The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  When Rey was not transporting Chief Kurtz to interviews with acquaintances of the deceased or to meetings with station captains, he would steal some free minutes to remove the bits from his trouser pocket and sprinkle the letters over a table. Sometimes he could make words, and he kept track in a memorandum book of the phrases that arose. He closed his gold-tinted eyes tight, opening them to double size with the unconscious expectation that the letters would string together on their own to explain what had happened or what should be done, like the dial-plates of the spiritualists, which, it was claimed, spelled out the words of the dead when operated by a sufficiently talented medium. One afternoon, Rey placed the station-house leaper’s final words, at least as the patrolman had transcribed them, amid the new jumble of letters, hoping that the two lost voices would in some way commune.

  He had a favorite grouping for the loose bits of letters: I cant die as im . . . Rey always stalled at that point, but wasn’t there something to it? He tried one of the others: Be vice as I . . . What to do with that torn piece with g or q?

  Central Station was flooded daily with letters of such spirited conviction that they might have been thought to clear up all questions had they shown the smallest trace of credibility. Chief Kurtz assigned Rey the task of reviewing this correspondence, in part to get him away from the “litter.”

  Five people claimed to have seen Chief Justice Healey at the Music Hall a week after the discovery of his wasted body. Rey tracked down the thunderstruck fellow in question by his season-ticket seat number: He was a Roxbury carriage painter with a mass of untamable curls somewhat similar to the judge’s. An anonymous letter informed the police that Reverend Talbot’s murderer, an acquaintance and distant relative of the letter writer, had boarded a ship to Liverpool in a surtout borrowed without permission and, there, had been dealt with foully, never to be heard from again (with the coat, presumably, never to be reunited with the rightful wearer). Another note claimed that a woman had spontaneously confessed at a tailor’s shop to having committed the murder of Judge Healey in a jealous rage and had then escaped by train to New York, where she might be found in one of four listed hotels.

  When Rey tore open an anonymous note comprising of two sentences, however, he felt the quickening sensation of discovery: It was a fine-grade stationery and the message was written in a blocky, broken penmanship—a mild disguise for the writer’s true hand:

  Dig deeper under the Reverend’s hole. Something missed beneath his head.

  The note was signed “Respectfully yours, a citizen of our city.”

  “Something missed?” Kurtz responded mockingly.

  “There’s nothing to prove here, no story to invent,” said Rey with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. “The writer simply has something to tell. And, remember: The newspaper accounts have varied widely as to what happened to Talbot. Now we must use that to our advantage. This person knows the true circumstances, or at least that Talbot was buried in a hole, and that he was upside down. Look here, Chief.” Rey read aloud and pointed: “‘Beneath his head.’”

  “Rey, the number of problems I have! The Transcript’s found someone at City Hall to confirm that Talbot was found with his clothes in a pile, just like Healey. They’re printing it tomorrow and the whole blasted city will know we’re dealing with a single killer. Then people won’t blame ‘crime’—they’ll want someone’s name.” Kurtz turned back to the letter. “Well, why would the letter not say what ‘something’ we might find in Talbot’s hole then? And why wouldn’t your citizen walk up to our station house and tell me to my face what he knows?”

  Rey did not answer. “Do let me have a look in the vault, Chief Kurtz.”

  Kurtz shook his head. “You’ve heard the heat we’ve taken from every cursed pulpit in the Commonwealth, Rey. We can’t go digging up the Second Church’s vault to pull out imagined mementos!”

  “We left the hole intact in the event there was further observation required,” Rey argued.

  “Just so. I don’t want to hear another word about it, Patrolman.”

  Rey nodded, but his expression of certainty did not diminish. Chief Kurtz’s stubborn refusals could not compete with Rey’s unwavering silent disapproval. Later in the afternoon, Kurtz snatched his greatcoat. He walked by Rey’s desk and ordered, “Patrolman: Second Unitarian Church, in Cambridge.”

