Poe shadow (53 page)

She lifted her hands upward and I could now observe more closely a gown that hung behind her. It was the wedding dress she had worn in 1803, in the ceremony in Baltimore that had ignited the world into consternation, that had sent emissaries from America scuttling across an ocean to try to appease the fury of the French leader. I had read about this dress recently when educating myself on the history of these episodes. It was India muslin and lace, and had caused something of a scandal as there was only one garment underneath it. “All the clothes worn by the bride might be put in my pocket,” a Frenchman reported in a letter to Paris.

It hung on the wall in perfectly fossilized condition, seeming, if one were not close enough to see signs of age in the fabric, as though it was quite new, and might be rushed to a church at any moment.

Suddenly there were the sounds of a baby, a rough, brittle cry that grew increasingly loud. Startled, I looked around for its source, as though it were some supernal happening, and found that the young servant girl rocking and swaying in the corner was in fact holding a baby, no more than eight months old. This, it was explained to me, was Charles Joseph Napoleon, the youngest child of Bo and his wife, Susan. Madame Bonaparte was caring for her new grandchild while Bo and his American wife traveled to Paris to beseech the emperor for the long-awaited rights of the Baltimore members of the family.

The woman took the baby from the nurse and curled her fingers around him tightly. “Here is one of the hopes of our race. And have you ever seen my other grandson? He attended Harvard and now studies at West Point. He is everything that my husband was not. Tall, distinguished, soon to be a soldier of the most capable order.” Madame Bonaparte cooed at the little creature then said, “He would make a very presentable emperor of the French.”

“Only if Louis-Napoleon agrees to return your offspring to the line of succession, madame,” I pointed out.

“The new emperor, Louis-Napoleon, is a rather dull man, on the order of George Washington. He shall need to secure a far stronger ingenuity for the empire to survive.”

“From your family, you mean?” The baby had now begun howling, and Madame Bonaparte returned him to the nurse.

“I am too old to coquette, as was once my only stimuli. I have been tired of killing time, Mr. Clark. To doze away existence. Once I had everything but money. Here, I have nothing but money. I shall not let men of my blood be mere American colonists like my son has mistaken himself for.”

“
You
did this, then. You agreed to eliminate a man, a genius, because Louis-Napoleon worried he could foresee his plot to overthrow the Republic.”

She shrugged slightly. “We have given money and comfort to travelers from France, under my direction—yes—if that is what you mean. Their orders came from other parties, not from me.”

“And did they accomplish what they were directed to do?”

She waved the nurse out of the room and frowned. “Dolts,” she said. “They mistook one man for another. I understand they were told by the Paris police to expect your presence around this Duponte they were after, yet they saw you waiting around the hotels of this other—this false Baron, this false Duponte. No matter, for what was needed was achieved: no one interfered with Louis-Napoleon’s plans, and now he has ascended.” She examined me closely again and I could feel the acute judgment of her eyes growing.

“Tell me,” she said. “From what we have understood, you brought along these two men of genius in some attempt to find a poet that you fancy. I have heard about this Poe. His talent has mostly been dismissed by America.”

“Not for long,” I said.

She laughed. “You do have faith. Perhaps you will be interested that I have heard that young poets and writers in Paris are now reading him in great numbers, your Poe. It seems he was like their own Monsieur Balzac—brilliant but luckless, doomed to be a puppet of fate. He will be brought into the European spirit, as all the better American minds are. Yet this is not enough for your Poe-worship, is it, Mr. Clark? My son is not dissimilar from how you must be; he believes books are written primarily for his personal readership.”

“Madame Bonaparte, my motives are not important. This is not about me.”

“But, stay! Think of it, dear Mr. Clark. You have helped by giving us an important task to perform, which has allowed us to prove our loyalty to France. We have ensured a new emperor from this, and he will create an empire in which my family can survive forever! I have spent a lifetime to see to it that my children have their proper inheritance, and would give my life for it now. What about you? You were but a chrysalis and you made the mistake of giving up what your family made you into. Tell me, what did you find?”

I rose from my chair without answering. “I have only one other question, Madame Bonaparte. If they came to know they assassinated the wrong man at the lyceum that night, did they then locate the right one? Has Duponte been killed, too?”

“I have told you,” the woman said slowly, “I only provide comfort. I provide a place to start, you might say, a birthplace for noble plans. Others must decide the rest for themselves.”

