Poe must die

asked employment of him?”

“No.”

“Happened when Mr. Dickens began his London newspaper a couple of years ago. Mr. Poe wrote and asked to be made the American correspondent. He never got the job. Have no idea why, actually.”

Figg eyed Mr. Barnum’s American Museum. Oh it was a sight, it was. The outside of the marble building was a collection of color and oddities that would make a dead man sit up and take notice. Around each of the building’s top four stories were oval oil paintings of beasts, birds and much stranger animals, a few of them springing from Mr. Barnum’s imagination. Two dozen flags flew from the rooftop and snapped in the cold February wind, with a monstrous American red, white and blue towering over all. Other flags flew from a third story balcony, where uniformed musicians began to fit themselves into chairs. There were posters and banners on the ground floor and Figg had to admit that merely to gaze upon Mr. Barnum’s handiwork was to view a wonder. The building was a mass of colors. To Figg, it looked as though drunken gypsies had been given paint and cloth and told to indulge themselves beyond all reason and at Mr. Barnum’s expense. The boxer had toured Britain with many a carnival and knew the importance of pulling in a crowd as skillfully as possible. Mr. Barnum seemed to be the man who could do it.

And here is where Figg would find those actors involved with Jonathan.

Here is where he would begin his revenge on those who had killed his wife and son.

“What think you of Mr. Barnum’s painted box?” asked Titus Bootham.

“Trips you up, it does. Makes you stop. That is what a man in his position must do. Has himself a little band, I notice.”

“If you call thirty to forty musicians little, yes. But wait until you hear them. Mr. Figg, I assure you that no more horrendous sound has ever reached your ears. Barnum has deliberately hired the worst musicians money can buy. Deliberately, I say.”

“American custom?”

“American greed. A crowd always gathers to listen and when this awful music comes down upon them, many seek refuge inside the museum, at an entrance fee of course.”

Figg nodded. “Right smart. Yes sir, right smart.”

“Mr. Figg?”

“Yes, Mr. Bootham?”

“I have no wish to pry into your business, but please regard me as a friend. I deem it an honor to assist you in any way possible and not merely because Mr. Dickens has asked me to do so.”

“Much appreciated, Mr.-” Figg stopped talking.

“Mr. Figg, what’s wrong?”

Figg waited until a wagon piled high with boxes had passed in front of the museum. When he spoke, his voice was ice. “Those two men there, the ones talking to that lady who just stepped from the black carriage.”

Titus Bootham squinted behind steel-rimmed spectacles. “Yes, yes, I see them.”

“Them is two who I come here to see.”

Titus Bootham felt the menace in Figg’s voice and suddenly he was glad that Figg hadn’t come to see him in such fashion. He said, “The woman, yes I know her. Yes.”

“Who is she?”

“Mrs. Coltman. Mrs. Rachel Coltman.”

Figg looked at Bootham. “Husband named Justin?”

“He’s dead now, God rest his soul. Died of cancer a few weeks ago. Shortly after returning from England, I believe. Quite a wealthy man. We gave him a rather large obituary. She is-”

“Your carriage.” Figg took Bootham by the elbow, pushing him forward.

“Where? Where? I thought you wanted to-”

Figg, hand still tightly gripping Bootham’s elbow, reached the journalist’s carriage tied up at a nearby hitching rail, now crowded with single horses. At the hitching rack, two young boys pulled feathers from a pair of geese and threw the feathers at pigs nosing about in the mud and snow.

Figg’s soft voice was steely. “Mrs. Coltman has finished her little chat and she’s leavin’ and I would like to see where she is about to take herself.” Find Justin Coltman and you find Jonathan.

“Your friends at the museum-”

“Ain’t my friends. Besides, I know where to get my hands on that lot. It is the lady what interests me now.” Jonathan has to be near her, he has to be. Her husband was about to find the Throne of Solomon.

Titus Bootham slowly maneuvered his horse-drawn carriage through the growing tangle of wagons, horses, people.

An impatient Figg said, “Do not lose sight of her.”

“I suspect she might be returning home.”

“And where might that be?”

“Fifth Avenue. It is the correct place for the wealthy to reside these days. Ironic, since not too long ago that area was a swamp fit only for poor Irish and herds of wild pigs. Do you know Mrs. Coltman?”

“We have things to touch upon.”

Figg looked at the traffic hemming them in left, right, back and front. The noise attacked his ears and he didn’t see how a man could live with it without going balmy. He felt the thrill of the hunt, the excitement of a satisfaction soon to be his. Rachel Coltman would lead him to Jonathan and Figg would kill him, then leave this bedlam of a city, with its mud, foul smells and children who had to collect dead animals in order to get a crust of bread.

Let little Mr. Poe keep New York. The city was as mad as he was.

Figg snatched the whip from Titus Bootham’s hand, stood up in the carriage and began to flay the horse. Jonathan.

“Mr. Figg, Mr. Figg, please I beg of you don’t-”

Figg stopped.

Bootham had tears in his eyes. “She is not a young horse, sir and she has served me well. I beg you.”

Burning with shame, Figg sat down, unable to look Titus Bootham in the face and tell him that he hadn’t been whipping the horse; he’d been whipping the man who’d killed his wife and son.

The two men followed Rachel Coltman’s carriage in silence.

TEN

“Believe,” said Paracelsus.

“I do.”

“Believe!” The word was a command.

“I do believe, sir. Oh I do, with all my heart.”

“Then I can bring your wife to you once again, but only for an instant. It is not easy to control the spirits of those who have gone on ahead. They are now free, you must understand this. Free from all worlds, all restraints-”

Lorenzo Ballou leaped from his chair, voice breaking with pain. “Dear God, anything! I will do anything you ask, pay any amount. Only bring her to me once more, I beg you!”

Paracelsus gently lifted a white-gloved hand from the table, pointed it at Ballou then lowered the hand to the table once more. As if by magic, Ballou sat down.

“Mr. Ballou, I do not seek your money. I require only that you place your faith in me without reservation, for without your complete commitment there is little I can achieve.”

Ballou, 250 pounds and 5’4”, wiped his perspiring forehead with one of his dead wife’s lace handkerchiefs. He was jowly, with pink flesh from his face and neck dripping over an expensive collar and silk cravat. His puffy and gray mutton chop whiskers smelled of his wife’s perfume, which he watered in order not to run out of it. Ballou,