Now Crow, on the other hand, knew what he wanted, said what it was, and almost always got it as a result. What a concept, Tess thought. And then she stopped thinking for a while, which was Crow’s great gift to her. He was the only person who could make her mind shut down.
The old church and its graveyard stood on the western edge of downtown Baltimore, in a neighborhood overtaken by the University of Maryland ’s various graduate schools. In fact, the university now owned Westminster Chapel, which had been turned into a performance hall, and a new law school was under construction behind the graveyard. This had been undeniably good for a once-blighted area, and it was probably safer than it had been in years, but it was still pretty darn lonely at midnight.
Not to mention cold. Two cars were parked on Fayette Street, engines running, and Tess envied them. How cozy it would be, waiting in the car with the heater on, listening to the tape player or the radio. She saw a few other people at the front gate, standing close together to generate warmth yet clearly not connected to each other. She found this creepy. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the story of someone who came, alone, to watch the Visitor make his January nineteenth pilgrimage.
Besides, not one of them resembled the Porcine One. He had a silhouette not soon forgotten.
“Don’t you think it’s better if we wait in the car?” she asked Crow. “I mean, suppose we have to chase someone down?”
They were on the side street, Greene, but standing on the opposite side from the graveyard gates, near the bright lights of University Hospital. Crow had come earlier in the day and walked around, noting all the graveyard’s entrances and exits. Tess had assumed the Visitor just strolled through the front gates, the crowd parting to make way. But Crow thought he might take advantage of the construction and scale the low wall behind Westminster Hall.
“The Visitor arrives on foot, not in a Nissan,” Crow said. “Besides, being outside seems to be part of the experience, don’t you think?”
“The Poe folks stay inside,” she said, pointing with her chin toward the old church where the regulars, the curator of the Poe museum and his invited guests, kept vigil every year. He was the gatekeeper, allowing only those he trusted inside the church. He would never permit anyone to interfere with the visit.
“Well, if you start coming every year, you could stay inside too.”
“Fat chance. You know, Life magazine photographed this one year. But it was understood they would never unmask him.”
“Imagine, a journalist with ethics,” he said mildly. Crow, who liked almost everyone, was willing to make an exception for those in her former profession.
It was 3 a.m., and they had been out for three hours. Tess had brought a thermos of coffee, but she took only tiny sips on infrequent breaks inside Crow’s Volvo, worried that her bladder wouldn’t make it through the night. According to Crow, the Visitor sometimes arrived as late as 6 a.m., which was still dark on January nineteenth. They had played Password, they had played Botticelli, they had played Geography, but their efforts to make time pass only made them more aware how slowly it was moving.
A blast of wind shot down Greene Street, and then the night fell still, as if it knew its part in this drama. A figure had come around the corner and was approaching the Greene Street gate. It was a man-well, maybe not, come to think of it-but definitely a person, wrapped in a cloak, an old fedora pulled down to his eyebrows, hands held up as if to shield the lower part of his face. From their vantage point, Tess and Crow had a clear view, but the spectators on Fayette Street were blocked and oblivious. She thought she saw a white flash in one of the church windows, a face appearing and reappearing, but it happened too quickly for her to be sure. The sounds of the city seemed to fade into the distance, and although she was aware of traffic on the nearby streets, it might as well have been a hundred miles-or a hundred years-away.
The figure entered the graveyard. Tess felt a strange excitement almost in spite of herself. She knew it was just a man, going through a ritual someone else had started, but it still felt magical. The past was suddenly accessible; she felt linked to a time she had never known, to a person who had never been particularly important to her. Through this one odd figure, she could travel to the past and back again. Her mind scrambled for the fragments of facts she had accumulated about Poe over her lifetime. He invented the detective story. He married his young cousin. He had been found, wandering in a state of confusion, on Election Day, wearing strange clothes. He had died in a hospital in East Baltimore within a few days- Church Home Hospital, she thought, although it may have had a different name then. Crow would know; she would have to ask him later.
She reached for Crow’s hand and they ran across Greene Street on tiptoe, finding a shadowy place where they could watch the man approach the grave. The night was bright: the moon almost full, the streetlamps on, the blue glow of Baltimore ’s Bromo-Seltzer tower adding a suitably surreal cast to what they could see.
“Tess-”
“Shhhh.” She didn’t want to talk, not now.
Crow pulled at her elbow, turning her so she was looking toward another spot in the graveyard. Another man stood there, near the entrance to the catacombs that ran beneath the church. Taller, swathed in a grander cloak, carrying the same tribute of roses and cognac. Two visitors? How could that be? Too tall, she told herself, and too slender to be John P. Kennedy, her porcine pal.
The first figure was already at the grave-not at the Poe monument, which dominated the front of the graveyard, but the plain tombstone in the back, where he was originally buried. Tess wanted to run after them, to see what happened when they met, but she couldn’t move. She told herself it was out of respect, but she was frightened in a way that only a nonbeliever can be when facing something that cannot be explained. Certainly, one of those figures could not be human. Poe had come back to meet his most constant friend.
The first man backed away from the grave as the second man put down his tribute. Was it Tess’s imagination, or was one trying to keep his distance from the other? The first man made a strange high-stepping movement-there must be a low fence around the grave itself-and stumbled. The other man caught him by the arm, then embraced him. The first man submitted to it, arms at his sides, his body cringing as if expecting a blow.
They parted, moving in different directions. The wind kicked up with a sudden burst, lifting the capes of both men. The taller one, heading east, seemed to be moving quickly, while the other moved at the same stately, measured pace he had used to approach. As he reached the southern wall of the cemetery, he turned back as if to take one last look at his doppelgänger. Tess was no longer sure who was who, which man had come through the gate and which man had come from the catacombs.
And then there was one.
A gunshot is startling any time, any place. It’s a sound people assume they know, and then they hear one and realize they never knew it at all. No diet of movies and television can prepare one for the way a gun cuts the air, the way it leaves all who hear it breathless with dread. Some run, others freeze in place. Whatever choice is made, the other always seems wiser.