The Poe Shadow Page 9

  The next morning I awoke after a deep, uncomfortable July sleep. I had returned to the Corneille the night before in a state of dull shock at my reception by Duponte. But in the morning my disappointment faded, eased by the thought that perhaps it was my own weariness that had clouded my first talk with Duponte. It had been unwise and unseemly to burst in on him like that, tired and anxious, disheveled in my appearance, without even a letter of introduction.

  This time I took a leisurely breakfast, which in Paris looks just like dinner minus soup—even beginning with oysters (though Cuvier himself could not put these small, blue, watery objects in any class of true oyster for an appetite born of the Chesapeake Bay). Arriving at Duponte’s lodgings, I lingered near the concierge’s chambers, and was glad to find that the concierge was out on business. His more talkative wife and a plump daughter sat mending a rug.

  The older woman offered me a chair. She blushed easily at my smile, and so I tried to smile liberally in the pauses between my words to induce her cooperation. “Yesterday, madame, you mentioned that Duponte does not receive very many callers. Are there not those who visit him professionally?”

  “Not in all the years since he has lived here.”

  “Had you not heard of Auguste Duponte before?”

  “Why certainly!” she answered, as if I had questioned her very sanity. “But I did not think it could have been the same one. They say that man was of importance to the police; our boarder is a harmless fellow, but quite in a stupor much of the time, a dead-alive sort of a man. I presumed it was a brother or some distant relation of his family. No, I suppose he hasn’t many acquaintances to visit him.”

  “And no lady-friends,” mumbled the bored daughter, and that was all you will hear the girl say for the whole two months in Paris.

  “I see,” I said, thanking both ladies before climbing to Duponte’s door. They both blushed again as I bowed.

  I had been thinking earlier that morning of Poe’s tales about C. Auguste Dupin. In the first one, Dupin abruptly and unexpectedly announces that he will investigate the horrible murders that occurred in a house on the Rue Morgue. An inquiry will afford us amusement, he says to his surprised friend. Let us enter into some examinations for ourselves. He searched for amusement. Of all the details I had spilled out in almost a single breath the day before, I had not once presented an enticing reason for Duponte to direct his genius to the case of Poe’s death! Perhaps, in the last few years, when Duponte seemed to have become inactive, no affair had come about worthy of his interest, and as a result he had settled into what seemed to most to be an aimless torpor.

  Duponte did not turn me away when I knocked at his door. He invited me for a stroll. I walked alongside him through the crowded and warm Latin Quarter. I say “alongside” even though his steps were abnormally deliberate and slow, one foot hardly passing the other in each of his strides; this meant that in trying to remain at the same pace, I sometimes felt like I was dancing a half circle. As with the day before, he spoke of commonplace matters. This time I engaged him in idle topics before making my latest attempt at persuasion.

  “Do you not find a desire to be occupied in more challenging dealings, though, Monsieur Duponte? While I have compiled all the particulars of Mr. Poe’s death available, others have employed the confused public knowledge to spit upon his grave. I should think an inquiry into a difficult, timely matter such as this would offer you great amusement…” I repeated this once more, as a heavy truck had rumbled by the first time. In response to this there was not a stir in the man. He clearly did not think himself in need of greater amusements, and I again was obliged to retreat.

  On a subsequent visit to Duponte’s apartment, I found him smoking a cigar in his bed. It seemed he used his bed for smoking and for writing—he detested writing anything, he said, for with obnoxious consistency it stopped him from thinking. For this visit I had been rereading and reflecting on the “liberal proposition” offered to C. Auguste Dupin by the police in Poe’s sequel tale, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” to penetrate the case of a young shopgirl found dead in the woods. Though agreeable compensation had certainly been implied in my own letters to Duponte, I now assured him expressly, in homage to Poe’s own words from the tale, that I would provide him “a liberal fee for your undivided attention to Poe’s death, beginning immediately.” I removed a check. I suggested an amount of considerable value, and then a few numbers even higher.

