George Washington Greene was settled into a reclining armchair in the Authors’ Room at the Corner. Nicholas Rey joined them. The questions teased every bit of information from Greene about his Dante sermons and the veterans who eagerly came to hear them each week. Then Lowell launched into a blunt chronicle of the Dante murders, to which Greene could hardly conjure a response.
As the details fell from Lowell’s mouth, Greene felt his secret partnership with Dante gradually wrested away from him. The modest pulpit in the soldiers’-aid home facing his spellbound listeners; the special place where Devine Comedy stood in his library shelf in Rhode Island; the Wednesday nights seated before Longfellow’s fireplace—all of these had seemed such permanent and perfect manifestations of Greene’s dedication to the great poet. Yet, as with everything else that had once been satisfactory in Greene’s life, all along there had been far more at hand than he could conceive. So much occurring independent of his knowledge and indifferent to his sanction.
“My dear Greene,” Longfellow said gently. “You must not speak to anyone of Dante outside those in this room until these matters are resolved.”
Greene managed to simulate a nod. His expression was of a man both useless and disabled, the face of a clock from which the hands had been torn. “And our Dante Club meeting that was planned for tomorrow?” he asked feebly.
Longfellow shook his head sadly.
Fields rang for a boy to escort Greene to his daughter’s house. Longfellow started helping him into his overcoat.
“Never do that, my dear friend,” Greene said. “A young man does not need it and an old one does not want it.” He paused on the arm of the messenger boy as he stepped into the hall; he spoke but did not look back at the men in the room. “You could have told me what had happened, you know. Any one of you could have told me. I may not have the strongest… I do know I could have helped you.”
They waited for the sound of Greene’s footfalls to die in the hallway.
“If only we had told him,” said Longfellow. “What a fool I was to envision a race against the translation!”
“Not so, Longfellow!” Fields said. “Think of what we now know: Greene preached his sermons on Thursday afternoons, directly before returning to Rhode Island. He would select a canto he wished to brush up on, choosing from the two or three cantos you had set as the agenda for the next translation session. Our blasted Lucifer heard the same punishment we were to sit down with—six days before our own group! And that left ample time for Lucifer to stage his own version of the contrapasso murder just a day or two before we transcribed it onto paper. So, from our limited vantage point, the whole farrago assumed the appearance of a race, of someone taunting us with the particulars of our own translation.”
“What of the warning cut into Mr. Longfellow’s window?” asked Rey.
“La Mia Traduzione.” Fields threw up his hands. “We were hasty to conclude it was the work of the murderer. Manning’s damned jackals at the College would surely stoop so low as to try to frighten us off the translation.”
Holmes turned to Rey, “Patrolman, does Willard Burndy possess anything that can help us from here?”
Rey answered, “Burndy says a soldier paid him for instruction in how to open Reverend Talbot’s safe. Burndy, assuming it was easy profit with little risk, went to Talbot’s house to scout the layout, where several witnesses happened to see him. After Talbot’s murder, the detectives discovered the eyewitnesses, and with the help of Langdon Peaslee, Burndy’s rival, they fixed their case against Burndy. Burndy is a lush and can barely remember any more of the killer than the fact of his soldier’s uniform. I wouldn’t trust his mind even for that if you hadn’t discovered the source of the murderer’s knowledge.”
“Hang Burndy! Hang ‘em all!” Lowell cried. “Can’t you see, men? This is in our sights. We’re so close on Lucifer’s path that we can’t help but step on his Achilles’ heel. Think of it: The erratic pacing between murders now makes perfect sense. Lucifer was no Dante scholar after all—he was but a Dante parishioner. He could only kill after hearing Greene preach on a punishment. One week Greene preached Canto Eleven as his text—Virgil and Dante sitting on a wall to get accustomed to the stench of Hell, discussing Hell’s structure with the coolness of two engineers—a canto that features no specific punishment, no murder. Greene then took ill the next week, didn’t attend our club, didn’t preach—no murder again.”
“Yes, and Greene was ill once before that during our time translating Inferno, too.” Longfellow turned a page in his notes. “And once after that. There was no murder in those periods, either.”
Lowell continued, “And when we put a pause in our club meetings, when we first decided to investigate after Holmes’s observation of Talbot’s body, the killings stopped cold—because Greene had stopped! Until we had our ‘respite’ and decided to translate the Schismatics—sending Greene back to the pulpit and Phinny Jennison to his death!”
“The killer’s putting the money under the Simoniac’s head now comes into plain daylight, too,” Longfellow said remorsefully. “That was always Mr. Greene’s preferred interpretation. I should have noticed his readings of Dante in the particulars of the murders.”
“Do not bring yourself down, Longfellow,” urged Dr. Holmes. “The murders’ details were such that only an expert Dantean would have known them. There was no way to have guessed Greene was their unwitting source.”
“I’m afraid, however well-intentioned my reasoning,” replied Longfellow, “that we’ve made a grave error. By our accelerating the frequency of our translation sessions, our adversary has now heard as much Dante from Greene in a week’s time as he would over the span of a month.”
“I say put Greene back in that chapel,” Lowell insisted. “But this time we make him preach on something other than Dante. We watch the audience and wait for someone to become agitated, then we nab our Lucifer!”
“It is far too dangerous a game for Greene!” said Fields. “He is not up to the trick. Besides, that soldiers’-aid home is half-closed up, and the soldiers are probably dispersed throughout the city by now. We haven’t time to plan anything of the kind. Lucifer could strike at any moment, against anyone who, in his distorted vision of the world, he believes has transgressed against him!”
“Yet he must have a reason for those beliefs, Fields,” replied Holmes. “Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.”
“We know now that the killer required at least two days’ time, sometimes more, after hearing a sermon to prepare his murder,” said Patrolman Rey. “Is there a chance we can predict potential targets now that you know the portions of Dante Mr. Greene has shared with the soldiers?”
Lowell said, “I fear not. For one thing, we have no experience by which to guess how Lucifer would react to this recent flurry of sermons as opposed to a single one. The canto of the Traitors we just heard would be most prominent in his thoughts, I suppose. But how could we possibly guess what ‘Traitors’ might haunt the mind of this lunatic?”
“If only Greene could better recall the man who approached him, who inquired about reading Dante for himself,” Holmes said. “He wore a uniform, had a hay-colored handlebar mustache, and walked with a limp. Yet we know what physical strength was shown by the murderer in each of the killings, and what swiftness of foot—seen neither by man nor beast before or after the murders. Wouldn’t a disabling injury render that unlikely?”
Lowell rose and headed for Holmes with an exaggerated limp. “Might your gait not turn soft as this, Wendell, if you wished to hide suspicions of your strength to the world?”