Marc Olden: Poe must die

Poe watched the child-prostitute leave with a burly man large enough to pick her up and carry the tiny whore under his arm.

“You wanted proof, poet, now goddam you, look !” Sproul’s liquored voice was as savage as a meat axe.

Poe leaned over and looked under the table. Light from the lamp stabbed his eyes and he felt its heat. He flinched at the sight of Lowery’supside-down and leering face, the man’s beard shiny with juice from his oysters. “ ’Ere Mr. Poet, you hold the lamp.” A gigantic muddy paw shoved the lamp at Poe, who took it. Poe’smouth was dry and the anxiety he’d always suffered from made it hard to breathe.

Lowery was on his knees, fingers fumbling with a stained, brown sack. “Feast yer eyes, Mr. Poet.”

The ghoul held up the head of Rachel’s husband with bits of ice gleaming in its long black hair and on its pale skin. The opened eyes glittered like polished glass and stared at Poe who used every ounce of willpower not to scream.

He sat up in his chair, forcing himself to breathe deeply, to forget the smell of the head, the smell that the ice could not mask.

Sproul stroked his deringer. “Gets what you pay for, providin’ you pays for it.”

Poe closed his eyes, then opened them and tried to concentrate on colored prints of George Washington and an American eagle hanging on the grimy wall in semi-darkness behind Tom Lowery. It had been at his feet all the time. He wanted to leap from his chair and lay his cane across Sproul’s grinning face.

Sproul said, “Pour a glass for the poet, Mr. Pier. I think he needs it.”

Tom Lowery laughed.

Poe had tried, God he had tried. He hadn’t had a drink in four days, not since Rachel had contacted him and asked his help. He owed her his best effort and that meant staying sober, staying healthy, staying sane. But it had been at his feet all the time!

Poe’s trembling hands brought the glass of gin to his lips.

A disgusted Pierce James Figg wanted to kick Mr. E. A. Poe in the head and be done with it.

Deep in drunken sleep, Poe lay curled on top of old newspapers in a dark corner of a cold, damp cellar, his slight body just inches from Figg’s feet. The boxer was seeing him for the first time, and the man was nothing but a gin-soaked pile of rags; Figg would not piss on Mr. Poe if each and every rag was in flames. Figg, squinting in the meager candlelight, was angry and disappointed. Travelling across an ocean to talk to, God help us, a lushington with a billy in his hole, a drunkard with a handkerchief in his mouth, his skinny little body wrapped in black clothing that had seen better days.

Hungry and exhausted, on edge because of the man he was stalking, Figg had come directly from the steamer Britannia in New York harbor to the New York Evening Mirror, the newspaper which currently employed Mr. Poe. In Figg’s humble opinion, anyone dumb enough to employ Mr. Poe had a pudding for a brain.

It was dawn, still snowing and in a twenty-five cent cab ride from the docks, Figg had seen and smelled enough of New York to last him a lifetime. A filthy city of wooden houses and muddy streets, with garbage, dead animals and ashes from fireplaces in the streets and rats and pigs feasting on it all. Gaslight threw beautiful long shadows on the snow, but you forgot that when you passed a slaughterhouse and heard cows and sheep crying out for their lives and you smelled their blood and dried guts, a stench which even the winter cold could not hide. Damn New York. Find Jonathan quickly, kill him, then leave this city of dirt and ice.

“What the ‘ell was he mutterin’ about when I come down them stairs?” Figg spoke to Josiah Rusher, an Evening Mirror copyboy and the only other person in the cellar.

“Oh that, sir. ‘Bird and bug, bird and bug’.”

Figg’s soft voice took on a sudden harshness. “I ‘eard it. I just wants to know what the ‘ell he means by it.” He snapped the words at the boy like a whip, wiping the smile from his face.

“He is speaking of his creative works, sir. Bird is ‘The Raven,’ a poem of some magnificence and bug is ‘The Gold Bug,’ a highly unusual work of detection. Public response to both has been most favorable, but I have heard him say that he would rather roast eternally on the devil’s spit than be remembered merely for these two achievements.”

Like to see him stand up, I would. I likes to remember ‘im for that.” Poe was a glock, a half-wit, and that’s all there was to it. Mr. Dickens ought to be more particular about choosing his friends.

“Mr. Poe is a good man, sir.” Josiah Rusher, 17, lean and stoop-shouldered in ink-stained overalls, red flannel shirt and mud spattered boots, held a candle in one long, bony hand, shielding its flame with the other. Figg was frightening, an ominous looking bull of a man with a scarred face and limping right leg and he stood between Josiah and the only staircase leading from the newspaper’s storeroom. Upstairs, only a handful of people were in the paper at this early hour. But Eddy was his friend, the one person on the newspaper who treated him with kindness.

Josiah used the palm of his right hand to rub candle wax from the back of his left hand. “Mr. Poe is courteous, decisive, with much grace and enthusiasm.”

Figg snorted, then spat. In the candlelight, the spit was a silver sliver on Poe’s shoe. “Don’t be readin’ to me over his bloody coffin, mate. When’s his eyes goin’ to open, may I ask yer worship?”

Josiah cleared his throat. “Some-someone put him in a cab and told the driver to bring him here. That was a hour or so ago and I am given to understand that he had been down in Five Points.”

“What is Five Points, if I might make so bold?”

“A terrible slum, sir. Horrible place.” Josiah’s eyes widened. “Filled with Irish and coloreds and almost every soul there involved in the criminal pursuits. A wicked place and not one for a casual stroll.”

“This damn city reeks of Irish.” So does London, for that matter.

“Famine, sir, 1846. Over a million died of hunger in Ireland and others left to come-”

“To come to any bleedin’ place where they could steal for a livin’.” Figg didn’t like the Irish. One had tried to bite Figg’s thumb off in a boxing match and Figg had stopped him by gouging out the Irishman’s left eye.

“Uh, Mr. Figg, if I might say so, he is not well, you know. Eddy is in poor health.”

“Sleeps well enough.”

“The smallest dram of whiskey-”

“I can bloody well see that, mate.”

Josiah gripped the candle with both hands to keep it from shaking. Hot wax oozed down onto his fingers. Fear of Figg sent the boy’s voice higher. “Sir, I mean sir, it is early and perhaps you would be warmed by coffee and brandy. If you come upstairs-”

“I ain’t leavin’ ’im.”

“He is a sick man, sir. Let him sleep and when he wakes, he will be in better condition to be of service to you.”

Figg, standing just beyond the circle of light from Josiah’s candle, looked at the nervous copyboy. Not much older than my Will and still growing. Within spitting distance of manhood, this one, and hair as yellow as the king’s gold. Scared of me and tryin’ hard not to tremble, him and me bein’ alone down here in this flippin’ ice house. Has Will’s eyes, he does, eyes as green as England’s hills. And he did offer me food and drink.

Brandy. Warms a man and that is a fact. Bit of food might help matters along as well, somethin’ simple and not too challengin’ to a man’s stomach. Figg reached down and picked up the carpetbag containing the few things he had brought with him from London.