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Holmes helped Rey up. He needed to make amends. He took the newspaper and held up the page with the likeness. “Grifone Lonza,” he revealed.
The glint in Rey’s eyes showed he was impressed and relieved. “Translate the note for me now, Dr. Holmes, please. Lonza spoke those words before he died. Tell me what they were.”
“Italian. The Tuscan dialect. Mind you, you’re missing some words, but for someone with no training in the language, it is a remarkable enough transcription. Deenan see am… ‘Dinanzi a me… Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro’: Before me nothing was made if not eternal, and I will last eternally. ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’: 0 ye who enter, abandon all hope.”
“Abandon all hope. He was warning me,” Rey said.
“No… I don’t think so. He probably believed he was reading it over the gates to Hell, from what we know of his mental state.”
“You should have told the police you knew something,” Rey cried.
“It would have been a greater mess if we had!” Holmes shouted. “You don’t understand—you can’t, Patrolman. We’re the only ones who could ever find him! We thought we had—we thought he fled. Everything the police know is coal dust! This shall never stop without us!” Holmes tasted snow as he spoke. He dabbed his brow and neck, which were bathed in hot sweat from every pore. Holmes asked if Rey wouldn’t mind moving inside. He had a story to tell that Rey might not believe.
Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nicholas Rey sat in his empty lecture room.
“The year was 1300. Midway through the journey of his life, a poet named Dante awoke in a dark wood, finding that his life had taken a wrong path. James Russell Lowell likes to say, Patrolman, that we all enter the dark wood twice—sometime in the middle of our lives and again when we look back upon it…”
The heavy paneled door to the Authors’ Room opened an inch and the three men inside jumped from their seats. A black boot edged in probatively. Holmes could no longer think what he might find to shatter his safety behind closed doors. Gaunt and ashen, he shared the sofa with Longfellow, across from Lowell and Fields, hoping that a single nod would suffice to respond to each of their greetings.
“I stopped home first before coming here. ‘Melia nearly did not let me back out of the house, the way I look.” Holmes laughed nervously as a drop of moisture shimmied into the corner of his eye. “Did you gentlemen know that the muscles with which we laugh and cry lie side by side? My young barbarians are always so taken with that.”
They waited for Holmes to begin. Lowell handed him the crumpled handbill a
He began an erratic, staccato narrative commencing with the police carriage’s surprise arrival at 21 Charles.
Lowell, pouring his third glass of port, said, “Fort Warren.”
“An ingenious choice on the part of our Lucifer,” said Longfellow. “I’m afraid the canto of the Schismatics could not be fresher to our minds. It hardly seems possible that it was only yesterday we translated it among our cantos. Malebolge is a wide field of stone—and described by Dante as a fortress.”
Lowell said, “Once again we see that we face a uniquely brilliant scholar’s mind, strikingly equipped to transmit choice atmospheric details of Dante. Our Lucifer appreciates the exactness of Dante’s poetry. All is wild in Milton’s Hell, but Dante’s is separated into circles, drawn with well-pointed compasses. As real as our own world.”
“Now it is,” Holmes said shakily.
Fields did not want to hear a literary argument at the moment. “Wendell, you say that the police were stationed all around the city when the murder occurred? How could Lucifer not be seen?”
“You would need the giant hands of Briareus and the hundred eyes of Argus to touch or see him,” Longfellow said quietly.
Holmes gave them more. “Je
“So Je
“For it… him… to have been killed on Tuesday yet be alive when I arrived this morning? For the body to be thrown into such convulsions that were I to drink every drop of Lethe I shall never be able to forget the sight of it?” Holmes asked despairingly. “Poor Je
“But to survive for two days after the attack,” Fields insisted. “What I mean to say is… medically speaking… mercy, it’s not possible!”
“ ‘Survival’ here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life—to be trapped in the gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to begin to describe the agony!”
“Why punish Phineas as a Schismatic?” Lowell tried his best to sound detached, scientific. “Whom does Dante find punished in that infernal circle? Muhammad, Bertrand de Born—the malicious adviser who split apart king and prince, father and son, as once was done to Absalom and David—those who created internal rifts within religions, families. Why Phineas Je
“After all our efforts, we haven’t answered that question for Elisha Talbot, my dear Lowell,” said Longfellow. “His thousand-dollar simony—for what? Two contrapassos, with two invisible sins. Dante has the benefit of asking the si
“Were you not close with Je
“He was a friend; I did not look for his misdeeds! He was an ear for me to complain about losses in stocks, about lecturing, about Dr. Ma
Holmes sighed heavily. “Patrolman Rey is as sharp as a blade, and likely has suspected our knowledge all along. He recognized the ma