by Dan Simmons
“Thank you, Colonel Rice,” said Holmes, getting to his feet and brushing off his trousers and jacket. “Shall we stroll to the southeast corner now?”
The last of the morning’s threatening clouds had disappeared and now all four men leaned on the metal fence to enjoy the spring sunlight.
“Harder shot from here,” said Mr. Drummond. “Adds almost another hundred yards to a shot from the southwest corner we were at.”
“Quite true,” said Holmes. “And it would be awkward steadying a rifle on that low steel fence. But a man standing on the searchlight stand . . .” He pointed his cane behind him without turning to look. “ . . . would have the ridges on the searchlight itself to brace a rifle.”
“How long is a Model Ninety-Three Mauser?” asked the colonel.
“Forty-eight inches,” Holmes said at once, but then he smiled thinly. “Without its bayonet.”
* * *
The Electricity Building pleased James the most of the four major buildings and Peristyle they’d inspected so far. It had a delightful curving promenade that looked down at the lagoons, bridges, and, for much of the southeast side, the front of the Administration Building. There was a large and elegant statue of Benjamin Franklin at the graceful entrance to the building with already the smell of ozone from the voluminous interior.
Holmes showed less interest in the promenade deck than he did in the eight high spires at various corners of the structure.
“Steps for the public up to them?” asked Mr. Drummond.
“Sure,” said the colonel. “Those rooftop spires are a hundred and seventy feet in the air and the open arches at the top provide one of the best views in the entire grounds.”
Looking out the broad opening from the spire closest to the Administration Building, Holmes sighted down the length of his cane. “A slight side shot, but the president standing alone to give his speech won’t have Secret Service men or anyone else standing next to him then. The other notables will be seated, yes?”
“Yes,” said Colonel Rice.
“Less than a hundred yards,” said Holmes.
“Yes,” said Colonel Rice.
And that was all for the Electricity Building. After a fast and late luncheon under sun-warmed canvas, Holmes said, “You’ll pardon us a minute, I hope, Mr. James” and stepped to one side to talk with Colonel Rice and Mr. Drummond for about fifteen minutes while James drank another cup of coffee. When the conference was over, Drummond came over to James. “It’s been a delight and deep honor to meet you, Mr. James. Should we cross paths again, I hope it will not be presumptuous of me to bring a few of your novels to sign for me. They would be the pride of my collection and a legacy to my children.”
“Of course, of course,” said James. Drummond shook hands with him, bowed slightly, and left the sun-warmed dining tent. James noted Holmes and Rice’s discussion was over so he joined the two men.
As Holmes was shaking hands good-bye with Rice, the Colonel said, “There’s one thing you haven’t asked about or mentioned, Mr. Holmes.”
“Yes?”
“Wherever your Lucan Adler sniper chooses to shoot from, there’s going to be the slight problem of him getting away after the fact. As we’ve discussed, upon such a terrible event as the shooting of the president, the Columbian Guard will close and lock all gates immediately. I have telephone lines to every exit. No boats will be allowed to leave from the pier. Is your man suicidal? Wanting to be martyr to anarchism?”
“Not in the least,” said Holmes. “Lucan Adler has never carried out an assassination without having a brilliant escape plan in place.”
Colonel Rice gestured to the boulevard along the Lagoon where they stood. “We can shut off access to the promenades and towers as you’ve asked, but that parade ground and all these side streets will be filled with more than a hundred thousand panicked people. And not one of them will get out without being checked out by police or my Columbian Guard.”
“It is a bit of a challenge to think of a sensible escape route, is it not, Colonel?” said Holmes. The detective nodded, tipped his hat, and turned away.
Henry James said his own good-bye to Colonel Rice and followed Holmes through White City streets filled with great crates, rubble, straw, and thousands of workmen.
TEN
Saturday, April 15, 8:30 a.m.
Henry James’s fiftieth birthday was as cold, lonely, and awful as he might have imagined it if he were writing a short story dipped deeply in pathos.