  A new sexton, a merchantlike gentleman with red whiskers, ushered them inside. He explained that his predecessor, Sexton Gregg, had become increasingly distraught since his discovery of Talbot’s body and had resigned to look after his health. The sexton searched clumsily for the keys to the underground vaults.

  “There’d better be something to this,” Kurtz warned Rey when the stench of the vault reached out to them.

  There was.

  After only a few strokes with a long-handled shovel, Rey unearthed the pouch of money exactly where Longfellow and Holmes had reburied it.

  “One thousand. Exactly one thousand, Chief Kurtz.” Rey counted out the money under the glow of a gas lantern. “Chief,” Rey said, having realized something remarkable. “Chief Kurtz, the Cambridge station house—the night we found Talbot’s body. Do you remember what they told us? The reverend had reported his safe robbed the very day before the murder.”

  “How much had been taken from his safe?”

  Rey nodded to the money.

  “One thousand.” Kurtz gasped in disbelief. “Well, I don’t know whether this helps us or confounds the matter even more. I’ll be damned if even Langdon W. Peaslee or Willard Burndy would blow a minister’s safe one night and butcher him the next and, if they did, leave the money behind for Talbot to enjoy from the grave!”

  It was then that Rey almost stepped on a bouquet of flowers, the token left there by Longfellow. He picked them up and showed them to Kurtz.

  “No, no, I haven’t let anyone else in these vaults,” the new sexton assured them back in the vestry. “Been closed off since the . . . occurrence.”

  “Then maybe your predecessor did. Do you know where we can find Mr. Gregg?” Chief Kurtz asked.

  “Right here. Every Sunday, faithful as could be,” the sexton replied.

  “Well, when he’s here next, I want that you ask him to call on us immediately. Here’s my card. If he permitted someone inside there, we shall have to know.”

  Back at the station house, there was much to be done. The Cambridge patrolman to whom Reverend Talbot had reported the robbery had to be interviewed again; they had to trace the legal-tender notes through the banks to confirm they originated from Talbot’s safe; Talbot’s Cambridge neighborhood would be scoured to find any information regarding the night his safe was broken into, and an expert in handwriting would analyze the note that provided the information.

  Rey could see that Kurtz was feeling genuine optimism, probably for the first time since he’d been told of Healey’s death. He was almost giddy. “That’s what it takes to be a good policeman, Rey—a touch of instinct. It’s all we have sometimes. It fades with each disappointment in life and career, I’m afraid. I would have thrown that note out with the other rubbish, but not you. So tell me. What should we do that we haven’t?”

  Rey smiled gratefully.

  “There must be something. Come, come.”

  “You won’t like what I say, Chief,” Rey responded.

  Kurtz shrugged. “As long as it’s not more of your damned scraps of paper.”

  Rey generally refused favors, but there was something for which he longed. He walked to the window framing the trees outside the station and looked out. “There’s a danger we can’t see out there, Chief, that someone who was brought into our station house felt more strongly than his own life. I want to know who died on our courtyard.”

  Oliver Wendell Holmes was happy to have a task suited to him. He was neither entomologist nor naturalist and was interested in the scientific study of animals only insofar as it revealed more about humans’ inner workings, and more specifically his own. But within
two days of Lowell’s dropping off the hodgepodge of crushed insects and maggots, Dr. Holmes had assembled every book on insects he could find from Boston’s best scientific libraries and began extensive studies.

  In the meantime, Lowell arranged a meeting with the Healeys’ maid, Nell, at her sister’s home on the outskirts of Cambridge. She told him what it had been like to find Chief Justice Healey, how he had seemed to want to talk and could only gurgle before he died. She had fallen to her knees at the sound of Healey’s voice, as though touched by some divine power, and crawled away.

  As for the discovery at Talbot’s church, the Dante Club had decided that the police must uncover for themselves the money buried in the vault. Holmes and Lowell were both against this: Holmes from fear and Lowell from a sense of possessiveness. Longfellow urged his friends not to view the police as rivals, even though knowledge of their activities by the police would be perilous. They were all working toward one end: stopping the murders. Only, the Dante Club was working primarily with what they could find literarily and the police with what they could find physically. So after reburying the pouch with its invaluable one thousand dollars, Longfellow had composed a simple note addressed to the office of the chief of police: Dig deeper . . . They hoped someone at the police station with a keen eye would see it and understand just enough, and perhaps discover something more of the murder.

