by Dan Simmons
Holmes looks at you. He sees the blurred outlines of the room or space behind you. He strains to make out your face.
“He’s slammed,” said one of the Finns.
“He’s all shot up. He ain’t even half here,” said the other Finn.
“Shut up,” snapped Murtrick.
All four men were inside the open door now, the Finns and Murtrick having worked their way carefully around to their right, Holmes’s left. But Culpepper stayed in the doorway. Braces and belt, Holmes remembered through the glow and wondrous, fearless terror of the heroin. If Culpepper remained a truly cautious man for the next two minutes, Mr. Sherlock Holmes of London would soon be a corpse.
Holmes had tucked away his leather foldaway and was on his knees as if praying to the drizzle falling vertically in front of him. Somewhere above the hole in the ceiling the sun had grown brighter; the waterfall was now made of skeins of liquid gold. Holmes’s walking stick was propped against the wall behind him and to the right. It would be most awkward for him to try to reach it and would take too long to try. The three men creeping up on him noted this. Holmes’s eyes were not focused on anything, but he vaguely noticed that Murtrick had removed the Bowie knife from its sheath. Culpepper had removed the revolver from his waistband. The Finns now raised their Paleolithic clubs.
Then Culpepper stepped into the room and wedged shut the door behind him. Most probably it was just old habit—seeking some privacy for a murder. Holmes had instinctively hoped for such a habit to be there, but he had not been certain. He had not been certain. Now he seemed to take no notice.
Now all four men were moving carefully around the perimeter of the terrible hole in the floor, keeping as close to the west wall of the empty room as possible. The Finns kept glancing down into the cavity with something like terror in their little Troglodyte eyes.
Holmes decided that it would have to be one of the Finns who should survive and carry back the details of this encounter to Mr. J and his superiors.
“Don’t cluster too close when you get him,” whispered Culpepper, following them but staying several paces back, then stopping completely at the west side of the hole while watching the other three advance. “The floor might not hold you there if you cluster up. We need the bottles intact.”
No one said anything but the three men opened more distance between themselves. The Finns shouldered their short clubs with nails driven through the working ends. Murtrick had his knife and was moving in an experienced knife-fighter’s crouch. Culpepper held his pistol loosely down at his side, every inch the vision of the accomplished duelist anticipating another easy victory. The Beaumont-Adams revolver’s hammer was cocked.
Holmes had not turned his head to watch their final approach. His eyes were vacant, the drug obviously in full control. There was a single drop of blood on the inside of his still-bare left arm.
The Finns attacked with Murtrick close behind.
Holmes—so cool behind his buffer that he watched with the most disinterested attention imaginable—whirled, away from the attacking men, as if attempting a retreat into the dead-end corner where the crater came all the way to the east wall, but the whirl was no half-turn away. He twirled almost completely around and came up out of his crouch with his walking stick in his hand.
The Finns shouted a single primal scream and raised their clubs.
Decades of single-stick practice guided Holmes’s two-second blur of six blows: two lateral swings to break their right arms; two vertical swings to club their underjaws and drop them to their knees; two fluidly vicious downward swings—one to crush the larger Finn’s skull, a lesser blow to knock the slightly shorter Finn down, but to leave him semiconscious.
Murtrick had made the mistake of staring at the blur of violence and leaping blood, but now he leaped closer, crouched lower, swung the deadly blade to the right, to the left. He jumped over the dead Finns: one motionless on its face, a river of blood flowing from his ears, the other twitching on his back, moaning as he cradled his aching head and bleeding scalp with both hands.
Holmes took a step backward, not because he feared Murtrick’s blade or needed the room but because he was sending a subliminal message to Culpepper to join the fray. Come closer. The dandy did take two steps closer but still stayed well out of club range. His pistol was raised but the man was obviously waiting for Murtrick to do his job. “The heroin bottles!” he screamed at his stinking friend. “Don’t break them!”
