The Dante Club

by Matthew Pearl

  “They locked Rey up in the Tombs, Chief!” Stoneweather protested, blood streaming from his thick nose.

  Rey said, “Chief, I need to get to Cambridge without delay!”

  “Patrolman Rey . . .” Chief Kurtz said. “You’re supposed to be involved in my . . .”

  “Now, Chief! I must go!”

  “Let him free!” Kurtz bellowed to the detectives, who withdrew from Rey. “Every damned one of you scoundrels in my office! This moment!”

  Oliver Wendell Holmes constantly checked behind him for Teal. The way was clear. He had not been followed from the underground tunnels. “Longfellow . . . Longfellow,” he repeated to himself as he passed through Cambridge.

  Then in front of him he saw Teal leading Longfellow along the sidewalk. The poet was walking cautiously on the thinning snow.

  Holmes was so afraid at that moment that there was only one thing he could do to stop himself from falling faint. He had to act with no hesitation. So he yelled at the top of his lungs: “Teal!” It was a shriek that could bring out the whole neighborhood.

  Teal turned, completely alert.

  Holmes took the musket from his coat and pointed it with trembling hands.

  Teal did not seem to take note of the gun at all. His mouth stirred and he released a soaked orphan of the alphabet as he spat into the white blanket at his feet: F. “Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes shall be your first,” he said. “He shall be your first to punish for what you’ve done. He’ll be our example to the world.”

  Teal lifted Longfellow’s hand, in which he held the army revolver, and directed it at Holmes.

  Holmes moved closer, his musket pointed at Teal. “Don’t you move any further, Teal! I’ll do this! I’ll shoot you! Let Longfellow free and you can take me.”

  “This is punishment, Dr. Holmes. All of you who have abandoned God’s justice must now meet your final sentence. Mr. Longfellow, on my command. Ready . . . aim . . .”

  Holmes stepped forward solidly and raised his gun to the level of Teal’s neck. There wasn’t an ounce of fear in the man’s face. He was a permanent soldier; there was no one left beneath. There were no choices left in him—only the incorrigible zeal to do right that had passed like a current through all humanity at one time or another, usually fizzling rapidly. Holmes shivered. He did not know whether he had sufficient reserves of that same zeal to stop Dan Teal from the destiny he had caught himself in.

  “Fire, Mr. Longfellow,” Teal said. “You’ll fire now!” He put his hand on Longfellow’s and wrapped his fingers around the poet’s.

  Swallowing hard, Holmes moved his musket away from Teal and pointed it directly at Longfellow.

  Longfellow shook his head. Teal took a confused backward step, pulling his captive with him.

  Holmes nodded firmly. “I’ll shoot him down, Teal,” he said.

  “No.” Teal moved his head in rapid motions.

  “Yes I will, Teal! Then he’ll not have had his punishment! He’ll be dead—he’ll be ashes!” Holmes yelled, aiming the musket higher, at Longfellow’s head.

  “No, you can’t! He must take the others with him! This is not done!”

  Holmes steadied the gun at Longfellow, whose eyes were tightly shut in horror. Teal shook his head rapidly and for a moment seemed about to scream. Then he turned as though someone were waiting behind him and then turned to his left and then his right, and finally ran, ran with fury away from the scene. Before he was too far down the street, a shot rang out, and then another ringing burst hung in the air, mixed with a dying cry.

  Longfellow and Holmes could not help looking at the guns in their own hands. They followed the last sound. There on a bed of snow was Teal. Hot blood, cutting a rivulet through untouched white and unwilling snow, floated down from him. Two red spots gurgled in the man’s army blouse. Holmes knelt down and his brilliant hands went to work, feeling for life.

  Longfellow inched closer. “Holmes?”

  Holmes’s hands stopped.

  Over Teal’s body stood a crazy-eyed Augustus Manning, his body trembling, his teeth chattering and fingers shaking. Manning dropped his rifle into the snow at his feet. He motioned with his stiff beard back at his house and pointed.

