by Dan Simmons
The vulgarly dressed man extended a rough hand. “Howard Culpepper,” he said in a rich baritone.
Holmes shook hands with him. If this was Culpepper, then the younger, silent man must be “Mr. J”—obviously the most important of the five thieves. The man Culpepper had called Murtrick never quit tapping at the hilt of his huge knife. Holmes felt in luck that his first real contact in Washington was this Culpepper fellow; based on his flashy dress and confident attitude, he might possibly be high enough up in the city’s criminal organization to answer Holmes’s questions. If given the proper incentive. He doubted very much if Mr. J would be so foolish as to give names—or any useful information for that matter.
“And your name, sir?” asked Culpepper.
“Henry Baskers,” said Holmes.
“Well, Mr. Baskers, I apologize, if your host has not, for the olfactory unpleasantness currently haunting our temporary place of business,” said Culpepper. “You’ve seen the local neighborhood, sir. Water has to be carried down here by hand all the way from Four-and-a-Half Street. There’s not so much as a single public pump in all of this Southwest quarter.” He squinted at Murtrick. “But that is little excuse, since civilization demands a price.”
Murtrick never took his eyes off Holmes, who had nothing to say to all of this. He allowed himself to show several subtle signs of nervousness without overplaying his role. Mr. “Baskers” would have purchased illicit drugs in unsavory places before this.
From time to time, Holmes allowed his nervous gaze to flick to Mr. J as if he were one gentleman appealing for help from another, but the tall man leaned against the counter with a withdrawn silence bordering on complete indifference. It was as if he weren’t there.
But Culpepper rubbed his palms together. “To business then, sir. My confederates tell me that you wish to purchase a modest amount of morphine and . . . how shall I put it? . . . a more significant amount of Mr. Bayer’s new heroic pharmaceutical.”
“Yes,” said Holmes. He repeated the amount of each he was ready to purchase.
“You’re aware, Mr. Baskers,” said Culpepper, “that Bayer has not yet fully released this miraculous heroin for general sale either in Europe or the United States. Soon it will be on every grocery store’s shelf, but right now it is undergoing—what do they call it?—trials in select hospitals, including Dr. Reed’s clinic.”
Holmes nodded impatiently. He allowed his gaze to remain riveted on the three bottles of heroin salts Culpepper was holding between the fingers of his right hand like a magician preparing to do a trick. Each label read FRIEDIR BAYER & CO., ELBERFELD, 40 STONE ST., NEW YORK.
In truth, Holmes was also noting the make and model of the pistol set in Culpepper’s tight waistband. It was familiar to the detective since not only was it British-made but had been standard issue for the British military until it had been replaced by the Enfield pistol in 1880. It was the .442-caliber Beaumont-Adams revolver that had become so famous in England’s war with the Zulus—this model almost certainly modified, as so many had been that had seen action in America’s Civil War, to take center-fire cartridges. This pistol had sported the first modern double-action system. Holmes knew that many American officers and cavalry in their Civil War had preferred it to the American military Colt due to the Beaumont-Adams’s superior trigger-cocking speed and more rapid rate of fire in close action. He wondered idly if Culpepper had been an officer in that war, now almost 30 years in the past, and if he kept this pistol for reasons of sentimentality. Based on the gray in the man’s sideburns and the obvious use of hair-darkening materials elsewhere under that homburg—perhaps the same patent goop Holmes was using in his Sigerson disguise—Culpepper could easily be in his late fifties or early sixties.
Holmes assumed that Mr. J was also armed, but almost certainly with a much smaller and more sensible pistol to carry in a city.
“The morphine will cost you only twenty dollars,” said Culpepper, holding the two smaller vials in his left hand. That was twice what Holmes would pay for it near one of the hospitals or in the Negro sections of town just a dozen alleys from here.
As if reading Holmes’s thoughts, Culpepper chuckled and said, “Yes, yes, you could get if for less in niggertown, Mr. Baskers, but God knows what our darky friends might have mixed into it. And as for the heroin . . . no, you have come to the one and only supplier in your nation’s capital, sir. You will find it nowhere else.”
