“Plain tea, thank you,” Holmes said. Lowell agreed.

“Oh, come now!” Bachi insisted, bringing Holmes one of the decanters. To placate the host, Holmes poured as few drops of whiskey into the teacup as possible, but Bachi lifted the doctor’s elbow. “I think the bitter New England climate would be the death of us all, Doctor,” he said, “were it not for a drop of something warm inside every now and then.”

Bachi pretended to consider tea for himself, then opted instead for a full glass of rum. The guests pulled up chairs, realizing simultaneously that they had sat in them before.

“From University Hall!” said Lowell.

“The College owed me at least that much, don’t you think?” Bachi said with stiff geniality. “Besides, where else could I find a seat so singularly uncomfortable, eh? Harvard men can talk as Unitarian as they wish, but they shall always be Calvinists up to the neck—they enjoy their own suffering, and that of others. Tell me, how is it you gentlemen found me here at Half Moon Place? I believe I am the only non-Dubliner for several square miles.”

Lowell unrolled a copy of the Daily Courier and opened it to a page with a row of advertisements. One was circled.

Bachi laughed to himself. “Merit, with us Italians, likes to hide its candle under a bushel. At home our proverb is A good wine needs no bush.’ But in America it must be ‘In bocca chiusa non entran mosche’: In a closed mouth, no flies enter. How can I expect people to come and buy if they do not know I have something to sell? So I open my mouth and blow my trumpet.”

Holmes flinched from a sip of the strong tea. “John Andrew is one of your references, signore?” he asked.

“Tell me, Dr. Holmes, what pupil looking for Italian lessons will call on the governor to ask after me? I suspect nobody has ever sent for Professor Lowell, in any case.”

Lowell conceded the point. He leaned in closer to the overlapping piles of Dante texts and commentaries blanketing Bachi’s desk, promiscuously open at all angles. Above the writing desk dangled a small portrait of Bachi’s estranged wife, a considerate softness from the painter’s brush obscuring her tough eyes.

“Now, how is it I could help you, even as I once needed your help, Professore?” Bachi asked.

Lowell brought out another newspaper from his coat, this one opened to the likeness of Lonza. “Do you know this man, Signor Bachi? Or should I say did you know him?”

Taking in the cadaverous face on the colorless page, Bachi sank into sadness. But when he looked up, he was angry. “Do you presume I would know every such ragged oaf of a man?”

“The bishop at Holy Cross Cathedral presumed,” Lowell said knowingly.

Bachi seemed startled and turned to Holmes as though surrounded.

“You’ve borrowed some not insignificant amounts of money there, I believe, signore,” Lowell said.

This shamed Bachi into candidness. He looked down with a sheepish smirk. “These are American priests—not like the ones in Italy. They have longer purses than the pope himself. If you were in my place, even priests’ money would not stink in your nostrils.” He drained his rum, threw his head back, and whistled. He looked again at the newspaper. “So you want to know something about Grifone Lonza.”

He paused and then pointed a thumb at the pile of Dante texts on his desk. “Like you literary gentlemen, I have always found my pleasantest companions among the dead rather than the living. There is this advantage, that when an author becomes flat or obscure or simply ceases to amuse, one can always bid him ‘Shut up.’ “ He belabored these last words pointedly.

Bachi rose to his feet and poured a gin. He took a large gulp, half gargling his words in the wash of liquor. “It is a lonely business in America. Most of my brethren who have been forced to come here can barely read a newspaper, much less La Commedia di Dante, which penetrates the very soul of man equally in all its despair and all its joy. There were a few of us here in Boston, years ago, men of letters, men of minds: Antonio Gallenga, Grifone Lonza, Pietro D’Alessandro.” He could not help but share a reminiscing smile, as though his current callers had been among them. “We would sit in our rooms and read Dante together aloud, first one and then the other, in this way progressing through the whole poem that records all secrets. Lonza and I were the last of the group who had not moved away or died. Now I am the only one.”

“Come now, don’t despise Boston,” Holmes said.

“Few are worthy to stay their whole lives in Boston,” Bachi said with a sardonic sincerity.

“Did you know, Signor Bachi, that Lonza died at the police station house?” Holmes asked gently.

Bachi nodded. “I’ve heard vaguely about it.”

Lowell said, eyeing the Dante books on the desk, “Signor Bachi, how would you respond if I were to tell you that Lonza spoke a line from the third canto of Inferno to a police officer before falling to his death?”

Bachi did not seem at all surprised. Instead, he laughed carelessly. Most political exiles from Italy grew more virulent in their rectitude and turned even their own sins into signs of sainthood; in their minds, on the other hand, the pope was a wretched dog. But Grifone Lonza had convinced himself he had somehow betrayed his faith and had to find a way to repent his sins in the eyes of God. Once settled in Boston, Lonza had helped expand a Catholic mission connected with the Ursuline convent, certain his faith would be reported to the pope and would win him return. Then rioters had burned the convent to the ground.

“Lonza, typically, rather than growing indignant, was shattered, certain he had done something deeply wrong sometime in his life to deserve these worst punishments from God. His place in America, in exile, became confused. He all but stopped speaking in English. It is my belief that part of him forgot how to speak it and knew only the true Italian language.”

“But why would Signer Lonza recite a verse from Dante before jumping from the window, signore?” Holmes asked.

“I had a friend back home, Dr. Holmes, a jovial fellow who operated a restaurant, who answered all questions about his food with quotes from Dante. Well, that was amusing. Lonza went mad. Dante became a way for him to live out the sins he imagined he had. He felt he was guilty of everything and anything proposed to him by the end. He never actually read Dante for the last few years, had no need. Every line and every word was fixed permanently in his mind, and to his terror. He had never memorized it intentionally, but it came to him as God’s warnings came to the prophets. The slightest image or word could make him slip into Dante’s poem—it could take days to pull him out sometimes, to hear him speak anything else.”

“It does not surprise you that he would commit suicide,” Lowell remarked.

“I do not know that that’s what it was, Professors,” Bachi snapped. “But it matters not what you call it. His life was a suicide. He gave up his soul for fear, little by little, until there was nowhere left in the universe but Hell. He stood on the precipice of eternal torment in his mind. It does not surprise me that he fell over.” He paused. “Is it so different from your friend Longfellow?”

Lowell shot to his feet. Holmes quietly tried to mother him back down.

Bachi persisted: “From what I understand, Professor Longfellow has drowned his suffering in Dante for—what is it?—three or four years now.”