  When Holmes had finished his study of the insects, Longfellow, Fields, and Lowell met at his house. Though Holmes could see all guests to 21 Charles Street arrive through the window of his study, he liked the formality of having his Irish maid settle visitors in the little reception room and then carry up a name to him. Holmes would then scamper down the stairs.

  “Longfellow? Fields? Lowell? Are you here? Come up, come up! Let me show you what I have been at work on.”

  The exquisite study was more orderly than most authors’ rooms, with books stretching from floor to ceiling, many—considering Holmes’s height—accessible only by the sliding ladder he had built. Holmes showed them his latest contrivance—a reaching bookcase at the corner of his desk so that one did not have to stand to retrieve something.

  “Very good, Holmes,” said Lowell, who was looking toward the microscopes.

  Holmes prepared a slide. “Up to the time of the living generation, nature had kept over all her inner workshops the forbidding inscription NO ADMITTANCE. If any prying observer ventured to spy into the mysteries of her glands and canals and fluids, she covered up her work in blinding mists and bewildering halos, like the deities of old.”

  He explained that the specimens were maggot-producing blowflies, just as Barnicoat, the city coroner, had pronounced the day the body was discovered. This type of fly lays its eggs on dead tissue. The eggs then became maggots that eat the decomposing flesh, nourishing themselves into flies and beginning the cycle again.

  Fields, rocking in one of Holmes’s chairs, said, “But Healey cried out before he died, according to that maid. That means he was still alive! Though I suppose only barely hanging to a thread of life. Four days after he was attacked . . . and he was filled with maggots in every crevice of his body.”

  Holmes would have been revolted at the thought of such suffering had the idea not been so fantastic. He shook his head. “Fortunately for Judge Healey and humanity, it can’t be. Either there were only a handful of maggots, four or five perhaps, on the surface of the head wound, where there would have been some dead tissue, or he was not alive. With the maggots feeding inside him in such mass quantities as has been reported, all the tissue would be dead. He would be dead.”

  “Perhaps the maid is given to phantasms,” Longfellow suggested, seeing Lowell’s defeated expression.

  “If you could see her, Longfellow,” Lowell said. “If you could see the flash in her eyes, Holmes. Fields, you were there!”

  Fields nodded, though he was now less sure. “She saw something terrible, or thought she did.”

  Lowell crossed his arms disapprovingly, “She is the only one who knows, for God’s sake. I believe her. We must believe her.”

  Holmes spoke with authority. His findings at least provided some order—some reason—to their activities. “I’m sorry, Lowell. She certainly saw something horrible: Healey’s condition. But this—this is science.”

  Later, Lowell took the horsecars back to Cambridge. He was strolling under a scarlet canopy of maples, frustrated with his inability to prevent the dismissal of the chambermaid’s story, when Phineas Jennison, Boston’s great merchant prince, glided by in his plush brougham coach. Lowell frowned. He was not in the frame of mind for company, though part of him craved the distraction.

  “Hullo! Give me your hand!” Jennison extended his well-tailored sleeve out the window as his sleek bay horses slowed to a leisurely gait.

  “My dear Jennison,” Lowell said.

  “Oh, how good it feels! The hand of an old friend,” Jennison said with elaborate sincerity. Though not possessing Lowell’s viselike grip, Jennison shook hands in the rather avid way of the Boston businessman, something akin to shaking up a bottle. He stepped down and knocked on the green door of the silver-mounted chaise for his driver to stay put.

  Jennison’s shining white overcoat was loosely buttoned, revealing a dark crimson frock coat over a green velvet waistcoat. He looped his arm through Lowell’s. “On your way to Elmwood?”

  “Guilty, my lord,” replied Lowell.

  “Tell me, has the accursed Corporation let you be already about that Dante class of yours?” Jennison asked, with serious concern slashing his strong brow.

