No portrait-maker or Daguerrean artist could do the Baron any justice because of the changes that constantly befell his features. In fact, if it were attempted, the Baron would likely grow more like the portrait canvas rather than the other way around. One would have to catch him asleep to see his true form.
"Monsieur Duponte," I said, with a leap to my feet, as the fire cracked and popped to life. "It is you!"
He looked up at my dramatic pronouncement.
"He is you!" I waved my hands in one direction, then the other. "That is why he schemed to have Von Dantker here!"
It took me three or four tries to express the meaning of my realization: the Baron Dupin had appropriated the form of Auguste Duponte! The Baron had tautened the muscles in his face, had weighed down the ends of his mouth, had-for all I could say-used some spell of magic to sharpen the very contours of his head and adjust his height. He also selected his dress like Duponte's, in the loose cut of the cloth and dull colors. He left behind the jewelry and rings with which he was formerly adorned, and smoothed the wilderness of ringlets in his hair. The Baron had subtly, using observation and the study of Von Dantker's sketches and portraiture, remade himself into a version of Duponte.
The reason, I presumed, was simple. To irritate his opponent; to avenge the provocation of Tindley; to sneer at the nobler being who dared to compete with him in this endeavor. Whenever he saw Duponte around the streets, the Baron could hardly speak without breaking into laughter at the brilliance of his newly instituted taunt.
An abomination, a conjurer, a swindler: masquerading as a great man!
He had also-somehow-I vow to you-he had also transmogrified the very timbre and pitch of his voice. To parrot with precision that of Duponte's! Even the accent was adjusted to perfection. If I had been in a dark chamber, and had been listening to a monologue by this falsifier, I would have happily addressed the fiend as though he were my accustomed and true companion.
The Baron's petty masquerade dogged me. It haunted me. It ground down my teeth. I do not think it bothered Duponte half as much. When I complained about the Baron's ploy, Duponte's mouth lengthened into an enigmatic arch, as though he thought the taunt amusing, child's play. And when he met his competitor, he bowed at the Baron all the same as before. The sight was astounding, particularly at nighttime, seeing them there together. Eventually, the only certain way to distinguish them was by the identity of the devoted associates, me on one side and Mademoiselle Bonjour on the other.
Finally, one day, I confronted Duponte. "When this fiend scoffs at you, mocks you, you allow it to continue unchallenged."
"What would you counsel me to do, Monsieur Clark? Propose a duel?" asked Duponte, more mildly than I probably deserved.
"Box his ears, certainly!" I said, though I do not suppose I would have personally done so. "Become quite warm with him, at least."
"I see. Should that help our cause?"
I conceded that it might not. "Just so. It would remind him, I should think, that he is not alone playing this game. He believes, in the infinite deception of his brain, that he has already won, Monsieur Duponte!"
"He has subscribed to a mistaken belief, then. The situation is quite the opposite. The Baron, I am afraid for him, has already lost. He has reached the end, as have I."
I leaned forward in disbelief. "Do you mean…?"
Duponte was speaking of our very purpose, the unraveling of the entire mystery of Poe…
But I see I have jumped too far ahead of myself, as I tend to do. I will have to retrace my steps before I return to the above dialogue. I had begun to describe my life as a spy, stimulated by Duponte's desire to know the Baron's secrets and plans.
As I noted before, the Baron changed hotels frequently to elude pursuers. I maintained my knowledge of their lodgings by following as one tired hotel porter moved their baggage from his hotel to the custody of a brother porter. I do not know how the Baron answered questions about the peculiar practice of moving hotels when he signed each new register. If I ever found myself doing the same, and could not give the actual reason-"You see, sir, my creditors are looking to make me a head shorter"-I would have claimed I was writing a guidebook for strangers to Baltimore, and required a basis to compare lodging choices. The proprietors would shower you with advantages. This was such a good idea, I was tempted to write of it as an anonymous suggestion to the Baron.
Meanwhile, Duponte instructed me to find out more information about Newman, the slave the Baron had engaged, and so I insinuated myself into a discussion with him in the anteroom one afternoon.
"I gonna leave Baltimore after he spring me," Newman said to my questions about the Baron. "I got a brother and sister in Boston."
"Why not run away now? There are northern states that will protect you," I commented.
He pointed to a printed notice in the entrance hall of the hotel. It stated that no colored person, "bond or free," could leave town without first depositing his papers and taking a white man to be his surety.
"I ain't no dumb nigger," he said, "to be hunted down and dead. I'd as good as go to my owner and beg to be shot."
Newman was right; he would be traced even if his owner did not especially care about the loss.
I should include an additional note, to avoid any perplexity, about the language of the young slave. Among the Africans, both slaves and free, in the southern and in northern states, the use of the word "nigger" was not about race. I have heard blacks talking of a mulatto with that term and even calling their masters "them white niggers." "Nigger" was used by blacks to mean a low fellow of any sort, color, or class. This rather ingeniously redefines the ugly word, until it will no doubt be removed from our language altogether. For those who ever doubted the intelligence of that mistreated race, I point to this linguistic stroke and wonder if whites would have thought of the same.
"And what of the other Negro?" I asked.
"Who?"
"The other black engaged by the Baron," I replied. I had become sufficiently convinced that the stranger I had seen once before with the Baron had been assigned by him to watch me-spying on me even as I spied on him.
"There ain't no other, sir, black or white. Baron D. don't want too many people to know him real close."
With my new proximity, I was surprised, and not a little pleased, to find a diminishment in the bluster the Baron displayed. On several occasions in my hearing, Bonjour would pose a rather elementary question about the Baron's conclusions regarding Poe; the Baron Dupin would demur. This brightened my hopes at our own success. But I suppose this also placed something of a negative and unsettling fear over me that Duponte would also be at a loss, as though there was a mystical connection between the two men. Maybe this was a subtle consequence on my mind of the new and startling resemblance between Claude Dupin and Auguste Duponte, as though one were real and one an image in the mirror, as in the doomed last encounter of Poe's own William Wilson. Other times it seemed both were mirror images of the same being.
Their behaviors, though, were different enough.
In the public eye, the Baron continued his loud, obnoxious proclamations. He began raising a subscription for a broadsheet he proposed to publish, and a lecture series he would give, on the true and sensational details of Poe's death. "Come, fly around, fly around me, gentlemen and gals, you shall never believe what happened under your noses!" he proclaimed in taverns and public houses, like a showman or mountebank. I must own, he was convincing, superficially; nearly another Mr. Barnum. You half expected him to announce to some street crowd that he would now transform this container of bran into a…live…guinea pig!