Holmes knew that this wasn’t true either, but he said, “How much for the three bottles of salts?”
“One hundred and fifty dollars, sir,” said Culpepper. Even Murtrick glanced over at the well-dressed man in surprise. This was more than four times the street price Holmes would have paid for an equal amount of the drug in New York.
He wrestled visibly with the shock of the price, allowing only the slightest hint of the serious addict’s always-losing war between absolute need and mere money to show on his face.
“Oh, what the heck,” laughed Culpepper. “We’ll throw both morphines in as part of the price. A better deal you’ll get nowhere east of the Mississippi, Mr. Baskers.”
Holmes swallowed hard and nodded. “All right.” He watched both men’s eyes glint as he counted a hundred and fifty dollars from his absurd wad of American bills. He was carrying more than eight hundred dollars with him—every bit of what he’d brought from France and converted to dollars in New York.
When the transaction was completed and the morphine and heroin bottles nestled most carefully in Holmes’s various jacket pockets, Culpepper asked in a casual tone, “Will we be having the pleasure of your future business, Mr. Baskers? I can give you the address of one of my . . . ah . . . less fragrant and more convenient places of business.”
This was it. If Holmes told them that he was going to be a regular customer, they might let him live. At these extortionate prices for heroin alone, they could have his remaining $650 in a few months without resorting to violence. Over a year or two, he would be worth a true fortune to them.
“No,” said Holmes. “I’m leaving tomorrow for San Francisco. I’m from Philadelphia and didn’t know if the heroin was in use out there yet and so . . . I thought . . .”
“We understand,” grinned Culpepper. He gave Murtrick the briefest of glances. “Have a safe trip, Mr. Baskers.”
Mr. J did not even turn his head to watch as Holmes left the former blacksmith shop.
CHAPTER 12
They’d sent one of the Finns to follow him up Casey’s Alley. Following a man surreptitiously up such a narrow venue, crowded as its sides were with a contiguous wall of shacks and tumbledown ruins, would have been difficult enough when the dirt street was dry; with the mud, it was impossible.
Holmes squelched northward, never looking back, assured that this Finn was merely keeping him in sight while the other three men—or possibly more by now—were moving up an adjacent north-south alley. When Holmes stopped, this Finn would get the word to the others in less than a minute.
Culpepper and Murtrick would be betting that this addict’s need was so great that he could not wait to get back to his hotel, but would seek out a private place along the way in which to inject his newly acquired heroin. They would also be banking that Holmes—“Mr. Baskers”—would do this before he left the slums of the Southwest quarter.
Holmes would not disappoint them.
* * *
He left the door of the abandoned hotel ajar behind him. The giant stain in the floor of the large room off the lobby remained just as disturbing as at first encounter and the three stories of cratered floorboards beginning with that room’s ceiling just as shocking. The cold spring rain had settled into a heavy drizzle and it continued to fall through the shattered rooftop more than three stories above.
Perhaps a meteor or comet struck the hotel, was the ironic thought that came from the most reasoned and deductive mind in England. Holmes was in great physical pain. The morphine he’d injected that morning had been the last of his store, h
ad been far too little for the pain that had accrued over the past week, and pain continued to distract him despite his years of disciplining himself to ignore it. A gunshot wound, something less than mortal, would have distracted him less than this ferocious full-body ache that came from too long of an interval between applications of his ameliorative.
He climbed the stairs slowly, testing each one carefully before committing his weight. The wood was soaked and rotten but had once been a sound and noble wood and only a few steps had to be avoided completely. The railing was continuous for the length of its long, curving climb, but so many balusters had fallen away that nowhere was the banister solid enough to hold a person’s weight should he or she be pressed against it. Between what the Americans called the second and third stories, there was almost no banister at all.
He turned into the dripping, wallpaper-curling corridor on the fourth floor and threw his shoulder against the warped door of his chosen room.
