Matthew Pearl - The Dante Club

“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 detective 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 fiance. He was far too occupied, with his daughters and with a new full-length poem, to find her a better gift.