James had lain awake for much of the night, fighting a nausea that sent him rushing to the lavatory three times before a faint dawn began contouring the outlines of his hotel windows. As he checked out—he had tickets for a 9 a.m. train to New York—he knew that Sam Clemens had left two days earlier and the clerk, when queried, said that Mr. Holmes had checked out “very, very early”.
The rain that had only threatened the previous morning was coming down now in a cold and unrelenting downpour. The chilly air felt more like November with winter beginning in earnest than mid-April. Even the fancily clad doormen were huddled under their umbrellas and looking sour this dark, freezing day.
The previous late afternoon when he and Holmes had returned to the Great Northern from their odd tour of an assassin’s-eye view of the great Columbian Exposition and World’s Fair, James had been surprised to find two telegrams waiting for him.
The first was from Henry Adams and read:
A SLIGHTLY PREMATURE HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HARRY STOP I KNOW YOU MUST BE EAGER TO RETURN TO LONDON AND YOUR MAGNIFICENT WORK, BUT I SINCERELY HOPE THAT YOU RETURN TO WASHINGTON TO STAY WITH ME AS MY GUEST WHEN YOUR BUSINESS IS CONCLUDED STOP WE ARE OLD FRIENDS, HARRY, AND IN A WAY I AM REQUESTING THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS IN CLOVER’S BELOVED NAME STOP HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MY DEAR FRIEND
James was stunned. He had no idea how Adams had found out that he was in Chicago, much less where he was staying in Chicago, and he knew it was highly unusual that Adams was inviting him as a house guest. He’d rarely had guests stay in his huge home in the years since Clover died.
The second telegram was from the Hays.
HAPPY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HARRY. STOP WE UNDERSTAND YOU MAY BE CELEBRATING THIS ESPECIALLY AUSPICIOUS DAY WHILE IN TRANSIT, BUT CLARA AND I DEEPLY AND SINCERELY HOPE THAT YOU WILL ACCEPT ADAMS’S OFFER AND RETURN TO WASHINGTON FOR A WHILE BEFORE HEADING ACROSS THE ATLANTIC STOP WE HAVE SO MUCH WE WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT—IN PERSON STOP CABOT LODGE HAS LAID ON THE SPECIAL TRAIN TO THE CHICAGO FAIR OPENING FOR APRIL 29, WITH SPECIAL ADMISSION PASSES FOR ALL OF US, AND IT WOULD BE CLARA’S AND MY DEEPEST WISH THAT YOU WILL JOIN US ON THAT EXPEDITION STOP HAPPY BIRTHDAY
James had accosted Holmes in the lobby before the detective had reached the elevator to go up to his room.
“Did you cable the Hays and Henry Adams that we were—that I was—staying here in the Great Northern?” snapped James.
Holmes seemed a bit taken aback by the writer’s ferocity. “Of course I did, old fellow. I would have thought you’d want your whereabouts known to some of your dearest friends. Especially right before your fiftieth birthday.”
James felt even angrier at this comment but refused to satisfy Holmes’s sardonic sense of humor by asking how the detective knew that the 15th was his birthday.
“Shall we dine together tonight at that interesting little Italian restaurant just down Jackson Street?” asked Holmes. “The concierge here strongly recommends it. And we may not be seeing each other again for a while.”
James started to say no—stopped—started to ask a question—and stopped again. He just stood there with the telegrams about his dreaded 50th birthday crumpled in his hand and glared at Sherlock Holmes.
“Good then,” said Holmes. “I shall meet you in the lobby promptly at eight p.m.”
* * *
During the night, between his bouts of nausea—an old foe of his along with constipation and diarrhea—James had weighed his decision. He’d studied the railway tables. A
train leaving the new North Station at 9:45 a.m. went to Pittsburgh where he could transfer for a non-stop express to Washington. The train to New York left from the old downtown station at 9:00 and passed through Cleveland and Buffalo on its way to New York, where he could immediately book passage to Portsmouth on the highly praised new transatlantic steamer the S.S. United States.
