Are we strong enough to unravel a murder? Dr. Holmes wondered. Moonshine, that’s what it was! There had been two murders, horrendous stuff, but it could not be proven, thought Holmes, recruiting his scientific mind, that any more would follow. Their involvement could be uncalled-for or worse, hazardous. Half of him regretted ever having observed the inquest at the medical college, and the other half regretted having reported his discovery to his friends. Still, he could not stop himself from wondering: What would Junior do? Captain Holmes. The doctor understood life from so many vistas that he could move easily over and under and around a given situation. Junior, however, had the gift and talent of narrow determination. Only the narrow could be truly brave. Holmes clamped his eyes shut.

What would Junior do? He thought about seeing off Wendell Junior’s army company in their shiny blue and gold as they left their training camp. “Good luck. Wish I were young enough to fight.” And so on. But he had not wished that. He had thanked heaven that he was no longer young.

Lowell leaned toward Holmes and repeated Fields’s words with a patient softness and a voice of indulgence rare and heart-wrenching in him. “That which we are, we are.”

That which we are, we are: what we choose to be. This calmed Holmes a bit. The three friends waiting for him had agreed. Still, he could walk away with his hands in his pockets. He drew in a deep asthmatic breath, the sort followed by an equally pronounced exhale of release. But instead of completing the motion, Holmes chose. He did not recognize his own voice, a voice composed enough to belong to the noble flame that spoke to Dante. He only barely recognized his reason for the decision that his words, Tennyson’s words, carried into existence: “‘… that which we are, we are,/One equal temper of heroic hearts, /Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find,’ “—he paused—” ‘and not to yield.’ “

“To strive,” Lowell whispered meditatively, methodically, studying the face of each of his companions in turn and pausing on Holmes’s. “To seek. To find…”

The clock chimed the hour and Greene stirred, but there was no need for further intercourse: The Dante Club had been reborn.

“Oh, a thousand apologies, my dear Longfellow.” Greene snorted himself awake over the unhurried peals of the old clock. “Did I miss much of anything?”

In the low world of Boston, much was the same on the week the Reverend Talbot’s body was discovered. Unaltered was the triangle of streets where slums and public houses and brothels and cheap hotels had driven out those residents who could afford being driven out, where chalky steam gushed from pipes bending outward from glass– and ironworks, where sidewalks were littered with orange peels and filled with mirthful singing and dancing at odd hours. Hordes of black people were coming and going on the public horsecars: young ladies, laundresses and household servants, whose hair was caught up loudly in colored handkerchiefs, whose dangling jewelry made brash music; a black soldier or sailor in uniform might be seen, still a jarring sight. So too was a certain mulatto walking with notable poise along the streets, ignored by some, laughed at by others, glared at by the more wizened blacks, who in their wisdom knew that Rey was a policeman and thus unlike them in that regard as well as in his mixed race. Blacks had been safe in Boston, were even permitted schooling and public transportation alongside whites, and therefore they kept quiet. Rey, however, would stir up hatred if he made a wrong move or crossed the wrong person in his duties. The blacks had exiled him from their world for these reasons, and because these reasons were right, no explanation or regret was ever delivered to him.

Several chattering young women holding baskets on their heads paused to look sideways at him, his beautiful bronze skin seeming to absorb all the lamplight as he went and carry it away. On the other side of the street, Rey recognized a bulky man loitering at the corner, a Spanish Jew, a notorious thief sometimes brought in for questioning to the Central Station. Nicholas Rey mounted the narrow stairs of his rooming house. His door faced the second-floor landing, and although the lamp was broken, he could see from the shadows that someone was blocking the way to his room.

The week’s events had been unrelenting. When Rey first drove Chief Kurtz to see the Reverend Talbot’s body, the sexton had ushered Kurtz and some sergeants to the steps that led below. Kurtz had stopped and surprised Rey by turning back. “Patrolman.” He had motioned Rey to follow. Inside the burial vault, Patrolman Rey had required a moment of staring at the display, the body stuffed wrong side up into an uneven hole, before even noticing the protruding feet: inflamed, blistered, and distorted. The sexton told them what he had seen.

The toes were ready to break off and fall from the pink, skinless, and misshapen extremities, making it difficult to distinguish between the ends of the feet that held the toes and the ends that, anatomically, would have to be called the heels. This detail—the burned feet, revelatory to the Danteans mere blocks away—was to the policemen merely insane.

“Only the feet were set on fire?” Patrolman Rey asked, squinting, delicately touching, with just a fingertip, the charred, crumbling flesh. He pulled back at the smoldering heat still baking the flesh, half expecting his finger to be singed. He wondered how much heat the human body could conduct before losing its physical form entirely. After two sergeants carried away the body, Sexton Gregg, in his tearful daze, remembered something.

“The paper,” he said, grabbing Rey, who was the only policeman left below. “There’s bits of paper along the tombs. They ain’t supposed to be there. He shouldn’t have been there! I shouldn’t have let him in!” He wept uncontrollably. Rey lowered his lantern and saw the trail of letters like remorse left unspoken.

The newspapers would speak of both terrible murders—Healey’s and Talbot’s—so frequently that they became partners in the public mind—often referred to in street corner conversation as the Healey-Talbot murders. Had the public’s syndrome exposed itself in Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s queer remark at Longfellow’s house the night Talbot was discovered? Holmes had been offering his expertise to Rey as nervously as a medical student. “Perhaps what sounds like a useless Latin prognosis can help catch this killer running about our city.” The word pierced Rey: killer. Dr. Holmes was assuming that the murders were executed by the same party. Yet there was nothing obvious to tie them into one, besides their respective brutishness. There was also the nakedness of the bodies and the neatly folded clothes stripped from them—but that had not yet been reported in the papers when Rey heard Holmes speak. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue on the part of the conceited little doctor. Perhaps.

The papers supplemented the headlining murders with healthy doses of other senseless violence: garrotings, hold-ups, safe blowing, a prostitute found half-strangled steps away from a police station, a child discovered beaten to a living pulp in a Fort Hill boardinghouse. And there was the strange incident of a vagrant brought for questioning to the Central Station, who was permitted by the police to throw himself to his death through the window, in plain sight of the helpless Chief Kurtz. The papers clamored: “Do the Police have any responsibility for the safety of citizens?”