Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  Rey passed through Harvard Yard, where cold winds were whistling around the old brick buildings. He felt foggy and confused about his purpose. Then a fire bell began to ring, ringing, it seemed, from every corner of the universe. And Rey ran.

  XI

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, poet and doctor, lit his slides of the insects with a candle positioned near one of his microscopes.

  He bent down and peered through the lens at a blowfly, adjusting the position of the subject. The insect was jumping and squirming as though filled with great anger at his watcher.

  No. It was not the insect.

  The microscope slide itself was trembling. Horse hooves thundered outside, exploding in an urgent stop. Holmes rushed to the window and pushed the drapes open. Amelia came in from the hall. With frightening gravity, Holmes ordered her to remain in place, but she followed him to the front door. The dark-blue figure of a burly policeman stood out against the sky as he pulled with all his strength to idle the stormy gray-flecked mares harnessed to a carriage.

  “Dr. Holmes?” he called from the driver’s box. “You are to come with me at once.”

  Amelia stepped forward. “Wendell? What’s this about?”

  Holmes was wheezing already. “’Melia, send a note to Craigie House. Tell them something has arisen, and to meet me at the Corner in an hour. I’m sorry to leave like this—can’t be helped.”

  Before she could protest, Holmes climbed into the police carriage and the horses broke into a stormy gallop, leaving a gust of dead leaves and dust. Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior peered down through the curtains of the third-floor sitting room and wondered what new nonsense his father was at now.

  A gray chill seized the air. The skies were opening. A second carriage galloped to a stop right at the spot the other had just relinquished. It was Fields’s brougham. James Russell Lowell flung open the door and asked Mrs. Holmes in an eruption of words to retrieve Dr. Holmes. She leaned forward just enough to make out the profiles of Henry Longfellow and J. T. Fields. “I don’t know where he has gone, I am sure, Mr. Lowell. But he was taken by the police. He directed me to send a note to Craigie House for you to meet at the Corner. James Lowell, I wish to know what business this is about!”

  Lowell looked around the carriage helplessly. On the corner of Charles Street, two boys were passing out handbills, crying out, “Missing! Missing! Take a flyer please. Sir. Ma’am.”

  Lowell thrust his hand into his sack-coat pocket, a hollow dread drying out his throat. His hand emerged with the crumpled handbill that had been stuffed into his pocket at the marketplace in Cambridge after he had seen the phantom with Edward Sheldon. He smoothed it against his sleeve. “Oh good Lord.” Lowell’s mouth quivered.

  “We’ve had patrolmen and sentinels all across the city since Reverend Talbot’s murder. But nothing was seen at all!” Sergeant Stoneweather cried out from the driver’s box as the twin flea-bitten horses careened away from Charles Street, muscles dancing. Every few minutes, he would hold out his rattle and twirl it.

  Holmes’s mind was swimming upstream under the sounds of the solid trot and crashing gravel under their wheels. The only comprehensible fact the driver had told him, or at least the only one that the frightened passenger had digested, was that Patrolman Rey had sent him to retrieve Holmes. At the harbor, the carriage halted abruptly. From there a police boat took Holmes out to one of the sleepy harbor islands, where stood unused, in blocky Quincy granite, a windowless castle now ruled by rats; there were empty ramparts and prone guns alongside drooping Stars and Stripes. Into Fort Warren they went, the doctor trailing the officer past a row of ghost-white policemen already on the scene: through a maze of rooms; down into a cold, pitch-dark stone tunnel; and finally into a hollowed-out storage chamber.

  The little doctor stumbled and nearly fell down. His mind jumped through time. When studying at the École de Médecine in Paris, young Holmes had seen the combats des animaux, a barbaric exhibition of bulldogs fighting each other, then being turned loose on a wolf, a bear, a wild boar, a bull, and a jackass tied to a post. Holmes knew even during the audacity of youth that he could never quite get the iron of Calvinism out of his soul, no matter how much poetry he wrote. There was still the temptation to believe the world was a mere trap for human sin. But sin, the way he saw it, was only the failure of an imperfectly made being to keep a perfect law. For his forefathers, the great mystery of life was this sin; for Dr. Holmes, it was suffering. He would have never expected to find so much of it. The dark memory, the inhuman cheers and laughter, stampeded into Holmes’s dazed mind now as he looked ahead.

