"What bust? What's this about?" I asked.

"February second," he said. "The anniversary of the funeral of Poe's wife, Virginia. There's an old tradition in Baltimore, where the Poes are buried, that some mysterious stranger places roses on his grave every year on his birthday. That fell on January nineteenth, during the winter break, so I couldn't observe that event this time. But this particular memorial fits the school schedule, so we'll have a little ceremony out at the statue today."

"What statue are you talking about?" I asked again.

"The Hall of Fame."

"Button up, Coop. Let's take a walk."

Professor Tormey looked relieved for the first time since we started talking. "You know it, Mr. Chapman?"

"I went to Fordham," Mike said, standing and opening the door for the three of us.

"Then you're acquainted with the neighborhood?"

"Used to be. Hall of Fame for Great Americans, right?"

Tormey led us to a rear stairwell and down, out the side door and along a walkway behind the library and the Hall of Philosophy. Fifty or sixty students lined the path, oblivious to the cold as they stood with cameras and coffee cups, calling out to Tormey as we passed by.

"Today, of course, there are halls of fame for athletes and singers, cowboys and country music stars. But this was the very first one in the country."

"Built when?" I asked.

"Nineteen oh one. I guess you knew that-ironically, I must add-this campus was once NYU. There was the downtown campus that's still thriving today, and this one was the uptown part of the school. The man who was then president of the college had this fabulous colonnade built just to conceal the unsightly foundation of these great buildings up on the heights. You remember The Wizard of Oz, don't you?"

"Sure," I said.

Tormey was alive now, warm and engaging. "Well, in the movie, when Dorothy dissolves the Wicked Witch of the East, don't you remember the Munchkins singing to her? 'You'll be a bust, be a bust, be a bust in the Hall of Fame'? This is the very place they were singing about. It really used to be famous all over the country."

I looked around as we walked toward the entrance, paved with red bricks rather than the yellow ones of Oz. We were high on a promontory over the expressway below, the bare trees covering the steep slope beneath us. I had assumed a "hall" would be the interior of a dusty old building, but this was an outdoor vista with sweeping views to the Harlem River, less than a mile away.

"What's here now?" I asked.

"Ninety-eight bronze busts, commissioned by prominent sculptors and artists. The project was abandoned in the 1970s, but it used to be quite grand in the first half of the last century."

"What's your interest in Poe?" Mike asked, as we both tried to keep pace with Tormey, who moved with greater speed than I expected of a man of his girth.

"A genius, Mr. Chapman. Possibly the greatest American writer ever to have lived. And despite the fact that he borrowed a bit too liberally from my man Coleridge, the kids here get him in a way they don't get the Brits and the Romantic poets."

I nodded at his enthusiasm for the macabre storyteller.

"They love the bizarre, the ghastly, the obsession with mortality," Tormey said. "The dean wanted me to find some way to put this wonderful landmark to work-the Hall of Fame, that is-so here you have it. I've created these little ceremonies, if you will, for many of the grand old gentlemen who still sit vigil here in the Bronx. Anything I do with Poe is especially popular with the students, as you can see. His death obsessions are so classically timeless."

Tormey pointed up at the words carved into the stone arch over the entrance, directly behind one of the original campus buildings on the quadrangle. "'Mighty Men Which Were of Old-Men of Renown.'" He held the elaborately filigreed iron gate open for me and I entered, staring off between the columns at the sharp precipice to the highway below.

This alfresco hall was, in fact, a series of more than ten connected serpentine paths. They were open and airy, high on this lofty point, twisting and winding with busts on both sides of the walk-way and bronze plaques beneath them identifying the subjects, who were separated from one another by tall white columns supporting an arched ceiling.

Names familiar to every schoolchild were mixed with those of long-forgotten heroes. Walter Reed, Robert Fulton, and Eli Whitney peopled the first long crescent, with several hundred feet of turf dedicated to their great accomplishments. Beside and between them were others whose deeds were little known today. I squinted at the chiseled descriptions of Matthew Fontaine Maury, pathfinder of the seas, and James Buchanan Eads, who built the first submarine before the Civil War.

The walk curved, abutting the solid wall of the building on its interior side. The second series of busts arched ahead of us. Tormey moved briskly, pointing his small bouquet of roses at figures along the way. The Wright Brothers stood opposite Thomas Edison and beside a mathematical physicist named Josiah Willard Gibbs. "George Washington," Tormey said. "He's the only one ever elected unanimously to rest here."

"An hour or two," Mike said, stopping to read the descriptions on some of the plaques, "and I'd be set with Jeopardy! questions for the next couple of years."

Around another corner and the building behind us-to our east-gave way to a courtyard, where we could see the students waiting for Tormey at the far end of the walkway. Framed against the bare gray branches that faced out over the western view were Abe Lincoln and Henry Clay, stuck for eternity opposite Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster.

The redbrick path wound around another corner, where jurists like John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes presided over the distant view, and then a further stretch of columns positioned with soldier heroes-John Paul Jones, the Marquis de Lafayette-the only non-American I spotted in the lineup-Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses Grant. Mike lingered to study the notations beneath them.

"This is quite a stretch."

"Typical, isn't it?" Tormey said to me. "Writers and artists come at the very end. Even teachers and scholars get their due here first."

We passed educators like Maria Mitchell, James Kent, Horace Mann, and Mary Lyon before turning to the final row of great wordsmiths. James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe were the first pair, gazing blankly into each other's eyes across the windy corridor.

"There's your Mr. Poe," Tormey said, pointing to a solemn figure perched several hundred feet above the roadway, situated between Samuel Clemens and William Cullen Bryant.

"Who was the sculptor?" I asked.

"The great Daniel Chester French."

The man best known for the massive monument to Abraham Lincoln on the Mall in Washington, D.C., had also crafted this smaller tribute to the dark poet-a solemn visage capped by thick wavy hair, with the bow of his waistcoat tied beneath his chin.

Noah Tormey lifted his arm over his head, waving to the students with his three roses to get their attention. He checked his watch and I looked at my own. We had caused him to be only a few minutes late for his eleven o'clock ceremony.

With a bit of a flourish, evident to those who were watching him from the courtyard, Tormey bowed to the bust of Poe and laid the flowers at the base of the granite pedestal on which it was mounted. The kids laughed and clapped and camera flashes lightened the gloomy morning sky.

As the professor straightened up and took my arm, the blast of gunshots repeating from a high-powered rifle sounded from directly below us on the wooded slope. The third one ricocheted off the head of Samuel Clemens and slammed into Noah Tormey's shoulder. He fell to the ground and I dropped to my knees beside him.