Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"You do not have to, sir," I said, and we shared a confidential nod. Of course I knew the room. I had spied on the Baron when he had stayed there.

I ascended the staircase with expectations racing through my blood.

I now remember Duponte as looking rather pale and haggard during our meeting, as though he had been all used up since we'd first met, or half used up at least. He was sitting serenely in the Baron Dupin's old hotel room when I came in. He didn't appear disappointed in having been discovered by me. I suppose I'd imagined that his remarkable composure would come unfurled by my surprise appearance, that he would speak in anger and threaten me if I seemed likely to expose him with the knowledge I now possessed of his whereabouts and his deeds. He had known the Baron would be killed in his place, and he had done nothing to prevent it.

He politely offered me a chair. The truth is, he was no less composed than ever. Then he pulled the bell for the hotel porter and told the man to take his trunk. I looked at him inquisitively.

"I had long given up on you," I said.

"It is time for me to leave," he replied.

"Now that I have come, you mean?" I asked.

He looked over at me. "You have seen the newspapers. All that has occurred in Paris."

I removed the pistol from my coat, studied it as though I had never seen it before, and placed it near him on a table.

"They might have followed me-if they are still looking for you, I mean. I have no desire to endanger you, Monsieur Duponte, despite the fact that I have been endangered by you. Keep this close to you."

"I do not know if they have still been looking for me, but if they have, they will not much longer."

I understood. The Baltimore Bonapartes had traveled to Paris in hopes of being rewarded for their loyalty to the new emperor. If they'd succeeded, they would have no motivation to continue supporting a search for Duponte, even though Madame Bonaparte and her rogues knew now they had failed to kill the real object of the assassination.

"The Baron is dead. You knew all along he would be killed in your place, and allowed it," I said. "You, monsieur, you have been the murderer."

A gong rang uproariously through the hotel. Duponte said, "Shall we dine? I have kept myself in my rooms too long. For the sake of fine food, I can afford the risk of being seen in public."

The vast dining room held approximately five hundred people sitting down to Chesapeake Bay shad. A colored "major-domo" signaled a gong to sound at each course, and all the covers on the next dishes were lifted simultaneously by waiters posted at each table.

At length I peered around to find a waiting assassin or perhaps a person who had known the Baron Dupin and would now think he's seeing his ghost. Yet, the tired countenance my companion now wore held as little resemblance to the Baron's vivid imitation of Duponte as to the old Duponte himself.

"No. I am not the murderer," Duponte now answered my earlier remark evenly. "I am not, but perhaps you are, you and the Baron, if you like. The Baron wished to disguise himself as me. Had I control over that? I tried to keep it away. I had remained in my rooms in Paris. But you needed ‘Dupin,' for your own purposes, Monsieur Clark. The Baron needed ‘Dupin' for his. Louis-Napoleon needed a ‘Dupin' to fear. Your arrival in Paris and your persistence made me accept that however much I remained dormant, the idea of ‘Dupin' would not. It was, as you said, something sort of immortal. "

Ah, but you are not Dupin! Never were!

It was at the end of my tongue. I was ready to seize the conversation and wrest it into my power. My thoughts were still buzzing with questions, though.

"When did you know? When did you know they were coming after you ? That those men, supported by the Bonapartes, wanted to murder you."

Duponte shook his head as if he did not know the answer.

"But on the Humboldt you knew there was the stowaway aboard, that villain Rollin. It started then. Monsieur, I am witness to it all!"

"No, I did not know there was a stowaway. Rather, I knew that if there was a stowaway there, they were hunting me."

"I suppose you guessed!" I exclaimed.

Duponte grinned just for a flash. He nodded.

I believe that day I felt the inner pain of Duponte that had made him the way he was when I'd first discovered his stationary life in Paris -alone, unintentional in all things. Everyone had believed that he possessed extraordinary powers after he had deciphered the Lafarge poisoning case. The young Duponte was an unnaturally confident man, and he himself began to believe that his abilities were of the almost supernatural nature that others wrote about in the newspapers. The stories about him enhanced his genius, perhaps even allowed for it in the first place. Yet I still could not answer whether genius had been created through the faith of the outside world. Readers often feel that the Dupin of Poe's tales finds the truth because he is a genius. Read again. This is only part of it. He finds the truth because someone has faith in him throughout-without his friend, there would be no C. Auguste Dupin.

"Each time I saw Louis-Napoleon review his troops," said Duponte, "I could see not the future, as the superstitious fool would believe about me, but the present-he was not content with being elected president. I suppose Prefect Delacourt warned him of me after I was seen out in Paris, with you, by his spies."

"The Baron told me of what happened to Catherine Gautier. Did Prefect Delacourt warn Louis-Napoleon because you were against him in that case? Did you wish vengeance on him by escaping him?"

"The prefect's actions were motivated by him having done me wrong, not my having wronged him. Our own past perversity, not that of others, sets us against someone for life. Prefect Delacourt was removed in favor of the new prefect for many reasons, I am certain-one of those may have been the failure to successfully find me before you and I left Paris together. De Maupas is not as astute a man as Delacourt, but he is far more competent, the two traits having no bridge between them-and, as a hobby, de Maupas is quite ruthless."

"Do you believe they learned they had murdered the Baron instead of you?"

Duponte now trimmed away a piece of Maryland ham, the second course brought by our waiter. "Perhaps. You certainly proclaimed the Baron's identity to the police loud enough, Monsieur Clark! It was never clear to the public, and is likely still unclear to those concerned in Paris. Chances are, the rogues who killed the Baron here heard of the truth. For their own sakes, they probably kept the fact secret from their superiors in Paris. Instead, their leader-that stowaway sent here to have charge over the mission-has quietly hunted me. However, I knew this would be the one place in Baltimore they would not look for me: the Baron's last rooms in the city. I came here during the Baron's lecture and have shown myself in the streets only now and then at night. The hotel believes I have come to mourn for my ‘brother,' the noble Baron, in peace, and has left me alone. Now that Louis-Napoleon has successfully surprised Paris into becoming an empire, and has presently held a successful vote to that effect, the stowaway surely is beginning to believe that their mistake concerning me and the Baron has passed its time of relevancy. If the American Bonaparte son succeeds in his mission, the stowaway may quietly stay in France for the rewards due to him before there are any further political changes. He and the American Bonapartes shall say nothing of their own errors, you can be sure. To Paris, I will be terribly dead."

I thought about the plain apartments of his hotel room upstairs and rehearsed in my mind what Duponte's life would have been like in the months since the Baron's murder, hiding here in plain view. He had books-in fact, the place was littered with books, as though a library had collapsed and disbursed itself at will. All of the titles seemed to relate to sediment, minerals, and general characteristics of rocks. In the darkness and gloom of these weeks, he had turned to the workings of geology. This struck me as horribly base and useless, that tomb of books and stones, and I was irritable that he was now implying a demand for my sympathies.