I had written and discarded a whole notebook of letters to Auguste Duponte. I detailed for him not only the hard reality—that Poe, apparently, had
not
modeled his character C. Auguste Dupin from any real person, but rather and remarkably only from imagination. I included not just this, but also the steps of thinking that had led me to reach this conclusion, knowing he would have an interest in the line of reasoning. However, if Duponte was still alive and escaped, I did not know where to address any letters. Not to Paris, not to his former residence, I felt certain. He would not be in this Paris, not in Louis-Napoleon’s Third Empire, where his genius was seen as an enemy to the emperor’s unending ambitions.

It was seeing the anxiety in Madame Bonaparte’s face at the close of our interview, when I asked whether Rollin and his rogues had found Duponte, that made me decide Duponte was probably closer than I’d considered. He had been patiently waiting—not for me, exactly, but it would be me he would have to see.

Passing the bustle of porters and guests at the massive Barnum’s Hotel one day, these various thoughts dissolved into an idea. Returning to Glen Eliza, I considered that my time to act might be short. I started on my way back to Barnum’s. I did not leave, though, without remembering to reach into the closet for the old pistol that the police had returned along with my other possessions. This time I checked—before slipping it into my pocket—that its age and disuse had not left the hammer entirely immobile.

“Sir?”

An ashen clerk with tight whiskers glared at me suspiciously and waited for me to say something.

“Monsieur,” I said abruptly and, as I’d hoped, he raised an eyebrow of interest at the French word. “There is a member of the French sovereign class currently residing in your hotel.”

He nodded with all the depth of his responsibility. “Indeed, sir. He has been staying in the room once occupied by the
Baron
who visited Baltimore earlier this year. This is his brother. The
Duke.
” He leaned in to whisper this last word confidentially. “The noble lineage is most evident in both of them.”

“The Duke.” I smiled. “Yes. But when did our imperial Duke begin his stay?”

“Oh, as soon as his brother, I mean the noble Baron, left. His current presence is most covert—with all that is happening in France, you know.”

I nodded, amused at the ease with which he’d yielded his secret. As though having the same thought, he now declaimed that he was not able to supply the location of the royal guest’s room.

“You do not have to, sir,” I said, and we shared a confidential nod. Of course I knew the room. I had spied on the Baron when he had stayed there.

I ascended the staircase with expectations racing through my blood.

I now remember Duponte as looking rather pale and haggard during our meeting, as though he had been all used up since we’d first met, or half used up at least. He was sitting serenely in the Baron Dupin’s old hotel room when I came in. He didn’t appear disappointed in having been discovered by me. I suppose I’d imagined that his remarkable composure would come unfurled by my surprise appearance, that he would speak in anger and threaten me if I seemed likely to expose him with the knowledge I now possessed of his whereabouts and his deeds. He had known the Baron would be killed in his place, and he had done nothing to prevent it.

He politely offered me a chair. The truth is, he was no less composed than ever. Then he pulled the bell for the hotel porter and told the man to take his trunk. I looked at him inquisitively.

“I had long given up on you,” I said.

“It is time for me to leave,” he replied.

“Now that I have come, you mean?” I asked.

He looked over at me. “You have seen the newspapers. All that has occurred in Paris.”

I removed the pistol from my coat, studied it as though I had never seen it before, and placed it near him on a table.

“They might have followed me—if they are still looking for you, I mean. I have no desire to endanger you, Monsieur Duponte, despite the fact that I have been endangered by you. Keep this close to you.”

“I do not know if they have still been looking for me, but if they have, they will not much longer.”

I understood. The Baltimore Bonapartes had traveled to Paris in hopes of being rewarded for their loyalty to the new emperor. If they’d succeeded, they would have no motivation to continue supporting a search for Duponte, even though Madame Bonaparte and her rogues knew now they had failed to kill the real object of the assassination.

“The Baron is dead. You knew all along he would be killed in your place, and allowed it,” I said. “You, monsieur, you have been the murderer.”

A gong rang uproariously through the hotel. Duponte said, “Shall we dine? I have kept myself in my rooms too long. For the sake of fine food, I can afford the risk of being seen in public.”

The vast dining room held approximately five hundred people sitting down to Chesapeake Bay shad. A colored “major-domo” signaled a gong to sound at each course, and all the covers on the next dishes were lifted simultaneously by waiters posted at each table.