In the end, it was the thought of the sunny warmth of his De Vere Gardens rooms, his waiting writing desk, the salons he would be revisiting, the country houses of gentlefolk he’d be invited to . . . that and the visceral sense of safe encirclement by all his books that made him decide for New York and home.
He’d found a porter to carry his baggage piled high on a cart and bought his ticket at the downtown station when, concealed as he was behind the high mound of his luggage and an iron post, he saw Professor James Moriarty moving up and down the first-class coaches peering in the windows.
He’s hunting for me, was James’s first gut-chilling thought. A thought that carried all the weight of certainty.
Two thuggish-looking men came up and reported quickly to Professor Moriarty, who dispatched them up and down the line of waiting cars. Moriarty stepped aboard and began striding through the first-class cars. James could watch his advance—like a high-domed scarecrow with white-straw hair, a mortician’s overcoat, and long strangler’s fingers—as Moriarty strode from carriage to carriage.
It made no sense that Moriarty would be looking for him, for Henry James. He was sure he’d not been seen on the evening he’d lain on that terrible beam high over the heads of Moriarty and his small army of anarchists and thieves. The only person he’d told was Sherlock Holmes.
But Holmes would have informed Drummond, the Washington and Chicago chiefs of police, and God knows how many other people here in the States and across Europe, to put them on their guard for the assassinations and uprisings of May 1.
Now it made perfect sense. James knew of Moriarty’s vast crime networks across Europe and even in the United States. Someone in police enforcement—so many of them crooked in this Gilded Age—had told one of Moriarty’s operatives.
It was possible, of course, that Moriarty and his thugs were checking the train for Sherlock Holmes and, for all James knew, Holmes might be on it and murdered at any moment, but down deep Henry James knew Professor James Moriarty and his killers are looking for me this cold and rainy morning.
As if confirming his intuition, Moriarty stepped out of the coaches and stood looking as three other thugs came up to him for orders. James stared at Moriarty’s terribly long, long fingers with their long yellow nails, his hands on his hips now as he showed visible exasperation. The fingers were like great white spiders crawling up black velvet.
Moriarty dispatched the three thugs and then turned quickly to stare in James’s direction, but not before James ducked down behind his piled-high mass of luggage. It took half a minute for James to work up the nerve to peek again and he let out a long breath when he saw that Moriarty was again walking the length of the train, looking in all uncurtained windows.
“Shall I load your luggage now, suh?” said the porter who’d been waiting patiently and showing no expression at James’s sudden pallor or his absurd concealment.
“No, no,” said James. “Find me a cab, any cab, as quickly as you can, and get these things loaded equally quickly. Here . . . for your trouble.” He handed the porter some bill from his wallet, but it had been so long since he’d trafficked in American money it might have been a $50 bill or a $1 bill. Either way, the porter touched his cap and said, “At once, sir.”
James kept the baggage between himself and Moriarty all the way out to the busy cab stand, nodded his head when the porter pointed to an expensive closed carriage cab, held his breath while the trunks were loaded with maddening slowness, and breathed again only when the cab started moving quickly away from the central station and Professor James Moriarty.
James, obviously still feeling edgy, almost jumped when the trap door opened above him for a second, just slitted to keep the pouring rain out, and the driver called down, “Where to, sir?”
“The new North Station,” said James in a strangely high voice. “And quickly, please. I have to catch a 9:30 train. There’s an extra quid in it if you get me there with time to spare.”
“A quid, sir?” asked the driver out there in the downpour.
“Five dollars extra if you get me there at all possible speed and with time to spare before that nine-thirty train’s departure,” said James.
The driver used the whip. The carriage flew through traffic as though there were a derby stakes race in progress. James had to brace both hands against the seat cushions or be thrown left and right as the racing cab swerved around all slower traffic. Other drivers and pedestrians shouted profanities as James’s carriage soaked them through with splashes.
The night before, at dinner, James had asked Holmes, “What are you doing next?”
Holmes, already smoking his cigarette after quickly finishing his dinner, touched a finger to his tongue to capture a mote of tobacco. “Oh, several things have to be looked into here and there. I should be busy until we meet again on Mr. Cabot Lodge’s private train on the twenty-eighth.”