This was it. There was a rotting floor intact for only eighteen inches or more before the huge cavity began. Holmes could see lathing and shards of ancient carpet that had been left in the interstices between joists when the impossible weight had crashed down for forty feet. There was space enough only on the right side of the crater to edge around the hole in this unfurnished room, and the constant drizzle from above—lit by the dim sunlight coming through gray clouds—gave an eerie and unreal illumination to the bare walls and remnant of floor and ceiling. Holmes had hoped that there’d be room enough against the wall opposite the doorway for him and there was—just. Four feet or so of downward-sloping floor there before the hole began.
If Culpepper wanted to kill him, all he had to do was open the door, aim, and fire—their target would be fewer than twenty feet away. But the odds of “Mr. Baskers” falling forward after being shot by a .442-caliber ball were almost 100% and it was Holmes’s mortal wager that Culpepper and Murtrick—or whatever their real names were—wanted the bottles of morphine and heroin intact after their other thievery was finished.
Holmes squeezed against the wall opposite the mild waterfall and empty space separating him across the room from the door he’d closed behind him and then slid down that wall, hoping the sloping floor would hold his weight. It did, although it groaned in protest. He got out one of the bottles and his leather syringe kit.
In France and during the crossing, Holmes had pondered the wisdom of arming himself with a pistol. He’d had one in India but France had been so peaceful—even the time he’d spent with the experimental chemists in Montpelier where he’d decided to wean himself off morphine by shifting to this newer, safer drug—that he’d had no need of a firearm there. His last chance to pick one up had been his one night in New York, but he’d been so busy there getting information about possible contacts in Washington that he hadn’t had time to go pistol-shopping. In truth, the thought had never entered his mind while he was there.
Sitting with his knees apart and one shoe bracing the bottle on the floorboards should it roll toward the terrible crater, Holmes set out his various apparatuses and smiled.
In Watson’s many written “Adventures . . .” and “Cases . . .”, most of which he kept in his older medical satchel on the shelf in his room and which the public had not yet heard of or read, Watson almost always portrayed himself as the one who brought a pistol to the adventure when a pistol was needed. In truth, despite the hundreds of hours of shooting instruction by his father and many more hours of lonely practice since, Holmes did indeed dislike firearms of any sort. But he smiled again at the memory of Watson always describing his own pistol only as “my old [or “trusty”] service revolver”, but his medical friend had learned enough about writing from Conan Doyle to know that readers were bored by details.
Holmes lived (and would probably die someday) for details. He’d noticed the first time Watson had ever armed himself for one of their mutual adventures that the “service revolver” was an Adams six-shot caliber .450 breechloader with a 6-inch barrel; standard issue for the British Army during the second Afghan war in which Watson had received his suspiciously mobile Jezail bullet. Dr. Watson’s weapon was not so different, in size and capability, from the Beaumont-Adams pistol that Culpepper had been showing off from his belted waistband. Holmes had noticed that the dandy had worn both braces—“suspenders” his Mr. Baskers would call them here in America—and a thick belt. Mr. Culpepper was a cautious man. Just how cautious, thought Holmes, they would all soon see.
Perhaps all five of them are carrying pistols by now, was Holmes’s last thought before he heard the front door of the hotel being forced open three stories below.
But no—Holmes felt certain, to his deep disappointment, that Mr. J had not joined this expedition. He’d certainly returned to report the interaction to his own superior.
Which meant that he would have to leave at least one of the four men tracking him alive. But not necessarily Culpepper.
Holmes’s materials were set before him on the leather cloth. He’d preloaded his syringe with saltwater and now he brought out a bottle cap taken from a bottle of Hires Root Beer he’d purchased earlier in the morning, after renting his magic-lantern projector. Holmes had tossed away the bottle and its contents—hideous stuff, “root beer”; he wondered how Americans could buy and guzzle three million bottles of it a year. Now he filled the bottle cap with the heroin salts and then squeezed out enough water to liquify the salts.