  From the center of the room, hanging on a hook meant for storing bags of salt or some similarly pouched supplies, a face stared at him. Or, more accurately, it had been a face. The nose was sliced away cleanly, all the way from the bridge to the mustached lip, causing the skin to fold over. One of the man’s ears dangled deciduously from the side of the face, low enough, indeed, to brush against the rigidly arched shoulder. Both cheeks were sliced in such a manner that the jaw dropped to a permanent position of openness, as if speech might come at any moment; but instead, blood poured black from his mouth. A straight line of blood was drawn between the heavily indented chin and the reproductive organ of the man—and this organ, the only remaining confirmation of the monstrosity’s gender, was itself split horribly in half, a dissection inconceivable even to the doctor. Muscles, nerves, and blood vessels unfolded themselves in unvarying anatomical harmony and baffling disorder. The body’s arms hung helplessly at his sides, ending in dark pulps wrapped in flooded tourniquets. There were no hands.

  It was a moment before Holmes realized he had seen the decimated face before and another moment still until he recognized the mangled victim, from the pronounced dimple doggedly remaining on his chin. Oh no. The interval between the two conscious moments was an annihilation.

  Holmes took a step back, his shoe gliding through the vomit that had been deposited by the first discoverer of the scene, a vagrant looking for shelter. Holmes twisted himself into a nearby chair, positioned as though for the purpose of observing all this. He wheezed uncontrollably and did not notice that to the side of his feet was a vest of a distractingly bright color neatly folded atop hand-tailored white pants and, on the floor, scattered scraps of paper.

  He heard his name spoken. Patrolman Rey stood nearby. Even the air in the room seemed to tremble, to push the whole arrangement upside down.

  Holmes tumbled to his feet and shook his head dizzily at Rey.

  A plainclothes detective, broad-shouldered and with a strong beard, marched over to Rey and began yelling that he did not belong there. Then Chief Kurtz intervened and pulled the detective away.

  The doctor’s nauseated wheezing spell left him standing in a place closer to the twisted carnage than he would have wished, but before he could think to move away, he felt his arm brushed by something wet. It felt like a hand, but in fact it was a bloody, tourniqueted stump. Yet Holmes had not moved an inch—he was sure of that. He was too shocked to move. He felt as if he were in that type of nightmare where one can only pray to himself that he is dreaming.

  “Heaven help us, it’s alive!” screamed the detective, running off, his voice strangled by his tight hold on a rising flood from his stomach. Chief Kurtz, too, disappeared, shouting.

  As Holmes spun around, he looked directly into the blankly bulging eyes of the maimed, naked body of Phineas Jennison and watched the wretched limbs flail and jerk through the air. It was only a moment, really—only a fraction of a tithe of a hundredth of a second—until the body stopped cold, never to move again, yet Holmes never doubted what he had just witnessed. The doctor stood corpselike, his little mouth dry and twitching, his eyes blinking uncontrollably with unwanted moisture, and his fingers wriggling desperately. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes knew that Phineas Jennison’s movement had not been the voluntary motions of a living being, the willed actions of a sentient man. They were the delayed, mindless convulsions of uns
peakable death. But this knowledge made it no better.

  The dead touch having left his blood cold, Holmes was hardly conscious of drifting back over the harbor water or of the police carriage, called Black Maria, in which they rode alongside the body of Jennison to the medical college, where it was explained to him that Barnicoat, the medical examiner, had taken to bed with a terrible pneumonia in a fight for a higher salary and Professor Haywood could not at present be located. Holmes nodded as though he were listening. Haywood’s student assistant volunteered to assist Dr. Holmes in an autopsy. Holmes barely registered these urgent exchanges, he could barely feel his hands cut into the already impossibly shredded body in a dark upper chamber of the medical college.

  “Observe in me the contrapasso.”

