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.”
I thought about the plain apartments of his hotel room upstairs and rehearsed in my mind what Duponte’s life would have been like in the months since the Baron’s murder, hiding here in plain view. He had books—in fact, the place was littered with books, as though a library had collapsed and disbursed itself at will. All of the titles seemed to relate to sediment, minerals, and general characteristics of rocks. In the darkness and gloom of these weeks, he had turned to the workings of geology. This struck me as horribly base and useless, that tomb of books and stones, and I was irritable that he was now implying a demand for my sympathies.
“Do you know the pinch my life has been in, Monsieur Duponte, since beginning our adventure?” I demanded. “I was presumed guilty of killing the Baron Dupin until the police came to their senses. Now I must fight or lose my entire estate, Glen Eliza itself, all that I possess.”
I explained, through a last course of watermelon, what had happened in prison and upon my escape and my discovery of Bonjour and the rogues. After we finished our large meal, we walked upstairs to return to his rooms.
“I must relate the full story of Poe’s death in court,” I said to him, “in one last bid to show that in all this I acted with reason and not imbecile dreams.”
Duponte looked at me with interest. “What will you say, monsieur?”
“You never intended to resolve Poe’s death, did you?” I asked sadly. “You used it as a distraction, knowing it would soon enough look to the world as though you had been killed here. You were inspired when you read the Baron’s newspaper announcement in Paris that he would set the trap for himself that would free you from the expectations of others. That was why you thrilled at the idea of that Von Dantker being sent to Glen Eliza by the Baron—so his imitation of you could be perfected. You only went out of the house at night to ensure the Baron’s charade would succeed. You simply wanted to kill the notion, once and for all, that you were the real ‘Dupin.’”
Duponte nodded at this last statement, but would not look directly at me. “When I met you, Monsieur Clark, I was angry at your insistence to see me in that light, as ‘Dupin.’ I then realized that only through studying Poe’s tales and studying you would I understand what it was you and so many others perennially looked for in such a character. There is no real Dupin anymore, and never will be.” He had a strange mix of relief and horror in his tone. Relief that he no longer carried the burden of being the master ratiocinator, of being the real Dupin. Horror at having to be someone else.
I would tell him the hard truth. “You are not Dupin!” I would say. “You never were. There was no such man ever alive; Dupin was an invention.” After all, perhaps that was why I had searched so lustily to find him again. To make him feel with me the sting of what had been lost. To take away something and thus leave him more alone.
But I did not say it.
I thought about what Benson had said to me about the dangers to the susceptible imagination of reading Poe. To believe you were in Poe’s writings. Perhaps, along the same lines, Duponte had once believed himself in a mental world created by Poe, had thought he was in the tales of Dupin. Yet he was more present in a world like the one Poe had imagined than most of us, and who was to say that did not make him the real embodiment of the character whom I had met first on a page in Graham’s magazine? Did it matter whether he was the cause or the effect?
“Where?” I asked Duponte. “Where will you go?”
Instead of answering, he said musingly: “There is much admirable in you, monsieur.”
I do not know why, but this statement astonished me, lifting my spirits, and I asked him to elaborate.
“Some people, you understand, cannot get out of their positions. They cannot be among the missing, even if desired. I could not, here or in Paris, until now, and Monsieur Poe could not even until death. You could have left all along and you did not.” He paused. “What will you say in court?”
“I will tell them the answers. I will give them the Baron Dupin’s story of Poe’s death. People will believe it.”
“Yes, they will. You will win the case if you do this?” Duponte asked.
“I will win. It will be as true to them as anything else. It is the only way.”
“And as for Poe?”
“Perhaps,” I said quietly, “it is as good as any other ending.”
“How very like an attorney you are, after all,” said Duponte, with a faraway smile.
At length the porter came to secure the balance of the Duke’s belongings. Duponte gave him various instructions. I retrieved my hat and bid him good evening. My steps lingered a bit as I entered the hall, but though wanting a last sight by which to remember Duponte, I only saw him struggling to arrange some unwieldy geological instruments to be transported. I wished he would turn and remind me I was not seeing any ordinary man. Call out an insult—“Dolt!” perhaps. Or “numskull!”
“I thought much of you, Duke,” I muttered to myself, and bowed.
34
THE DAY SOON came for me to sit upon the witness stand and tell the full “truth” of Poe’s death. To provide convincing evidence that the actions alleged as delusional and fantastical were in fact fruitful, rational, and conspicuously normal on my part. Peter had worked assiduously in my aid throughout the trial, particularly as to these points, and we had at least come to be held even with our legal adversaries in the prevailing judgment of the populace. The opposing lawyer had a lion-like voice that roared the jury into submission. Peter said that my presentation of Poe’s death would be needed to obtain our victory.
Hattie, her aunt, and additional Blum family members arrived each day to court. They were perplexed by Peter’s insistence on laboring over my defense (“and that after young Clark’s behavior!”), but came dutifully to support the man they expected to marry their Hattie. I believe they also came to watch my disgrace and financial collapse. Hattie and I were able to have private words at intervals but never for long. Each time, the eye of her aunt found us, and each time she innovated new techniques to prevent any further intercourse.
This morning’s testimony was widely anticipated among our society. The courtroom audience swelled from its usual numbers. I was, in particular, to prove that all of this was indeed an attempt to seek answers to a mystery about Poe’s death by showing the reality of this claim: by answering the mysteries themselves. On some nights, I’d had dreams about it. In them, I thought I could see the literary figure C. Auguste Dupin—who resembled quite precisely, though not uniformly, Auguste Duponte—and could hear him dictate each particular. Yet when I woke I could describe no conclusions, could re-create no ratiocination, could find only conflicting fragments of ideas and sentences, and felt helpless
and frustrated. That is when the Baron would reappear to my mind, and I would be grateful that I had his firm answers, his reliable and dramatic answers, answers that would satisfy any public demand.
Mere words that would save all I possessed.
There were stares from the onlookers, the same species of stares that had greeted the Baron on the lyceum stage. Stares of greed, the signs of a bargain between speaker and hearers to reach into the lowest part of the souls of both. Many Poe spectators who had once longed to hear the Baron were here. I would reveal how Poe died, it was said throughout the city. I could see Neilson Poe and John Benson coming into the room, men who, in very different ways, had needed those answers, any answers. I saw Hattie—for whom I would be saving a life we could have together, keeping for us a home in Glen Eliza, just by licking my lips with the Baron’s honey of persuasion. Just by telling a story.
The judge called my name, and I looked down at the lines I’d written. I took a breath.
“I present to you, Your Honor and Gentlemen of the Jury, the truth about this man’s death and my life. The narrative has not been told before. Whatever has been taken away from me, one last possession remains: this story.”
Could I insist, as the Baron had, that what seemed true must be true? Yes, yes, why not? Wasn’t I a lawyer? Wasn’t it my job, my role?
“There are those of our city today who tried to stop it. There are those sitting here among you who still believe me a criminal, a liar, an outcast, a clever, vile murderer. Me, Your Honor: Quentin Hobson Clark, citizen of Baltimore, member of the Bar, a fond reader.