The Bowie knife was its own blur. Holmes was fast enough with his stick to have batted it across the room in the quarter of a second when Murtrick tossed it from hand to hand—the man was obviously as ambidextrous at ripping his enemies open from sternum to crotch as he was filthy—but Holmes had use for the knife stuck in the floor here, not lost down the golden waterfall hole or sticking from an unreachable wall or door across the room. He risked more by waiting for Murtrick to sweep the blade a final time and then lunge forward in a ballet-beautiful single motion. Only in Spain and once in Calcutta had Holmes seen knife-fighters perform that brilliantly. It was precisely the kind of super-fast knife move, Holmes knew, that almost always left the expert knife-wielder’s opponent’s bowels hanging out and then dropping to the floor with that ultimately final, squishy sound that the horrified and dying victim lived long enough to see and hear. The length of a Bowie knife only made that full hari-kari more likely, but the weight of Mr. Bowie’s famous blade and hilt did slow the killing move by that necessary fraction of a second on which Holmes counted.
Holmes arched his body while balancing on his heels, the tip of the Bowie knife took a button off his waistcoat, and then he slammed his weighted stick down on Murtrick’s right hand—the knife dropped and embedded its point in the floor exactly where Holmes had wished it—and then, without pausing in its complex arc, the stick swung up and caught Murtrick in the side of the head.
Dazed, Murtrick wobbled toward the drop, started to go over.
Holmes grabbed the man, then pulled him toward his own chest with what felt like an infinitely powerful heroin-assisted left hand, keeping his stick in his right hand between them. Holmes brought his face so close to Murtrick’s it seemed as if he was going to kiss the semi-conscious thug, then Holmes lowered his face to the man’s chest, making himself smaller as he pushed both of them forward around the perimeter of the crater.
The four cracks from the .442 Beaumont-Adams revolver seemed to reach Holmes hours after the impacts had shattered the back of Murtrick’s skull, lodged in the man’s spine, blown his left shoulder into bone fragments, and passed through his body—that final ball passing between Holmes’s right arm and his torso.
It was a five-shot pistol, but Holmes had pushed the upright corpse up and into Culpepper by this point and the fifth shot blew wet plaster out of the rotted ceiling. Holmes dropped Murtrick’s corpse, unhurriedly clubbed the empty gun out of Culpepper’s hand, and dragged him back to where he had injected the heroin, both men doing rather dainty dances over the three fallen bodies. The rotted and tilting floor sagged under their weight, but Holmes needed Culpepper near the knife embedded hilt-up in those groaning floorboards.
He swung Culpepper around and shoved him toward the edge of the hole, stopping his fall only with his left hand grasping the older man’s jacket collar. Culpepper teetered and whimpered. Holmes suddenly smelled urine.
Holmes tossed away his club and reached into his shirt pocket to retrieve the three photographs there. Still holding Culpepper at a steep angle over the drop, he thrust the first photograph—the one of the older, heavier, dark-eyed, mustached man—in front of the murderer’s face.
“Do you know this man?” barked Holmes. “Have you ever seen him?”
“No.” Culpepper’s baritone was now a soprano’s quaver.
“Make sure,” said Holmes. “I don’t know which of the Southwest Toughs’ bosses you report to—Dillon, Meyer, Shelton—but it would have been at their headquarters, maybe in their office. Or perhaps this man and yo
ur boss dining together.”
“I’ve never seen him!” screeched the dangling man. Every time Culpepper tried to bring his arms back to grab at Holmes, the detective let him tilt a little more over the drop. Culpepper quit trying to grab and let his pudgy hands and arms flap like a pigeon’s broken wings.
Holmes pocketed that photo and brought forth the photograph of the much younger man. In profile—thin lips, long, straight nose, hair combed back, eyes as light as a reptile’s. The image terrified Holmes even in the perfectly disinterested state the heroin had granted him.
Culpepper’s hesitation told Holmes what he needed to know. “Tell me. Now!” he said and let the big man tilt a few more inches forward. Holmes’s left arm and hand were growing tired; he knew he’d almost dropped Culpepper three stories by accident right then. That would never do. But he couldn’t change hands. Not yet. “Tell me now!” he bellowed.