  He tried to string his thoughts together. It was several minutes before anything coherent emerged. “The patrolman guarding my house left a few hours ago! Then just now I heard shouting and saw him through my window,” he said. “I saw him, his uniform . . . it all came to me, everything. He stripped my clothes, Mr. Longfellow, and, and . . . he tied me . . . took me without clothes . . .”

  Longfellow offered a consoling hand, and Manning sobbed into the poet’s shoulder as his wife came running outside.

  A police carriage halted behind the small circle they formed around the body. Nicholas Rey had his revolver out as he rushed over. Another carriage followed, carrying Sergeant Stoneweather and two more policemen.

  Longfellow took Rey’s arm, his eyes bright and questioning.

  “She’s fine,” Rey said before the poet could ask. “I have a patrolman watching her and her governess.”

  Longfellow nodded his gratitude. Holmes had grabbed a fence railing in front of Manning’s house to catch his breath.

  “Holmes, how wondrous! Perhaps you need to lie down inside,” Longfellow said with giddiness and fear. “Why, you’ve done it! But how . . .”

  “My dear Longfellow, I believe daylight will clear up all that lamplight has left doubtful,” Holmes said. He led the policemen through town to the church and the underground tunnels to rescue Lowell and Fields.

  XXI

  “Hold, hold, wait a minute,” spat out the Spanish Jew to his crafty mentor. “Then ain’t that mean, Langdon, that you’ll be the very last of the Boston Five?”

  “Burndy wasn’t one of the original five, my fair sheeny,” answered Langdon Peaslee omnisciently. “The Five were, bless each one of their souls as they drop into Hell below—and mine own, too, when I join them—Randall, who’s serving half-a-stretch in the Tombs; Dodge, who suffered from a nervous collapse and has retired out West; Turner, who was jammed by his ladybird of two and a quarter years—if that ain’t a lesson to not hitch yourself I haven’t heard one; and dear Simonds, holed up on the wharf side, too cup-shot to crack open a child’s jug.”

  “Oh it’s a shame. A shame,” moaned one of the men in Peaslee’s audience of four.

  “Say again?” Peaslee raised a limber eyebrow in reproach.

  “A shame to see him about to walk the ladder!” the cross-eyed thief continued. “Never met the man, no. But I’ve heard it said he was just about the best safecracker Boston’s ever had! He could knock over a safe with a feather, says they!”

  The other three listeners turned silent and, had they been standing rather than sitting at a table, might have shuffled their boots nervously on the rough shells littering the bar floor or wandered away at such a comment made to Langdon W. Peaslee. Under the circumstances, they took quiet swills of their drinks or absent drags on the unwrapped cigars that had been passed out by Peaslee.

  The door to the tavern swung open and a fly propelled itself into the smoky black compartments that divided the barroom and buzzed around Peaslee’s table. A small number of the fly’s brothers and sisters had survived the winter and a smaller number still had thrived in certain sections of the woods and forests of Massachusetts and would continue to do so, though Professor Louis Agassiz of Harvard, had he known, would have declared it preposterous. With a darting glance, Peaslee noticed the strange flaming red eyes and large bluish body. He swatted it away, and at the other end of the bar, some men made sport of chasing it.

  Langdon Peaslee reached for his strong punch, the special drink of the house at the Stackpole Tavern. Peaslee did not have to adjust his position in his hardwood chair to reach the drink with his left hand, even though the chair was pushed out a fair distance from the table so that he could adequately address his crooked semicircle of apostles. Peaslee’s arachnid arms allowed him
to reach many things in life without the need to budge.

  “Take my word for it, my good fellas, that our Mr. Burndy”—Peaslee hissed the name through the large gaps in his large teeth—“was merely the loudest safecracker the bean city’s ever seen.”

  The audience accepted the defusing jest with a raising of their glasses and a peal of exaggerated laughter, fertilizing Peaslee’s already excessive grin. The laughing Jew stopped cold with a strained glance over the rim of his glass.

  “What is it, Yiddisher?” Peaslee twisted his neck to see a man standing over him. Without a word, the minor thieves and pickpockets around Peaslee rose and veered off to separate corners of the bar, leaving behind aimless clouds of stale smoke to add to the windowless bar’s boiling atmosphere. Only the cross-eyed crook remained.

