The Fifth Heart

by Dan Simmons

  “I’m afraid that due to Mr. Roosevelt’s extended and repeated efforts to be boorish, much of the dinner’s conversation was lost on me,” said James.

  Holmes stopped walking and gave the writer a sharp glance through the pall of pipe smoke. “Nothing is ever lost on you, James. You know it and I know it.”

  James said nothing and they resumed their walk. The sun had disappeared and much of the three-dimensionality of their surroundings disappeared in the pleasant twilight. Trees, monuments, lower headstones, and grassy knolls all took on a flatter aspect without their glow and shadows to set them off.

  “There was the mystery of the canvasback ducks,” said James. “But Clara Hay brought up that subject when she explained we were having teal, and it was her husband who said that the disappearance of canvasbacks in the restaurants and shops was a bit of a mystery.”

  “And Henry Adams solved that mystery,” said Holmes. “The Jews were behind the disappearance . . . just as they are behind so many nefarious plots.”

  Holmes’s tone was not lost on James and he started to speak to explain his friend, to say that Adams was usually a most liberal person but had this blind spot when it came to the Jews.

  Holmes interrupted the apologia with a swing of his cane. “It’s no matter, James. Many Englishmen share this reflexive mistrust and hatred of Jews, but in this country, of course, it is overshadowed by the Americans’ treatment of more than eight million Negroes as something less than citizens or full human beings.”

  James almost said Not here in the North but remembered that they were in Washington, D.C., and that had never really been part of the North. He had a sudden and almost overpowering memory of a beautiful spring day in 1863—May 23—when James had deliberately chosen not to go watch his brother Wilkie parading down Beacon Street with his regiment, the famous black 54th Massachusetts Regiment then under the command of the young (and, of course, white) Colonel Shaw. Henry James had been wasting his time at Harvard, paying almost no attention to his courses in law and using his time to read fiction, but on that day when classes were canceled so that all the young Harvard men could go cheer on the departing Massachusetts regiments, James had stayed in his rented room and read. Later, he found out that his older brother William—also at Harvard—had done the same. James was certain that William could no more explain why he hadn’t joined family, friends, and strangers in seeing the regiment off than young “Harry” could.

  For a moment, James felt guilt at using the wounding of his brothers Wilkie and Bob in his retort to Theodore Roosevelt the previous night. Wilkie’s wounds had been so terrible, his agony so great while lying for day after day on the moldy and bloody cot set near the front door where they had carried him in, and Wilkie’s courage so profound in later returning to active duty with his regiment, that the experience had changed something in the writer forever. He rebuked himself now for using Wilkie’s suffering as part of his argument.

  But he also knew that if he had that May 23, 1863, to do over again, he still would not go to Beacon Street to watch Wilkie’s regiment parade, in all their radiant and masculine health and high spirits and bannered glory, to the train station on their way to war.

  James was brought out of his reverie by the sharp report of Holmes striking the metal end of his cane on the lane. “We have to assume that—if Adams is playing fairly, as you say he probably is—his so-called mystery has to do with something he was talking to us about today rather than at the dinner party.”

  “That seems likely,” said James, feeling suddenly weary. “But you remember that I missed several minutes of your conversation at Clover’s monument when I went for a walk.”

  “Yes,” said Holmes and swerved them off the lane and onto the grass.

  James saw the dense trees of the enclosure for Clover’s memorial ahead and said, “You think the monument may be a clue?”

  “I think that there is a bench there on which I can sit and smoke while we think,” said Holmes.

  They approached the back side of the monument in silence. Just as they got to the granite block, Holmes said, “Odd . . . Adams said to both of us that this was the important side of the monument.” He touched the granite block gently with his stick.

  “Not odd at all,” said James. “As powerful as Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture is, it’s the entwined wedding rings on this side of the monument”—he had to reach on tip-toe to touch the large double rings—“that symbolizes their years of marriage, which is what this memorial piece is all about.”

  “Yes, certainly,” said Holmes, resting his cane on his shoulder and squinting at the now-shadowed block of stone. James thought that the detective did not sound totally convinced.

  Holmes led them around and through the narrow gap through the trees and hedges. The interior area bounded by the hexagon, benches, slab, and sculpture was quite dark. Holmes sat on a bench directly opposite the sculpture, set his heavy canvas bag down on the bench, laid his cane beside it, and crossed his legs while he relit his pipe.

  “What did I miss when I left you two alone here this afternoon?” asked James.

  Between puffs, Holmes said, “I showed him the picture of the actress and diva Irene Adler, who—I am convinced—played the part of Clover’s friend Rebecca Lorne in the months before Clover’s death. Adams said that he could not be sure it was the same woman. He asked me to drop this inquiry. I said that I had a debt to my client, which led to Adams cursing me and . . .”

  “He cursed you?” said James, not even attempting to keep the shock and amazement out of his voice. This was not the character or behavior of the Henry Adams he had known all these years.

  “He cursed me,” repeated Holmes, “and then explained that while he had loved Clover’s brother Ned, that madness ran through the Hooper family. He essentially suggested that I was on a mission designed by a madman and said flatly that it had been Ned who’d typed the cards and distributed them to the Five of Hearts every December six . . .”

