The Fifth Heart

by Dan Simmons

  “What was the name of that novel of yours that I said I liked?” said Holmes, still standing close to the right side of the monument so that he could not be seen or targeted from inside the sculpture.

  “What?” The echoing voice sounded more like James this time. An obviously irritated James.

  Holmes repeated his question.

  “The Princess Casamassima,” came the anger-tinged reply. “But what on earth does that have to do with anything?”

  Holmes smiled and stepped out in front of the cowled figure. He could not help but glance over his shoulder every few seconds. “Where is he?” he asked the statue.

  “I don’t have the vaguest idea, Holmes.” Holmes could hear the voice better from this new vantage point and it was definitely James’s, although muffled by the bronze. “Just after you stepped out, the cigarette glow disappeared. I didn’t see the man move . . . did not see him go out through the entrance. He just . . . disappeared.”

  “All right,” said Holmes. “I missed him then. Could you please bring my bag when you come out?”

  “It’s too dark,” said James through one of the eyeholes. “I can’t see where to put my feet. The shaft . . . can’t find the lock mechanism . . . I’ll try, but . . .”

  “No, on second thought, it’s better that I come fetch you,” said Holmes. “Sit tight for just another moment and I’ll bring the lantern.”

  But instead of going outside and to the rear of the monument, Holmes went straight across the hexagon, dropped to one knee, and began examining the graveled ground near the bench. Then he took several minutes to move the lantern close to the ground near all three benches. Then he stepped around behind the bench and did the same careful examination. He was checking the ground in the open space of the hexagon when the statue made another muffled noise.

  Holmes walked over to it and held the lantern high. “What was that, James?”

  “What in God’s name are you doing!” demanded the androgynous face of deepest mourning.

  “Looking for the cigarettes and/or ashes,” said Holmes. “We watched Lucan—this figure in the dark—smoke at least three cigarettes to their end—we could both smell the tobacco smoke in the darkness—but there’s not a single ash or remnant of a dead cigarette anywhere. He must have dropped the ashes from the cigarettes into his palm and put the ashes and the cigarette butts in his pocket. Don’t you find that odd behavior for an innocent person, James?”

  “Damn the cigarette ashes,” said the shadow-sharpened bronze face. “Come get me out of here, Holmes. I’ve needed to relieve myself for more than an hour now.”

  * * *

  The hansom and its cabbie were not there when they reached New Hampshire Avenue.

  “That blackguard!” cried James, referring to the driver. “That cursed driver took your money but left anyway.”

  “We’ve been a long time,” said Holmes. He’d done the entire walk from the monument with his shoulders hunched until they ached, waiting for the impact of the pistol or rifle shot whose sound he would not hear. They stayed tensed out in the open of the lightly traveled avenue. There were no street lights or house lights here.

  “Maybe our smoking friend took it,” said James. “What do we do now?”

  “It’s only a little less than four miles back to Mrs. Stevens’s place, so we walk,” said Holmes, knowing that despite his best efforts to relax, his body would be expecting the impact of a bullet every step of the way. And for every hour and minute of the days and nights to come until this whole matter was resolved.

  Some minutes later, they came to a single gas lamp on a post in the lawn of a darkened house. The light drew a yellow oval on the macadam of the road and illuminated both of them as James stopped for a second.

  This is the perfect spot, thought Holmes. Lucan in the darkness behind the house or in the blackness under the trees to either side. His target—or perhaps targets, if Lucan was in an especially bloody mood—frozen like a deer in the beam of an illegal hunting lantern.

  “I somehow contrived to lose my watch,” said James. “What time is it?”

  Holmes could only hope that the author hadn’t lost the watch inside the monument. Tomorrow morning, Holmes was going to let Henry Adams know that he had figured out the little mystery, been to and inside the most expensive duck blind in history, but he didn’t want Adams to know about his friend James’s participation.

  Now he set down his heavy canvas burglar bag, lifted his watch out of his waistcoat pocket by its chain, and held it so that James could see in the light.