At length I peered around to find a waiting assassin or perhaps a person who had known the Baron Dupin and would now think he’s seeing his ghost. Yet, the tired countenance my companion now wore held as little resemblance to the Baron’s vivid imitation of Duponte as to the old Duponte himself.

“No. I am not the murderer,” Duponte now answered my earlier remark evenly. “I am not, but perhaps you are, you and the Baron, if you like. The Baron wished to disguise himself as me. Had I control over that? I tried to keep it away. I had remained in my rooms in Paris. But you needed ‘Dupin,’ for your own purposes, Monsieur Clark. The Baron needed ‘Dupin’ for his. Louis-Napoleon needed a ‘Dupin’ to fear. Your arrival in Paris and your persistence made me accept that however much I remained dormant, the idea of ‘Dupin’ would not. It was, as you said,
something sort of immortal.
”

Ah, but you are not Dupin! Never were!

It was at the end of my tongue. I was ready to seize the conversation and wrest it into my power. My thoughts were still buzzing with questions, though.

“When did you know? When did you know they were coming after
you
? That those men, supported by the Bonapartes, wanted to murder you.”

Duponte shook his head as if he did not know the answer.

“But on the
Humboldt
you knew there was the stowaway aboard, that villain Rollin. It started then. Monsieur, I am witness to it all!”

“No, I did not know there was a stowaway. Rather, I knew that if there
was
a stowaway there, they were hunting me.”

“I suppose you guessed!” I exclaimed.

Duponte grinned just for a flash. He nodded.

I believe that day I felt the inner pain of Duponte that had made him the way he was when I’d first discovered his stationary life in Paris—alone, unintentional in all things. Everyone had believed that he possessed extraordinary powers after he had deciphered the Lafarge poisoning case. The young Duponte was an unnaturally confident man, and he himself began to believe that his abilities were of the almost supernatural nature that others wrote about in the newspapers. The stories about him enhanced his genius, perhaps even allowed for it in the first place. Yet I still could not answer whether genius had been created through the faith of the outside world. Readers often feel that the Dupin of Poe’s tales finds the truth because he is a genius. Read again. This is only part of it. He finds the truth because someone has faith in him throughout—without his friend, there would be no C. Auguste Dupin.

“Each time I saw Louis-Napoleon review his troops,” said Duponte, “I could see not the future, as the superstitious fool would believe about me, but the present—he was not content with being elected president. I suppose Prefect Delacourt warned him of me after I was seen out in Paris, with you, by his spies.”

“The Baron told me of what happened to Catherine Gautier. Did Prefect Delacourt warn Louis-Napoleon because you were against him in that case? Did you wish vengeance on him by escaping him?”

“The prefect’s actions were motivated by him having done me wrong, not my having wronged him. Our own past perversity, not that of others, sets us against someone for life. Prefect Delacourt was removed in favor of the new prefect for many reasons, I am certain—one of those may have been the failure to successfully find me before you and I left Paris together. De Maupas is not as astute a man as Delacourt, but he is far more competent, the two traits having no bridge between them—and, as a hobby, de Maupas is quite ruthless.”

“Do you believe they learned they had murdered the Baron instead of you?”

Duponte now trimmed away a piece of Maryland ham, the second course brought by our waiter. “Perhaps. You certainly proclaimed the Baron’s identity to the police loud enough, Monsieur Clark! It was never clear to the public, and is likely still unclear to those concerned in Paris. Chances are, the rogues who killed the Baron here heard of the truth. For their own sakes, they probably kept the fact secret from their superiors in Paris. Instead, their leader—that stowaway sent here to have charge over the mission—has quietly hunted me. However, I knew this would be the one place in Baltimore they would not look for me: the Baron’s last rooms in the city. I came here during the Baron’s lecture and have shown myself in the streets only now and then at night. The hotel believes I have come to mourn for my ‘brother,’ the noble Baron, in peace, and has left me alone. Now that Louis-Napoleon has successfully surprised Paris into becoming an empire, and has presently held a successful vote to that effect, the stowaway surely is beginning to believe that their mistake concerning me and the Baron has passed its time of relevancy. If the American Bonaparte son succeeds in his mission, the stowaway may quietly stay in France for the rewards due to him before there are any further political changes. He and the American Bonapartes shall say nothing of their own errors, you can be sure. To Paris, I will be terribly dead.”