Poe must die

THREE

New York City, February 1848

Hamlet Sproul said of the dead man, whose body he had stolen from its grave two days ago and now held for ransom, “Let us call him Mr. Lazarus, for he too shall rise from the grave when you give us the money we ask.”

“I would like proof that you do indeed possess the body. At present, I have only your word and on that basis, I cannot ask his widow to pay ransom.”

“We could kill you, Mr. Poe, and place you beside the decayin’ Mr. Lazarus, You would then be close enough to ensure yourself that we do own the gentleman in question. You can count on your death at my hands should you play treachery with me.”

“Going into darkness and distance holds no terror for me, sir.”

“Explain, please.”

“Death. I am not afraid of it.”

“Darkness and distance.” Hamlet Sproul aimed his deringer at Poe’s forehead. “The poet’s touch.” Sproul squeezed the trigger. Click. The hammer fell on an empty chamber.

“One hundred thousand dollars, if you please, dear poet. And cash money. All in eagle coins. Paper money’s barely fittin’ for pluggin’ holes in a man’s boot, don’t you think.” Sproul’s smile was a quick glimpse of crooked yellow teeth surrounded by a blond beard streaked brown with tobacco stains.

Edgar Allan Poe blinked nervously. That filthy bastard Sproul. The pistol was empty. And Poe had been afraid. His small hands pushed down hard on the head of his cane, driving its tip deeper into the sanded floor.

He said, “You ask a lot in exchange for a dead man.”

Sproul’s brogue was slurred by liquor. “Poet, you must understand the ways of the heart. She’ll be lovin’ her husband ‘til hell freezes over. Actually, you both ought to be thankin’ me. Instead of her waitin’ to go to heaven to meet up with him again, I can deliver her man right here on earth.” Sproul snorted and the two other grave robbers supported him with sly grins. Poe could have calmly killed all three.

Hamlet Sproul was the leader, a small, bearded man in a red flannel shirt and eyes to match, thought Poe. Sproul’s floor length, green overcoat appeared to have been used in cleaning streets, and in addition to the deringer, which he fingered as a nun would beads, Sproul wore a bowie knife on a leather thong around his neck. The blade on the knife was a foot long and as wide as a man’s hand.

He was homicidal and almost drunk. Poe watched him drink his fourthflip, a sickening concoction of rum, beer, sugar and the touch of a loggerhead, a red hot iron dipped into the brew. Bartenders kept the loggerheads hidden to prevent the drinkers from having at each other with them. Sproul’s bloodshot eyes had the brilliance of barely controlled lunacy, thought Poe.

Poe, ill and hating the bitter winter weather, was in a grog shop, a disgusting gin mill in the Five Points slum. In this rum palace, which was no larger than a damp cellar, he sat at a table with the three Irish resurrectionists, who’d stolen the body of the wealthy Mr. Lazarus for ransom. At the widow’s request, Poe had agreed to arrange an exchange of money for the dead husband. Poe had once been in love with the woman, and loved her still.

“A large sum, poet.” Sproul aimed his empty deringer at a painted, ten-year-old whore who had just entered the grog shop and stood shivering near the door, her thin body wet with snow and unable to stop trembling. “But word has reached us that the lady is bee-reeved at the removal-”

“Theft.”

Sproul casually looked across the table at Poe and waited long seconds before smiling. “Heard about your sharp tongue. They say you’re a nasty little man of the pen, you are. I say removal of her husband’s corpus from its final resting place.” His voice dared Poe to challenge him.

“Theft.”

The word was in the air before Poe could stop it. Tonight, his courage came not from liquor, but from rage. Yes, he knew these ghouls would as soon spill his blood as spill more whiskey. Hamlet Sproul, Tom Lowery, Sylvester Pier. Three of Ireland’s worst exports. Paddy at his most loathsome. But in stealing Mr. Lazarus, they had harmed Rachel.

He said, “I am not here to agree to your demands unconditionally.”

“You are here as go-between for the weepin’ widow, are ye not?”

Poe watched Sproul’s eyes dart to the men on either’ side of him. Sproul would slaughter butterflies and gouge the eyes from newborn lambs if there was a shilling to be gained from it.

“I am here for proof that you have the body in your possession. Your note indicates that you stole it and indeed someone has, for it is no longer in place.”

“Noticed that didja?” Tom Lowery sneered, then swallowed more oysters, which at six cents a dozen were among the cheapest of foods. He was a hulking, bearded man in a tattered derby, hobnail boots which he used effectively in fights and a filthy, food stained white shirt long minus its collar and studs. Poe found him to be the most stomach churning of the three ghouls. Lowery was said to have raped his own daughter, then sexually abused the small girl child who had resulted from that rape.

