Poe shadow (12 page)

“Beg your pardon, monsieur. Would it not be preferable to Monsieur Duponte’s tastes if I were announced first?”

The concierge took offense—whether because the suggestion questioned his competence or because the notion of announcing a visitor demeaned his role to that of a house servant, I did not know. The concierge’s wife shrugged and said, with a touch of sympathy that she directed with an upturned glance to God, or the floor above, “How many visitors does he have?”

The odd exchange no doubt contributed to my nervous rambling when I first met the man himself in the doorway to his lodging. The employment of his skills was even more exclusive and rare than I had imagined. Parisians, to judge from the comment of the concierge’s wife, did not think it worthwhile even to
attempt
to secure his help!

When Duponte opened the door to his chambers, I poured out an introduction. “I wrote you some letters—three—sent from the United States, as well as a telegraph directed to your previous address. The letters spoke of the American writer Edgar A. Poe. It is crucial that the matter of his death is investigated. This is why I have come, monsieur.”

“I see,” said Duponte, screwing his face into a grimace and pointing behind me, “that this hall lamp is out. It has been replaced many times, yet the flame is out.”

“What? The lamp?”

That is how it went with our conversation. Once inside, I repeated the chronicle narrated in my letters, urged that we strike at once, and expressed my hope that he would accompany me back to America at his earliest convenience.

The rooms were very ordinary and oddly devoid of all but a few unimportant books; it felt uncommonly cold in there, even though it was summer. Duponte leaned back in his armchair. Suddenly, as though only now realizing I was addressing him rather than the blank wall behind, he said, “Why have you told this to me, monsieur?”

“Monsieur Duponte,” I said, thunderstruck, “you are a celebrated genius of ratiocination
.
You are the only person known to me, perhaps the only person in the known world, capable of resolving this mystery!”

“You are very far mistaken,” he said. “You are mad,” he suggested.

“I? You
are
Auguste Duponte?” I responded accusingly.

“You are thinking of many years ago. The police asked me to review their papers from time to time. I’m afraid the journals of Paris were excited with their own notions and, in some cases, assigned me certain attributes to meet the appetites of the public imagination. Such tales were told…” (Wasn’t there a flicker of something like pride in his eyes when he said this?) Without a blink or a breath, he overthrew the topic altogether. “What you should know, might I say, are the many worthwhile outings in Paris in the summer. You will want to see a concert at the Luxembourg Gardens. I might tell you where to see the finest flowers. And have you been to the palace at Versailles? You will be pleased by it—”

“The palace at Versailles? Versailles, you say? Please, Duponte! This is monstrously important! I am no idle caller. Nearly half the world has passed by my eyes to find you!”

He nodded sympathetically and said, “You certainly should sleep, then.”

The next morning I awoke after a deep, uncomfortable July sleep. I had returned to the Corneille the night before in a state of dull shock at my reception by Duponte. But in the morning my disappointment faded, eased by the thought that perhaps it was my own weariness that had clouded my first talk with Duponte. It had been unwise and unseemly to burst in on him like that, tired and anxious, disheveled in my appearance, without even a letter of introduction.

This time I took a leisurely breakfast, which in Paris looks just like dinner minus soup—even beginning with oysters (though Cuvier himself could not put these small, blue, watery objects in any class of true oyster for an appetite born of the Chesapeake Bay). Arriving at Duponte’s lodgings, I lingered near the concierge’s chambers, and was glad to find that the concierge was out on business. His more talkative wife and a plump daughter sat mending a rug.

The older woman offered me a chair. She blushed easily at my smile, and so I tried to smile liberally in the pauses between my words to induce her cooperation. “Yesterday, madame, you mentioned that Duponte does not receive very many callers. Are there not those who visit him professionally?”

“Not in all the years since he has lived here.”

“Had you not heard of Auguste Duponte before?”

“Why certainly!” she answered, as if I had questioned her very sanity. “But I did not think it could have been the same one. They say that man was of importance to the police; our boarder is a harmless fellow, but quite in a stupor much of the time, a
dead-alive
sort of a man. I presumed it was a brother or some distant relation of his family. No, I suppose he hasn’t many acquaintances to visit him.”

“And no lady-friends,” mumbled the bored daughter, and that was all you will hear the girl say for the whole two months in Paris.

“I see,” I said, thanking both ladies before climbing to Duponte’s door. They both blushed again as I bowed.

I had been thinking earlier that morning of Poe’s tales about C. Auguste Dupin. In the first one, Dupin abruptly and unexpectedly announces that he will investigate the horrible murders that occurred in a house on the Rue Morgue.
An inquiry will afford us amusement,
he says to his surprised friend.
Let us enter into some examinations for ourselves.
He searched for amusement. Of all the details I had spilled out in almost a single breath the day before, I had not once presented an enticing reason for Duponte to direct his genius to the case of Poe’s death! Perhaps, in the last few years, when Duponte seemed to have become inactive, no affair had come about worthy of his interest, and as a result he had settled into what seemed to most to be an aimless torpor.

Duponte did not turn me away when I knocked at his door. He invited me for a stroll. I walked alongside him through the crowded and warm Latin Quarter. I say “alongside” even though his steps were abnormally deliberate and slow, one foot hardly passing the other in each of his strides; this meant that in trying to remain at the same pace, I sometimes felt like I was dancing a half circle. As with the day before, he spoke of commonplace matters. This time I engaged him in idle topics before making my latest attempt at persuasion.

