this day? The Baltimore police pose no problem to me. Today, I turn a corner. Today it is do or die to put a finale on all this. Unless you shall stop me, for you are the only one who can now-no, but clearly you will not. I shall no longer live in the shadows, not in the shadows of my enemies or of Auguste Duponte. There are times when genius, like Duponte's, must doff its hat to cunning. This day shall be my passport back to glory."
The Baron followed the lyceum director onto the platform and to the podium. I looked around desperately, trying to think of what to do, but found myself on a mental treadmill. Finally, I pushed forward onto the platform and attempted to at least divide the Baron from the podium. Then I saw the crowd-no, call it the mob, the endless, formless, hollering expanse of people's stares-and I understood why the Baron did not need Bonjour at his side to be protected. He was safe in a crowd. He was about to become legitimate again in the eyes of the world.
In the background, a lyceum clerk was fixing a light, causing it to sway disruptively, further confusing my senses in the dark hall. I could only shout for the lecture to be stopped and heard moans of displeasure in response.
I had lost all ability to articulate, all flow of logic. I shouted something about justice. I pulled and prodded, and was pushed in return. At some point in the fog of my memory, I can see there was the face of Tindley, the Whig doorkeeper, standing out in the crowd. A red parasol twirled in the horizon of my sight. I saw faces: Henry Herring, Peter Stuart, who pushed past the anxious crowd to come closer to the front. The old clerk from the athenaeum was there, too, squeezed into his seat, and newspaper editors from all the chief offices of the press. Sometime in all this, in the wavering light I saw it-the grin, the razor-sharp peculiar grin of mischief that Duponte had held for Von Dantker, now precisely plagiarized upon the face of the Baron. Then there was the noise, the only noise that could have risen above the excited clamor that my disturbance had now provoked. It was like a cannon burst. The first sent the stage lights crashing to the ground, drowning the whole place in darkness. And then there was another.
I jumped back amid the sea of screams and feminine shrieks at the sounds of gunfire. I trembled with a sudden chill, and from some macabre instinct put my hand to my chest. I remember only fragments after that:
The Baron Dupin above me and both of us falling together in a bloody tangle, upending the podium in the process...his shirt stained with a wide oval, the rim of which was a thick darkness the color of death...he groaning, gripping madly, passionately at my collar...a horrid weight over my body.
Then, both of us sinking, sinking into oblivion.
Chapter 26
Book V. The Flood
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted
- Tomas Moore
26
I WAS NOT suspicious when Officer White took me in his coach from the lyceum to Glen Eliza. Think of it. I had more knowledge of the complex situation that had just occurred than anyone. Though I did not have unreserved confidence in the abilities of the police officers, I believed that with my assistance, Duponte could be found...and then he would find the truth the Baltimore police could not.
Officer White entered the drawing room of Glen Eliza with his clerk and several other police officers I had not seen before. I proceeded to transfer to White all the knowledge I possessed-from the arrival of Baron Dupin in Baltimore to the violent moment as I had just witnessed it. But from his interjections, I began to wonder how closely he was listening.
"Dupin is dying," White kept repeating with different emphasis. "Dupin is dying."
"Yes, at the hands of these two rascals," I explained once more, "who pursued me through the city earlier, thinking I was trying to prevent their petty vengeance against the Baron."
"Then you saw one of them shoot the Baron at the lyceum?" asked Officer White, who sat at the edge of an armchair. The police clerk was all the while standing dumbly behind me. I never liked feeling watched, and I looked back repeatedly with an unsubtle desire that he would at least be seated.
"No," I answered