  “I suppose they have tapered off a bit, thankfully,” Lowell said, sighing. “I only hope they do not mistake the fact that I have suspended my Dante class as a victory for their side.”

  Jennison stopped in the middle of the street, his face paling. He spoke in a small voice, holding his dimpled chin in the palm of his hand. “Lowell? Is this the Jemmy Lowell who was banished to Concord for disobedience when he was at Harvard? What of standing up to Manning and the Corporation, on behalf of the future geniuses of America? You must, or they shall . . .”

  “It has nothing to do with the confounded fellows,” Lowell assured him. “I have something I must sort out at the moment that demands my complete attention, and I cannot be bothered with seminar classes. I am lecturing only.”

  “A domestic cat will not answer when one wants a Bengal tiger!” Jennison made a fist. He was satisfied with the rather poetic image.

  “’Tis not my line, Jennison. I know not how you manage men like the fellows. You deal with idlers and dunces at every turn.”

  “Is there any other kind in business?” Jennison flashed his enormous smile. “Here is the secret, Lowell. You call up a row until you get what you’re after—that’s the ticket. You know what’s important, what must be done, and everything else may go to the devil!” he added with zeal. “Now, if I could be of any help in your fight, any help at all . . .”

  Lowell was tempted for a brief second to tell Jennison everything and plead for help, though he did not know why exactly. The poet was terrible with finances, always shuffling his money between unwise investments, so to him, successful businessmen seemed to possess supernal powers.

  “No, no, I have recruited more help for my fights than good conscience should allow, but I thank you all the same.” Lowell patted the rich London broadcloth of the millionaire’s shoulder. “Besides, young Mead shall be grateful for the holiday from his Dante.”

  “Every good battle needs a strong ally,” Jennison said, disappointed. Then it seemed as if he wanted to reveal something he could not. “I have observed Dr. Manning. He will not stop his campaign, and so you must never stop. Do not trust what they tell you. Remember that I said that.”

  Lowell felt a black cloud of irony after speaking about the class he had fought to preserve for so many years. He felt the same awkward confusion later that day when he was passing through the white wooden gates of Elmwood, on his way to Long
fellow’s.

  “Professor!”

  Lowell turned to see a young man, in the collegian’s standard black frock coat, running, fists up, elbows to his side, mouth stern. “Mr. Sheldon? What are you doing here?”

  “I must speak with you at once.” The college freshman was panting from exertion.

  Longfellow and Lowell had spent the last week compiling lists of all their former Dante students. They could not use the official Harvard records, since that would risk attracting attention. This was a particularly taxing development for Lowell, who kept loose records and remembered only a handful of names at any given time. Even a student from a few years earlier might receive the warmest greeting upon meeting Lowell on the streets. “My dear boy!” and then, “Your name again?”

  Fortunately, his two current students, Edward Sheldon and Pliny Mead, were immediately removed from any possibility of suspicion, as Lowell had been teaching them in his Dante seminar at Elmwood at the very time (by their best calculations) of Reverend Talbot’s murder.

  “Professor Lowell. I received this notice in my box!” Sheldon shoved a slip of paper into Lowell’s hand. “A mistake?”

  Lowell glanced at it indifferently. “No mistake. I have some things to tend to which necessitate freeing my time, only for a week or so, I hope. I have no doubt you are occupied enough to put Dante out of your mind for a spell.”

  Sheldon shook his head in dismay. “But what of all you always say to us? What of a new circle of admirers finally widening to relieve Dante’s wandering? You have not yielded to the Corporation? You have not tired of the study of Dante, Professor?” the student pressed.

  Lowell felt himself shiver at the question. “I know not the thinking man who can tire of Dante, my young Sheldon! Few men have meaning enough in themselves to penetrate a life and work of such depth. I prize him more as man, poet, and teacher every day. He gives hope, in our darkest hour, of a second chance. And until I meet Dante himself in the first purgatorial terrace above, upon my honor I shall never give an inch to the blasted tyrants of the Corporation!”