by Dan Simmons
Theodore’s grin somehow grew broader. “Yes,” he said softly. “And it’s going to stay there. You three go about your business now and no one will get hurt.”
The two largest thugs began laughing at this and the youngest one joined in with his unpleasant cackle.
The leader reached forward. The second man produced a short-bladed knife almost identical to the one the youngest thug was again holding against the curve of Henry James’s belly.
“Do not touch me,” said Roosevelt to the bearded thug. The tall man in the hat must have had twenty pounds and six inches of height to his advantage.
“What’re you going to do when I do touch you, four-eyes?” The broad, filthy hands were poised in front of Theodore’s thick torso and gleaming watch chain.
In fairly fluent German—which James could follow—Roosevelt said, “I shall kick you in the balls, make your teeth eat my knee, and then head butt your paltry brains out.”
James noticed that young Theodore hadn’t been sure of the German word for “butt” and had just used Kopfbütten as an approximate. He’d also used the informal du form which an adult would use with an intimate, a child, or an animal. His intention there was clear when he’d used the fressen form of “to eat”—dogs and other animals fressen—rather than the human essen. Theodore carefully removed his pince-nez by its ribbon, set the glasses in an inner vest pocket, and patted the pocket. His smile was thin now with his huge teeth no longer gleaming.
The tall leader laughed and said, “We got a couple of midget Dutch-men here, boys. Let’s beat the shit out of them.”
The two tall men stepped forward. Roosevelt and King took three hasty steps backward, as if they were preparing to run. The leader widened his stride to cut Theodore off.
Roosevelt opened his arms wide, leaned backward with that massive torso, and kicked the tall man between the legs with the kind of full-force, wound-up, full-legged kick that Henry James had only seen on rugby fields. The polished toe of Theodore’s small, expensive boot all but disappeared in the leader’s vulnerable crotch. The impact was so great that James saw the leader-thug’s feet actually leave the ground.
The big man fell to his knees and started to crumple, his hat falling forward as his head came down. He was using both hands to hold his testicles and the moan that came out of him did not sound human.
As the man’s face arched down, Theodore’s right knee came up more rapidly than it had in the kick. James heard teeth snap and the man’s huge nose break.
The thug’s upper torso rocked back—his face smeared with blood—his eyes closed but now on the same level as Teddy Roosevelt’s blue gaze. Roosevelt grabbed the thug by the shoulders, jerked him toward himself, and smashed that great, square, Roosevelt forehead against the leader’s face and temples so hard it sounded like an ax smashing against thin wood.
The leader went down on his back and did not stir.
The other big thug had not been watching idly. He had his knife out jabbing forward and swinging from left to right even as his long arms went wide as if to encircle Clarence King before stabbing.
King had hefted his heavy cane to his shoulder and now he swung it like a baseball bat. Henry James had never played baseball as a child, but his brother William had . . . and loved it. And during the last two weeks, James had suffered John Hay’s enthusiasm for the sport, so when King made his powerful swing, James guessed that it was more like one of the batters from the Boston Beaneaters—expected to win the pennant this year—than a hitter from the perennially last-place Washington Senators.
The beaked stone at the head of the cane caught the advancing thug full in the face. James saw and heard the cheekbone snap, the nose break, and both he and the youngest thug next to him actually had to jump back to avoid the geyser of blood and teeth that came their direction. The big man dropped his knife and fell to all fours.
Five-foot-six Clarence King had grown a belly but the decades of mountain climbing and mine digging had turned his thighs and arms to powerful engines. He kicked the man in the backside so hard that the thug skidded forward on his ruined face on the alley cinders, his arms and hands trailing palms up.
The boy, who was left-handed, swung away from James and swung his arm back to stab Clarence King in the side.
Henry James had written William just before Christmas that he’d been putting on far too much weight, that he was going forth belly-first into the world these days and it did not please him. He’d told William how he’d hired a fencing coach for three two-hour workouts a week, but also how—while James very much enjoyed the exercise—it hadn’t taken an ounce off his weight.
