Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

To be perfectly honest, it was difficult to keep from showing restlessness at Duponte's pace. I suppose I should have predicted it. Poe had recognized the requirements of an intelligence this sophisticated. In his tales, C. Auguste Dupin undertakes meticulous reviews of newspaper reports of the respective crimes before he ventures to resolve the cases.

But here was the difference, in the line of timing, between those literary tales and our undertaking: we were not alone. In the back of my mind at all times there stood the ghostly image of my kidnapper, Dupin. (Looking at that sentence, I see I must not write "Dupin" like that, or I shall think automatically of the C. Auguste Dupin of Poe's tales. Though it costs more in ink, "Claude Dupin" or "Baron Dupin" it shall be.) Sometimes, I even thought I saw his face, in the open window of a building, in a crowd on Baltimore Street, grinning cunningly at me. Had the Baron truly come to America, or had his announcement been a hoax to confuse his creditors in Paris?

I began to collect all the newspapers Duponte had requested. The imposing Baltimore Sun building had been the first iron structure in Baltimore. Although some judged the five-story edifice beautiful, that was the wrong sort of term. Impressive: that's what you thought while walking through the newspaper offices, the presses and steam engines whirling below in the basement, heating your boots; the cracking of telegraph machinery raining onto the ceiling from the second floor above. You were in the middle of something powerful, something demanded by the mass of our citizens.

Visiting also the Sun 's competitors, the Whig papers Patriot and the American, and those known for Democratic leanings, the Clipper and the Daily Argus, I gradually furnished Duponte with everything he had asked for from Baltimore. Then I started for the athenaeum to search for more from other states and any new reports about Poe.

I had not yet sent word to Hattie or Peter of my return. Auntie Blum's prohibition on Hattie writing to me had remained for the balance of my time in Paris. Peter, in his last few letters, had said little of Hattie or anything else of interest, but had alluded to certain sensitive matters of business he needed to speak with me about. I had a strong desire to commune with both of them. But it was as though the world outside my involvement with Duponte was suspended; as though I had been caught in a universe made only from Duponte's mind and his ideas and could not return to my usual place until the task at hand had been achieved.

Though I had been abroad for only a season, I noticed every change in Baltimore acutely. The city was growing bigger by the day, so it seemed. There was the rubble, ladders, joists, and tools of construction in every direction. Warehouses five stories high had overtaken old mansions. All that was brand-new, like the dust of the construction, cast a dull pallor over the city. There was something else, I know not what to call it. An unrest. A cheerless restiveness. This is how it seemed passing through the street.

At the reading room, I situated myself at a table with my memorandum book and opened a newspaper. I scanned the columns, stopping several times to study some interesting bit of news that had transpired in my absence. Then I saw it. My heart quickened with-surprise, exhilaration, fear. I could not have said which. I switched to the next paper, then another. There was not just a chance mention in the back sheets of one paper. No. There were mentions everywhere! Each paper featured some item about the death of Poe! There were many details yet to learn in the mysterious circumstances of the late poet's death, wrote the Clipper. "The prominent topic of conversation in literary circles, has been the death of that melancholy man Edgar A. Poe," said a weekly dollar magazine. "He was altogether a strange and fearful being."

The articles provided almost no factual details. Instead, each page was like a newsboy who shouted ad infinitum of some sensational hanging without saying how it had come to be.

I rushed to the front of the room, where the ancient clerk sat. Another patron of the reading room stood across from the desk, but as he was not yet addressing the clerk, I felt free to proceed.

"What is all of this about Edgar Poe? How has this come about?" I asked.

"Mr. Clark," replied the clerk, with a look of great interest, "you have been away quite a while!"

"My good sir, not many months ago," I said, "there was hardly any concern for the death of Edgar Poe. Now it forms a topic in the columns of every paper."

The clerk appeared ready to answer when we were interrupted.

"Yes, yes!"

We both turned to the other patron, whose spot I had taken. He was a bulky man with wiry eyebrows. He blew his large nose into a handkerchief before continuing.

"I have read of it, too," he said collegially, nudging me, as though we had shared snuff from the same box.

I looked at him blankly.

"Of Poe's death!" he said. "Isn't it wonderful?"

I studied this stranger. "Wonderful?"

"Certainly," he said suspiciously, "you think Poe a genius, sir?"

"Of the greatest degree!"

"Certainly you think there is no better prose written in the world than ‘The Gold-Bug'?"

"Only ‘A Descent into the Maelström,'" I replied.

"Well, then, it is wonderful, is it not, that it is finally receiving the attention it deserves from the editors of the newspapers? Poe's sad sorrowful death, I mean to say." He touched his hat to the clerk before leaving the reading room.

"Now, you say…what is it that has come to your attention?" the clerk asked me.

"The newspapers, why…" My thoughts were lost in the memory of what the other man had just said. I pointed to the door. "Who was that gentleman standing here before, who has just bid us farewell?"

The clerk did not know. I excused myself and hurried to the corner of Saratoga Street, but there was no sign of him.

I was so struck by these combined phenomena-the newspapers, the strange Poe enthusiast, the restiveness that seemed to have overtaken the city-that I did not initially direct much attention to a woman, with puffed cheeks and silver hair, on a bench not too far from the athenaeum. She was reading a book of poems by Edgar A. Poe ! Here, I should say, I was in command of a unique advantage of observation. Having purchased every volume of Poe's writings published, I could recognize the editions from great distances by small attributes of appearance, size, and engravings unique to each of them. I suppose my boast is lessened by the fact that there were not many collections. Poe did not like the few that were published. "The publishers cheat," he lamented in a letter to me. "To be controlled is to be ruined. I am resolved to be my own publisher." This would not happen, though. His own finances were in disarray, and the periodical press remained miserly in what they would pay him for his writings.

I stood over the woman's bench and watched her propping her finger to turn the dog-eared and spotted pages. For her part, she did not notice me, so rapt was she in the tale's final pages, the sublime collapse of "The Fall of the House of Usher." Before I realized it, she had closed the book with an air of deep satisfaction and scurried away as though fleeing from the crumbled ruins of the Ushers.

I decided to inquire to a nearby bookseller to see whether he had followed the new public discussion of Poe. It was one of the booksellers less likely to fill his shelves with cigar-boxes and portraits of Indians and anything else other than books, which had become a growing trend among these establishments since more people were buying books through subscriptions. I paused inside the front vestibule when I saw another woman, this one committing the most peculiar crime.