The Dante Club Page 0,92

Lowell, Holmes, would you accompany me down to the wine cellar while Fields sees how work goes along in the kitchen?" he asked as he lifted a candle from the table.

"Ah, the true foundation of any house!" Lowell jumped from the armchair. "Do you have a good vintage, Longfellow?"

"You know my rule of thumb, Mr. Lowell:

'When you ask one friend to dine,

give him your best wine.

When you ask two,

the second best will do.' "

The company let out a collective peal of laughter, inflated by a consciousness of relief.

"But we have four thirsts to quench!" Holmes objected.

"Then let us not expect much, my dear doctor," advised Longfellow. Holmes and Lowell followed him down to the basement by the light of the taper's silver gleam. Lowell used the laughter and conversation to divert himself from the shooting pain radiating in his leg, pounding and traveling upward from the red disk covering his ankle.

Phineas Jennison, in white coat, yellow waistcoat, and insistent wide-brimmed white hat, came down the steps of his Back Bay mansion. He walked and whistled. He twirled his gold-trimmed walking staff. He laughed heartily, as if he just heard a fine joke in his head. Phineas Jennison often laughed to himself in this way while rambling through Boston, the city he had conquered, every evening. There was one world remaining to obtain, one where money had severe limits, where blood determined much of one's status, and this conquest he was about to fulfill, in spite of recent hindrances.

From the other side of the street he was watched, watched step after step from the moment he left behind his mansion. The next shade needing punishment. Look how he walks and whistles and laughs, as though he knows no wrong and has known none. Step after step. The shame of a city that could no longer direct the course of the future. A city that had lost its soul. He who sacrified the one who could reunify them all. The watcher called out.

Jennison stopped, rubbing his famously indented chin. He squinted into the night. "Someone say my name there?"

No reply.

Jennison crossed the street and glanced ahead with faint recognition and ease at the person standing motionlessly beside the church. "Ah, you. I remember you. What is it you wanted?"

Jennison felt the man twist behind him, and then something pierced the merchant prince's back.

"Take my money, sir, take it all! Please! You can have it and be on your way! How much do you want? Name it! What say you?"

"Through me the way is among the people lost. Through me."

The last thing J. T. Fields expected to find when he set off the next morning in his carriage was a dead body.

"Just up ahead," Fields said to his driver. Fields and Lowell stepped down and walked up the sidewalk to Wade and Son. "This is where Bachi went in before rushing to the harbor." Fields showed Lowell.

They had found no listing of the store in any of the city directories.

"I'll be hanged if Bachi wasn't doing something shady here," Lowell said.

They knocked quietly without producing a response. Then, after a while, the door swung open and a man in a long blue coat with bright buttons brushed past. He was holding an overfilled box of assorted cargo.

"Beg pardon," Fields said. Two other policemen were approaching now, and they opened the doors to Wade and Son wider, pushing Lowell and Fields in. Inside was a lantern-jawed older man slumped on the counter, a pen still in his hand, as though he had been in mid-sentence. The walls and shelves were bare. Lowell inched closer. A telegraph wire was still wrapped around the dead man's neck. The poet stared with fascination at how lifelike the man seemed.

Fields rushed to his side and pulled his arm toward the door. "He's dead, Lowell!"

"Dead as one of Holmes's carcasses at the medical college," Lowell agreed. "No murder so mundane could be done by our Dantean, I'm afraid."

"Lowell, come!" Fields panicked at the growing number of police busying themselves studying the room, not yet taking notice of the two intruders.

"Fields, there's a suitcase beside him. He was getting ready to flee, just as Bachi did." He looked again at the pen in the deceased's hand. "He was trying to get done his unfinished business, I would rather think."

"Lowell, please!" Fields cried.

"Very well, Fields." But Lowell circled toward the corpse and stopped at the mail tray on the desk, slipping the top envelope into his coat pocket. "Come on then."