Now James raised his own walking stick and brought it down on the boy’s wrist as if he were driving a tent peg with a mallet. Surprisingly, his aim was perfect—he heard the head of the cane make loud contact with the scrawny young thug’s wrist bone and the knife dropped to the alley cinders.
The young thug shouted in pain but he was very, very fast. He dropped to one knee to retrieve the knife before James could even get his cane raised again.
King stepped forward and planted his polished but heavy boot on the knife blade. The young thug tugged but the blade snapped off at the hilt.
“Trade knife,” said Roosevelt from where he stood astride the fallen leader. “They give them away to the Indians by the gross out in the Badlands. Not worth a damn.”
King had shifted his cane to his left hand and suddenly, from a coat pocket, he pulled out a jackknife which he flicked open with a snap of his wrist. The blade was enormous for a folding knife—at least seven inches long, James thought, and tapered to a terrifying point.
King set that sharpened point a millimeter under the young thug’s left eye, pushing strongly enough to draw blood and a terrified gasp from the would-be highwayman. James half-expected King to pop the boy’s eye out like a street vender scooping out ice cream on a hot summer night.
“There’s a lesson here, boy,” hissed King. “If you’re coming to a knife fight, bring a knife. Otherwise you’ll end up with a Heidelberg scar.”
King flicked the blade right across the young thug’s cheek and blood geysered.
The boy screamed, clasped both hands to his opened cheek to hold together the bloody flaps now exposing his molars, stood, and ran off into the night.
James could only stare at the two men unconscious on the ground as the sound of the boy’s pounding boots dwindled down the dark alleyway. He jumped slightly when someone touched his elbow, but it was only Roosevelt. “That move of yours was rather neat, Mr. James.”
“Very neat, I thought,” said King, cleaning off the stone head of his cane in the dirt and cinders.
“Your right sleeve is ripped and bloody,” said young Theodore. “Did that young brat do that?”
“No,” said James, astounded at how steady his voice sounded, “I . . . fell when getting off a trolley a short while ago. Just tore it up a bit on the gravel.”
King and Roosevelt exchanged a glance, but said nothing. They stepped away from the two forms on the ground, one moaning and weeping, the other still unconscious.
King twirled his newly cleaned cane. “We really were headed for Hay’s place for dinner. Would you care to accompany us, Mr. James?”
“I would, Mr. King,” said the writer.
Two blocks further—where the street lights were closer together, shops were open, the street was evenly paved, and the true sidewalks began again—they saw a cab passing that was large enough for the three of them and Roosevelt hailed it with a whistle that made the horse jump.
15
The Panic of ’93
Most of the dinner guests had not yet arrived when Roosevelt, King, and James knocked on the door, but Hay immediately took in Harry’s dishabille and told his head butler Benson and another servant named Napier to help Mr. James up to his room. Dr. Granger, who’d arrived early just so that he could have a whiskey and quiet conversation with his old friend Hay, looked at James’s slee
ve and said, “I’d best come up to your room with you and have a look at that.”
“It’s nothing,” said James.
“I’ll just get my bag from John’s man,” said the doctor.
Roosevelt, wearing his pince-nez again, grinned and said, “Dr. Granger brings his medical bag to social occasions?”
“Dr. Granger brings his medical bag everywhere he goes,” said Clarence King.
Upstairs, James kicked off his spats first, and when Napier swept them up and said “I’ll have these cleaned immediately, sir,” James snapped, “No, burn them.” He would always see the contemptuous tobacco stain on the one spat no matter how clean it might be.
“Come into the bathroom where it’s bright,” ordered Dr. Granger. “Imagine, a guest room with its own bathroom, running water, and electric lights. Will wonders never cease?”
The sumptuous bathroom was as bright and sterile as a surgical operating room and, when James had removed his sodden and torn shirt and thrown it in a corner, Dr. Granger looked at the lacerated forearm and said, “How did you say you injured your arm?”
