The Poe Shadow

closing in on the sounds. A short man wearing spectacles and a morning coat walked right by, sending me jumping back, and now I recognized the voice of the man chasing him.

'Why, Mr. Reynolds!' the pursuer boomed out.

'Leave me be, won't you,' replied the man-well, now we are free to say replied Reynolds.

'Good sir,' protested the Baron Dupin, 'I must remind you that I am a special constable.'

'Special constable?' Reynolds repeated doubtfully.

'For the British crown itself,' the Baron said patriotically.

'British crown!' Reynolds exclaimed. 'Why would it harass me? To hell with their crown then!'

'Is deep concern a sort of harassment? One is the very opposite of the other. I wish only to know the full story, for your protection.' The Baron Dupin grinned. He spoke in his usual dashing fashion; he was not in his shaggy disguise this time.

'But I haven't a story to tell anyone!'

'You don't realize you have one yet. My dear Reynolds, there are parties who are quite interested in how events came off that day, as you have seen lately in the newspapers. Your public reputation, your livelihood as a carpenter, your family's good name could be in jeopardy if the truth is not sufficiently extracted first. You were there that day at Ryan's. You saw-'

'I saw nothing,' said Reynolds. 'Nothing out of the ordinary. It was an election day. There was debauchery, of course! The year before, there was a large fuss over the election of sheriff-both sides with their supporters. Election days are rather wild in Baltimore, Mr. Baron.'

'Just ‘Baron,' dear fellow. Poe called urgently for ‘Reynolds' as he lay dying in his hospital room.' So the Baron had discovered that, too. 'Do you not think that is out of the ordinary? Shall we say extraordinary? Was there some reason he would remember your part in his last hours?'

'I do not remember meeting any Poe there. You may ask the other judges. I insist you pardon me.'

I leaned out far enough from behind the wall that hid me to see the Baron's face after Reynolds walked away. The Baron remained standing in place. His smile was contorted, as though he had tasted something sour or had just stolen Reynolds's wallet. (Would it have been surprising if he had?) In all his activities, the Baron looked smugly victorious. Though he was a disgraced attorney fleeing from creditors-and though now Reynolds wanted nothing to do with him-the Baron was generally confident in his prospects.

Standing alone in the street, the Baron ran his tongue over his lower lip several times, as if to slick up for future eloquence. His face and bearing looked dead when he was not barking, or cooing, at someone. His gears and pumps had to move constantly. The glimmer of his intellect shined out as he muttered one word to himself. This word:

'Dupin!'

He grinded out the word 'Dupin' as though it were a curse. It no doubt seems strange for a man to jeer his own name in this way, much like punching oneself in one's own chin. It is less strange, perhaps, if you think about it not as his name, but his heritage and legacy that he admonished. The Baron, however, was the type to see himself as culminating rather than offshooting all that had come before him. When asked who were his ancestors, he might, like Emperor Napoleon to the royal potentates, reply: 'I am an ancestor.'

No. His imprecation of 'Dupin' was directed at neither himself nor his family. The Baron meant to conjure up none other than the figure of C. Auguste Dupin. The persona over which he sought to prove paternity, authority. Why did he murmur in this way about the literary Dupin? This deception to which he had clung since my first meeting with him in Paris, that he could be the real Dupin, was now a specter too powerful for him-and this he could only admit, if at all, when completely alone, as he thought he was now on the street. He could not argue or intimidate or mask himself as the real Dupin, as he was used to doing in life and law. He either was, or was not. There was a desperation to the scene, a vulgarity to it. I thought perhaps he was conceding something there, preparing to cave in. I was wrong.

I leaned against a post supporting the awning of a daguerreotyping establishment. Soon, a carriage that I recognized drove up the street. It was the same hackney cab that had been waiting for the Baron and Bonjour the other night. I could only imagine how the Baron had cajoled or threatened the original coachman to gain private use of the carriage. Bonjour stepped down. The same lean, light-skinned black man sat in the driver's seat. I learned later that the Baron had secured the service of this slender slave still in his teen years, whose name was Newman, to drive and deliver messages for them. He had told Newman that if he performed well, he would purchase the slave's freedom from his master.

Bonjour quietly reported to the Baron, in French, that at nightfall 'we meet him at the Baltimore Cemetery.' That was all I could hear.

I returned to Glen Eliza and pulled the city directory from the shelf. The Baron Dupin had revealed that the 'Reynolds' in the street with him was a carpenter. In the directory, the entry for the beguiling surname with that occupation and an address close to where I saw the two men read thus:

REYNOLDS, HENRY, CARPENTER, CORNER FRONT AND LOW

What could this inconspicuous carpenter I had seen in the street have had to do with Poe? The one sort of person who never employs a carpenter, after all, was someone traveling, as Poe had been in Baltimore. That I could know without the aid of ratiocination. And this particular Mr. Reynolds himself had denied seeing the poet.

I thought more about the Baron Dupin's comments on the street. He had implied that Henry Reynolds had been with Poe in Ryan's, had witnessed something. I sat thinking gravely about why this Reynolds might have been with Poe in his hour of misery, and how the Baron would know…

There was mention of the election. 'Election days are rather wild in Baltimore, Mr. Baron.' And the 'other judges.' Reynolds had been at Ryan's, perhaps, in some connection to the elections, since Ryan's was used that day as the Fourth Ward polling station. I burrowed through our collection of newspapers. I stopped when I found the Sun from October 3, 1849. That was the day when Poe was discovered in Baltimore in 'shocking condition,' as one of the papers had said, at Ryan's.

There, in the political department of the newspaper, was the name 'Henry Reynolds,' on a page with a long list of Baltimore 's election judges, men who administered the oaths to voters and oversaw the polls. Reynolds was one of the election judges for the Fourth Ward's polling place, Ryan's hotel. This was Reynolds's local poll. That explained why the Baron had been hounding him so close to Ryan's-it was right near where the carpenter lived.

I was burning to speak aloud about my discovery. But if I told Duponte, I would certainly be reproved. He would repeat, philosophically, his previous pronouncement that we not speak to witnesses. 'We can ascertain everything we need obliquely,' he would say. Besides, the Baron Dupin had already spoken with Reynolds, he would reason; the Baron had contaminated him, not to mention most other persons in Baltimore.

I repeated silently to myself that Duponte was the world's most eminent analyst, that my contribution should be nothing more ambitious than providing for his needs. Yet, now I could not stop myself from thinking who him might be-the man the Baron and Bonjour were to meet on the dangerous grounds of the Baltimore Cemetery tonight according to what I had overheard. I could not help but wonder this, and wonder whether their rendezvous touched the subject of Reynolds. When darkness fell, I excused myself for some air.

I secured a coach and rode through the streets into a northeastern quarter of the city where one would prefer to have daylight. Closing in on the Baltimore Cemetery, my carriage came to a choppy halt. The horses pulled and quivered.

'Driver, do you not have control over the horses?' I asked.

'No, sir, I suppose I do not.'

'Stop here! I will walk the rest of the way.'