Poe shadow (23 page)

“How did you,” I said, stopping midway on the creaking stairs. “Monsieur, the pass-word—”

“Aside! Aside!” A man lurching over the stairs from above squeezed past us. Duponte accelerated our climb. The raucous shouts from above became clearer.

The upper floor was a small room filled with smoke and noise. Firemen and tottering rowdies sat at gaming tables and called for more drinks from thinly clad bargirls, dresses only barely covering the milky white of their necks. One rogue sprawled out flat on a bed of sharp oyster shells, while one of his comrades kicked him over to the left for a better place to stand for a billiards game.

Duponte found a small, broken table more or less right at the center, where we were conspicuous. Heated stares followed us into our rickety chairs. Duponte sat and nodded to a waitress as though entering a respectable café on the sidewalks of Paris.

“Monsieur,” I whispered, taking a seat, “you must tell me directly—how is it you knew the pass-word to admit us?”

“The explanation is rather simple. I did not give the pass-word.”

“My dear Duponte! It was like an ‘open sesame’! If this were two centuries earlier, you would have burned as a witch. I cannot stand to continue without being enlightened as to this point!”

Duponte rubbed one of his eyes as though just waking up. “Monsieur Clark. Why have we come here to this building?” he asked.

I did not mind playing the student if it would provide answers. “To see if Baron Dupin had also come in here, and if so what he was looking for tonight before we happened upon him.”

“You are right—all right. Now, if you were the proprietor of a secret or private association, would you be most interested in talking with a visitor who gave the correct pass-word, as was given by every simpleton and sot you see in this rum-hole”—this he said without lowering his voice, causing some heads to swivel—“or talking with that one peculiar person who arrives out of place and, quite brashly, provides an absolutely incorrect pass-word?”

I paused. “I suppose the latter,” I admitted. “Do you mean to say that you invented a phrase, knowing plainly it was wrong; and that
because
it was wrong we would be as readily admitted?”

“Exactly. ‘Rosy God’ was as good as another. We could have chosen almost any word, as long as our demeanor was equally interested. They would know we were not part of their usual community, and yet be aware that we seriously desired entrance. Now, these suppositions accepted, if our intent was thought to be possibly aggressive, even violent, as they must initially consider, they would rather us inside here, surrounded by their rather large-sized allies and whatever weapons are kept here, than downstairs, where, they might imagine, our own friends could be hiding outside the street door. Would you not think in the same way? Of course, we seek no violent confrontation. Our time here will be brief, and we need no more than a few moments to begin to understand the Baron’s interest.”

“But how shall you be led to the proprietor here?”

“He shall approach us, if I am right,” Duponte answered.

After a few minutes, a paternal man with a white beard stood before us. The menacing doorkeeper lumbered to our other side, closing us in. We rose from the table. The first man, in tones harsher than seemed possible from his looks, introduced himself only as the president of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward and asked why we were there.

“Only to aid you, sir.” Duponte bowed. “I believe there was a gentleman trying to enter here in the last hour, probably offering money to your doorkeeper for information.”

The proprietor turned to his doorkeeper. “Is it true, Tindley?”

“He waved some hard cash, Mr. George.” The doorkeeper nodded sheepishly. “I turned the blockhead away, sir.”

“What was it he was asking?” Duponte inquired. Though my companion had no authority here, the doorkeeper seemed to forget that and answered.

“He was all agog to know if we had been interfering in the elections in October of two years ago, laying pipe with voters and such. I told him we were a private Whig club and he would do well to give the pass-word or lope.”

“Did you take his money?” asked his chief sternly.

“Course not! I was on the sharp, Mr. George!”

Mr. George glanced peevishly at the doorkeeper at the use of his name. “What do you two have to do with this? Are you sent by the Democrats?”

I could see Duponte was satisfied with what had been so readily revealed: what sort of club this was, what the Baron had wanted, and the name of the leader of this society. Now Duponte’s face lit up with a new idea.

“I live far from America, and could not tell a Whig from a Democrat. We have come merely to proffer a friendly caution,” said Duponte reassuringly. “That gentleman who called earlier tonight will not be satisfied with your doorkeeper’s answer. I think I can put you in the way of detecting the villain of this rascality. He means to quarrel with you over the moral principles of your club.”

“That so?” the proprietor said, contemplating this. “Well, thank you kindly for your concern. Now you two cap your luck before there are any more quarrels here.”

“Your servant, Mr. George,” Duponte said with a bow.

THE NEXT DAY,
I pressed Duponte on why he had so easily agreed to the Baron Dupin’s demand that he refrain from talking to witnesses. It would now be a race to gather information, and we could afford no encumbrance. I was anxious to know Duponte’s plans to combat the Baron.

“You intend to deceive him, I suppose? You will, of course, speak to persons who know something of Poe’s last visit?”

“I shall remain quite faithful to my pledge. No, I will not interview his witnesses.”

“Why? Baron Dupin has done nothing to merit your pledge. He has certainly done nothing to claim any witnesses as
his
alone. How shall we possibly understand what happened to Poe if we cannot speak to those who saw him personally?”

“They will be useless.”

“But would their memories not be fresh from the time of Poe’s death, which was but two years ago?”

“Their memories, monsieur, hardly exist at present, but are subsumed by the Baron’s tales. The Baron has infected the newspapers and the whispers of Baltimore with his sophistry and craft. All actual witnesses will have become tainted, if they are not already, by the time we would be able to locate them.”

“Do you believe they would lie?”