“Jumping off a trolley a bit too soon and falling on cinders,” James said, having to avert his gaze even as he spoke.
Granger’s blue eyes could sometimes be as playful as Teddy Roosevelt’s and he only gave James a glance before saying, “All right, but this particular bit of street or alley appears to have been paved with bird shot.”
Napier had brought a small, curved white pan and Dr. Granger used some sort of tong-like instrument to remove the shotgun pellets one by one, each clanking as the round bit of shot dropped into the pan making James blush yet again. Dr. Granger removed twelve of the pellets and put iodine—or something equally as painful—over the extraction cuts and other lacerations where there had been no shot.
“None touched muscle,” said Dr. Granger. “Most barely penetrated the skin. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you’d been in a slight hunting accident, suffering from a shotgun fired from some distance.”
“I don’t hunt, sir,” said James. He started to pull on the clean white dress shirt Benson had brought from the wardrobe.
“Just a minute,” said Dr. Granger. “You don’t want to get iodine stains all over your shirt sleeve and I don’t want those wounds to get infected. Hold your arm steady . . . there . . . against the wash basin.”
Granger removed a roll of bandage and some scissors from his bag and within a minute James’s entire forearm had been carefully wrapped and taped.
“Feel any better?” asked Dr. Granger.
“I feel like a fool and”—he gestured with the right arm bandaged almost to his elbow—“like an Egyptian mummy.”
“Wait, don’t put on the shirt quite yet,” said the doctor. He was filling a syringe with a dark fluid from a vial.
“Wait, I don’t think . . .” began James but the doctor had already administered the injection in the author’s upper arm. “What was that?”
“Just a little something to help with the pain and to cut down on the chance of tetanus,” said the doctor as he closed the bag.
Damn, thought James. He’d recognized the morphine and should have spoken sooner. Both he and Katharine Loring had been trained in how to administer the liberal doses of morphine to his sister Alice in her last months of dying . . . she’d actually passed away while lost in her morphine dreams . . . and Henry James had vowed never to allow anyone to put the stuff in his own veins. Too late.
And the pain was less. Much less. James thought of Sherlock Holmes and his abominable injections and wondered if this light feeling . . . almost of happiness . . . might be the result of those illicit injections as well.
“If I babble like an idiot during dinner,” said James, “I shall blame it on you and your needle, Dr. Granger.”
“If we’re not all babbling like idiots by the third course,” said the doctor, “we shall have to blame it on Hay for not providing sufficient wine and liquor.”
* * *
As the other guests were arriving and just before they repaired to the dining room, Hay saw that James was concerned about something. He gingerly took the author’s left upper arm, led him to the hallway, and said, “What’s wrong, Harry? Can I help?”
James realized that he was biting his lip. “Absurd as it sounds, John,” he said softly, “I find that I simply must get in touch with Mr. Holmes. It’s urgent.”
“Sherlock Holmes?” said his host. “I thought he’d left town.”
“Perhaps he has,” said James, “but I really must communicate something to him. He did leave the address of a cigar store here in town so if perhaps your man could find a boy to carry a message . . .”
“We can do better than that, Harry. We can see if the cigar store has a telephone and contact them directly.”
“Why on earth would a cigar store have a telephone?” said James. He fought down another uncharacteristic urge to giggle aloud.
Hay shrugged as he led the way to his private study. “Strange age we live in, Harry.”
James had noticed the telephone in Hay’s study before, but he’d never seen his host operate it. Now there were several minutes back and forth with someone James understood to be an “operator”—or perhaps general information person—and then Hay grinned, handed the apparatus to James, and said, “Mr. Twill is on the phone. He’s the manager of the cigar store Holmes mentioned and he’s there now.” Hay left the room so that James could have privacy.
“Hello, hello, hello?” said James, feeling rather idiotic.
