The Dante Club Page 0,51

in a dangerous way!"

"Jamey, Wendell, please..." Fields stood between them.

"If you go to the police, you can just count me out of this," Holmes added with a treble voice as he took a seat. "Do it over my principled objection and my stated refusal."

"Observe, gentlemen," Lowell said with a demonstrative flick of his hand at Holmes, "Dr. Holmes in his usual position when the world needs him - sitting on his arse."

Holmes looked around the room, hoping someone would speak up in his support, then sank deeper into his chair, meekly removing his gold chain, tangled with his Phi Beta Kappa key, and checking his watch against Longfellow's mahogany clock, half certain that any moment all the timepieces of Cambridge would tick to a dead stop.

Lowell was at his most persuasive when he spoke with soft assertiveness as he did when turning to Longfellow. "My dear Longfellow, when the officer arrives, we should have a note prepared, addressed to the chief of police, explaining what we believe to have discovered here tonight. Then we can put this behind us as our dear Dr. Holmes wishes to do."

"I'll begin." Fields reached for Longfellow's stationery drawer. Holmes and Lowell began their argument again.

Longfellow breathed a small sigh.

Fields halted with his hand in the drawer. Holmes and Lowell shut their mouths.

"Pray, do not leap in the dark. First tell me," Longfellow said. "Who in Boston and Cambridge knows about these murders?"

"Well, there's a question." Lowell was frightened enough to be impolite even to the one man, after his late father, whom he worshipped. "Everyone in the blessed city, Longfellow! One's on the front page of every paper" - he grabbed the headlining page on Healey's death - "and Talbot's will follow suit before the cock crows. A judge and a preacher! You might as well try to lock up the beef and beer as to keep that away from the public!"

"Very well. And who else in the city knows about Dante? Who else knows how le piante erano a tutti accese intrambe? How many are strolling down Washington and School Streets peering into the shops or stopping in at Jordan, Marsh for the latest fashion in hats, thinking to themselves that rigavan lor di sangue il volto, che, mischiato di lagrime and imagining the fright of those fastidiosi vermi - the loathsome worms?"

"Tell me, who in our city - no, who in America today - knows the words of Dante in his every work, in his every canto, his every tercet? Enough to even begin to think how to turn the entrails of Dante's punishments in Inferno into models of murder?"

Longfellow's study, holding New England's most sought after conversationalists, fell uncannily silent. Nobody in the room thought to answer the question, because the room was the answer: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Professor James Russell Lowell; Professor Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes; James Thomas Fields; and a small cross-section of friends and colleagues.

"Why, dear God," Fields said. "There's only a handful of people who would be able to read Italian, not to speak of Dante's Italian, and, even of those who might make some of it out with a heap of grammar books and dictionaries, most have never beheld a copy of Dante's works!" Fields should know. The publisher made it his business to know the reading habits of every litterateur and scholar in New England and everyone who counted outside it. "That is to say," he continued, "will never behold one until there's a completed translation of Dante to be published in all corners of America..."

"Like the one we're working on?" Longfellow held up the proofs for Canto Sixteen. "If we do disclose to the police the precision with which these murders have been drawn from Dante and carried out, whom could they possibly single out with knowledge sufficient to commit these crimes?"

"We will not only be their first suspects," Longfellow said. "We will have to be their prime suspects."

"Come now, my dear Longfellow," Fields said with a desperately serious laugh. "Let us get our heads out from under this excitement, gentlemen. Look around the room: professors, leading citizens of the Commonwealth, poets, the frequent hosts and guests of senators and dignitaries, bookmen - who would really think us involved in a murder? I do little to inflate our status by reminding us that we are men of great standing in Boston, men of society!"

"As was Professor Webster. The gallows tell us there's no law against stringing up a Harvard man," Longfellow replied.

Dr. Holmes