The Poe Shadow

A sudden thought forced me to my feet. 'Bonjour,' I gasped to myself. I heard Slatter coming to life in a series of groans, but I did not stop to look back at him. I raised myself onto the side of his horse and rode back in the direction I had come from.

'My horse!' Slatter cried. 'You! Bring back my horse!'

My fears were realized when I saw that the door to the Bonaparte house I had just left was wide open. I tied the slave-trader's horse to a post outside and walked circumspectly through the front hall. It was quiet except for the sounds of audible, pained breathing. If there had been any other noises it's unlikely I would have heard them. They would have folded into the background of my mind, along with the furnishings. I was transfixed.

In the parlor, there had clearly been a struggle only minutes, maybe seconds, before I arrived. Chairs, lamps, curtains, and papers were scattered over the floor. The chandelier still shook with the violence. The victor was clear. Bonjour stood over the large figure of Rollin, who was perspiring pitifully. From the disarray at a nearby window, it was clear he had tried to jump out of it. Bonjour, though perhaps half his size, was holding him down and had a blade touching his throat.

His eyes met mine and I wondered: did he know me now too?

I had been leaving Paris with Auguste Duponte to begin our investigation of Poe's death. Climbing aboard the ship, Duponte announced there was a stowaway. You remember.

'Do request,' he said to me, 'Monsieur Clark, that the steward inform our ship's captain there is a stowaway on board.'

'You shall want to know what I know!' cried this stowaway, Rollin, when he was revealed and accused of trying to steal the steamer's mail shipment. There was something in his tone that may have rekindled the memory in me when the same man asked, in a voice far too aggressive, 'You would like to leave word?' at the door of the Bonaparte mansion. But more than that, it was the lift of his hat-revealing the square baldness that had been unwillingly shown that day at sea when he was flung from the rails. It was that sight that made me remember where I had seen him that time.

By the time I had discovered Bonjour there, the implications of this man's presence on the Humboldt had settled into my imagination. But to answer my previous question for myself: no, I do not think he knew me now. He had been watching for someone else that earlier day at sea.

Now he was staring right at me. Rollin's eyes burned with ghastly interest, his legs wet with water and spotted with flower petals that had spilled on the rug from a shattered vase.

Bonjour peered around. She smiled slightly, almost apologetically, at me. I could almost feel all the passion and regret of her kiss again while I looked upon her face.

'I am sorry, Monsieur Clark.' She said this as though I were the one prostrate and pleading for my life.

'You,' I said, standing upright with the revelation. 'You poisoned me. It was not the police or the prison guards! It was you. You slipped the poison into my mouth when we kissed.'

'After I found a way inside the prison, I saw that the walls of the hospital chambers were already giving way to the floods,' she said. 'I felt you could get out through the sewer passage, but I needed to find a way for you to be transferred there. You may say I helped you, monsieur.'

'No, you did not do it to help me. You wanted to follow me to Duponte so he would find the men who shot the Baron, and whoever ordered it. You thought Duponte could still help and that I'd know where Duponte was.'

'I wanted the same thing as you, Monsieur Clark. To find the truth.'

'Please,' begged the man on the floor. Bonjour kicked him fiercely in his stomach.

I looked on as the man twisted in pain. I took a step closer. 'Bonjour, this will help nothing. The police can arrest them now.'

'I have no trust in police, Monsieur Clark.'

The man swallowed down some further plea and trembled pitifully.

Bonjour crouched on the floor, positioning her blade. 'Leave,' she said to me, pointing to the door.

'You do not owe the Baron vengeance, mademoiselle,' I said. 'You have fulfilled your obligations by discovering the man who ordered his killing. Murdering this villain now will only make your life wretched, will only force you to run, as you have had to before. And,' I added, 'I will be the sole witness to this crime. You will have to kill me, too.'

I was surprised when Bonjour, after remaining dead still in the midst of contemplation, turned slowly to me with a tear at the corner of her eye. It seemed a true affection had arisen in her expression. She stepped gingerly toward me like a scared deer. She seemed to be holding her breath when she threw her arms around my shoulders with a low moan. It was less of an embrace, somehow, than when our bodies were brought together at the fortifications in Paris. It was more a need for support, and I stood straight as a pillar. 'Bonjour. It will be made right. We have both helped ourselves. Let me help you.' She then shoved me away as though I had been the one to pull her to me. I nearly fell against the edge of a sofa. There was something lost from her eyes that made me know that I would not see her again.

Bonjour let her dagger drop and, after a moment of looking over the scene she had created, she began kicking the man brutally across the face several times in a flurry of blows. Then she ran from the room. I breathed in relief that she had not killed him. And yet it was not my monologue that had moved her not to do so. Approaching the place where Rollin lay crumpled like a corpse, I saw what Bonjour had seen: one of the objects that had crashed to the floor during their struggle was a newspaper from that morning. On the first page was announced the death of the mysterious French baron in the hospital.

The slave-trader had not been mistaken, as I had thought, when he'd said I was wanted for murder. Bonjour, for her part, must have felt her obligation to avenge the Baron somehow burn and fade upon his death-perhaps, for the thief in her, the reward, his honor, disappeared past redemption. Perhaps, for the true criminal mind, honor did not continue beyond death; nothing continued beyond death-there was no heaven or hell for persons who sought those same territories here. Or perhaps true sorrow had made all else pale in comparison. Whatever the reason, she had abandoned her revenge.

I leaned down at the side of Rollin and found that he was insensible but only superficially injured. I wrapped his wounds with a piece of fabric I tore from a fringed curtain. Then, before leaving, I found the washbasin to try to expunge his blood from my hands.

My mind circled vigorously around what I had learned. Though I had made great strides in understanding all that had happened, I still had no evidence against the men who'd killed the Baron. I had nothing in my possession to convince the police of what I now had uncovered. Even if I waited for the two villains to return to the Bonapartes', they would not hesitate to eliminate me. Indeed, this would perhaps be Rollin's first order to them if he regained consciousness. Since the police would only want to arrest me, I would have no protection if I sent for them.

And I would remain forever the man who killed the real Dupin. That was what people would think. I was destroyed. I would hang for someone else's sins and, at the moment, I could not even decipher whose-these men, or Duponte's. Worst of all, I had let all this mess forever prevent the resolution of Poe's death.

***

With these thoughts, I walked up and down the streets of Baltimore, stopping only at intervals to rest. I walked until the early hours of the morning, and then sunrise came and still I walked.

' Clark?'

I turned around. As I did I realized I was not far from one of the district station houses, and so you can imagine that I was not entirely unprepared to see what I did.

'Officer White,' I said, and then I greeted his clerk, too.

I looked down half bemused at the blood splattered like stains of guilt across the sleeves and buttons of my ragged coat, as they grabbed me.