  “Did he have proof of that?” asked James. He’d considered that possibility and it certainly made sense . . . more sense than any other hypothesis.

  “He did not,” said Holmes. “It was just his belief.”

  “Was there more?”

  Holmes opened his hands. James thought of white doves taking flight in the gloom. “Not really. Then he challenged me to find and solve this ‘mystery’ and you returned.”

  “It doesn’t sound as if . . .”

  “Silence please!” snapped Holmes. At first flush, James was certain that Holmes had heard someone approaching their enclosure and the writer prepared himself to come face to face with Henry Adams again. But no one came through the thin portal amongst the leaves and James realized that Holmes was requesting silence so that he could think.

  James looked at the sculpture across from them and although it was impossible—the top of the bronze piece was lower than the top of the line of trees or the granite slab behind it—the cowled figure seemed to glow with more light than the rest of the dark enclosure.

  Holmes sat smoking and thinking for at least twenty minutes. James did not mind the calm, although the settling darkness was mildly disconcerting. He was startled when Holmes finally spoke in a loud voice—“ ‘Many is the time in the past two years that I’ve sat and watched and listened, without being watched or listened to, as people encounter this piece for the first time—their comments run the gamut from interesting to cruelly puerile.’ ”

  “What?” cried James. “I thought that today was the first time you’d seen this monument!”

  “It is,” said Holmes. “It was. Those were Adams’s words this afternoon—to both of us.”

  “Yes,” said James, casting his powerful memory back like a searchlight. “Those were his precise words.”

  “ ‘I’ve sat and watched and listened, without being watched or listened to’,” Holmes again quoted Adams. In the gloom, Holmes opened his arms to take in all three of the benches that formed one half o
f the hexagon. “Where could he sit and listen without being seen in return, James?”

  “I took him to mean that he stole glances at other people’s reactions to the monument when they were not paying attention to him,” said James. “And that he overheard their comments.”

  “That is how I interpreted the words,” said Holmes, standing, “but you know even better than I that Henry Adams is not careless with language. He used those words deliberately—I’ve sat and watched and listened, without being watched or listened to. He has a place around here where he can eavesdrop without being observed in return.”

  “Certainly not here at the benches,” said James.

  “No, it must be outside this space,” said Holmes. “Do you remember a bench outside this enclosure, close enough to hear voices and to see anyone sitting on these benches?”

  “I didn’t notice one during my stroll today,” said James, “but of course I wasn’t looking for benches. I was thinking.”

  “Let’s find out,” said Holmes. “We can both go look.”

  “It will be too dark in here for us to make out any shape from outside,” said James.

  Holmes knocked the last of his ashes out of his pipe and set it away in a pocket of his caped coat. “Precisely,” he said. “This shall be our surrogate person.” He pulled the dark lantern from his bag, set it on the winged arm at the left end of the bench, lit it, and pulled the shutter back. The lantern threw its beam of light toward the only entrance through the trees. Leaving the bag and lantern behind, Holmes led the way back outside.

  Outside, it was much less dark. The spring twilight still filled the sky with faint gray, although one or two of the brighter stars were making an appearance. It was almost, not quite, light enough to read by.

  “What’s to have kept Adams from sitting on the grass anywhere here?” asked James, gesturing toward the various rises and dips in the turf.

  “Can you see your friend Adams sitting on the grass in a cemetery?” laughed Holmes.

  James shook his head. “A bench or monument then. And it has to be on this side because this is the only path through the trees wide enough to allow a view inside or out.”

  Holmes pointed his cane to the right as he walked to the left. They spread out, studying the monuments and looking for a bench.

  After a couple of minutes, James cried out, “This is flat. One could sit on it.” Holmes walked over to join him. Above them, bats and swallows were carving the evening sky into arcs.

  “This headstone is high enough and broad enough to make a comfortable perch,” said James, patting it.

  “Then why don’t you sit on it?”

  James frowned at the detective’s tone. “I cannot. It is, after all, a headstone.”

  “Exactly right,” said Holmes, “and we have to assume that Adams does the majority of his looking and listening here in the daylight.”

  “Hay has told me that Adams comes so often to this cemetery that he’s referred to it as his real home,” said James.

  Holmes nodded, distracted. “The view of people standing or sitting within the enclosure would not be good from here,” he said.

  James looked. The detective was correct. Only a fringe of the lantern’s glow could be seen through the narrow break in the trees and virtually all of the hexagon area was totally out of sight.

  “And it must be sixty paces from the hexagon in front of the sculpture with the trees adding another buffer,” continued Holmes. “Too far to overhear people speaking in normal tones.”

  “Where then . . .” began James.

  “The trees and hedge!” said Holmes, almost loping back to the ever-darkening enclosure.

  They walked the outer perimeter together. “I take it that we’re hunting for what we Americans call a ‘duck blind’,” whispered James. He wasn’t sure why he had whispered.

  “Yes,” replied Holmes. “Some concealed blind in the foliage here.” He poked away with his cane. “In England, a ‘blind’ is what we call a legitimate business that conceals some criminal enterprise.”

