Poe shadow (49 page)

“Who—? What is—?” Montor could not think of the proper words. “Who allowed you in, sir, and what is your business?”

No answer.

“I shall call
burglary…
” Montor warned. “Tell me your name,” he commanded.

“Don’t you know me?” came the question in fine French.

Montor squinted. In his defense, the light was dim and the appearance of his visitor somewhat frightful and haggard. “Yes, yes,” he said, but he could not remember the name. “That young man from Baltimore…but how have you come in here?”

“I spoke to your servant, in French, and told him we were to have an important government meeting that must be private. I ordered him to return in two hours, and paid him for his trouble.”

“You had no right to…” Yes! Now Montor remembered this face. “I remember. I first met you in the reading rooms, studying the French newspapers. I helped you with your French language and took you around a bit. Quentin, isn’t it? You were looking for the real Dup—”

“Quentin Hobson Clark. Yes, you remember.”

“Very well, Monsieur…
Clark.
” The engine of Montor’s mind was now clicking. “I shall have to ask you to leave my property at once.”

Montor was alarmed to have an intruder in his lodging, even one who had previously been an acquaintance and had seemed so harmless. He was also alarmed at the name, Quentin Clark. He had retained almost no memory of the name from the reading room. But the name meant something else to him as of late.

It took Montor a few moments to be able to produce any sound, and it came out as merely a breath. “Murder! Murder!”

“Monsieur Montor,” I said when he had finally calmed down, “I believe you know all about the Baron Dupin.”

“You—” he began. “But you—” Montor was finally able to explain that Clark’s name had been wired to Montor as the suspect in the attempted assassination of a Frenchman.

“Yes. Me. But I did not shoot anyone. However, I believe you know something more to assist me in determining who did.”

Montor now seemed more reluctant to cry out. “Help you? After you invade my house, bribe my servant? Why are you doing this?”

“Simply for truth. I have been forced to look for it with an ungloved hand, and I will.”

“They told me you were in prison!”

“Did they tell you so? Did they tell you they were plying me with poisons to manipulate me into a confession?”

Montor muttered, “I do not know what you wish me to say, Monsieur Clark! I have nothing to do with such foul play and have never even met this…this…so-called baron!”

“The men pursuing him were a pair of French rogues. I believe they were under the command of someone else—some person of great intelligence and foresight.” Since Bonjour had told me they could not have been working for the Baron’s creditors, and since the rogues had spoken of “orders,” I knew there was more to it than the two blackguards. “You are surely aware of Frenchmen in and out of this area.”

“I do not stand at the harbor peeping into the windows of ships, Monsieur Clark! Do you know the police will look for you for this…this outrageous trespassing.” He frowned, remembering they would already be looking for me for a far worse offense. “You seem very different from when we met, monsieur.”

I stood above him and looked over him coolly. “I believe you know where men like them would hide, and who would shelter them. You know all the important French citizens who reside in the region of Baltimore. Perhaps some dangerous characters like these rogues would even find you.”

“Monsieur Clark, I work directly for Louis-Napoleon since he has become president. If there were French outlaws here, and they wished to hide from your authorities and ours, they would not come to
me.
You see that, don’t you? Think of it.” He noticed that I listened seriously to this point, and now tried to switch topics to gain my sympathies. “Didn’t I help you research Auguste Duponte, the real Monsieur Dupin? Yes, what of that? Did you find him in Paris?”

“This has nothing to do with Auguste Duponte,” I said. I made no threatening motion, no sudden gesture toward him. Yet he cowered; that he believed me wild and violent made me almost inclined to prove him right.

It wasn’t even necessary to demand that he tell me whatever he knew. “Bonapartes!” he suddenly babbled.

“What do you mean?” I asked, annoyed.

“In Baltimore,” he continued. “Monsieur Jérôme Bonaparte.”

“You introduced me to some Bonapartes at that dress ball you took me to before I left for Paris. Jérôme Bonaparte and his mother. But why would someone like Jérôme Bonaparte know more about such rogues? They are relatives of Napoleon’s, aren’t they?”

“No. Yes. Not ones that Napoleon acknowledged, I mean. You see, when the brother of Napoleon—the true Napoleon, Emperor Napoleon, I mean—when this brother was traveling through America as a soldier at nineteen, he courted and married a wealthy American girl, Elizabeth Patterson. You met her at the ball—the ‘queen.’ They had a son, named Jérôme after his father, and that is who you met with her, the man dressed as the Turkish guard. When he was no more than a baby, Emperor Napoleon ordered his brother to abandon the poor bride, and after a brief struggle the brother at length obeyed. Elizabeth Patterson, now abandoned, returned with her son to Baltimore, and this family would never again be recognized by the emperor. They have been separated from their proud family line ever since.”

“I understand,” I said. “Continue please, Monsieur Montor.”