“I think I saw this fellow . . . maybe . . . once. Dear Jesus, don’t drop me!” Holmes pulled him a few inches closer.
“A couple of years ago,” babbled Culpepper. “Maybe three. At Shelton’s office on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“What was his name?”
“I just saw him, from a distance,” quavered Culpepper. “I swear to God. If I knew anything more about him I’d tell you. I swear to God. Please don’t push me! Please don’t drop me. I’ll change my life. I swear to Jesus Christ.”
“And this man?” demanded Holmes, showing the third photograph. The oldest of the three in the photographs—one of a shockingly pale and cadaverous-looking, hollow-cheeked, and balding man. But the sharpness of features does not create sympathy in the viewer; this face is one of a predator, not of a victim or prey. One’s first impression is of an almost disturbingly large shelf and dome of white forehead looming above deep-set eyes magnified by old-fashioned pince-nez spectacles. The sense of the older man being an intellectual created by the oversized forehead and glimpse of old-fashioned collar, ribbon tie, frock coat, and pince-nez is immediately counteracted by the sharp and strong jut of the older man’s chin, from which various and strong—and somehow angry-looking—cords of wrinkle and muscle rise to the sharp cheekbones and to both sides of the vulpine blade of a nose. It is a predatory face made even more raptor-like by the hunched shoulders rising like a vulture’s black feathers on either side of the grub-white blade of a face.
“Never seen him . . .” gasped Culpepper. “I’m slipping! I’m slipping! Oh, Jesus . . .”
“Perhaps you’ve heard his name,” said Holmes, feeling the strength in his restraining hand beginning to fade. “Moriarty. Professor James Moriarty.”
“No! Never!” cried Culpepper, and Holmes could see in his eyes that he was lying. Perfect.
Holmes shot a brief glance at the surviving Finn, still slumped against the wall and holding his bleeding head. He’d ceased moaning and had seen and heard everything well enough. But there was no fight left in him. Blood from the scalp wound had soaked his fingers, wrists, and sleeves.
Holmes put away the photos and pulled Culpepper back from the edge. He didn’t believe he’d get any more. What had he learned? That Lucan might or might not have been in Washington two or more years ago. That Culpepper had definitely heard of Professor Moriarty but almost certainly hadn’t seen him.
Holmes released his grip on the stocky man and looked at the floor. Blood had pooled completely around the dead Finn’s head. Murtrick’s body lay across the dead man’s legs, his bullet-shattered head no longer recognizable as something that had once been human. The surviving Finn had managed to scrunch back further from his dead brother and boss. The bleeding Finn’s eyes were as big as saucers staring at Holmes through his carmine-stained fingers.
All this for the information that Lucan might have been in Washington and in touch with the Toughs a few years ago? And that the criminal organization here simply knows of Moriarty? He was assailed by a sudden sadness, amplified to something like grief by the fading of the first-freedom of the heroin.
He should have left all this drama aside and simply coldcocked and kidnapped Mr. J and interrogated him. He was the only one Holmes had encountered this afternoon who might know if they’d done business with Lucan.
Holmes sighed and turned his back on Culpepper as if to retrieve his dropped club.
The Bowie knife had been sticking hilt-up only inches from Culpepper’s right boot. The big man tugged the blade out with a grunt and leaned forward to strike.
Holmes leaned away from him, his head almost to the moldy wall, his right elbow on the floor, and kicked his left leg straight, his foot flat as he’d been trained in his youth, the leverage in that leg of his suddenly uncoiled body carrying enough energy to have kicked in a locked and barred door.
Culpepper actually flew upward and backward so that Holmes caught a glimpse of the soles of his shoes looking like two exclamation marks hanging in mid-air before Culpepper screamed and the drizzle, no longer golden, seemed to carry him down into the center of the ten-foot-wide hole in the floor.
Holmes paused in the room only long enough to pick up the fallen Beaumont-Adams revolver. It was an old weapon, but not unattractive. Wiping it off with his handkerchief, he disassembled it and dropped the pieces down the wide hole.