  With no resulting success. It seemed he was not moved at all by money, despite his less than luxurious circumstances. To this, as to other attempts to direct his attention to my own agenda, he would take my elbow as he pointed out an architectural oddity; or praise the Parisian summers extensively for their loveliness; or remove any need for a reply by letting his eyes linger shut in a ruined blink. Sometimes, Duponte seemed almost an imbecile in his placid stare as we passed shops and the blooming flowers and trees of the garden—“the horse-chestnuts!” he would say suddenly—or maybe it was a stare of sadness.

  One evening after leaving another interview with Duponte, I passed a group of police officers sitting at tables outside a crowded café eating ices. They were a formidable blur of single-breasted blue coats, mustaches, and small, pointed beards.

  “Monsieur! Monsieur Clark, bonjour!”

  It was the squat young policeman who had commandeered my carriage upon my arrival in Paris. I attributed his enthusiasm at seeing me to the congenial spirits of their party.

  Each of the officers rose to greet me.

  “This is a gentleman and a scholar who has come from America to see Auguste Duponte!” After a moment of interesting silence, the policemen all burst into laughter.

  I was confused by this reaction to Duponte’s name. I sat down as the first one continued: “There are many stories to hear of Duponte. He was a great genius. Duponte, they say, would know a thief was going to take your jewels before the thief did.”

  “He was a great genius, you say?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. Long ago.”

  “My father was in the police when the prefects would engage Monsieur Duponte,” said another policeman, who displayed a scowl that may have been permanent. “He said Duponte was a clever young man who merely created difficulties so he could seem to surmount them.”

  “In what manner?” I asked with alarm.

  He scratched his neck viciously with his overgrown fingernails; the side of his neck looked red and inflamed from this habit. “It is what he heard,” the Scratcher muttered.

  “It is said that Duponte,” continued the more amiable officer, “could judge the morals of all men with precision just by their looks. He once offered to walk through the streets on the day of a public fête and point out to the police all the dangerous people who should be removed from society.”

  “Did he?” asked another.

  “No—the police would have had no business to attend to if he had.”

  “But what happened to him?” I asked. “What of the investigations he performs today?”

  One of the officers who looked thoughtful and quieter than the others spoke up. “They say Monsieur Duponte failed—that the woman he loved was hanged for murder, and his powers of analysis could not rescue her. That he could do no more investigations—”

  “Investigations!” balked the Scratcher. “Of course there can be no more. Unless he manages to carry them out as a ghost. He was killed by a prisoner who had vowed that he would avenge himself on Duponte for arresting him.”

  I opened my mouth to correct him, but thought better of it—there was a deep venom in that man’s voice that seemed better not to rouse.

  “No, no,” one of the others disagreed. “Duponte is not dead. Some say he lives in Vienna now. He grew tired of the ingratitude. What stories I could tell you! There is no living soul like that in Paris in this age, in all events.”

  “Prefect Delacourt would not hear of it,” added the squat officer, and the others cackled raucously.

  Here wa
s one of the officers’ anecdotes.

  Years earlier, Duponte one evening had found himself in a cabinet, or private chamber, of a tavern in Paris, sitting across from a convict who had only three days earlier sliced the throat of a prison guard from one side to the other. Every agent of the Paris police had been on watch for him since he’d escaped, including several who sat with me at the café. Duponte, employing his varied skills, had deduced where in the city the rogue would most likely think it safest to conceal himself. So there they sat together in the cabinet.

  “I will be safe from capture from the police,” the villain confided. “I can outrun any one of them—and could beat any one of them in a pistol fight if I had to. I’m safe, as long as I do not meet with that wretch Duponte. He is the true criminal of Paris.”

  “I should think you would know him when you see him,” Duponte commented.

  The scoundrel laughed at Duponte. “Know him…?God bless!” He now emptied his wine bottle at a breath. “You have never dealt with this knave Duponte, have you? He’s not to be seen twice in the same dress. In the morning, he appears to be just another person, like yourself. Then, an hour later, so changed that his own mother would never recognize him and, by evening, no man or demon would ever remember having seen him before! He knows where you are, and can auspicate where you go next!”