  “Quarter past midnight,” said Holmes. James merely nodded, lifted the bag for Holmes, and began walking again.

  Past midnight, thought Holmes as he caught up to the other man, macadam crunching under their soles. It was now Tuesday—the fourth of April—Sherlock Holmes’s birthday.

  He had just turned 39 years old.

  Wiggins Two Arrived Safely New York Today

  The morning after the absurd and disturbing melodrama in Rock Creek Cemetery, Henry James awoke with the immediate and determined resolution to do something. He just could not decide what. Return immediately to England. Go to Henry Adams with a confession and abject apologies for invading his most hidden privacy? (No, no . . . the thought of that bed in that sarcophagus of stone under the ground on the subterranean level close to Clover’s buried remains not only still gave James goosebumps, but made him slightly nauseous. He could never bring it up with Adams, nor hint in any way that he knew about the secret world inside Clover’s sculpture and monument stone. Nor tell John Hay. Never.)

  As James bathed and trimmed his short beard and dressed that rainy Tuesday morning—wishing for the hundredth time that he had the Smiths, his mediocre cook and her less-than-mediocre tippler husband of a manservant, with him from De Vere Gardens—he decided to tell Mrs. Stevens’s slow-witted daughter that he would again take his breakfast in the privacy of his room. He was in the hall looking for her when the last man he wanted to see—Mr. Sherlock Holmes, looking damp and red-cheeked and in the process of shrugging off his waterproof macintosh—was preparing to knock him up.

  “Just the man I wanted to see!” cried Holmes, as good-naturedly as if they hadn’t invaded a good man’s mind and most sacred secret the night before. “Come down to Mrs. Stevens’s breakfast room and we’ll talk over a good breakfast.”

  “I was going to have mine in my room,” James replied in a cool tone.

  Holmes didn’t seem to perceive the frost in the air. “Nonsense. There’s much we have to talk about and very little time in which to do it, James. No, now come on down to the breakfast room like a good fellow.”

  “I have no intention of discussing any part or aspect of last night’s . . . events,” said James.

  Holmes actually smiled. “Good. Neither do I. This is more important news. I’ll see you down in the breakfast room.”

  And Holmes turned with one of his sudden, almost spastic (although strangely graceful), moves and bounded down the stairway, shedding rain from the macintosh folded over his arm as he went.

  James paused at the head of the stairs. Should he snub Holmes now and set their relationship on the new and definitely colder and more formal level to which it needed to be adjusted? Or should he suffer hearing this “more important news”?

  In the end, James’s hunger for breakfast won out over the higher moral arguments. He went downstairs.

  * * *

  “I have moved out of Mrs. Stevens’s comfortable abode,” said Holmes, eating his bean and egg and sausage and fried-toast English-style breakfast which he’d charmed Mrs. Stevens into making for him each morning.

  For some reason, James was stunned. “When?” he said.

  “This morning.”

  “Why?” asked James a second before he realized that he did not want to know the answer and that it was none of his business anyway.

  “Things have become too dangerous,” answered Holmes, almost gulping his coffee. Usually, Jame
s had noticed, the detective was indifferent to food, but there were times—such as this morning—where he seemed to be stoking a steam engine with fuel more than merely eating.

  “Whoever that man was smoking his cigarettes at the monument last night, odds are that he was someone who had followed us there with an intention to do me harm . . . in short, to kill me,” said Holmes, eating his eggs with gusto. “My continuing to reside here would put you, Mrs. Stevens, her daughter, and everyone else around me in some danger.”

  “But you’re not sure that the man last night was . . . an assassin,” said James, almost stumbling over that last melodramatic word.

  “No. Nowhere near certain,” agreed Holmes. “But for the time being, I should take no chances with my friends’ well-being.”

  Something about that phrase—“my friends”—made James feel warm inside. And he hated himself for feeling that way. He certainly had not included this Sherlock Holmes person in his rigidly vetted and constantly reviewed list of friends, and for Holmes to suggest that their association had reached that plane was pure presumption.

  Yet James still felt the warm glow.

