Poe shadow (43 page)

To this, Officer White merely bobbed his head as one would do to a rambling child.

“Claude Dupin had to be stopped—for the sake of Poe,” he said.

I was surprised at this turn in the conversation. “Precisely,” I replied.

“You told me earlier he had to be stopped—‘at all costs.’”

“Indeed, Officer.” I hesitated then began again. “Yes, you see, what I meant…”

“He was certainly laid out awful flat,” commented the clerk from behind my chair, “Dupin was. Flat as a hog barbecued.”

“A hog barbecued, sir?” I asked.

“Mr. Clark,” Officer White continued, “you wished to choke off his speaking at the lyceum. You told me as much beforehand when you came looking for your French friend.”

“Yes…”

“That portrait you passed along to us, signed by one Von Dantker, was of the Baron. It shows him to a hair. Why had you commissioned a portrait of him?”

“No, it was
not
the same man! I did not commission anything!”

“Clark, you may gas and blow all you have a mind to later, but no more fables today! It is said that the Baron had precisely the same fantastic smile upon his face right before being shot as the one shown in this portrait! Unusual smile!”

My skin grew warm, my body sensing danger before I could think about what was happening. I halted when I noticed my shirt stained with the Baron’s blood. Then I realized that my servants were shuffling around nervously in the corridors, away from their posts. The three or four police officers who had come with Officer White were nowhere to be seen in the room—and other policemen were now parading through the room, enough to constitute a standing army. I could hear footsteps ascending the stairs and moving in the bedrooms above. Glen Eliza was being searched even as I sat there. I felt as if the walls were sinking around me, and the image of Dr. Brooks’s burning house came into my mind.

“You grabbed the Baron, even as he began to address the audience—”

“Officer! What do you mean to say?” We were talking over each other now.

“No one could account for your presence—and there is no trace of your friend, this ‘Mr. Duponte,’
anywhere.
”

“Officer, you are implying something…you may call me a story-teller if you like…!”

“…Poe has done you in once and for all.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Your obsessive dalliances with Mr. Poe’s writings, Mr. Clark. You would have done anything to stop Baron Dupin talking of Poe, wouldn’t you? You have admitted you assaulted and ‘cut’ another Frenchman. You wished only for yourself to talk of Poe and nobody else. If someone indeed was involved with Mr. Poe’s death, I wonder if that person would have exhibited signs of preoccupation with it—it’s leading me to wonder about your own activities at the time Edgar Poe died.”

As I strenuously objected, the police clerk came around and took my arm, asking in calm tones that I stand up and not struggle.

AT FIRST I
was held in one of the cells across from Officer White’s private rooms in the Middle District station house. At the sound of every footstep there rose in me a semi-desperate expectation. Imprisonment, I might interrupt myself to say, does not merely produce a feeling of being alone. Your entire history of loneliness returns to you piece by piece, until the cell is a castle of your mental misery. The memories of solitude flood over all other thoughts of the present or the future. You are only yourself. That is the world; no poet of the penal system could devise anything harsher than that.

Whom did I await with palpitating breast? Duponte? Hattie? Perhaps the sour but stalwart expression on the face of Peter Stuart? The Baron Dupin himself, escorted by the doctors, able to bear witness to the real culprit who shot him and to free me? I longed even for the clamor of my great-aunt’s voice. Anything to remind me that there was another person concerned by my fate.

There was no word about Duponte, meanwhile. I feared for him an outcome worse than my own. I had failed him. Failed in my role to protect him in the operation of his genius.

Officer White circulated a selection of passable newspapers and journals as part of the jail liberties for the prisoners who were literate. I accepted them, but only pretended to read them while, in fact, I went about far more important reading, which I had smuggled in with me. When I had wrestled at the lyceum with the Baron Dupin, I had semi-consciously removed from his hands the notes he had brought for his speech. Hardly thinking of their significance, I had thrust these papers into my coat before accompanying Officer White to the station house.

As long as I had candlelight in my cell, I studied them, propped in a magazine.
Edgar Poe has not left, but has been taken away,
said the Baron’s treatise. It was not on the whole inelegant, though at no time aspiring to literary merit. As I read, I committed it to memory. I thought of Duponte reading over my shoulder.
Only through observing that which is mistaken can we come to the truth.

One time while studying these pages, I was interrupted by the approach of a visitor. The slouching figure of a man came into the hall, escorted by the clerk. It was a man unknown to me, wearing an expressionless face. He leaned his umbrella on the wall and shook off the excess water from his gigantic boots, which seemed to take up half his height.

“The stink in here…” he said to himself, sniffing.

A woman sang drunkenly from the ladies’ cells corridor. The visitor merely stood silently. Not finding any particular look of sympathy about him, I did the same.

I was surprised when the stranger was joined by a frightened young lady, wrapped tightly in her cloak.

“Oh, dear Quentin, look at where they’ve put you!” Hattie stared pityingly at me. She was near tears.

“Hattie!” I reached out and grabbed her by the hand. It hardly seemed possible that she was real, even with the warm leather of her gloves. Taking renewed notice of the stranger, I released her hands. “Is Peter not with you?”

“No, he would not hear of me coming. He will not speak of the situation at all. When he went to the lecture, he was quite angered, Quentin. He felt he had to do something to try to stop you. I do believe he is still your friend.”

“He must know I am innocent! How could I have something to do with the shooting of the Baron? The Baron had kidnapped my friend to prevent him from speaking—”

“Your friend? Would that be the friend who has placed you into this
débâcle,
Mr. Clark?” said the man standing at Hattie’s side, turning toward me with a frown not unlike Peter’s.