Even now, he looked up from his oysters and gin at the child whore who peered through the oil lamp lit darkness for customers. Sproul said, “None a that, Tom. To business first.”

Sylvester Pier said, “Paid to notice things, he is, ‘cause Mr. Poe here is a writer.” The respect in Pier’s voice was a mild shock to Poe.

“Read somethin’ once,” said Pier.

Once would seem the sum total of your attempts at reading, thought Poe.

“Somethin’ of yours, it was. ‘Bout a bird.”

“I hates fuckin’ birds.” Lowerv spoke with his mouth full.

“Mr. Poe writes good about birds,” continued Pier. “This was some sort of poem. ‘Bout a raven, I think. Yeah, a raven. Thought it was kinda nice.”

Poe pulled his black cloak tighter around him. Applause from a dullard, from a Hibernian vagabond to whom the picking of his very own nose must be ranked as a metaphysical achievement. Pier was nineteen, youngest of the three and wore the faded uniform of a commodore in the United States Navy-dark double-breasted frock coat, blue forage cap, dark blue trousers and a rusted, dull sword minus its scabbard. He was short, stocky, cheerful and reminded Poe of a hand puppet. Pier’s clean shaven and pleasant face appeared to possess what little decency existed in the three grave robbers.

Poe, observant, deductive, sensed that Sylvester Pier was a mental defective. How else to explain the youth’s choice of trade and companions. Or his eternal, idiotic smile or his wearing the uniform of an American naval officer and sitting with a gray mongrel dog in his lap. The dog’s ears had been sliced off; it was a fighter, to be pitted against other dogs with the owners betting on the outcome. The ears had been removed to prevent them from being chewed off in combat.

“Join us in a glass, Mr. Poe.” Sylvester Pier’s wide smile seemed nailed in place. It was ear to ear and indicated nothing.

“Thank you, no.” Poe’s mouth went suddenly dry and he averted his eyes from the bottle of gin in Pier’s hand.

“Come now, sir, you are no son of temperance. That’s for sure.”

Poe shook his head in emphatic refusal. Alcohol. My cup of frenzy. The smallest amount of liquor was enough to carry him into the arms of personal demons and such an embrace had always proven destructive. He always resisted, always fought the desire to rush to those devils that were his very own, but in the end he always succumbed. Alcohol had not pushed him into sorrow; sorrow had pushed him to drink, a bitter truth understood by few in Poe’s life.

He was thirty-nine, his health and creative powers waning after a life of unending poverty and personal hell and he drank because this was the only way to survive such an existence. He drank because he feared becoming as insane as his sister Rosalie, an adult whose mind had never gone beyond that of a twelve-year-old. He drank because publishers had cheated him during his entire writing career, because critics had insultingly found his work “learned and mystical,” because the American public was moronic and insensitive, a mass of idiots with tobacco juice for brains and the desire to read nothing more complicated than an Indian head penny.

He drank because it made him sick to his stomach to see fortune and praise heaped on talents inferior to his, talents which couldn’t draw a straight line in mud with a stick. He drank because he had never made more than $800 for a year’s work in his life.

Why did Poe “sip the juice”? Because his adored wife Virginia had died much too young, as had his beloved mother and his stepmother as well. He drank to forget and no man had more reason to.

But he could not forget that Rachel trusted him to settle this matter involving her dead husband. Rachel, who even now warmed his heart and gave him some small reason to hope that life held a little joy for him. Again Poe shook his head in refusal to Sylvester Pier’s offer of gin. The lower classes called the drink “Blue Ruin” or “Strip-and-go-naked.”

“Our little poet musta taken the pledge. He’s got a nice big T beside his name, I bet.” T for total abstinence. Teetotaler. Tom Lowery didn’t like little Mr. Poe of the soft voice and precious manners and actin’ like a bloody aristocrat and him all in shabby clothes, too. Lowery could squash him like a bug if he had to. Wasn’t much to the man. No more than 5’8”, 130 pounds and pale as the snow fallin’ outside.

Lowery bit into a hardboiled egg without removing the shell. Poe was sickly looking, like somethin’ that belonged under the earth and away from decent people. The poet had brown hair, gray eyes, thin lips and a long nose, too long if you ask Lowery. Shouldn’t be puttin’ it in other people’s business. High, wide forehead you could paint a sign on and a mustache right beneath that long nose of his. Lowery blinked. Poe’s unblinking gray eyes were on his.