  Holmes’s head snapped up as if a child had just cried for help. Reynolds, the student assistant, looked back, as did Rey and Kurtz and two other officers who had entered the room unnoticed by Holmes. Holmes looked again at Phineas Jennison, his mouth hanging open by the cut jaw.

  “Dr. Holmes?” the student assistant said. “All right, are you?”

  Just a burst of imagination, the voice he had heard, the whisper, the command. But Holmes’s hands trembled too much even to carve a turkey, and he had to leave the remainder of the operation to Haywood’s assistant as he excused himself. Holmes wandered into an alleyway off Grove Street, gathering his breath in bits and spurts. He heard someone approach him. Rey backed the doctor farther into the alleyway.

  “Please, I can’t speak at the moment,” Holmes said, his eyes fixed

  down.

  “Who butchered Phineas Jennison?”

  “How should I know!” Holmes cried. He lost his balance, inebriated with the mangled visions in his head.

  “Translate this for me, Dr. Holmes.” Rey pried open Holmes’s hand and placed a notepaper there.

  “Please, Patrolman Rey. We’ve already . . .” Holmes’s hands shook violently as he fumbled with the paper.

  “‘Because I parted persons so united,’” Rey recited from what he had heard the night before, “‘I now bear my brain parted. Thus observe in me the contrapasso.’ That is what we just saw, isn’t it? How do you translate contrapasso, Dr. Holmes? A countersuffering?”

  “There’s no exact . . . how did you . . .” Holmes pulled off his silk cravat and tried to breathe into the neck cloth. “I don’t know anything.”

  Rey continued: “You read of this murder in a poem. You saw it before it happened and did nothing to prevent it.”

  “No! We did all we could. We tried. Please, Patrolman Rey, I can’t . . .”

  “Do you know this man?” Rey removed the newspaper engraving of Grifone Lonza from his pocket and handed it to the doctor. “He jumped from the window at the police station.”

  “Please!” Holmes was suffocating. “No more! Go away now!”

  “Hey there!” Three medical college students, the rustic type Holmes referred to as his young barbarians, were passing the alleyway relishing cheap cigars. “You, moke! Get away from Professor Holmes!”

  Holmes tried to call out to them, but nothing made it out of the clutter in his throat.

  The swiftest barbarian collided into Rey with a fist aimed at the officer’s stomach. Rey grabbed the boy’s other arm and threw him down as softly as possible. The other two pounced on Rey just as Holmes’s voice returned. “No! No, boys! Be still! Get away from here at once! This is a friend! Scat!” They slid away meekly.

  Holmes helped Rey up. He needed to make amends. He took the newspaper and held up the page with the likeness. “Grifone Lonza,” he revealed.

  The glint in Rey’s eyes showed he was impressed and relieved. “Translate the note for me now, Dr. Holmes, please. Lonza spoke those words before he died. Tell me what they were.”

  “Italian. The Tuscan dialect. Mind you, you’re missing some words, but for someone with no training in the language, it is a remarkable enough transcription. Deenan see am . . . ‘Dinanzi a me . . . Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro’: Before me nothing was made if not eternal, and I will last eternally. ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’: O ye who enter, abandon all hope.”

  “Abandon all hope. He was warning me,” Rey said.

  “No . . . I don’t think so. He probably believed he was reading it over the gates to Hell, from what we know of his mental state.”

  “You should have told the police you knew something,” Rey cried.

  “It would have been a greater mess if we had!” Holmes shouted. “You don’t understand—you can’t, Patrolman. We’re the only ones who could ever find him! We thought we had—we thought he fled. Everything the police know is coal dust! This shall never stop without us!” Holmes tasted snow as he spoke. He dabbed his brow and neck, which were bathed in hot sweat from every pore. Holmes asked if Rey wouldn’t mind moving inside. He had a story to tell that Rey might not believe.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nicholas Rey sat in his empty lecture room.

  “The year was 1300. Midway through the journey of his life, a poet named Dante awoke in a dark wood, finding that his life had taken a wrong path. James Russell Lowell likes to say, Patrolman, that we all enter the dark wood twice—sometime in the middle of our lives and again when we look back upon it . . .”