Hattie motioned him for patience. She turned back to me. “This is my cousin’s husband, Quentin. One of the finest attorneys in Washington in this sort of matter. He can help us, I’m certain.”

Despite the despair of what was now my lot, I felt comfort at the word “us.”

“And the Baron himself?” I asked.

“He lies without hope of recovery,” my new lawyer blurted out.

“I have written to your great-aunt for her to come at once; she shall help rectify all this,” Hattie continued, as though not having heard the terrible words. If what her cousin said was true, if the Baron was shortly to die, in the eyes of the world I would be condemned as a murderer.

A few days later I was moved from the district station house to the Jail of Baltimore City and County, on the banks of Jones Falls. The atmosphere duplicated my hopelessness; the surrounding cells were filled to capacity with some who’d been convicted of grave crimes along with those waiting, with small hopes, for their trial dates, or with perverse eagerness for their own hangings.

The morning before, I had been officially arraigned for the attempt to murder Baron Dupin. My declarations that the Baron must be stopped, combined with my appearance on the lyceum stage, were cited widely. Hattie’s cousin shook his beard disapprovingly at the fact that a highly respected police officer was a witness against me. The police had also found a gun when searching Glen Eliza—the weapon I had brought as a safeguard when I’d visited John Benson, which, absentmindedly, I had left in plain view.

The tempests outside grew worse every day. The rain would not stop. Each time it slowed itself it followed on even harder, as though it had only been taking a breath. It was said that a bridge was swept away at Broadway near Gay Street and struck another bridge, so that the two bridges drove themselves downriver through half of Baltimore, knocking entire houses off the banks along their way. In the prison, meanwhile, the air itself seemed to change—full of pressure and discomfort. I saw one prisoner scream frightfully and squeeze his head with his hands as though something was burrowing through to get out. “It’s come!” he cried apocalyptically. “It’s come!” Confrontations between some of the more desperate prisoners and the guards also grew worse, whether from the air or from other causes of which I had not made myself aware. Through the bars of my window, I could see the shore of Jones Falls gradually surrender to the boiling layer of rainwater. I felt myself do the same.

My lawyer returned, each time with more bad tidings from outside. The newspapers, which I could read only listlessly, were quite giddy about my guilt. It was now written that the Frenchman dangerously wounded and lying in the hospital was the model for Poe’s tales of analysis, and that I had done away with him because of jealousy, due to a diseased preoccupation with Poe. The Whig newspapers thought my action as assassin somehow heroic. The Democratic newspapers, perhaps in response against the Whigs, were convinced I was villainous and cowardly. Both, though, had decided I was certainly the killer. The newspapers known to be neutral, namely the
Sun
and
Transcript,
worried that the episode would do no insignificant damage to our country’s relationship with the still young French Republic and its president, Louis-Napoleon.

I protested vociferously that the Baron Dupin was by no means the real Dupin, though I believe Hattie’s cousin thought my choice of objection in the matter most strange. Edwin came to see me several times, but soon the police peppered him with questions, suspicious of any Negro having business with me, and I begged him to refrain from his visits to protect himself from their scrutiny. John Benson, my benevolent Phantom, came to call on me in this wretched place, too. I shook his hand warmly, desperate for an ally.

The cross-bar shadows fell over his haggard face. He explained that he was working nearly all hours on his uncle’s account books. “I’m dragged out, no mistake. The devil himself was never so pressed with business,” he said. He looked at me sidelong through the bars, as though at any moment we could exchange places if he were not careful with the words he chose.

“Perhaps you should confess, Mr. Clark,” he advised.

“Confess what?”

“That you had been overtaken with Poe.
Overcome,
so to speak.”

I hoped I could elicit more valuable assistance from him. “Benson, you must tell me if there was anything else you discovered about how Poe died.”

He sat on a stool kicking his legs out, despondent and sleepy, and repeated his suggestion that I consider making a complete confession. “Don’t think of the Poe predicament any longer, Mr. Clark. The truth behind his death is beyond discovery now. You see that.”

Hattie visited me on the days she managed to avoid both her aunt and Peter. She brought me food and small gifts. In my anxious and confused state, I could hardly find words to express my gratitude to her.

She recalled many stories from our childhood to calm my nerves. We had frank discussions touching all subjects. She told me how she felt when I was in Paris.

“I could see yours were great dreams, Quentin.” She sighed. “I know we do not have a life of mutual happiness ahead of us, Quentin. But I wish only to say that you mustn’t think I was angered, or melancholy, for your having gone away, or because you have not told me more. If I have shown melancholy it is because you did not feel, you did not
know
decidedly, that you could say every detail and would receive in return my unblushing friendship.”

“Peter was right. There was selfishness that began all this. Maybe I did all this not for what Poe’s writings would mean to the world, but for what they meant to me alone. Perhaps that exists only in my mind!”

“That is why it is important,” Hattie replied, taking my hand.

“Why couldn’t I see?” I fretted nervously. “It has become all about his death to me, at the expense of his life. Precisely what I worried others would do. At the expense of my life, too.”

The rains and flooding soon made it too difficult to travel to the prison from other quarters of the city. Separated from Hattie, there was no company outside the desolate prisoners. I had never felt quite so unaided, trapped, finished.

Once, during a night in which sleep had mercifully overtaken me, I heard light footsteps coming toward my cell. Hattie. She had come again, through the worst floods and rains yet. She came swiftly and elegantly through the corridor, closed off from the filth of the cells in her bright red cloak. Yet, strangely, there was no guard beside her and—I realized when coming to my senses—these were not hours in which visitors were admitted. As she emerged from the shadows of other cells, she reached in and grabbed my wrists so tightly I could not move. It was not Hattie at all.