  “Hike!” Peaslee hissed. The remaining cohort disappeared into the rest of the crowd.

  “Now, now,” Peaslee said, looking his visitor up and down. He snapped for the barmaid, barely garbed in a low-necked dress. “Hob or nob?” the safecracker asked with a shining grin.

  Nicholas Rey dismissed the server pleasantly with a motion of his hand as he took a seat across from Peaslee.

  “Oh come now, Patrolman. Blow a cloud then.”

  Rey refused the extended long-leaf cigar.

  “What’s with the Friday face? These are bully times!” Peaslee refreshed his grin. “See here, the fellas were about to adjourn to the back to buck the tiger. We have it every other night, you see. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you joining us. That is, unless you don’t have enough beans for an ante.”

  “I thank you, Mr. Peaslee, but no,” Rey said.

  “Well.” Peaslee put a finger to his lips, then leaned forward, as if to exchange a confidence. “Don’t think, Patrolman,” he began, “you haven’t been shadowed. We know you were after some goose who tried to kill that Harvard mooseface Manning, someone you seem to believe had something to do with the other Burndy murders.”

  “That’s right,” Rey said.

  “Well, fortunate for you, it didn’t come out,” Peaslee said. “You do know these are the fattest rewards since Lincoln was done in, and I won’t be put in a hole for my bit. When Burndy walks the ladder, my quota’ll be thick enough to choke a hog, as I told you, Rey old man. We’re still watching.”

  “You’ve done Burndy in wrongly, but you don’t have to watch for me, Mr. Peaslee. If I had the evidence to free Burndy, I would have brought it in already, whatever the consequences. And you wouldn’t get the rest of your reward.”

  Peaslee raised his glass of punch thoughtfully at the mention of Burndy. “It’s a nice story those lawyers make, ’bout Burndy hating Judge Healey for freeing too many slaves before the Fugitive Slave Act and quashing Talbot and Jennison for cheating him out of money. He’s met his Waterloo, oh yes. And may he dance when he dies.” He took a long sip, then became stern. “They say the governor’s calling for the detective bureau dismantled after your row at the station, and that the aldermen are looking to replace old Kurtz and permanently demote you. I’d cap your luck, run while you can, my dear Lily White. You’ve made many enemies of late.”

  “I’ve made some friends, too, Mr. Peaslee,” Rey said after a pause. “As I say, you don’t have to worry about me. There’s someone else, though. That’s why I’ve come.”

  Peaslee’s wiry brows pushed up his tan derby.

  Rey turned around in his seat and looked at an awkwardly tall man sitting on a stool at the bar counter. “That man’s been asking questions all around Boston. Seems he thinks there’s some other explanation to the murders than what your side has presented. Willard Burndy had nothing to do with it, according to him. His questions could cost you the rest of your share of the reward, Mr. Peaslee—every cent.”

  “Dusty business. What do you suggest be done about it?” Peaslee asked.

  Rey thought about it. “Were I in your position? I would convince him to take leave of Boston for a long while yet.”

  At the counter of the Stackpole bar, Simon Camp, the Pinkerton detective assigned to cover metropolitan Boston, reread the unsigned note that had been sent to him—by Patrolman Nicholas Rey—telling him to wait there at that time for an important rendezvous. From his stool, he was looking around with increasing frustration and anger at the crooks dancing with the cheap prostitutes. After ten minutes, he put some coins down and stood to get his coat.

  “Now, where you loping off to so soon?” the Spanish Jew said as he grabbed his hand and shook.

  “What?” Camp asked, throwing off the Jew’s hand. “Who in the Lord’s name are you swablers? Stand back before I grow warm.”

  “Dear stranger.” Langdon Peaslee’s grin was a mile wide as he pushed apart his comrades like the Red Sea and moved to stand in front of the Pinkerton detective. “I think it best you step into the back room and join us for some bucking the tiger. We’d hate to hear of visitors to our city ever growing lonely.”

  Days later, J. T. Fields was pacing an alleyway in Boston at the hour that Simon Camp had specified. He counted the coins in his chamois bag, ensuring that the hush money was all there. He was checking his pocket watch once again when he heard someone approach him. The publisher involuntarily held his breath and reminded himself to stay strong, then he hugged his bag to his chest and turned to face the mouth of the alley.