“Outlaws would not seek to find me, an official government minister, as I say, with Louis-Napoleon as the current head of government. But such criminals might seek out those who are estranged from the name of Napoleon. Yes.” His mouth loosened and he became excited, as though understanding this was now his mission too. “They might, monsieur!”

“Do you have the city directories for Baltimore?” I asked.

He pointed to a shelf in the corridor. His eyes traveled away from me shiftily, toward the window and door. He’d been caught up momentarily in my questions, but I could see he was now preparing in his mind an indignant report to the police.

It did not matter. I stopped my finger at the right page and tore it out. I could still reach the train depot before Montor’s reports reached the ears of the Washington police.

And indeed, the conductor of the train did not seem at all concerned with me upon my boarding. As a precaution, I sat in the last passenger car, and to observe more I opened the window at my seat, provoking malevolent stares when pockets of cold air rushed inside. One fellow spit his tobacco pointedly close to my boots, but I only shifted my legs farther from him.

I looked for any signs of something unusual, having to will my eyes not to close for longer than a few seconds. At one point, as the train made a turn, I saw a young boy running along the front of the train boldly grab hold of the cowcatcher—this was the device in front that forced away animals like sheep, cows, and hogs that strayed onto the track—and, gripping onto this, he managed to swing into the first car. I was startled, but told myself this was just a stowaway. I soon forgot the sight of the boy dangling in front of the train through a short spell of sleep.

I was jolted awake as the train shook with a violent shudder and soon began to nudge into a slower speed as it approached a bridge over a ravine. I jumped to my feet and was about to ask what had happened when I overheard another man as he questioned the conductor and engineer. The conductor had a harum-scarum look about him, as though he were frightened even of himself.

“The train went over a chaise and horse,” the engineer said coolly. “Two ladies were thrown out, and pretty well smashed, too. The chaise broken to pieces.”

The conductor passed by this engineer and scurried to the next car.

“Good God, mister!” cried the other passenger, looking back to me for the same reaction. I took a few steps backward and checked the door to the freight car that was attached to the end of the train. It was locked.

My eyes were fixed on the engineer’s face. I tried to think whether I had heard a crash at all, and cursed myself for having fallen asleep. The engineer seemed unnaturally calm for just having been part of a terrible accident, possibly killing two women.

“Chaise was broken to pieces,” the engineer said, then looked flustered as he realized he had already said this.

I interjected casually, “I didn’t hear a crash.” Of course, I had been asleep, but I felt it was a test worth trying. Could they be lying? Were they slowing down for the police to come aboard?

“Funny, mister,” murmured the fussy passenger in front of me. “I didn’t hear any crash either, and doesn’t everyone say I have the finest hearing in Washington!”

This decided it. I swung myself to the door as the train continued to cut the speed of its engine.

“You there! Stop! What do you think you are doing?” The engineer shouted this at me as he grabbed hold of my arm, but I shook him away hard and he stumbled over a piece of luggage. The passenger who had been speaking, from an overload of confusion, motioned to try to restrain me but stopped cold when he saw from my face that I would not be deterred.

Forcing the door open, I leapt onto the bank of grass alongside the tracks and rolled myself down the side of the steep arched ravine below.

LATER, I WOULD
learn more about the Bonapartes and their quiet residence over the decades in Baltimore. Now, I wished only to find them. I could remember faintly my parents speaking of the scandal, so many years earlier—long before I was born—that ensued when the brother of Napoleon Bonaparte married Baltimore’s richest young beauty, Elizabeth Patterson. That brother had long returned to luxury in Europe. It was the American descendants of Napoleon’s lighthearted brother that I had to confront—the Jérôme Bonaparte I had met in costume and his family and allies—to see if they knew those rogues whose presence would prove my innocence.

But I had no particular concern for the Bonaparte family’s history or ambitions at the moment. Today the question of my survival was too real.

These American Bonapartes and their offspring had multiplied and spread themselves around the city, and had maintained many homes across Baltimore through their great wealth from the Patterson family and the stipend the jilted wife received from Napoleon. The first address I visited no longer belonged to them at all—but the domestic who answered, a plump Irishwoman, received enough mistaken callers to know where to direct me. Still, it was several jaunts into different quarters, meeting various affiliated persons, before I found the most promising residence: one of the homes of Napoleon’s brother’s grandsons, estranged great-nephew to the legendary Napoleon himself and cousin, by my rough calculations, to the current French president.

Following the incident on the train, I felt confident I’d eluded any police agents from Washington, but I still proceeded slowly and methodically, which was maddening for such an urgent affair. It was not safe to be out in the light of day. After my escape from the train, I had waited until night in a frigid ditch and then found safe passage back to Baltimore in a covered mail-sleigh, lodging myself in the straw at the bottom of the cart with a few servants and a sleeping Hungarian peddler who, in the apparent throes of a dream, repeatedly kicked me in the stomach with a hobnailed boot. The driver rode through the night over rough stones and paths at a dashing rate as quick as any train.