The living, still-bleeding Finn tried to push himself further back, literally into the wall, as Holmes passed him with his heavy club swinging idly by his side. The detective could only trust that the surviving Finn had just enough intelligence—and not such a serious concussion—that he could reliably report these proceedings to Mr. J and his other bosses.
Holmes had told Watson more than once that when he, Sherlock Holmes, retired, he was going to write his opus—The Whole Art of Detection. But the book he should really write, Holmes knew, was How to Get Away with a Murder. Rule No. 8 would be—Never take away anything of the victim’s. Nothing at all.
He closed the door behind him, the surviving Finn still shaking in fear as if he thought Holmes would come back around the hole with its rainbow waterfall to finish the job, and then Holmes was stepping carefully down the stairway. It had borne more weight than it was used to this rainy March day. Holmes did stop in the large room off the lobby. A second broad stain had joined the first. Somehow Culpepper had contrived to land directly on the top of his head. His homburg was not the better for it, and the sharp, bloody-white base of the heavy man’s spine had been pushed out through his buttocks.
Holmes rolled the body over, taking care to keep even his disguised-as-poor-American-bloke’s clothes free from stain, and retrieved his $150. He would have use for it in the coming weeks.
It was Saturday, March 25. Holmes expected Henry James to come to his senses soon and return to England or France, but he knew that he himself might have to stay in America at least until the official opening on the first of May. President Cleveland was scheduled to push the button that let the fountains jet high, the battleship to fire, and the chorus to unleash the “Hallelujah Chorus”. Holmes would have to stay here in America that unbearable time unless, of course, circumstances of his own doing—including this encounter—or a telegram from his older brother released him from such long and tiresome obligations.
’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, thought Holmes, remembering that evening in 1874 when the 20-year-old Sherlock Holmes, understudy to the lead under a different name entirely, had replaced the suddenly-taken-ill bright new acting star in the firmament and troupe-director Henry Irving for one glorious night not as Rosenkrantz, not as faithful Horatio (“Yes, m’lord,” “No, m’lord” for two and a half aching hours), but as Hamlet. The ovation had been standing. The reviews in The Times had been sterling. Irving had fired him from the troupe the next day.
Holmes left the mold- and blood-coppery-smelling old hotel and walked up Casey’s Alley until his feet found pavement again.
His briefcase and other clothes were where he had placed them in the abandoned house in Foggy Bottom. Holmes took care folding away h
is American clothes and getting into his Norwegian gentleman’s too-heavy tweeds. It took him a minute to get the black cover and silver barking-dog’s head secured in place over the cruder wooden walking stick he’d had to wash along the way.
Holmes peered into a glass pane that threw back his reflection. He’d made sure his hands were clean but now he saw three tiny rosettes of blood line up like crimson snowflakes along his left cheekbone. Wetting his handkerchief in a puddle near a broken window, he dabbed the spots away. Then he tossed away the un-monogrammed handkerchief.
Leaving the house with the confidence of an absentee owner after an inspection, Holmes headed back through Foggy Bottom and into the lovely Federalist-style-lined streets closer to the downtown and the Executive Mansion. His walk now was the wide and confident stride of a famous explorer. His fancy stick now clacked on perfectly laid bricks.
* * *
Holmes had plenty of time to bathe and change before five o’clock tea time.
When they all met in the smaller parlor, Holmes thought that Henry James looked especially bleak, as if he had been brooding away the day. But it was obvious that James hadn’t yet revealed anything about Holmes’s identity to John or Clara Hay; Holmes could see and hear that in his host and hostess’s joyous welcomes and easy behavior during the energetic conversation at tea.
“Did you find our quiet city as exciting as your explorations in Asia?” asked Clara Hay.
“Just as stimulating, in its own unique way,” replied Jan Sigerson, his Norwegian accent faint but present.
A few hours later, they had roast beef for dinner. It seemed to be a specialty of the Hays’ cook—or perhaps they had made it in honor of Henry James, whom they obviously considered more English than American now.
Holmes chose his slices very rare.
CHAPTER 13
The weekend turned out to be one of the most painful in Henry James’s memory.