Poe shadow (50 page)

Out of caution, I waited another day before going to the next Bonaparte address. The house was empty—or, rather, there were no servants and nobody responded to my knocking at the door. But I noticed the carriage house door was open and, as I stood outside, I could see shapes through the windows of the house. Propping myself on a ledge, I pressed against a window and thought I could hear men speaking in French.

When the door opened, I could see two of the figures inside more clearly. I knew one as the rogue who had almost killed me in the carriage factory, and the second to be his partner. The first wore a large bandage fastened around his arm where he had been crushed by the carriage after I had stabbed him.

A different man, the one closer to the street door, was handing over money to the two rogues, who were nodding and soon departed into the carriage house. This third man had the demeanor of being their leader. I waited until they had driven away and then rang.

The man returned to the door. He was grander than the two rogues. Not bigger, exactly, but better fashioned to provoke respect rather than mere fear, with perfectly squared shoulders. For a moment I stood paralyzed as he waited for some word from me. He looked back at me as I stared at him with a vague air of recognition.

“Mr. Bonaparte,” I said finally, choking back a gasp. “You are Monsieur Bonaparte?”

He shook his head. “My name is Rollin. Young Monsieur Bonaparte is away, at West Point. You would like to leave word?” He instructed more than asked this, but I declined. There was something in his tone….

I promised to return another day and hastily began backing away, terrified that one of the rogues would have occasion to return and see me at the door. But even more I feared that third one, the man calling himself Rollin. He lifted his hat, slowly, to bid me good evening, and before he returned it to its place I knew exactly where I had first seen him. It had been so brief, and long before, halfway across the world.

Remembering that first vision of him, I comprehended, gradually, as I walked through the street, how it had all happened, how it had all been connected from Paris until now. How the Bonapartes had come to be involved. How in one attempted assassination in Baltimore indeed lay the future of France….

As these thoughts gathered themselves together, I walked rapidly, but somewhat carelessly, toward another boardinghouse Edwin had arranged for me upon my return from Washington. Suddenly, I felt a stinging pain travel across my back. I fell forward, then rolled onto my back. Above me, I saw flashes of a white horse, rearing upward to the sky, and a tall and powerful man on top. He unrolled his whip and this time caught my arm.

“Mr. Clark, attorney, isn’t it? What a thing to see such a finely bred man wanted for murder.” It was Slatter, the slave-trader, riding a perfect specimen of the largest Pennsylvania horse. I attempted to stand, but he kicked the side of my head with his boot. I writhed in pain on the ground and coughed up blood.

Slatter jumped down from the horse and, while holding me down with his dark mahogany cane, placed my wrists and ankles in shackles.

“Your sands are nearly run down, my friend! I’ve cleared two thousand dollars in the last month but will enjoy this even more.”

“I did not shoot anyone! And I have no business with you!” I cried.

“But you had business with me the other week, didn’t you? With that woolly-head young friend of yours? No, your business is not with me. It is with the city. It is always a pleasure for me to serve the police of Baltimore.” The leading slave-traders often received the rolls of men and women wanted for arrest, since many of those were escaped slaves. “Perhaps you’d like to spend a night in my pen with the stock that are about to be shipped off, before you go to the police. I’m sure they will be anxious to see you again—we know you’re such an avowed lover of their kind. Perhaps you even speak their nigger-tongue.”

The shackles were immovable, and I had no choice but to walk along toward his slave pen as he pulled me by a long chain from his horse. Slatter seemed to relish the slow pace we took, as though he were parading me to thousands of onlookers, though, in fact, the flooded and dark streets were empty, and he bent his neck around often in order to take delight at the sight of me.

I was looking down in despair when I heard a sound of footsteps. I glanced up, and I suppose he must have seen my eyes widen with surprise. Turning around swiftly, he saw what I’d seen—a man springing from the ground with a yell to knock him over. Slatter’s head hit the ground hard. He lifted his neck briefly, and then his eyes closed with a moan. Edwin Hawkins stood over him and searched Slatter’s coat for the keys to my shackles.

