Holmes helped Rey up. He needed to make amends. He took the newspaper and held up the page with the likeness. “Grifone Lonza,” he revealed.

The glint in Rey’s eyes showed he was impressed and relieved. “Translate the note for me now, Dr. Holmes, please. Lonza spoke those words before he died. Tell me what they were.”

“Italian. The Tuscan dialect. Mind you, you’re missing some words, but for someone with no training in the language, it is a remarkable enough transcription. Deenan see am… ‘Dinanzi a me… Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create se non etterne, e io etterno duro’: Before me nothing was made if not eternal, and I will last eternally. ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’: 0 ye who enter, abandon all hope.”

“Abandon all hope. He was warning me,” Rey said.

“No… I don’t think so. He probably believed he was reading it over the gates to Hell, from what we know of his mental state.”

“You should have told the police you knew something,” Rey cried.

“It would have been a greater mess if we had!” Holmes shouted. “You don’t understand—you can’t, Patrolman. We’re the only ones who could ever find him! We thought we had—we thought he fled. Everything the police know is coal dust! This shall never stop without us!” Holmes tasted snow as he spoke. He dabbed his brow and neck, which were bathed in hot sweat from every pore. Holmes asked if Rey wouldn’t mind moving inside. He had a story to tell that Rey might not believe.

Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nicholas Rey sat in his empty lecture room.

“The year was 1300. Midway through the journey of his life, a poet named Dante awoke in a dark wood, finding that his life had taken a wrong path. James Russell Lowell likes to say, Patrolman, that we all enter the dark wood twice—sometime in the middle of our lives and again when we look back upon it…”

The heavy paneled door to the Authors’ Room opened an inch and the three men inside jumped from their seats. A black boot edged in probatively. Holmes could no longer think what he might find to shatter his safety behind closed doors. Gaunt and ashen, he shared the sofa with Longfellow, across from Lowell and Fields, hoping that a single nod would suffice to respond to each of their greetings.

“I stopped home first before coming here. ‘Melia nearly did not let me back out of the house, the way I look.” Holmes laughed nervously as a drop of moisture shimmied into the corner of his eye. “Did you gentlemen know that the muscles with which we laugh and cry lie side by side? My young barbarians are always so taken with that.”

They waited for Holmes to begin. Lowell handed him the crumpled handbill announcing that Phineas Jennison was missing, offering many thousands in reward for his return. “Then you know already,” Holmes said. “Jennison’sdead.”

He began an erratic, staccato narrative commencing with the police carriage’s surprise arrival at 21 Charles.

Lowell, pouring his third glass of port, said, “Fort Warren.”

“An ingenious choice on the part of our Lucifer,” said Longfellow. “I’m afraid the canto of the Schismatics could not be fresher to our minds. It hardly seems possible that it was only yesterday we translated it among our cantos. Malebolge is a wide field of stone—and described by Dante as a fortress.”

Lowell said, “Once again we see that we face a uniquely brilliant scholar’s mind, strikingly equipped to transmit choice atmospheric details of Dante. Our Lucifer appreciates the exactness of Dante’s poetry. All is wild in Milton’s Hell, but Dante’s is separated into circles, drawn with well-pointed compasses. As real as our own world.”

“Now it is,” Holmes said shakily.

Fields did not want to hear a literary argument at the moment. “Wendell, you say that the police were stationed all around the city when the murder occurred? How could Lucifer not be seen?”

“You would need the giant hands of Briareus and the hundred eyes of Argus to touch or see him,” Longfellow said quietly.

Holmes gave them more. “Jennison was found by a drunkard who sometimes sleeps in the fort since it has been out of use. The vagrant was there on Monday, and all was normal. Then he returned on Wednesday, and there was the horrible display. He was too frightened to report it until the next day—I mean until today. Jennison was last seen on Tuesday afternoon, and his bed was not slept in that night. The police interviewed everyone they could find. A prostitute who was at the harbor says she saw someone come out from the fog at the harbor Tuesday evening. She tried to follow him, I. suppose as obliged by her profession, but got only so far as the church, and she did not see which direction he took.”

“So Jennison was killed on Tuesday night. But the body was not discovered by the police until Thursday,” Fields said. “But, Holmes, you said that Jennison was still… is it possible that for such a time… ?”

“For it… him… to have been killed on Tuesday yet be alive when I arrived this morning? For the body to be thrown into such convulsions that were I to drink every drop of Lethe I shall never be able to forget the sight of it?” Holmes asked despairingly. “Poor Jennison had been mutilated without hope of survival—that is to be sure—but cut and bound just enough to slowly lose blood, and with it his life. It was a good deal like inspecting what remains of fireworks on the fifth of July, but I could see that no vital organs had been punctured. There was careful craftsmanship amid such wild massacre, done by one very familiar with internal wounds, perhaps a doctor,” he said thickly, “with a sharp and large knife. With Jennison, our Lucifer perfects his damnation through suffering, his most perfect contrapasso. The movements I witnessed were not life, my dear Fields, but simply the nerves dying out in a final spasm. It was a moment as grotesque as any Dante could have envisioned. Death would have been a gift.”

“But to survive for two days after the attack,” Fields insisted. “What I mean to say is… medically speaking… mercy, it’s not possible!”

“ ‘Survival’ here means simply an incomplete death, not a partial life—to be trapped in the gap between the living and the dead. If I had a thousand tongues, I would not try to begin to describe the agony!”

“Why punish Phineas as a Schismatic?” Lowell tried his best to sound detached, scientific. “Whom does Dante find punished in that infernal circle? Muhammad, Bertrand de Born—the malicious adviser who split apart king and prince, father and son, as once was done to Absalom and David—those who created internal rifts within religions, families. Why Phineas Jennison?”

“After all our efforts, we haven’t answered that question for Elisha Talbot, my dear Lowell,” said Longfellow. “His thousand-dollar simony—for what? Two contrapassos, with two invisible sins. Dante has the benefit of asking the sinners themselves what has brought them to Hell.”

“Were you not close with Jennison?” Fields asked Lowell. “And yet you can think of nothing?”

“He was a friend; I did not look for his misdeeds! He was an ear for me to complain about losses in stocks, about lecturing, about Dr. Manning and the blasted Corporation. He was a steam engine in trousers, and I admit sometimes he cocked his hat a bit too much—he had a hand in every flashy business enterprise over the years that I suppose had an underbelly of brine. Railroads, factories, steelworks—such business matters are hardly comprehensible to me, you know, Fields.” Lowell dropped his head.

Holmes sighed heavily. “Patrolman Rey is as sharp as a blade, and likely has suspected our knowledge all along. He recognized the manner of Jennison’s death from what he had overheard at our Dante Club session. The logic of the contrapasso, the Schismatics, he connected to Jennison, and when I explained more, he immediately understood Dante in the deaths of Chief Justice Healey and Reverend Talbot, too.”