  Holmes finished eating and lit a cigarette. The detective never ate the yolk of his fried egg and this was one reason that James dreaded having breakfast with the man; invariably, when finished with his cigarette, he would stub it out in the runny yolk, leaving the butt end sticking up like some artillery shell that had failed to detonate. The repulsive habit always bothered Henry James and this morning, he knew, it would actively nauseate him.

  “I’m not very hungry this morning,” lied James, pushing his own plate forward and preparing to leave. “I wish you luck in your new habitations . . .”

  “Wait, sir. Wait,” said Holmes, actually putting his long violinist’s fingers on James’s lower sleeve as if ready to physically restrain him if the author attempted to rise and leave. “There’s more I need to tell you.”

  James waited but with growing anxiety as the cigarette Holmes was smoking burned itself shorter and the runny yellow-orange egg yolk sat there amidst the debris of the eaten breakfast like a leaking bull’s-eye. He was waiting because he wanted to know where Holmes would be . . . if this was indeed the last of their absurd adventure together.

  “Are you going to tell me where you’ve moved?” said James, shocked at his own rude bluntness.

  “No, it would be better for everyone if you didn’t know, James.”

  Say nothing, James commanded himself. Several times in the last few days, he’d already stepped out of the character of “Henry James, Author” that he’d created over almost fifty years. Time to come back to himself again. The watcher, not the initiator. The wary listener, not the yammering fool. Still, he heard himself saying—“Will you be leaving Washington then? I’m asking just in case Hay or Adams or . . . someone . . . might need to know.”

  “If you need to get in touch with me,” said Holmes, “send a note to this establishment.” Holmes clicked open his retracting mechanical pencil and wrote quickly on the back of one of his own business cards.

  James looked at the address. It was a cigar shop on Constitution Avenue.

  “You’re residing at a cigar store?” James couldn’t help saying.

  Holmes made that abrupt, almost barking sound that served him as a laugh. “Not at all, my dear James. But the proprietor there will forward any message sent to me by dispatching a boy either to my new place of residence or to send a cable. For some reason known only to Americans, the cigar shop is open twenty-four hours a day, so feel free to contact me at any time.”

  James nodded, slipped Holmes’s card into his wallet, set the wallet back in his jacket, and was about to rise again when Mrs. Stevens appeared in the doorway with a young boy in tow.

  “He has a message for you, Mr. James.” She paused, perhaps reading James’s expression, and added, “I know the lad. His name is Thomas. He carries messages between some of the best homes and families around Lafayette Park. If you wish to send a reply message, I’m sure it will be safe and secure in his keeping—and unread until it reaches its source.”

  James nodded, interpreting her final comment to mean that young Thomas couldn’t read. He beckoned the boy forward.

  Unfolding the paper, he saw that it was on John Hay’s private stationery.

  Dear Harry—

  Should you like to drop around today just after tea-time—say 5:15 or so—I would be pleased to discuss a most important (and perhaps urgent) topic with you. I look forward to seeing you then.

  Your Obedient Servant,

  John Hay

  P.S.—Please do not inform Mr. Holmes of your visit. This is very important.—JH

  Mrs. Stevens had thoughtfully brought a small stationery pad should James wish to respond. He did. Shielding his writing from Holmes’s view, he accepted Hay’s invitation and said that he would be there promptly at 5:15 p.m.—a rather specific time, James thought, but then John Hay was a man who’d devoted his life to specifics since he’d been secretary to President Abraham Lincoln.

  James handed the note and a coin to the boy, saying, “Deliver this into the hand of the person who sent this message, son.”

  Thomas might not be able to read, but there was intelligence in his eye as he nodded.

  “Oh, you don’t need to pay the boy, Mr. James,” Mrs. Stevens was saying. “I’m sure the person who sent the message already did that.”

  “Nonetheless,” said James and waved Thomas away on his errand.

  At that moment two other lads were shown in by Mrs. Stevens’s daughter, who looked confused at the sudden invasion of messengers. One was a boy about Thomas’s age although less-well dressed, the other a young man in his late teens who was wearing the livery of a Western Union delivery boy.

