The Dante Club Page 0,138

spoke but did not look back at the men in the room. "You could have told me what had happened, you know. Any one of you could have told me. I may not have the strongest... I do know I could have helped you."

They waited for the sound of Greene's footfalls to die in the hallway.

"If only we had told him," said Longfellow. "What a fool I was to envision a race against the translation!"

"Not so, Longfellow!" Fields said. "Think of what we now know: Greene preached his sermons on Thursday afternoons, directly before returning to Rhode Island. He would select a canto he wished to brush up on, choosing from the two or three cantos you had set as the agenda for the next translation session. Our blasted Lucifer heard the same punishment we were to sit down with - six days before our own group! And that left ample time for Lucifer to stage his own version of the contrapasso murder just a day or two before we transcribed it onto paper. So, from our limited vantage point, the whole farrago assumed the appearance of a race, of someone taunting us with the particulars of our own translation."

"What of the warning cut into Mr. Longfellow's window?" asked Rey.

"La Mia Traduzione." Fields threw up his hands. "We were hasty to conclude it was the work of the murderer. Manning's damned jackals at the College would surely stoop so low as to try to frighten us off the translation."

Holmes turned to Rey, "Patrolman, does Willard Burndy possess anything that can help us from here?"

Rey answered, "Burndy says a soldier paid him for instruction in how to open Reverend Talbot's safe. Burndy, assuming it was easy profit with little risk, went to Talbot's house to scout the layout, where several witnesses happened to see him. After Talbot's murder, the detectives discovered the eyewitnesses, and with the help of Langdon Peaslee, Burndy's rival, they fixed their case against Burndy. Burndy is a lush and can barely remember any more of the killer than the fact of his soldier's uniform. I wouldn't trust his mind even for that if you hadn't discovered the source of the murderer's knowledge."

"Hang Burndy! Hang 'em all!" Lowell cried. "Can't you see, men? This is in our sights. We're so close on Lucifer's path that we can't help but step on his Achilles' heel. Think of it: The erratic pacing between murders now makes perfect sense. Lucifer was no Dante scholar after all - he was but a Dante parishioner. He could only kill after hearing Greene preach on a punishment. One week Greene preached Canto Eleven as his text - Virgil and Dante sitting on a wall to get accustomed to the stench of Hell, discussing Hell's structure with the coolness of two engineers - a canto that features no specific punishment, no murder. Greene then took ill the next week, didn't attend our club, didn't preach - no murder again."

"Yes, and Greene was ill once before that during our time translating Inferno, too." Longfellow turned a page in his notes. "And once after that. There was no murder in those periods, either."

Lowell continued, "And when we put a pause in our club meetings, when we first decided to investigate after Holmes's observation of Talbot's body, the killings stopped cold - because Greene had stopped! Until we had our 'respite' and decided to translate the Schismatics - sending Greene back to the pulpit and Phinny Jennison to his death!"

"The killer's putting the money under the Simoniac's head now comes into plain daylight, too," Longfellow said remorsefully. "That was always Mr. Greene's preferred interpretation. I should have noticed his readings of Dante in the particulars of the murders."

"Do not bring yourself down, Longfellow," urged Dr. Holmes. "The murders' details were such that only an expert Dantean would have known them. There was no way to have guessed Greene was their unwitting source."

"I'm afraid, however well-intentioned my reasoning," replied Longfellow, "that we've made a grave error. By our accelerating the frequency of our translation sessions, our adversary has now heard as much Dante from Greene in a week's time as he would over the span of a month."

"I say put Greene back in that chapel," Lowell insisted. "But this time we make him preach on something other than Dante. We watch the audience and wait for someone to become agitated, then we nab our Lucifer!"

"It is far too dangerous a game for Greene!" said Fields. "He is not up