“For goodness’ sake!” I cried out. “I am desperate glad to see you, Edwin!”

Retrieving the keys, he freed me from my restraints. “Mr. Clark,” he said, interrupting my exclamations of gratitude, “I must make tracks.” He looked back at Slatter.

“Do not worry. He is unconscious,” I said. “He won’t be awake for a while yet.”

“I have to leave Baltimore. Now, Mr. Clark. He knew me in my youth.”

Then I realized. If Slatter had seen Edwin, and recognized the attacker as a man whom he had sold years before, or had just looked long enough to remember his face…Edwin would not only be convicted, he would be entered back into slavery. “Did he see you?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Clark. But I can’t risk finding out. I am sorry I won’t be able to help you any longer. I know you will find the evidence you need.”

“Edwin.” I took his arm. “If only I had not shown surprise! He would not have turned at all, and you would never have been at risk of him seeing you. You have done this for Poe!”

“No. This I have done for you.” He took my hand with a warm smile. “You will prove your name, and that will be reward for this. For me, you must go ahead. With heaven speed.”

I nodded. “Leave here quickly, my friend,” I whispered, “and be silent on your way.” He disappeared into the streets.

I shackled Slatter’s hands but left his feet and legs free so he could find help when he awoke. He did not look as tall as he had on the horse; in fact, he was a decrepit old man lying there, with a blank and sloppy expression. I could hardly move from this spot. With Edwin gone, I felt inconsolably alone, and I remembered longingly the comforts of Hattie’s visits in prison, and Bonjour’s appearance there, and the burst of strength I’d received from them.

A sudden thought forced me to my feet. “Bonjour,” I gasped to myself. I heard Slatter coming to life in a series of groans, but I did not stop to look back at him. I raised myself onto the side of his horse and rode back in the direction I had come from.

“My horse!” Slatter cried. “You! Bring back my horse!”

My fears were realized when I saw that the door to the Bonaparte house I had just left was wide open. I tied the slave-trader’s horse to a post outside and walked circumspectly through the front hall. It was quiet except for the sounds of audible, pained breathing. If there had been any other noises it’s unlikely I would have heard them. They would have folded into the background of my mind, along with the furnishings. I was transfixed.

In the parlor, there had clearly been a struggle only minutes, maybe seconds, before I arrived. Chairs, lamps, curtains, and papers were scattered over the floor. The chandelier still shook with the violence. The victor was clear. Bonjour stood over the large figure of Rollin, who was perspiring pitifully. From the disarray at a nearby window, it was clear he had tried to jump out of it. Bonjour, though perhaps half his size, was holding him down and had a blade touching his throat.

His eyes met mine and I wondered: did he know me now too?

I had been leaving Paris with Auguste Duponte to begin our investigation of Poe’s death. Climbing aboard the ship, Duponte announced there was a stowaway. You remember.

“Do request,” he said to me, “Monsieur Clark, that the steward inform our ship’s captain there is a stowaway on board.”

“You shall want to know what I know!” cried this stowaway, Rollin, when he was revealed and accused of trying to steal the steamer’s mail shipment. There was something in his tone that may have rekindled the memory in me when the same man asked, in a voice far too aggressive, “You would like to leave word?” at the door of the Bonaparte mansion. But more than that, it was the lift of his hat—revealing the square baldness that had been unwillingly shown that day at sea when he was flung from the rails. It was that sight that made me remember where I had seen him that time.

By the time I had discovered Bonjour there, the implications of this man’s presence on the
Humboldt
had settled into my imagination. But to answer my previous question for myself: no, I do not think he knew me now. He had been watching for someone else that earlier day at sea.

Now he was staring right at me. Rollin’s eyes burned with ghastly interest, his legs wet with water and spotted with flower petals that had spilled on the rug from a shattered vase.

Bonjour peered around. She smiled slightly, almost apologetically, at me. I could almost feel all the passion and regret of her kiss again while I looked upon her face.

