“Good fellow, can you tell us whether you know this man?” asked Oliver Wendell Holmes affably.
The recurrence was almost enough to break the reverie of the loafer, though not quite.
Lowell bent forward. “Sir?”
Holmes pushed the newspaper at him again. “Pray, tell us whether he looks at all familiar and we’ll be happily on our way, dear fellow.”
Nothing.
Lowell shouted, “Do you require an ear trumpet?”
This did not get them very far. The man picked out a bit of unrecognizable food from his pot and slipped it down his throat, without, apparently, bothering to swallow.
“Wouldn’t you know,” Lowell said to Holmes, who stood to the side. “Three days of this, and nothing. This man did not have many friends.”
“We have already gone beyond the Pillar of Hercules of the fashionable quarter. Let us not yield here yet.” Holmes had seen something in the loafer’s eye when they held up the newspaper. He had also noticed a medal dangling from his neck: San Paolino, the patron saint of Lucca, Tuscany. Lowell followed Holmes’s stare.
“Where are you from, signore?” Lowell asked in Italian.
The interrogated party still stared implacably ahead, but his mouth dropped open. “Da Lucca, signore.”
Lowell complimented the beauties of the named land. The Italian showed no surprise at the language. This man, like all proud Italians, had been born with the full expectation that everyone should speak his tongue; he who did not was little worthy of conversation. Lowell then renewed the questions regarding the man in the newspaper engraving. It was important, explained the poet, to know his name so that they might find his family and arrange a proper burial. “We believe this poor fellow was from Lucca too,” he said sorrowfully in Italian. “He deserves burial in a Catholic churchyard—with his own people.”
The Luccan took some time to ponder this before painstakingly turning his elbow into a different position so he could point his morsel-plucking finger at the massive door to the church right behind him.
The Catholic prelate who listened to their questions was a dignified though portly figure.
“Lonza,” he said, handing back the newspaper. “Yes, he has been here. I believe Lonza was his name. Yes—Grifone Lonza.”
“You knew him personally then?” Lowell asked hopefully.
“He knew the church, Mr. Lowell,” the prelate responded with a benign air. “We have a fund entrusted to us from the Vatican for immigrants. We provide loans and some passage money for those who need to return to their homeland. Of course, we can only help a small number.” He had more to say but stymied himself. “What is your business in looking for him, gentlemen? Why has his likeness been printed in the newspaper?”
“I’m afraid he has passed on, Father. We believe the police have been trying to identify him,” said Dr. Holmes.
“Ah. I fear you won’t find the congregants of my church or those around these neighborhoods very eager to speak with the police on any matter. It was the police, recall, who did nothing to seek justice when the Ursuline convent burned to the ground. And when there is a crime, it is the poor, the Irish Catholics who are harassed,” he said with the firm-jawed anger of a clergyman. “The Irish were sent to war to die for Negroes who now steal their jobs, while the rich stayed home for a small fee.”
Holmes wanted to say: Not my Wendell Junior, my good Father. But, in fact, Holmes had tried to convince Junior to do just that.
“Did Mr. Lonza wish to return to Italy?” Lowell asked.
“What anyone wishes in his heart, I cannot say. This man came for food, which we give on a regular basis, and a few small loans to keep afloat if I recall correctly. If I were Italian, I might well wish to return to my people. Most of our members are Irish. I fear the Italians do not feel so welcome among them. In all Boston and its surrounding areas, there are fewer than three hundred Italians, by our approximation. They are a very ragged lot, and require our sympathy and charity. But the more immigrants from other countries, the fewer jobs for the ones already here—you understand the potential trouble.”
“Father, do you know if Mr. Lonza had family?” asked Holmes.
The prelate shook his head contemplatively, then said, “Say, there was one gentleman who was sometimes a companion to him. Lonza was something of a drunkard, I’m afraid, and needed watching. Yes, what was his name? A peculiarly Italian name it was.” The prelate moved to his desk. “We should have some papers on him, as he too received some loans. Ah, this is it—a language tutor. He received some fifty dollars from us over the last year and a half. I remember he claimed to have once worked at Harvard College, though I would tend to doubt that. Here.” He sounded out the name on the paper. “Pietro Bachi.”
Nicholas Rey, questioning some ragged children splashing at a horse trough, saw two high hats exit buoyantly from the Holy Cross Cathedral and disappear around the corner. Even from a distance, they looked out of place in the crowded dinginess of the area. Rey walked to the church and called for the prelate. The prelate, hearing that Rey was a police officer searching for an unidentified man, studied the newspaper illustration, looking over and then through his heavy gold-bowed spectacles before placidly apologizing.
“I’ve never seen this poor fellow in my life. I’m afraid, Officer.”
Rey, thinking of the two high-hatted figures, asked whether anyone else had been in the area to ask about the unidentified man. The prelate, replacing the file of Bachi in his drawer, smiled blandly and said no.
Next, Patrolman Rey went to Cambridge. A wire had been received at the Central Station detailing an attempt, in the middle of the night, to steal Artemus Healey’s remains from his coffin.
“I told them what would come from public knowledge,” Chief Kurtz said of the Healey family with unbecoming vindication. Mount Auburn Cemetery had now put the body into a steel coffin and hired another nighttime caretaker, this one armed with a shotgun. On a hillside not far from Healey’s gravestone was the portrait statue erected over the Reverend Talbot’s site, paid for by his congregation. The statue had a look of pure grace that improved on the minister’s actual face. In one hand the marble preacher held the Holy Book and in the other a pair of eyeglasses; this was a tribute to one of his pulpit mannerisms, a strange habit of removing his large eyeglasses when reading text from the lectern and replacing them when preaching freely, instructively suggesting that one needed sharper vision to read from the spirit of God.
On his way to look over Mount Auburn for Chief Kurtz, Rey was stopped by a small commotion. He was told that an old man, who roomed on the second floor of a nearby building, had been absent for more than a week, not an unexpected period of time, as he sometimes traveled. But the residents demanded something be done about an offensive smell emanating from his room. Rey knocked and considered breaking through the fastened door, then borrowed a ladder and placed it outside. Climbing up, he raised the window to the room, but the horrible smell from inside almost sent him tumbling down.
When the air had traveled out sufficiently to allow him inside, Rey had to hold himself against a wall. It took several seconds for him to accept that there was nothing to be done. A man stood erect, his feet dangling near the floor, with a rope around his neck that was hooked overhead. His features were stiffened and decayed beyond normal recognition, but Rey knew the man, from his clothes, and from the still bulging, panicked eyes, to be the former sexton of the nearby Unitarian church. A card was later found on the chair. It was the calling card Chief Kurtz had left at the church to be given to Gregg. On the back of this, the sexton had written a message to the police, insisting he would have seen any man who might have entered the vaults to kill Reverend Talbot. Somewhere in Boston, he warned, had arrived a demon soul, and he could not continue fearing its return for the rest of them.