James had to use all his control to avoid near-shouting—“I won’t be on Lodge’s damned train! And I won’t be your Boswell. And I don’t appreciate being abandoned like this in a city strange to me on the eve of my birthday. And I’m tired. And I’m going home.”
He’d said none of that, of course. A graceful telegram—two graceful telegrams—sent from New York before his ship sailed would send his thanks and regrets to Henry Adams and the Hays.
Now, after his wildly whipping and racing cabbie had gotten him more or less in one piece to North Station with plenty of time to spare and he’d purchased his first-class tickets to Pittsburgh and then straight on to Washington, Henry James sat in his almost-empty and overheated compartment, rested his face against the cool glass of the window, and watched the black canyons of Chicago fall behind in the rain. He looked away as the train passed through a fringe industrial wasteland with slag heaps and squalid homes looking for all the world like a clumsy American imitation of a Dickensian nightmare landscape.
Happy Birthday, Henry James, he thought as they moved out into the country, and the rain, impossibly, pounded down even more heavily. You’re fifty years old.
At that moment he found himself wishing that he’d done what he’d gone to the Seine that night to do, meant to do, had steeled himself to do at that dark river. It had been raining that night as well.
PART 4
1
On Monday, April 24, after a whirlwind visit to more than half a dozen large American cities, Sherlock Holmes returned to Washington and checked into the same Kirkwood House hotel at 12th St. N.W. and Pennsylvania Avenue where he’d stayed earlier. He knew it was dangerous to do so—if Lucan Adler had been searching him out, he would know about Holmes’s earlier stay there and have someone keeping a lookout for him—but this part of Holmes’s American visit had to be dangerous. If he could lure Lucan Adler to him before May 1, it would be the best for everyone—save perhaps for Sherlock Holmes.
Early that spring evening he went to the address near Dupont Circle that Mrs. Gaddis, the retired school teacher in her alley carriage-house apartment in Boston, had given him. This was also a calculated risk. Holmes did not believe that the odds favored Lucan Adler being there for long stretches of time, but there was no doubt that the assassin visited there.
It was a stately brick house on a quiet street just off the Circle. When Holmes knocked on the door, a tiny woman, barely four feet tall, dressed out in European livery of a maid, opened the door and squinted up at him.
“Is Mrs. Rebecca Lorne Baxter home?” asked Holmes, removing his hat.
“Nie, ona nie jest teraz w domu,” said the tiny maid.
“Oh, a shame,” said Holmes. “Would you please give her my card and this message?�
�� He handed the dwarf-maid his business card and an envelope containing a short message:
Irene—Would you be kind enough to meet me tomorrow evening (Tuesday) between 7 and 8 p.m. at Clover Adams’s Memorial?—S. Holmes
The maid took the card and the envelope without saying a word—in Polish or any other language—and shut the door.
Holmes walked slowly away from the house and back to Dupont Circle, but all the time he was still in view of the house, the spiderwebs of scars on his back itched as if someone had painted a target on his back with turpentine.
2
Holmes arrived at Rock Creek Cemetery just before seven p.m. He told the cab driver not to wait. One way or the other, he would not need a cab home this night. The sun had just disappeared behind the forest to the west of the cemetery grounds but the soft spring twilight lingered and promised to light the sky for most of the next hour.
He walked directly to the Clover Adams memorial. He had his sword-cane in one hand and the little lemon-squeezer pistol in a jacket pocket, but he knew that neither would be of any use if Lucan Adler was lying in wait with his sniper rifle. He’d stipulated this night, Tuesday, to give Irene Adler a full day to contact Lucan with the information about this meeting.
He knew from his terrible experience in the Himalayas that it was true that one does not hear the rifle bullet—or in his case, three steel-cased bullets—that rips through your flesh since the bullet travels well above the speed of sound. In his instance, it had been three sharp sounds immediately following three unbelievable intense blows to his back and lower side. And, because of the mountains, those three sounds had echoed.