“My survival, Monsieur Nast,” the Frenchman assured me, “will be the earnest and guarantor of yours. Tweed and his associates will want you dead, but they will not dare to move against you so long as I am free and able to speak of what I know. I cannot, of course, prove that he was involved in these murders, but I can embarrass and clog the machine of which he is a part. And I will do so, if he defies me.”
We shook hands and parted company. Dupin rode away northwards and I hiked down to Morningside. There, I was able to prevail on a fisherman to give me a lift on the back of his cart when he took his day’s catch down to Peck Slip, and I was home only an hour or so after sunset.
Dupin, I learned later, had put pen to paper before he embarked from Spuyten Duyvil. Whatever it was he wrote to Tweed, the Tammany machine rescinded its writs and remands against the Roebling family and their great construction project and withdrew any and all accusations of unsafe working practices. A warrant was issued for the arrest of the foreman, O’Reilly, on twenty counts of murder, but his room in a seedy boarding house at Red Hook was found to have been emptied of all moveable items. Verbal descriptions were issued, along with a promise of reward, but O’Reilly never turned up again, and I doubt he will now — not until the last trump brings the dead up out of their graves.
Dupin wrote to me, too, enclosing a letter for Mrs. Emily Roebling, but also a few lines for my own edification. Your Mr. Tweed, he wrote, trades very strongly on the appearance of invulnerability. If you wish to harm him, you must first encourage the perception that he is susceptible to harm. I mention this, my dear friend, because your own trade of cartooning seems to me to be very admirably suited to this purpose. You asked me a question when we first met: what is your motive and your métier? What is the singular thing that you pursue? I ask you now to consider this very question yourself. I believe that your answer will be the same as mine — that you are a servant of truth. And you will know to what I am referring when I say she arms her servants well.
Well, I chewed that over a while, and I saw clear enough that he was right. So I took up my sword (it was shaped somewhat like a Woodson & Penwick number 1 black sable paintbrush) and I went to war.
ADDENDUM: From 1870 to 1873, Thomas Nast’s editorial cartoons mercilessly lampooned the corrupt activities of the Tammany Ring, and its formidable front man, William “Boss” Tweed. Harper’s Weekly rallied behind him, and one by one the other New York newspapers joined the crusade. In 1873, Tweed was arrested on multiple charges of fraud and racketeering. He died in prison five years later, having been convicted on all counts.
THE UNFATHOMED DARKNESS
By
SIMON CLARK
…the Lucifugus demons are eminently malicious and mischievous, for these, said he, not merely impair men’s intellect, by phantasms and illusions, but destroy them with the same alacrity as we would destroy the most savage wild beast.
Books! Books! Books! I always considered them to be the sole reason to continue to live upon our dreary Earth. Books, however, were on this November night, very nearly the death of me, and my friend, Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin.
I am writing this account just hours after the extraordinary events that nearly led to our destruction. I confess that as well as smoking pipe after pipe of strong tobacco I have drunk several invigorating glasses of absinthe. My friend, Dupin, slumbers in his bedchamber, but I am in such a state of profound excitement that I am far from the shores of sleep— so, by the light of candles, and with the heat of that powerful spirit of wormwood putting fire in my belly, I am attempting to exorcise the ghost of what I experienced tonight by writing down all that I saw, heard, and felt.
And it all began with our addiction to books that drove us out into the snowy night, where we heard the terrible sound of a woman’s scream.
Dupin had received a letter informing him that a sailor would sell him a cache of tomes acquired on his travels of the Eastern Mediterranean. One of these is a sublime rarity, entitled Dialogue on the Operation of Demons, penned by that Byzantine philosopher and educator of princes, Michael Psellus. Dupin has little in the way of money, yet the purse put aside for food was hastily retrieved from beneath the boards of his study; thereafter, we lit a lantern apiece and hurried out into the Parisian night. Snow had fallen steadily all evening, veiling the ground with a pristine shroud. The footprints and cart tracks left by the sparse midnight traffic soon vanished entirely as we headed out amongst the open fields beyond Montmartre.
“Books, books, books!” panted Dupin. “The word hurtles through your head like a musket ball through its barrel.”
“I know your tricks by now,” I replied. “You saw me mouthing the word to myself.”
“No, absolutely not. You are obsessed with books. I hear you at night chanting the word over and over in your sleep. You covet books, you crave books, monsieur. You sit at a table and curl your arms over a book, like a hawk protecting its freshly killed prey, so no other creature can steal it.”
“Is that so? Then I am morbidly diseased by my love of the printed page. My soul must be liquefying into printer’s ink.”
“Ha!” His teeth flashed in the light of our lanterns as he smiled. “I am gripped by the same contagion bibliotheque. The reading germ nests snugly in both our brains.”
We continued to chatter thus as our feet crunched on freshly fallen snow. A distant church clock struck the half hour after midnight, and although the bitterly cold air wormed its way through our cloaks to shiver our skin we were so eager to hold that eight hundred-year-old book of Psellus’ in our hands that we almost ran along the deserted lane, our lamps throwing out splashes of light.
It was as the lane cut through broad, flat meadows that we heard the scream.
“A woman is being murdered!” I cried.
“Not being murdered,” Dupin corrected. “That’s the sound of grief, despair, and a heart-breaking realization of loss — the woman has found the lifeless body of someone she loves.” He stood absolutely still; the lamp was held high, as he carefully and precisely stored the sound away in that remarkable brain of his. Chevalier Dupin is a man who methodically preserves memories of the sights, sounds, and odors produced by the horrors of this world, as I would methodically place books on my library shelves. He is the consummate archivist of the accouterments of tragedy.
The woman screamed again, this time the sound being much fainter, suggestive of increased distance, rather than her becoming weaker, or overcome in some way. Dupin and I hurried through dense bushes that lined the track. Within moments, we found ourselves in a broad meadow that possessed a smooth covering of snow. Our lanterns shone across that pristine shroud of white. Nothing had disturbed the snow — neither birds, animals, nor people. We scrunched onwards, searching for the distressed female. From the dark sky above, a lazy snowflake or two descended. We heard no sound. The woman had fallen silent.
“Perhaps there was no woman?” I suggested as the search revealed nothing but a winter’s meadow. “Might the cry have been made by a fox?”
“That was no fox, monsieur. You know as well as I.” Dupin raised the lamp higher, endeavoring to push back the darkness. “That was a lady in distress. Ha!” He pointed. “Now do you see what caused said distress?”