He was slightly built, his dark eyes handsome but worn, with a waywardness of expression. The stranger displayed a chessboard of missing and rotting teeth and emitted something like a hiss, releasing a stench of Medford rum. He either didn’t notice or didn’t mind that his clothes were coated in rotten egg.
Kurtz marched down the reshuffled gallery of rogues and explained again. He explained about the man found naked in a field near the river, his body swarming in flies, wasps, maggots, eating into his skin, soaked in his blood. One of the present company, Kurtz informed them, had killed him with a blow to the head and carried him there to leave to nature’s blights. He mentioned another odd touch: a flag, white and tattered, planted over the body.
Rey propped his disoriented ward to his feet. The man’s nose and mouth were red and irregular, overwhelming his thin mustache and beard. One of his legs was lame, the casualty of a long forgotten accident or fight. His large hands shook in wild gesticulations. The stranger’s trembling increased at each detail thrown out by the chief of police.
Deputy Chief Savage said, “Oh, this chap! Who brought him in, do you know, Rey? He wouldn’t give a name earlier when they were photographing all the new ones for the rogues’ picture gallery. Silent as an Egyptian sphinx!”
The sphinx’s paper collar was all but hidden under his slovenly black scarf, wrapped loosely to one side. He stared emptily and flailed his oversize hands in the air in rough, concentric circles.
“Trying to sketch something?” Savage commented jokingly.
His hands were sketching indeed—a map of sorts, one that would have aided the police immeasurably in the weeks to come had they known what to look for. This stranger had long been an intimate of the locale of Healey’s murder but not the richly paneled parlors of Beacon Hill. No, the man was sketching an image in the air not of any earthly place at all but of a murky antechamber into an otherworld. For it was there–there, the man understood, as the image of Artemus Healey’s death seeped into his mind and grew with every particular—yes, it was there that punishment had been meted out.
“I daresay he’s deaf and dumb,” Deputy Chief Savage whispered to Rey after several thoughtful hand gestures failed to get through. “And at a real altitude, from the smell. I’ll bring him for some bread and cheese. Keep an eye on that Burndy fellow, won’t you, Rey.” Savage nodded toward the show-up’s incumbent troublemaker, who was now rubbing his pink eyes with his shackled hands, spellbound by Kurtz’s grotesque descriptions.
The deputy chief gently separated the trembling man from Patrolman Rey’s stewardship and walked him across the room. But the man shook, weeping hard, then with what seemed like accidental effort hurled the deputy chief of police away, sending him headlong into a bench.
The man then leapt up behind Rey, his left arm springing across Rey’s neck, his fingers hooking underneath Rey’s right armpit and his other hand knocking off Rey’s hat and locking on to his eyes, twisting Rey’s head toward him, so that the officer’s ear was trapped in the raw dew of his lips. The man’s whisper was so low, so desperate and throaty, so confessional, that only Rey could know words had been spoken at all.
Happy chaos erupted among the rogues.
The stranger suddenly released Rey and gripped a fluted column. He hurled himself hard around its circumference, catapulting ahead. The obscure hissed words ensnared Rey’s mind, a meaningless code of sounds, so jarring and powerful as to suggest more meaning than Rey could imagine. Dinanzi. Rey struggled to remember, to hear the whisper again, just as he struggled (etterne etterno, etterne etterno) not to lose his balance as he lunged for the fugitive. But the stranger had launched himself with such great momentum that he could not have stopped himself had he wanted to in this, his last moment of life.
He crashed through the thick plane of a bay window. One loose shard of glass shaped perfectly like a scythe, swiveled out in an almost graceful dance catching the black scarf and slicing cleanly through his windpipe, flinging his limp head forward as he hit the air. He dropped hard through the shattered mass onto the yard below.
Everything fell silent. Shavings of glass, delicate as snowflakes, popped under Rey’s blunt-toed shoes as he approached the window frame and stared down. The body unfurled over a thick cushion of autumn leaves, and the lens of the window’s shattered glass cut the body and its bed into a kaleidoscope of yellow, black, hectic red. The ragged urchins, the first down to the courtyard, pointed and hollered, dancing around the splayed body. Rey, as he descended, couldn’t escape from the blurring words the man had chosen for whatever reason to bequeath unto him as his last act of life: Voi Ch ‘in-trate. Voi Ch’intrate. You Who Enter. You Who Enter.
James Russell Lowell felt much like Sir Launfal, the grail-seeking hero of his most popular poem, as he galloped through the iron portal of Harvard Yard. Indeed, the poet might have looked the part of gallant knight as he entered today, high on his white steed and outlined crisply by the autumn colors, had it not been for his peculiar grooming preferences: his beard trimmed into a square shape some two or three inches below his chin, but his mustache grown out far longer, leaving it to hang below. Some of his detractors, and many friends, noted privately that this was perhaps not the most becoming choice for his otherwise bold face. Lowell’s opinion was that beards should be worn or God would not have given them, though he did not specify whether this particular style was theologically required.
His imagined knighthood was felt with stronger passion these days, when the Yard was an increasingly hostile citadel. A few weeks earlier, the Corporation had attempted to persuade Professor Lowell to adopt a proposal of reforms that would have eliminated many of the obstacles faced by his department (for instance, that students receive half the number of credits for enrolling in a modern foreign language that they would for a classical language) but in return would have granted the Corporation final approval over all of Lowell’s classes. Lowell had loudly refused their offer. If they wanted to pass their proposal, they would have to go through the lengthy process of pushing it through the Harvard Board of Overseers, that twenty-headed Hydra.
Then one afternoon Lowell was given advice by the president that made him realize the board’s demand for approval over all classes had been a lark.
“Lowell, at least cancel that Dante seminar of yours and Manning may well improve things for you.” The president grabbed Lowell by the elbow confidentially.
Lowell narrowed his eyes. “That’s what this is? That’s all they’re after!” He turned with outrage. “I shall not be humbugged into bending to them! They drove Ticknor out. By God, they made Longfellow resent them. I think every man who feels like a gentleman ought to speak out against them, nay, every man who hasn’t passed his master’s degree in blackguardism.”
“You think me a great churl, Professor Lowell. I don’t control the Corporation any more than you do, you know, and it is like talking through a knothole to them most days. Alas, I am just the president of this college,” he chortled. Indeed, Thomas Hill was just the president of Harvard, and a new one at that—the third in a decade, a pattern resulting in Corporation members stockpiling far more power than he possessed. “But they believe Dante an improper part of your department’s development—that is plain. They will make an example of it, Lowell. Manning will make an example of it!” he warned, and grabbed Lowell’s arm again as though at any moment the poet would have to be steered away from some danger.