfellow smiled and ran down the rest of the page. A rebus and a featured article reviewing “My Eventful Yesterday (from breakfast to nighttime),” by A. A. Longfellow.

  “Oh, it’s lovely, dear heart.” Longfellow paused doubtfully over one of the last items on the list. “Panzie, it says here that you let a caller in just before sleep last night.”

  “Oh yes. I had come down for some milk, didn’t I. Did he say I made a good hostess, Papa?”

  “When was that, Panzie?”

  “During your club meeting, of course. You say you must not be disturbed during your club meeting.”

  “Annie Allegra!” Edith called down from the stairwell. “Alice wishes to revise the table of contents. You must bring your copy back up right away!”

  “She’s always the editor,” Annie Allegra complained, reclaiming the periodical from Longfellow. He trailed Annie into the hall and called up the staircase before she could reach the private office of The Secret—the bedroom of one of their older brothers. “Panzie dear, who was the caller last night that you mention?”

  “What, Papa? I’ve never seen him before yesterday.”

  “Could you remember what he looked like? Perhaps that should be added to The Secret. Perhaps you can interview him yourself to ask of his experience.”

  “How pretty that would be! A tall Negro man, very splendid-looking, in a cloth cloak. I told him to wait for you, Papa—I did. Did he not do as I said? He must have gotten bored just standing there and left to go home. Do you know his name, Papa?”

  Longfellow nodded.

  “Do tell me, Papa! I shall be able to interview him as you say.”

  “Patrolman Nicholas Rey, of the Boston police.”

  Lowell burst through the front door. “Longfellow, I have much to tell . . .” he stopped when he saw the pall on his neighbor’s face. “Longfellow, what’s happened?”

  Patrolman Rey had been shown into a severe sitting room earlier that day, left to stare out at groves of weather-beaten elms shading the Yard. A congregation of hoary men began to file into the hall, their knee-length black dress-coats and tall hats as uniform as monasterial habits.

  Rey entered the Corporation Room, from which the men were departing. When Rey introduced himself to President Reverend Thomas Hill, the president was in mid-conversation with a lingering member of the College government. This other man stopped cold at Rey’s mention of police.

  “Does this concern one of our students, sir?” Dr. Manning dropped his conversation with Hill. He revolved so his marble-white beard faced the mulatto officer.

  “I have a few questions for President Hill. Regarding Professor James Russell Lowell, actually.”

  Manning’s yellow eyes widened, and he insisted on remaining. He closed the double doors and sat down beside President Hill at the round mahogany table across from the police officer. Rey could see at once that Hill reluctantly allowed the other man to dominate.

  “I wonder how much you know about the project Mr. Lowell has been at work on, President Hill,” Rey began.

  “Mr. Lowell? He’s one of the finest poets and satirists in all New England, of course,” Hill replied with a lightening laugh. “‘The Biglow Papers.’ ‘The Vision of Sir Launfal.’ ‘A Fable for the Critics’—my favorite, I confess. Besides his North American Review duties. You know he was the first editor of the Atlantic? Why, I’m sure our troubadour is at work on any number of undertakings.”

  Nicholas Rey removed a slip of notepaper from his waistcoat pocket and rolled it between his fingers. “I am referring in particular to a poem I believe he has been helping to translate from a foreign language.”

  Manning steepled his crooked fingers together and stared, his eyes dropping to the folded paper in the patrolman’s hand. “My dear officer,” Manning said. “Has there been any sort of problem?” He looked remarkably as if he wanted the answer to be yes.

  Dinanzi. Rey studied Manning’s face, the way the elastic ends of the old scholar’s mouth seemed to twitch with anticipation.

  Manning passed a hand across the polished top of h
is scalp. Dinanzi a me.

  “What I mean to ask . . .” Manning began, trying another tack—he was less anxious now. “Has there been some trouble? Some complaint of a sort?”

  President Hill pinched the padding of his chin, wishing Manning had departed with the rest of the Corporation fellows. “I wonder if we should not send for Professor Lowell himself to talk this over.”

  Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create

  Se non etterne, e io etterno duro.

  What did it mean? If Longfellow and his poets had recognized the words, why would they go to lengths to keep it from him?

  “Nonsense, Reverend President,” Manning snapped. “Professor Lowell cannot be bothered over every trifle. Officer, I must insist that if there has been some trouble, you point it out to us at once, and we shall resolve it with all due speed and discretion. Understand, Patrolman,” Manning said, leaning forward genially. “There have begun attempts by Professor Lowell and several literary colleagues to bring certain literature into our city that does not belong. Its teachings will endanger the peace of millions of gentle souls. As a member of the Corporation, I am bound by duty to defend the good reputation of the university against any such blemishes. The motto of the College is ‘Christo et ecclesiae,’ sir, and we are beholden to live up to the Christian spirit of that ideal.”

  “The motto used to be ‘veritas,’ though,” President Hill said quietly. “Truth.”

  Manning shot him a sharp look.

  Patrolman Rey hesitated another moment, then returned the notepaper to his pocket. “I expressed some interest in the poetry Mr. Lowell has been translating. He thought you gentlemen might be able to direct me to a proper place for its study.”

  Dr. Manning’s cheeks streaked with color. “Do you mean to say this is a purely literary call?” he asked with disgust. When Rey did not respond, Manning assured the officer that Lowell wanted to make a fool of him—and the College—for sport. If Rey wished to study the Devil’s poetry, he could do so at the Devil’s feet.