“Not purposefully. Their genuine memories of those events, and the stories they can tell from them, will irrevocably reshape themselves in the image of the Baron’s. They are as much his witnesses now as though he has recruited them into a trial and paid them for testimony. No, we cannot gain very much beyond the most basic facts provided by those witnesses, and I suspect we will gather that information through the natural course of events.”

You’d probably guess that Duponte was a formal sort of person. You are right and wrong. He did not subscribe to rules of manners and meaningless pleasantries. He smoked cigars inside the house, regardless of who was in the room. He was inclined to ignore you if he had nothing to say, and answer with a single word when he felt it was sufficient. He was in a way a
fast friend,
for he was your companion without any of the usual rituals or demands of friendship. However, he always bowed and sat with absolutely correct posture (though upon standing there was a noticeable slant of the shoulders). And in his labors he was most strict and serious. In fact, it made you quite uneasy to interrupt him when he was at all occupied. It could be the least important task imaginable, it could be stirring oatmeal, but it would seem leagues more critical than anything you might have to say to break his concentration were the house burning down around his ears.

Yet he grew attached to some of the strangest frivolities. When he was out on the city streets, a distinguished gentleman with a fancy cravat fastened in voluminous folds exclaimed aloud that Duponte was the queerest specimen of man he had ever seen. Duponte, taking no offense, invited the man, who was a painter of some renown here in Baltimore, to share a table with us at a nearby restaurant.

“And tell me your story, dear sir,” said the man.

“I would gladly, monsieur,” replied Duponte apologetically, “but then there is the likely danger that I would have to hear yours.”

“Fascinating!” said the man, unruffled.

The man expressed his eagerness to paint Duponte. It was soon arranged that he would call at Glen Eliza to begin a Duponte portrait. This seemed to me quite absurd considering our other occupations, but I did not object since Duponte was fervent about it.

Rather than coming to find me in the house when he had something to say, Duponte would often send one of the servants to me with a note. Glen Eliza was large and rambling but not so terribly mammoth as to require a messenger through its corridors! I did not know what to think when a servant first handed me the note, whether it was done out of the height of sloth or an excess of concentration.

The times when we ventured out of the house and into public establishments, Duponte refused to be waited on by slaves without paying them some small amount. I had seen instances of this over the years when visitors from Europe came to Baltimore, though during extended stays custom would soon wear down their finer sensibilities and the habit would gradually cease. Duponte’s action, however, was not out of any sentimentality, I believe, nor a point of principle, for he had said that more people are slaves than realized it and some far more enslaved than the blacks of our South; rather than sentimental reasons, Duponte did this, he said, because service without payment would never be as valuable to either party. Many of the slaves would be extremely grateful, others timid, and some strangely hostile to Duponte’s subsidies.

At Glen Eliza, we had difficulties with the domestics I had hired upon my return from Paris. No doubt, our peculiar practice of sending letters from the parlor to the library made extra work for them, though this was not the only source for discontent. Many of my servants immediately rebelled against Duponte. One colored girl, in particular, a free Negress named Daphne, occasionally refused to wait on him. When I asked Daphne for the reason, she said that she thought the houseguest most cruel. Had he ever abused her? Scolded her for a mistake, perhaps? No. He had hardly addressed her at all, and when he did he was very polite. Something was not right, she said, nonetheless. “He is cruel. I can see it.”

In between household duties, I called on Hattie’s house more than once without success. Peter’s pessimistic remarks about rectifying that situation had rendered me quite anxious. Her mother, who had always been of delicate health and in her bed when not away recuperating in the country or at a spring, had been further debilitated over the summer. After a stay by the seaside, she was now largely confined, which meant more duties for Hattie. It also gave Auntie Blum fuller swing over the household. Each time I called, a servant would inform me that neither Miss Hattie nor Auntie Blum was present. Finally, I was able to speak with Hattie one day as she was ascending a carriage outside her house.

“Dear Hattie, have you not received my notes?”

Hattie glanced around and spoke stealthily, leading me away from the gates. “You must not be here, Quentin. Things are quite different here, now that Mother has been worse. I am needed by my sisters, my aunt.”

“I understand,” I said, fearing that my endeavors had only added to the strain that had fallen on poor Hattie’s shoulders. “Of our plans…I need only a bit more time…”

She shook her head, silencing me. “Things are different,” she repeated. “We cannot speak about it now, but we will. I will find you when I can, dear Quentin—I promise. Do not speak to my aunt. Wait for me to find you.”

Noises came from the house. Hattie directed me to return to the street and make a hasty exit. I did so. I could hear Auntie Blum (and could almost hear the wide bird feathers I pictured in her hat ruffling, too) ask in her big tones, “Who was that, dear girl?” I kept my back to them and quickened my stride, having the distinct feeling that if I turned to look back, the older woman inside the carriage might direct her driver to flatten me.

At Glen Eliza, the portraitist, Von Dantker, sat across from Duponte with his array of canvas and brushes spread on a table. Duponte remained giddy about the prospect of this artistic creation. The hotly temperamental Von Dantker sternly admonished Duponte to remain still, and so only the analyst’s mouth moved when we conversed. When I commented that this was not a very polite manner of holding a conversation, Duponte claimed he was all attention and that he wished to see if he could divide his mind into compartments of concentration. At times it was like speaking to a living portrait.

“What would you say truth is for the Baron, Monsieur Clark?” Duponte asked pointedly one evening.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“You asked him whether he seeks the truth. Surely truth is not the same for everyone, as most people think they have it, or desire to have it, and yet there are still wars, and there are professors who daily overthrow each other’s hypotheses. So what is it for him, for our friend the Baron?”