“Do you not find a desire to be occupied in more challenging dealings, though, Monsieur Duponte? While I have compiled all the particulars of Mr. Poe’s death available, others have employed the confused public knowledge to spit upon his grave. I should think an inquiry into a difficult, timely matter such as this
would offer you great amusement…
” I repeated this once more, as a heavy truck had rumbled by the first time. In response to this there was not a stir in the man. He clearly did not think himself in need of greater amusements, and I again was obliged to retreat.

On a subsequent visit to Duponte’s apartment, I found him smoking a cigar in his bed. It seemed he used his bed for smoking and for writing—he detested writing anything, he said, for with obnoxious consistency it stopped him from thinking. For this visit I had been rereading and reflecting on the “liberal proposition” offered to C. Auguste Dupin by the police in Poe’s sequel tale, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” to penetrate the case of a young shopgirl found dead in the woods. Though agreeable compensation had certainly been implied in my own letters to Duponte, I now assured him expressly, in homage to Poe’s own words from the tale, that I would provide him “a
liberal fee
for your undivided attention to Poe’s death, beginning immediately.” I removed a check. I suggested an amount of considerable value, and then a few numbers even higher.

With no resulting success. It seemed he was not moved at all by money, despite his less than luxurious circumstances. To this, as to other attempts to direct his attention to my own agenda, he would take my elbow as he pointed out an architectural oddity; or praise the Parisian summers extensively for their loveliness; or remove any need for a reply by letting his eyes linger shut in a ruined blink. Sometimes, Duponte seemed almost an imbecile in his placid stare as we passed shops and the blooming flowers and trees of the garden—“the horse-chestnuts!” he would say suddenly—or maybe it was a stare of sadness.

One evening after leaving another interview with Duponte, I passed a group of police officers sitting at tables outside a crowded café eating ices. They were a formidable blur of single-breasted blue coats, mustaches, and small, pointed beards.

“Monsieur! Monsieur Clark, bonjour!”

It was the squat young policeman who had commandeered my carriage upon my arrival in Paris. I attributed his enthusiasm at seeing me to the congenial spirits of their party.

Each of the officers rose to greet me.

“This is a gentleman and a scholar who has come from America to see Auguste Duponte!” After a moment of interesting silence, the policemen all burst into laughter.

I was confused by this reaction to Duponte’s name. I sat down as the first one continued: “There are many stories to hear of Duponte. He was a great genius. Duponte, they say, would know a thief was going to take your jewels before the thief did.”

“He
was
a great genius, you say?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. Long ago.”

“My father was in the police when the prefects would engage Monsieur Duponte,” said another policeman, who displayed a scowl that may have been permanent. “He said Duponte was a clever young man who merely created difficulties so he could
seem
to surmount them.”

“In what manner?” I asked with alarm.

He scratched his neck viciously with his overgrown fingernails; the side of his neck looked red and inflamed from this habit. “It is what he heard,” the Scratcher muttered.

“It is said that Duponte,” continued the more amiable officer, “could judge the morals of all men with precision just by their looks. He once offered to walk through the streets on the day of a public fête and point out to the police all the dangerous people who should be removed from society.”

“Did he?” asked another.

“No—the police would have had no business to attend to if he had.”

“But what happened to him?” I asked. “What of the investigations he performs today?”

One of the officers who looked thoughtful and quieter than the others spoke up. “They say Monsieur Duponte failed—that the woman he loved was hanged for murder, and his powers of analysis could not rescue her. That he could do no more investigations—”

“Investigations!” balked the Scratcher. “Of course there can be no more. Unless he manages to carry them out as a ghost. He was killed by a prisoner who had vowed that he would avenge himself on Duponte for arresting him.”

I opened my mouth to correct him, but thought better of it—there was a deep venom in that man’s voice that seemed better not to rouse.

“No, no,” one of the others disagreed. “Duponte is not dead. Some say he lives in Vienna now. He grew tired of the ingratitude. What stories I could tell you! There is no living soul like that in Paris in this age, in all events.”

“Prefect Delacourt would not hear of it,” added the squat officer, and the others cackled raucously.

Here was one of the officers’ anecdotes.

Years earlier, Duponte one evening had found himself in a
cabinet,
or private chamber, of a tavern in Paris, sitting across from a convict who had only three days earlier sliced the throat of a prison guard from one side to the other. Every agent of the Paris police had been on watch for him since he’d escaped, including several who sat with me at the café. Duponte, employing his varied skills, had deduced where in the city the rogue would most likely think it safest to conceal himself. So there they sat together in the
cabinet.

“I will be safe from capture from the police,” the villain confided. “I can outrun any one of them—and could beat any one of them in a pistol fight if I had to. I’m safe, as long as I do not meet with that wretch Duponte. He is the true criminal of Paris.”

“I should think you would know him when you see him,” Duponte commented.

The scoundrel laughed at Duponte. “Know him…?God bless!” He now emptied his wine bottle at a breath. “You have never dealt with this knave Duponte, have you? He’s not to be seen twice in the same dress. In the morning, he appears to be just another person, like yourself. Then, an hour later, so changed that his own mother would never recognize him and, by evening, no man or demon would ever remember having seen him before! He knows where you are, and can auspicate where you go next!”

When this bad fellow had drunk more than he’d intended, Duponte went downstairs for another bottle of wine and then returned to the
cabinet
with perfect calmness. Duponte reported to the convict that the barmaid had said she’d seen Auguste Duponte there, looking in on the private rooms. The villain was thrown into a wild fury at the news, and Duponte suggested that the fellow hide in the closet so he might come out and kill the investigator when he entered. When the villain stepped into the closet, Duponte locked it and fetched the police.