  The heavy paneled door to the Authors’ Room opened an inch and the three men inside jumped from their seats. A black boot edged in probatively. Holmes could no longer think what he might find to shatter his safety behind closed doors. Gaunt and ashen, he shared the sofa with Longfellow, across from Lowell and Fields, hoping that a single nod would suffice to respond to each of their greetings.

  “I stopped home first before coming here. ’Melia nearly did not let me back out of the house, the way I look.” Holmes laughed nervously as a drop of moisture shimmied into the corner of his eye. “Did you gentlemen know that the muscles with which we laugh and cry lie side by side? My young barbarians are always so taken with that.”

  They waited for Holmes to begin. Lowell handed him the crumpled handbill announcing that Phineas Jennison was missing, offering many thousands in reward for his return. “Then you know already,” Holmes said. “Jennison’s dead.”

  He began an erratic, staccato narrative commencing with the police carriage’s surprise arrival at 21 Charles.

  Lowell, pouring his third glass of port, said, “Fort Warren.”

  “An ingenious choice on the part of our Lucifer,” said Longfellow. “I’m afraid the canto of the Schismatics could not be fresher to our minds. It hardly seems possible that it was only yesterday we translated it among our cantos. Malebolge is a wide field of stone—and described by Dante as a fortress.”

  Lowell said, “Once again we see that we face a uniquely brilliant scholar’s mind, strikingly equipped to transmit choice atmospheric details of Dante. Our Lucifer appreciates the exactness of Dante’s poetry. All is wild in Milton’s Hell, but Dante’s is separated into circles, drawn with well-pointed compasses. As real as our own world.”

  “Now it is,” Holmes said shakily.

  Fields did not want to hear a literary argument at the moment. “Wendell, you say that the police were stationed all around the city when the murder occurred? How could Lucifer not be seen?”

  “You would need the giant hands of Briareus and the hundred eyes of Argus to touch or see him,” Longfellow said quietly.

  Holmes gave them more. “Jennison was found by a drunkard who sometimes sleeps in the fort since it has been out of use. The vagrant was there on Monday, and all was normal. Then he returned on Wednesday, and there was the horrible display. He was too frightened to report it until the next day—I mean until today. Jennison was last seen on Tuesday afternoon, and his bed was not slept in that night. The police interviewed everyone they could find. A prostitute who was at the harbor says she saw someone come out from the fog at the harbor Tuesday evening. She tried to follow him, I suppose as obliged by her profession,
but got only so far as the church, and she did not see which direction he took.”

  “So Jennison was killed on Tuesday night. But the body was not discovered by the police until Thursday,” Fields said. “But, Holmes, you said that Jennison was still . . . is it possible that for such a time . . . ?”

  “For it . . . him . . . to have been killed on Tuesday yet be alive when I arrived this morning? For the body to be thrown into such convulsions that were I to drink every drop of Lethe I shall never be able to forget the sight of it?” Holmes asked despairingly. “Poor Jennison had been mutilated without hope of survival—that is to be sure—but cut and bound just enough to slowly lose blood, and with it his life. It was a good deal like inspecting what remains of fireworks on the fifth of July, but I could see that no vital organs had been punctured. There was careful craftsmanship amid such wild massacre, done by one very familiar with internal wounds, perhaps a doctor,” he said thickly, “with a sharp and large knife. With Jennison, our Lucifer perfects his damnation through suffering, his most perfect contrapasso. The movements I witnessed were not life, my dear Fields, but simply the nerves dying out in a final spasm. It was a moment as grotesque as any Dante could have envisioned. Death would have been a gift.”

  “But to survive for two days after the attack,” Fields insisted. “What I mean to say is . . . medically speaking . . . mercy, it’s not possible!”

  “‘Survival’ here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life—to be trapped in the gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to begin to describe the agony!”

  “Why punish Phineas as a Schismatic?” Lowell tried his best to sound detached, scientific. “Whom does Dante find punished in that infernal circle? Muhammad, Bertrand de Born—the malicious adviser who split apart king and prince, father and son, as once was done to Absalom and David—those who created internal rifts within religions, families. Why Phineas Jennison?”