  “If we find this so-called duck blind,” said James, “we still will not have answered the more important question.”

  “What’s that?” asked Holmes, feeling into foliage with his bare hand as well as with his cane.

  “Whether we’re hunting canvasback ducks or teals.”

  They did the rest of the careful search without speaking. It was no use—the trees were only trees, the hedges real hedges. There was no place of concealment unless one bodily forced his way into the shrubbery and James knew Adams well enough to know that would never happen.

  They returned to the lantern and Holmes shuttered it again, allowing their night vision to return, but instead of leaving or sitting on the bench again, he stood there several minutes obviously lost in thought. Waiting for him again, James wondered idly if Holmes’s friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson, spent much of his time waiting for Holmes to come out of his deep-thought fugues.

  “Of course!” exclaimed Holmes, snapping his fingers. “I’ve been an absolute fool. A blind man could have seen it!” He lifted the lantern, unmasked it, and carried it to the sculpture, holding it first on one side and then the other, first close then further away.

  James stayed where he was. He’d found Saint-Gaudens’s brooding statue disconcerting enough in the daylight; by lantern light it was downright frightening.

  “Come,” said Holmes, striding quickly and returning to pick up the bag and shutter-down the lantern’s beam until it was a narrow glow.

  “Are we going home now?” asked James.

  “No,” said Holmes. “We’re going to Henry Adams’s duck blind.”

  The Constant Red Glow in the Darkness

  It was the intertwined marriage rings, of course.

  For several minutes both Holmes and James had reached up to feel around the sunken edges of the granite rings with Holmes muttering much of the time—“This is the important side of the monument”—“The monument was covered with a tent for a month and a half”—“Who needs to protect a granite slab from the weather?”—“Adams did everything but draw me a map and leave real arrows on the grass showing me the way.”

  On the first three tactile explorations, Holmes’s fingers found nothing. But then he felt the slight niche, the smallest of indentations, at the bottom of the ten-inch-wide right ring.

  “Stand back,” he said to James and retrieved a burglar’s tool from his bag: a very short crowbar with a chisel’s narrow end to it. It fit. There was a corresponding snap from behind the granite and the two rings swiveled to almost right angles from the monument. Holmes pushed on one of them. A panel in the granite swiveled, opening into absolute darkness.

  “Good Lord!” cried James as he took a quick two steps backward as if he feared being swallowed up by that black aperture.

  Before stepping in, Holmes played the narrow beam from the dark lantern into that darkness and it was good that he had. About fourteen feet inside, the floor ended and a square hole in the floor—showing a ladder on the right side and just big enough for a man—dropped into blackness. Straight ahead, on the far side of that hole, was a strange cushioned seat one could reach by walking carefully along granite ledges on either side. The far side of the interior of the granite monument was irregular, a series of bronze protrusions and indentations.

  “The statue’s hollow,” said Holmes, his voice showing no surprise because he’d realized all this while sitting out on the bench. He put the tool back in his bag, held the bag and his walking stick in one hand and the lantern ahead of him in the other, stepped in, moved to the ladder side along the narrow strip of granite, then played the lantern beam back over the entrance. “Take care when you step in, James.”

  “I’m not going in there,” said the writer. He’d kept his distance from the monument when the panel had swiveled open.

  “All right,” said Holmes, “but go back to the carriage waiting for us on New Hampshire Avenue. I shan’t be long in
here.” He started to swing shut the panel.

  “Wait!” said James. “I am coming in.” The portly writer stepped in with great care and balanced on the granite ledge on the left side of the hole. Holmes played the lantern beam over the inside of the portal. “I need to make sure there’s a release mechanism on the inside that does not require a key so that we don’t get . . . ahh, here it is.” Holmes worked the mechanism to his satisfaction and then swung the swiveling panel shut until it clicked.

  They were entombed.

  “The ladder first,” said Holmes and aimed the beam down the iron ladder driven into the granite. It had a railing and rungs and went down about eight feet. Nothing else was visible at the bottom until he realized that the wall on the statue side of the bottom of the short shaft was actually a black curtain.

  “Would you please hold the lantern with that beam playing just so until I get to the bottom?” asked Holmes.

  “No!” cried James. “I mean . . . you can’t. We must not! This is . . . all this . . . down there . . . it’s too terrible!” The last was said in a dying whisper since this place seemed to call for whispering.

  Holmes looked at his companion’s face in the reflected lantern light and knew exactly what James was thinking lay beyond that black velvet curtain: a glass coffin with Clover Adams’s rotting remains in it. What would she look like after seven years? Unfortunately, Holmes knew all too well what a body dead seven years looked like. He whispered, “No, no, I think not, James. Your friend Adams is strange, perhaps even mad by some standards, but there’s a method to this madness. I am convinced that we will find nothing terrible or gruesome down there.”

  He handed the lantern to James, set his bag and stick on the cushioned chair that was suspended along the far wall by a round iron post that was secured in the interior of the sculpture.

  “Down just a bit,” said Holmes and, when James tipped the dark lantern forward, he clambered down several rungs. “I’ll take it now.” The tall man’s white fingers reached for the metal handle atop the lantern.