  When this bad fellow had drunk more than he’d intended, Duponte went downstairs for another bottle of wine and then returned to the cabinet with perfect calmness. Duponte reported to the convict that the barmaid had said she’d seen Auguste Duponte there, looking in on the private rooms. The villain was thrown into a wild fury at the news, and Duponte suggested that the fellow hide in the closet so he might come out and kill the investigator when he entered. When the villain stepped into the closet, Duponte locked it and fetched the police.

  That had once been Duponte. It was that Duponte I had to bring to America. Nor had my limited communion with him proved totally void of his talents. One afternoon, during one of Duponte’s walks, the heat was strong and I convinced him to share a coach with me. After some time driving through Paris in silence, he pointed out the window of our coach to a cemetery. “That,” he said, “upon the other side of the wall, is the small burial place of your people, Monsieur Clark.”

  I saw a sign in French for the Jewish cemetery. “Yes, it is quite small…” I paused, leaving my statement in the air. Thinking of what had just been said to me, I turned in astonishment. “Monsieur Duponte!”

  “Yes?”

  “What did you say a moment ago? Of that burial place?”

  “That in it are the people of your faith, or perhaps partially of your faith.”

  “But, monsieur, whatever leads you to believe I am Jewish? I have never said so to you.”

  “You are not?” Duponte asked in surprise.

  “Well,” I answered breathlessly, “my mother was Jewish. My father, Protestant; he has died too. But however did you think of that?”

  Duponte, seeing I would press the question, explained. “When we neared a particular lodging house in Montmartre some days ago, you realized from the newspaper accounts that it was the place where a young girl was brutally murdered.” Articles about the gruesome case, indeed, had daily pervaded the Paris newspapers I had been reading to improve my French. Duponte continued: “Feeling it was something of a sacred place, a place of recent death, you reached for your hat. However, rather than taking off your hat—as the Christian does automatically upon entering a church—you secured it tighter on your head—like the Jew in his synagogue. Then you fumbled with it for another moment, showing your uncertain instincts in the matter to remove or tighten it. This made me consider that you had worshipped, at times, in church and in synagogue.”

  He was correct. My mother had not yielded her Jewish heritage upon entering wedlock, despite the collective urgings of my father’s family, and once the Lloyd Street Synagogue was completed in Baltimore she had brought me with her.

  Duponte returned to his usual silence. I kept my excitement to myself. I had begun to break down Duponte’s walls.

  I tried delicately to solicit Duponte for more facts about his past, but his face would stiffen each time. We developed a friendly routine. Each morning I would knock at his door. If he was stretched on his bed with the newspaper, he would invite me inside for coffee. Usually, Duponte would announce his departure for a walk and I would ask permission to accompany him, to which he would assent by ignoring my question.

  He had an impenetrability, a moral invisibility that made me want to see how he would be in all the possible variations of life: to see him in love, in a duel, to see what meal he would select at a certain establishment. I burned to know his thoughts and wished him to desire to know more of me.

  Sometimes I would bring him an item related to my original purpose that I hoped might strike his interest. For example, I found a guidebook of Baltimore in one of the Paris bookstalls and showed it to him.

  “You see, inside there is a folded map—and this part of town is where Edgar Poe lived in Baltimore when he won his first newspaper prize for a tale called ‘Ms. Found in a Bottle.’ Here is where he was discovered in an insensible state in Baltimore. Look here, monsieur; that is his burial place!”

  “Monsieur Clark,” he said, “I am afraid such things are of as little interest to me as you can imagine.”

  You see how it was. I tried every approach to uplift him from his inactive trance. For example, one hot day when Duponte and I were walking across a bridge over the Seine, we decided to pay twelve sous each to one of the floating establishments on the river to take a bath under a canvas roofing. We plunged into the cooling water opposite each other. Duponte closed his eyes and leaned back, and I followed his example. Our bodies were rocked up and down by the happy splashing of children and young men.

  Quentin: “Monsieur, surely you know the importance of Poe’s tales of C. Auguste Dupin. You have heard of them. They were published in the French journals.”

  Duponte (inattentively, a question or statement?): “They were.”

