In the dark well of his rooming house, Rey had come to a stop mid-stair and made sure nobody was behind him. Hand on his billy club underneath his coat, he proceeded. “Only a poor beggar, good sir.” The man from whom these words emerged at the top of the stairs was easily recognizable once the angle revealed a pair of stringy trousered legs growing out from iron-heeled shoes: Langdon Peaslee, safecracker, nonchalantly buffing his diamond breast-pin with the wide cuff of his shirt.

“Why, Lily White.” Peaslee grinned, showing a beautiful set of teeth sharp as stalagmites. “Have a shake.” He grabbed Rey’s hand. “Ain’t seen that prize phiz of yours since that show-up. Say, this wouldn’t be your room up here?” He pointed behind him innocently.

“Hello, Mr. Peaslee. I understand you robbed the Lexington bank two nights ago.” Nicholas Rey said this to demonstrate that he had just as much information as the thief.

Peaslee had left no evidence that would survive his lawyers in court and had thoroughly selected and fenced only untraceable valuables. “Why, tell me, who’s crack enough these days to heave a bank all alone?”

“You, I’m certain. Have you come to turn yourself in?” Rey said with a serious face.

Peaslee laughed sneeringly. “No, no, dear boy. But I do think these restrictions they put on you—what are they? No uniform, can’t arrest white men, so on—well, they are unfair, unfair indeed. But there are some conciliatory factors. You’ve become such close pals with Chief Kurtz, and that can go a ways to bringing someone to justice. Like the murderers of Judge Healey and Reverend Talbot, rest their souls. I hear the deacons of Talbot’s church are even now building up a subscription for a reward.”

Rey started for his room with an uninterested nod. “I’m tired,” he said quietly. “Unless you have someone specific who must be brought to justice at the moment, you’ll excuse me.”

Peaslee twirled a hand into Rey’s scarf and held him still. “Policemen cannot accept rewards, but a just citizen, like myself, most certainly would And if some finds its way to a deserving copper’s door…” There was no reaction in the mulatto’s face. Peaslee showed his irritation, turned off his charm. He pulled the scarf tight like a dropped noose. “This is how that dumb beggar at the show-up met Old Grim, now, isn’t it? Listen close. There’s a fool about our city who can be made very guilty for killing Talbot, my dear prigger-napper. I’ll jacket him easily. Help me see to it, half the boodle will be yours,” he said bluntly. “Thick enough to choke a hog, then you can go your own way as you please. The floodgates are opened: Everything’s going to change in Boston. The war lined this whole place with money. These times are too dusty to walk alone.”

“You’ll excuse me, Mr. Peaslee,” Rey repeated with stoic equanimity.

Peaslee waited a moment, then lapsed into a defeated laugh. He brushed some imaginary lint from Rey’s tweed coat. “Just as well, Lily White. I should’ve known by looking that you wear a Joseph’s coat. It’s only I feel sorry for you, my friend, very sorry. The darkies hate you for being white and everyone else hates you for being black. Me, I judge a bloke by whether this is up to snuff.” He pointed to the side of his head. “Once I found myself in a country town in Louisiana, Lily White, where you could see the white blood in half the Negro children. The streets were full of hybrids. I imagine you’ve wished you lived somewhere like that, haven’t you?”

Rey ignored him and reached for the latchkey in his pocket. Peaslee said he would do the honors. He pushed Rey’s door open with a single arachnid finger.

Rey looked up, alarmed for the first time in their encounter.

“Locks are my game, understand,” Peaslee said, cocking his hat boastfully. Then he pretended to surrender, turning up his wrists. “You can bag me for trespass, Patrolman. Oh, no, no, you can’t, can you?” A departing grin.

Nothing was missing from the apartment. That last trick had just been a show of power by the great safecracker, in case any unwise notions ever visited Nicholas Rey.

It was strange for Oliver Wendell Holmes being out with Longfellow like this, to see him pass among the common faces and sounds and wonderful, terrible scents of the streets, as though he were part of the same world as the man driving a horse team with a sprinkling machine to clean the street. Not that the poet had never left Craigie House the last few years, but his outside activities were concise, confined. Dropping off proof sheets at Riverside Press, dining with Fields at an unpopular hour at the Revere or Parker House. Holmes felt ashamed for having been the first one to stumble on something that could so inconceivably break Longfellow’s peaceful suspension. It should have been Lowell. He would never think to feel guilt at forcing Longfellow into the bricked-up, soul-confusing Babylon of the world. Holmes wondered whether Longfellow resented him for it—whether he was capable of resentment or whether he was, as he was with so many unsavory human emotions, immune.

Holmes thought of Edgar Allan Poe, who had written an article entitled “Longfellow and Other Plagiarists,” accusing Longfellow and all the Boston poets of copying every writer, living and dead, including Poe himself. This was at a time when Longfellow was helping keep Poe alive through loans. An infuriated Fields forever banned any of Poe’s writings from appearing in Ticknor & Fields publications. Lowell barraged newspapers with letters conclusively demonstrating the New York scribbler’s outrageous errors. Holmes became consumed with the idea that every word he wrote was indeed a theft from some better poet before him, and in his dreams it was not uncommon for the ghost of some old dead master to appear to demand his poetry back. Longfellow, for his part, said nothing publicly, privately attributing Poe’s acts to the irritation of a sensitive nature chafed by some indefinite sense of wrong. And remarkably enough to Holmes, Longfellow genuinely mourned Poe’s melancholy death.

Both men were carrying flower bouquets under their arms while they traveled into the part of Cambridge that was less a village, more a town. They walked around Elisha Talbot’s church, looking with each step for the location of the terrible demise of Talbot, stooping under trees and feeling the ground between grave markers. Several passersby asked for autographs on handkerchiefs or inside hats—often from Dr. Holmes, always from Longfellow. Though the nighttime would have granted welcome anonymity,

Longfellow had decided it would be best if they appeared as mourners visiting the churchyard rather than overdressed resurrection-men looking for a body to steal.

Holmes was thankful that Longfellow had assumed leadership in the days since they had agreed to… What had they agreed to do, with Ulysses’ fiery words singeing their tongues? Lowell said investigating (always with an outward-thrust chest). Holmes preferred calling it “making inquiries,” and did so pointedly when speaking to Lowell.

There were of course the few Danteans besides themselves who had to be accounted for. Several were spending time in Europe, on either a temporary or permanent basis, including Longfellow’s neighbor Charles Eliot Norton, another former student of the poet’s, and William Dean Howells, a young acolyte of Fields’s, appointed envoy to Venice. Then there was Professor Ticknor, seventy-four, holed up in his library for three decades of solitude; and Pietro Bachi, who had been an Italian tutor under both Longfellow and Lowell before being fired by Harvard; and all of the past students of Longfellow’s and Lowell’s Dante seminars (and a handful more from Ticknor’s time). Lists would be made and private meetings scheduled. But Holmes prayed they would uncover an explanation before they made fools of themselves in front of people whom they respected and who had, at least up to the present, respected them in return.