  “Message for Mr. Holmes,” said the ragged lad.

  “Telegram for Mr. Holmes,” said the older boy.

  James still thought and felt as if he were on the verge of leaving, but stayed seated out of sheer curiosity. With Holmes moved away—God knows where—he might not see the detective again. All of the tantalizing events of the past couple of weeks might forever remain a mystery.

  Holmes stubbed his cigarette out right in the center of the egg yolk and James looked away to control his rising nausea.

  Holmes quickly read his telegram, set the flimsy on the table next to his napkin, said, “No reply” to the Western Union lad who touched his cap and left, and then waved forward the other boy with the private message. This he read quickly, clutched the pad that James had used for his own reply, and said, “I shall be back in one minute, James. I’ll only walk our young Mercury here to the door as I scribble a reply.”

  Mrs. Stevens and her daughter had already left. The telegram boy was gone. Alone, James could clearly hear the footsteps of Holmes and the second messenger on the parquet floor of the foyer beyond the parlor, and then the squeak of the front door hinges as they stepped out onto the porch. The obscene cigarette butt still rose from the center of the bleeding yolk.

  Beside it lay the telegram Holmes had forgotten near his napkin.

  No, thought James. Absolutely not.

  He stood as if heading for the stairway up to his room, turned right instead of left, and opened the top fold of the telegram with his left hand.

  WIGGINS TWO ARRIVED SAFELY NEW YORK TODAY STOP BE INFORMED THAT SCOTLAND YARD AND INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES HERE AND IN FRANCE REPORT THAT MORIARTY’S NETWORKS HAVE BEEN ACTIVATED IN PARIS, BERLIN, PRAGUE, ROME, BRUSSELS, ATHENS, LONDON, BIRMINGHAM, NEW YORK CITY, CHICAGO AND WASHINGTON, D.C. STOP NO CONFIRMATION OF LUCAN ADLER’S WHEREABOUTS DURING PAST FIVE WEEKS STOP TAKE GREAT CARE

  MYCROFT

  James quickly let the top fold of the telegram drop into place and he walked to the stairway on the opposite side of the room as he heard Holmes’s usual brisk steps on the parquet and then on the boards and braided rug in the parlor. He was standing on the first step with one foot raised to the second step when Holmes bustled
back in. Holmes noticed the telegram, folded it, and set it in his hacking jacket’s pocket with the other message without showing any signs of concern at it being read.

  “So, you’re heading back up to your room now,” said Holmes.

  “Egad, Holmes,” said Henry James, feeling a need to put this imitation gentleman in his place. “Your powers of deduction . . . how do you do it?”

  Instead of showing anger or embarrassment, Holmes merely made that semi-bark of a laugh again, raised his walking stick—the one with the sword in it, James knew—and said, “Well, then, it’s cheerio for the time being, although I fully trust that our paths shall cross again before too much time goes by.”

  “I’m thinking of sailing for England very soon,” said James. He wasn’t sure why he said it, since he’d not made up his mind about any such thing. He absently touched his waistcoat pocket where the ivory snuffbox containing his sister Alice’s ashes was as firmly embedded as a tumor.

  “Ah, well, then perhaps we shan’t see each other again,” Holmes said, almost lightly, almost merrily, thought James with an inward glower. “Ta-ta,” said Holmes and turned his back and walked briskly out of the room and to the front door, whistling some cheap music-hall tune that sounded vaguely familiar to James. Something he’d heard at the Old Mo on Drury Lane.

  James realized that he had been standing there for almost a full minute after he’d heard the front door slam shut, one foot still raised to the second step, standing like a statue of a man turned to stone by the Gorgon’s stare. Worse than that, he realized that he was waiting for Holmes to come back to say that he’d changed his mind, he wasn’t moving out after all.

  Mrs. Stevens came into the breakfast room to clear the dishes, saw James standing there frozen on the stairway with the odd look on his face, and she was clearly startled. “Is everything all right, Mr. James? Do you need something?”