  “Lowell?” Fields exhaled.

  James Russell Lowell’s head was wrapped in a black bandage. “Why, Fields, I . . . why are you . . .”

  “See here, I was just . . .” Fields stammered.

  “We agreed not to pay off Camp, to let him do as he would!” Lowell said when he noticed Fields’s bag.

  “So why have you come?” Fields demanded.

  “Not to stoop to paying his price under the cover of darkness!” Lowell said. “Well, you know I don’t have that sort of cash at hand, in all events. I’m not certain. Just to give him a large piece of my mind, I suppose. We couldn’t let that devil drag Dante down without a fight. I mean . . .”

  “Yes,” Fields agreed. “But perhaps we shouldn’t mention to Longfellow . . .”

  Lowell nodded. “No, no, we shan’t mention this to Longfellow.”

  Twenty minutes passed as they waited together. They watched the men on the street using staffs to light the lamps. “How has your head been feeling this week, my dear Lowell?”

  “As if it were broken in two and awkwardly mended,” he said, and laughed. “But Holmes says the soreness will be banished in a week or two more. Yours?”

  “Better, much better. You’ve heard the tidings of Sam Ticknor?”

  “That last-year’s jackass?”

  “Opening a publishing house with one of his wretched brothers—in New York! Wrote me that he’ll run us out of business from Broadway. What would Bill Ticknor have thought of his sons trying to destroy the house with his own name, I wonder.”

  “Let those ghouls try! Oh, I shall write you my best poem yet this year—just for that, my dear Fields.

  “You know,” Lowell said after some more waiting, “I’d wager a pair of gloves that Camp has come to his senses and given up his little game. I think such a heavenly moon and quiet stars as these are enough to drive sin back to Hell again.”

  Fields lifted his bag, laughing at its weight. “Say, if that’s right, why not use a little of this bundle for a late supper at Parker’s?”

  “With your money? What holds us back!” Lowell started walking ahead and Fields called after him to wait. Lowell didn’t.

  “Hold now! Poor obesity! My authors never wait for me,” Fields grumbled. “They should have more respect for my fat!”

  “You want to lose some girth, Fields?” Lowell called back. “Ten percent more to your authors, and I guarantee you’ll have less fat to complain of!”

  In the months to follow, a new crop of nickel crime magazines, loathed by J. T. Fields for their deteriorating influence on an eager public, reveled in the story of the minor Pinkerton detectiv
e Simon Camp, who, soon after fleeing Boston following a long interview with Langdon W. Peaslee, was indicted by the attorney general for the attempted extortion of several top government officials over war secrets. For the three years preceding his conviction, Camp had pocketed tens of thousands of dollars by extorting persons involved in his cases. Allan Pinkerton refunded the fees of all his clients who had worked with Camp, although there was one, a Dr. Augustus Manning of Harvard, who could not be located, even by the country’s foremost private detective agency.

  Augustus Manning resigned from the Harvard Corporation and moved his family away from Boston. His wife said he had not spoken more than a few words at a time for months; some said he had moved to England, others heard he had gone to an island in unexplored seas. An ensuing shake-up in the Harvard administration precipitated the unexpected election of the newest overseer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an idea hatched by the philosopher’s publisher, J. T. Fields and endorsed by President Hill. Thus ended a twenty-year exile from Harvard for Mr. Emerson, and the poets of Cambridge and Boston were grateful to have one of their own inside the College boardroom.

  A private printing of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Inferno was produced before the close of 1865 and received gratefully by the Florentine Committee in time for the year’s final commemoration of Dante’s six-hundredth birthday. This raised expectations surrounding Longfellow’s translation, which was heralded already as “choicely good” in the highest literary circles of Berlin, London, and Paris. Longfellow presented one advance edition to each member of his Dante Club, and to other friends. Though he didn’t mention the subject very often, he forwarded the last one as an engagement present to London, where Mary Frere, a young lady of Auburn, New York, had moved to be near her fiancé. He was far too occupied, with his daughters and with a new full-length poem, to find her a better gift.