  Q: “Your own achievements in analysis provide the character of the main figure with his abilities. That must mean something to you! The exploits involve the most intricate, seemingly impossible, and miraculous triumphs of reason.”

  D: “I have not read them, I believe.”

  Q: “Not read the literature of your own life? That which will make you immortal? How could this be?”

  D: “It is of as little interest to me as I could imagine, monsieur.”

  Should that last comment have an exclamation mark? Perhaps a grammarian could answer; it was quite sharply enunciated but without any greater volume than a waiter at a restaurant repeating an order back to his customer.

  It was just a few days later when there came an important turn in my companionship with Duponte. I had walked with Duponte through the Jardin des Plantes, where not only the finest plants and trees were enjoyed in the summer but one of Paris’s best scientific zoological collections. After a tunnel of clouds had darkened above the trees, we had begun walking for the exit when a man rushed up behind us. He spoke with great consternation.

  “Kind monsieurs,” he said, panting out the words, “have you seen somebody with my cake?”

  “Cake?” I repeated. “What do you mean, monsieur?”

  He explained that he had walked to the street-vendors and purchased a seedcake, a rare indulgence for him, to enjoy on what had been a beautiful sunny day before the rain began. This fellow had placed his treat lovingly on the bench beside his person until such a time as he would feel his earlier dinner properly digested. He had turned his back only for a brief moment to secure his umbrella from the ground upon noticing the storm gathering overhead. However, when he turned back finally ready to savor his sweet luxury, it had vanished completely, and there was not a man around!

  “Perhaps a bird picked it up, monsieur,” I suggested. I tugged at Duponte’s arm. “Come along. It is beg
inning to rain, Monsieur Duponte, and we haven’t any umbrellas.”

  We parted from our cakeless friend, but after a few steps Duponte turned around. He called back this despondent man.

  “Monsieur,” said Duponte, “stand where I am now and likely your cake shall return in two to seven minutes. Approximately speaking.” Duponte’s voice exhibited neither joy nor particular interest in the matter.

  “Indeed?” the man cried.

  “Yes. I should think so,” said Duponte, and he began walking away again.

  “But—how?” the man now thought to ask.

  I, too, was held dumbstruck by Duponte’s proposition, and Duponte saw this.

  “Imbeciles!” said Duponte to himself.

  “What?” the man asked with offense.

  “Pardon, Monsieur Duponte!” I said, also protesting the insult.

  Duponte ignored this. “I shall demonstrate the conclusion,” he said. We two waited at the very edge of anticipation. But Duponte simply stood there. After a space of three and a half minutes, roughly, a regular stampede of hurried noises was heard nearby and there—I must reveal—came a piece of cake from around the corner, floating in the air, right near the nose of its rightful owner!

  “The cake!” I pointed.

  The confection was attached to a short string of some sort, and followed behind two small boys running headlong through the gardens. The man chased down the boy and untied his cake from its thief. He then ran back to us.

  “Why, remarkable monsieur, you were entirely right! But how have you recovered my cake?” For a moment the man looked at Duponte suspiciously, as though he had been involved in some scheme. Duponte, seeing he would have no peace without explaining, offered this simple description of what had transpired.

  Among the most popular attractions in the natural collections of the Jardin des Plantes was the exhibition of bears. Before being accosted by the cake-widower, Duponte had casually noticed that it was near the time in which the bears usually stirred from their sleep. This was also known by the many local devotees to these animals, and it was a daily occupation to try to make the waking bears perform various antics and climb the pole provided for them, an effort that often involved dangling some item of food into their pit by twine or string. Indeed, the vendors at the gates to the gardens sold as much of their wares for these purposes as for human nourishment. But since among the lovers of the bears who would come from miles away for this sport were many young boys, and since most of these gamins had no spare sous in their pockets for such delicacies, Duponte reasoned that as the man had turned to secure his umbrella at the sign of rain, one of these boys had snatched the cake on his way to the bears. Because the bench was quite high, and the boy short, the man, on turning around again, saw no one nearby and thought the source of the theft fantastic.