From another pouch in his unrolled leather bag, Holmes extracted the bit of chemical tubing he’d used that morning to tie off his arm. He did so again, tapping at the veins on the inside of his elbow and then, from his waistcoat pocket, brought forth perhaps the most unique device he owned—a prototype cigarette lighter presented to Holmes in 1891, just months before his self-disappearance, by a satisfied client: a scientist by the name of Carl Auer von Welsbach. The patenting of a flint-like substance called ferrocerium allowed the von Welsbach lighter to be small, simple, and safe, in comparison to the bulky, complex, and extremely dangerous Döbereiner flame-makers of decades past. He held the blue flame from von Welsbach’s gift under the bottle cap.
The von Welsbach lighter had saved Holmes’s life numerous times in the Himalayas; now he asked it only to work quickly so he could heat the heroin-crystal-saltwater mixture before the audible footsteps on the stairway reached his floor.
Holmes took a small pellet of cotton he’d been carrying in his shirt pocket next to the three photographs and dropped the cotton wad onto the Hires bottle cap he was using for a cooker. The cotton acted as a filter, blocking the inevitable undissolved clumps of heroin salts that would clog the syringe and stop his heart.
The footsteps were climbing above the second-story landing.
Holmes lifted the filled syringe, tapped it, squirted a tiny bit to be sure there were no air bubbles, and leaned over to inject the contents into his vein.
It sounded like only four men, not five, climbing to the fourth floor. They were trying to climb quietly, but not too quietly. They obviously weren’t overly concerned as to whether meek Mr. Baskers heard them or not. What could he do if he did?
Holmes wanted time for the heroin to take effect. He tugged the tubing off, emptied and disassembled the syringe, and put the bottles, bottle cap, and precious von Welsbach cigarette lighter back in their proper places.
The heroin hit his system almost at once.
First came the glowing warmth filling his heart, chest, torso, limbs, and then brain. Then came the fading of all pain—especially the pain of his question of existence or non-existence—and then came the sense of rising on the crest of a curling wave.
The footsteps stopped outside the door of his room. Holmes vaguely heard whispering. He ignored it.
Rising rapidly on that silent wave, he could see and sense his own life better now. He could make out the lacunae, the ellipses, the terrible gaps between his so-called cases, his so-called adventures, his so-called life as a famous consulting detective.
Those days or weeks or sometimes months between the cases that Watson had been feverishly chronicling were not a memory of life; they were a glimpse of rough sketches with faces not drawn in, backgrounds not sketched, days not filled. Holmes remembered screeching his bow on his expensive violin. He remembered injecting cocaine. He remembered sleeping long afternoons and fooling around in his locked room with his chemistry set like a child, bubbling things, burning things. He remembered the ghost of Mrs. Hudson carrying trays into the common room, carrying trays out. There were a few times when Mrs. Hudson—still looking and sounding like “Mrs. Hudson” in Holmes’s memory—had been inexplicably referred to as “Mrs. Turner” in Watson’s chronicles. All that was a blur now. None of it had any sense of solidity or the simple taste of the real.
The warped door was shoved open. The Finns came in, almost tiptoeing, like cartoon characters from Comic Cuts, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, or Illustrated Chips, all guilty favorites of Dr. Watson. Holmes ignored them; he had no time left but he also had no choices left. He had to see what the drug would allow him to see before he could pay attention to his would-be murderers.
Holmes’s consciousness had expanded until he came up against the horizontal iron bars of his cage. The bars were not solid. Sections of different lengths floated in the gray air—no, not air, some gelatinous aether—in front of him, but no two horizontal blocks were far enough apart that he could press his head or shoulders between them. Holmes realized that the floating horizontal elements of his cage were distinct words, giant words, separate words like slugs of type set into a gelatinous void of a medium, but the huge words and sentences were written backward from his point-of-view. Holmes grabbed at two of the longer floating words—the metal was so cold it burned his hands—and he stared through the imprisoning word-bars with the expression of a madman or a castaway seeing his first ship in years receding from view.