When he and Mr. Twill had both identified themselves again, James said, “I understand that someone at your store receives and conveys messages to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. It is absolutely imperative . . . urgently imperative . . . that I get in touch with him at once. Or speak to him telephonically if he is there now.”
“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, sir?” squawked Twill’s voice through the rumble and scratching of the phone lines.
“Yes.”
“English gentleman, sir?”
“That’s him!”
“No, he hasn’t been around the store, sir, since the day he paid me for this little service of sending along messages. He has a boy come check two or three times a day.”
James sighed. If he didn’t feel so . . . light . . . at the moment, he realized that his chest would be aching with anxiety at giving Holmes the extraordinary news of what he had seen and heard that afternoon.
“All right,” he said. “Could you please take down this message and get it to Mr. Holmes as quickly as possible?”
“As soon as his boy stops by, sir.”
“All right. The message reads . . . have you paper and pen ready?”
“Pencil poised, sir.”
“The message reads . . .” James had to pause a second to frame it. “ ‘I followed Professor Moriarty to a meeting here in Washington today. I overheard’ . . . yes, yes, I’ll slow down.”
“You can go ahead now, sir. You overheard . . .”
“ ‘I overheard Moriarty sharing his plans about May first with several . . . groups. It’s absolutely imperative that you contact me at once. I leave by train tomorrow . . . that’s Sunday, nine April . . . afternoon. Absolutely urgent that we speak before then. Signed, James’. Can you read that back to me, please?”
Twill did so, James corrected a couple of minor infelicities in the cigar-store keeper’s notes, and then the line was dead and the author was fumbling to hang the hearing apparatus onto the speaking stem and then to get the whole contraption back on its shelf.
* * *
Perhaps it was the morphine—if it had been morphine—but the evening’s dinner party was one of the most enjoyable Henry James could ever recall. James could not stop laughing. The day’s events should have been hanging over him like a black shroud, but instead the sharp memories of hiding on the high beam, of Moriarty, of the criminals and anarchists, and of the street confrontation with the ruffians (a bloody confrontation of which neither Ted
dy Roosevelt nor Clarence King showed the slightest signs either in manner or spatters of this or that on their formal clothing) seemed to buoy James up with a joy and energy he’d not felt for years. He was wearing a fresh shirt and dinner jacket.
Hay sat at one end of the table again, overseeing the conversation and stimulating it when it lagged—which it almost never did with this all-male group. James was given pride of place to the right of their host and to his right was his old acquaintance Rudyard Kipling. James had given away the bride, Miss Carrie Balestier, at Kipling’s 1892 wedding in London and, to complete the bonds of affection, the two men were mutual literary admirers. Why Kipling—who represented so much about Britain, proud and shameful, in his writing—chose to live in America was beyond James’s comprehension.
Henry Adams sat next to Kipling and beyond him was Teddy Roosevelt. This night, Augustus Saint-Gaudens took the chair at the opposite end of the table from John Hay. James admired Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture almost beyond words with which to praise it—he thought the sculpture at Clover Adams’s grave site showed not only consummate skill but tremendous courage, stirring as it did no sense of hope or an afterlife or surcease of sorrow, as James remembered that hack Poe had once phrased it, but only the infinite depths of sorrow and loss.
To Saint-Gaudens’s right on the other side of the table were Clarence King, Dr. Granger, and Henry Cabot Lodge to Hay’s left.
All the men at the table seemed extraordinarily witty this night, but Kipling and Roosevelt stole the show as far as James’s adrenaline- and morphine-muddled perceptions could judge such things. The 27-year-old Kipling, who’d been wintering at their home in snowy Vermont and whose wife Carrie had just had a baby on December 29, was the object of much congratulating and back-slapping. James would someday write—“Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.”
“It was very considerate of Josephine to choose twenty-nine December as her birth date,” the young writer was saying, “since my birthday is on the thirtieth and Carrie’s on the thirty-first. Keeps thing tidy, as it were.”