Lowery, annoyed, stopped chewing the boiled egg. Bits of white shell were caught in his beard. “’Ere now, what the hell you starin’ at? You keep on doin’ that and I’m comin’ across the table and bite yer goddam nose off.” Gloomy looking bastard, Lowery thought. Big head on him, too.

Poe’s gentle voice had traces of a southern accent. “You eat like a Hun, sir.” Playing with violence as always, aren’t you Eddy?

Lowery frowned, uncertain, then deciding yes, he had been insulted. He grinned. “Don’t know what a Hun is, but I know what a drunk is and that’s you, me little man. Seen you in a few rum palaces, drunk as a lord and ravin’ at the top of yer lungs and nobody able to understand a goddam word of what you is yellin’ about.”

Poe pointed across the table with his walking stick. “Guard the mongrel well, Mr. Pier. You egg-eating friend may well press his sexual attentions upon it before the evening has ended.” He enjoyed the danger; even though it terrified him, he enjoyed it.

An angry Tom Lowery inhaled, his eyes almost closed. Hamlet Sproul placed a small hand against Lowery’s chest to keep him seated. “Stay, Tom. The poet’s talent for abuse is well known and far superior to yours, I’m afraid. Words are his cannon and he is well supplied. Don’t push Tom too far, Mr. Poe. He’s a violent man.”

Poe’s eyes went to Sproul. “I demand proof you have the body.”

Sproul petted Pier’s gray mongrel. “Thought you might.” He reached inside his long, green coat and took out the brooch. Opening it, he kept it in the palm of his hand, extending his arm across the table to Poe. “This here was buried with Mr. Lazarus. No you can’t have it, but you go back and tell the grievin’ widow you saw it. She’ll know what you are talkin’ about, since she was the one who laid it on his breast just before the earth covered him.”

The brooch was gold, trimmed in small white pearls and opened to show tiny black and white daguerreotypes of Rachel and her husband. “Nice little pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Lazarus.” A grinning Sproul snapped the brooch closed.

“Got more for you to look at, poet. Under the table. Go on. ‘Ere, Tom, take the lamp and hold it down there so’s the poet can see what’s what.”

Poe shifted on his hard, wooden chair. No gas light in this hell hole. Five Points had none of the modern conveniences enjoyed by the rest of New York. The grog shop was lit by sperm lamps-lamps filled with whale oil, one to a table and three on the bar. The darkness in here was like that of a mine shaft. The two windows had been whitewashed to prevent prying eyes from seeing inside and all liquor was served from a plank placed on two empty barrels. The sanded floor was wet from snow covered boots entering and leaving the grog shop and the small room smelled of musty dampness, cheap alcohol and smoke from the oil lamps.

Poe watched the child-prostitute leave with a burly man large enough to pick her up and carry the tiny whore under his arm.

“You wanted proof, poet, now goddam you, look!” Sproul’s liquored voice was as savage as a meat axe.

Poe leaned over and looked under the table. Light from the lamp stabbed his eyes and he felt its heat. He flinched at the sight of Lowery’supside-down and leering face, the man’s beard shiny with juice from his oysters. “ ’Ere Mr. Poet, you hold the lamp.” A gigantic muddy paw shoved the lamp at Poe, who took it. Poe’smouth was dry and the anxiety he’d always suffered from made it hard to breathe.

Lowery was on his knees, fingers fumbling with a stained, brown sack. “Feast yer eyes, Mr. Poet.”

The ghoul held up the head of Rachel’s husband with bits of ice gleaming in its long black hair and on its pale skin. The opened eyes glittered like polished glass and stared at Poe who used every ounce of willpower not to scream.

He sat up in his chair, forcing himself to breathe deeply, to forget the smell of the head, the smell that the ice could not mask.

Sproul stroked his deringer. “Gets what you pay for, providin’ you pays for it.”

Poe closed his eyes, then opened them and tried to concentrate on colored prints of George Washington and an American eagle hanging on the grimy wall in semi-darkness behind Tom Lowery. It had been at his feet all the time. He wanted to leap from his chair and lay his cane across Sproul’s grinning face.

Sproul said, “Pour a glass for the poet, Mr. Pier. I think he needs it.”

Tom Lowery laughed.

Poe had tried, God he had tried. He hadn’t had a drink in four days, not since Rachel had contacted him and asked his help. He owed her his best effort and that meant staying sober, staying healthy, staying sane. But it had been at his feet all the time!

Poe’s trembling hands brought the glass of gin to his lips.