“I am sorry, Monsieur Clark.” She said this as though I were the one prostrate and pleading for my life.

“You,” I said, standing upright with the revelation. “You poisoned me. It was not the police or the prison guards! It was you. You slipped the poison into my mouth when we kissed.”

“After I found a way inside the prison, I saw that the walls of the hospital chambers were already giving way to the floods,” she said. “I felt you could get out through the sewer passage, but I needed to find a way for you to be transferred there. You may say I helped you, monsieur.”

“No, you did not do it to help me. You wanted to follow me to Duponte so he would find the men who shot the Baron, and whoever ordered it. You thought Duponte could still help and that I’d know where Duponte was.”

“I wanted the same thing as you, Monsieur Clark. To find the truth.”

“Please,” begged the man on the floor. Bonjour kicked him fiercely in his stomach.

I looked on as the man twisted in pain. I took a step closer. “Bonjour, this will help nothing. The police can arrest them now.”

“I have no trust in police, Monsieur Clark.”

The man swallowed down some further plea and trembled pitifully.

Bonjour crouched on the floor, positioning her blade. “Leave,” she said to me, pointing to the door.

“You do not owe the Baron vengeance, mademoiselle,” I said. “You have fulfilled your obligations by discovering the man who ordered his killing. Murdering this villain now will only make your life wretched, will only force you to run, as you have had to before. And,” I added, “I will be the sole witness to this crime. You will have to kill me, too.”

I was surprised when Bonjour, after remaining dead still in the midst of contemplation, turned slowly to me with a tear at the corner of her eye. It seemed a true affection had arisen in her expression. She stepped gingerly toward me like a scared deer. She seemed to be holding her breath when she threw her arms around my shoulders with a low moan. It was less of an embrace, somehow, than when our bodies were brought together at the fortifications in Paris. It was more a need for support, and I stood straight as a pillar. “Bonjour. It will be made right. We have both helped ourselves. Let me help you.” She then shoved me away as though I had been the one to pull her to me. I nearly fell against the edge of a sofa. There was something lost from her eyes that made me know that I would not see her again.

Bonjour let her dagger drop and, after a moment of looking over the scene she had created, she began kicking the man brutally across the face several times in a flurry of blows. Then she ran from the room. I breathed in relief that she had not killed him. And yet it was not my monologue that had moved her not to do so. Approaching the place where Rollin lay crumpled like a corpse, I saw what Bonjour had seen: one of the objects that had crashed to the floor during their struggle was a newspaper from that morning. On the first page was announced the death of the mysterious French baron in the hospital.

The slave-trader had not been mistaken, as I had thought, when he’d said I was wanted for murder. Bonjour, for her part, must have felt her obligation to avenge the Baron somehow burn and fade upon his death—perhaps, for the thief in her, the reward, his honor, disappeared past redemption. Perhaps, for the true criminal mind, honor did not continue beyond death; nothing continued beyond death—there was no heaven or hell for persons who sought those same territories here. Or perhaps true sorrow had made all else pale in comparison. Whatever the reason, she had abandoned her revenge.

I leaned down at the side of Rollin and found that he was insensible but only superficially injured. I wrapped his wounds with a piece of fabric I tore from a fringed curtain. Then, before leaving, I found the washbasin to try to expunge his blood from my hands.

My mind circled vigorously around what I had learned. Though I had made great strides in understanding all that had happened, I still had no evidence against the men who’d killed the Baron. I had nothing in my possession to convince the police of what I now had uncovered. Even if I waited for the two villains to return to the Bonapartes’, they would not hesitate to eliminate me. Indeed, this would perhaps be Rollin’s first order to them if he regained consciousness. Since the police would only want to arrest me, I would have no protection if I sent for them.

And I would remain forever
the man who killed the real Dupin.
That was what people would think. I was destroyed. I would hang for someone else’s sins and, at the moment, I could not even decipher whose—these men, or Duponte’s. Worst of all, I had let all this mess forever prevent the resolution of Poe’s death.