by Dan Simmons
James still shook his head and tried to hand the key back to Holmes.
“Nonsense,” said Holmes, refusing to take it. “You’ve been in a thousand lifts, Mr. James.”
“Not so many,” grumbled the writer. It was certainly true that London had little use for the modern elevator, any more than his beloved Rome or Florence.
As if the matter had been settled, Holmes turned to Drummond, the two standing within the cage of the elevator car. “How many marksmen did you decide on?”
“President Cleveland is adamant about refusing to have men with rifles visible on the rooftops,” said Drummond. “He says that it would make this joyous day feel like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural with soldiers stationed on every building.”
“Fine, fine,” said Holmes. “How many subtle, out-of-plain-view marksmen did you settle on?”
“Twelve,” said Drummond. “Prone or otherwise hidden on the top levels of every other Great Building that visually aligns with the full south promenade of this building.”
Holmes nodded. “Telescopic sights?”
“Twenty-power,” said Drummond.
“Do not forget to remind them that they are not to shoot unless I either give the signal or have been shot down,” said Holmes. “We don’t want a gun battle raging above the heads of one hundred thousand people.”
“How can you be so sure that Lucan Adler will choose the promenade of this building for his sniper’s nest?” asked Colonel Rice.
“I just am,” said Holmes. “He will be at the easternmost end of the promenade deck. Essentially beside or behind the giant German spotlight mounted there.”
“A difficult target from all the angles the marksmen will have,” said Chief McClaughry.
“Precisely,” said Holmes.
“But we’ll never let him get out of this building alive,” said Rice.
Holmes smiled and turned to James. “People will be going up and down to the Observation Deck all morning until ten a.m., James,” he said softly. “Then men from Colonel Rice’s Columbian Guard will make a clean sweep of the entire rooftop area to make sure no one has stayed behind and after that, they will lock both the elevator door and the cage door. You will have the key.”
“To give to what lady?” asked James. His voice was shaky.
“You will recognize her from the Irene Adler photograph I’ve shown you. Auburn hair. Strong chin. Amazing cheekbones. Eyes that are almost violet.”
Holmes held out his hand. “Good-bye for now, old boy. Thank you for everything.”
James shook the hand and gave one apprehensive glance up at the two hundred vertical feet through which he was supposed to guide that elevator. The four men left the building and Colonel Rice locked the outside door again.
“The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building will open at its usual scheduled time,” Rice said to Henry James. “At ten a.m., my men will make their sweep to empty the Observation Deck and rooftop level and then we’ll put up the sign saying that the elevator attraction and promenade deck will be closed to the public between ten a.m. and two p.m. Many will want to get up to get a better view of the president, but all the high walkways will be closed through those hours. You need to be here at ten.”
James looked at the large key and put it in his waistcoat pocket. “What should I do until then?” he asked somewhat plaintively.
“If I were you,” said Agent Drummond, “I’d take that waiting power boat back to Senator Cameron’s yacht and catch another couple of hours’ sleep. Just make sure someone wakes you so that you can be here—with the key in your pocket—at ten a.m. You won’t have to say anything to anyone—the sign will explain the closure, the outer cage door will be locked, and the disappointed public will go outside on the ground level to see the president.”
Later, James didn’t remember even nodding before he turned and walked back to the pier.
9
The morning grew chill and cloudy and was threatening rain until minutes before the President of the United States arrived, when the sun emerged on cue and bathed spectators and dignitaries with rich light.
Holmes heard the huge crowd gathered on the Parade Ground around the Administration Building cheer and clap the sun even before the president’s procession of carriages came into sight. The detective peered out of the long, narrow slit he’d had Colonel Rice’s crew cut out of the metal base below the giant searchlight on the southwest corner of the Observation Deck on the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. He could see the length of the walkway to the identical searchlight and metal base on the southeast corner of the building. If Lucan Adler had chosen some other place for his sniper’s roost, the world-famous detective Sherlock Holmes would be the fool lying, sweltering and sweating, in the tight airless box despite the cool morning, curled up like a useless fetus while the President of the United States was shot dead from some other sniper’s roost.
Unless one of Colonel Rice’s Guardsmen carrying handguns or Agent Drummond’s marksmen with rifles saw and shot Lucan Adler before he struck.
Holmes knew they wouldn’t.
His watch, which he had laid on the floor in the narrow strip of light coming in, said precisely eleven o’clock when the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief” as President Cleveland climbed the stairs to the speakers’ platform. Curled and cramped because of the massive insulated wires filling so much of the space in the steel base, Holmes kept his vigil through the slit but saw no movement. The president was now an easy target for Lucan’s ’93 Mauser—if that’s what he chose—from a hundred other places surrounding the open square massed with people. Holmes guessed correctly from the noise of the applause given the president’s arrival and the first of the speakers—voices barely audible to Holmes—that the crowd must be lining both sides of the Lagoon all the way back to and possibly through the Peristyle, spilling out into every side street and out onto the pier itself.
Holmes knew the schedule to the second, so that he knew they’d already fallen at least three minutes behind schedule when the crowd quieted as a blind chaplain gave the Opening Day blessing.
After the debacle of the previous autumn’s endless (and freezing) Dedication Day Ceremony, Daniel Burnham and the other Fair directors had decided to keep this opening ceremony as short as possible. But almost a full hour had passed between the president’s arrival on the speakers’ platform—Holmes heard faint echoes of badly written Odes to Columbus and other time wasters—and Director-General Davis rising to speak briefly and then introduce the president.
Through his east-facing slit, Holmes could see the supposedly locked door of the base of the searchlight at the far east end of the Observation Deck swing open silently. Lucan Adler uncurled himself from the dark space, reached in, and pulled out a long, cloth-covered object. He shook off the black cloth and, even from this distance, Holmes could see that it was indeed the ’93 Mauser with the five-round clip and an attached 20X telescopic sight.
Holmes kicked his own door open, got to his feet, and began walking straight toward Lucan.
* * *
For two hours Henry James stood near the inoperative elevator and heard would-be president-seers express their anger and frustration at not being able to travel to the Observation Deck promenade. But now the president was about to be introduced—the huge hall had emptied out around him and James could faintly hear voices through the opened doors—and James stood alone near the elevator.
Until a few minutes before noon, that is, when a well-dressed woman perhaps in her early forties, a woman with auburn hair, a strong chin, high cheekbones, and violet eyes, came up to him and said, “Are you by any chance the writer Henry James?”
Blinking at being recognized in public, not something that happened to him in America, James said, “Why, yes, I am.”
He was about to tip his hat to her when the woman took an ugly-looking and obviously heavy revolver pistol from her cloth handbag and aimed at James’s belly.
“Take out the key,” she said
. “Open these two gates. And then take me up.”
James hurried to comply although he almost fumbled and dropped the key at the outer gate and fussed too long with the elevator cage door as well. She all but pushed him into the lift cage and stepped in behind him, the pistol still trained on him.
“Take me up,” she said. “Quickly.”
James jerked the lever too far to the left, causing the car to lurch up like a rocket, and then he compensated too far to the right, causing it to slow to a near stop only forty feet above the floor.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” snapped the woman, moved James aside, and pushed the lever left so that the elevator hurtled upward.
* * *
Lucan Adler, even leaner and more aquiline in profile than his famous father, had settled in against and partially behind the large searchlight, the Mauser braced on one of the light’s metal ridges. Squeezed in between the Observation Deck’s fence and the searchlight as Lucan was, Holmes doubted whether he offered a clear target to any of Drummond’s men, even if they’d caught his brief movement out and up.
Lucan finished adjusting the telescopic sight with a tiny screwdriver he set back into his shirt pocket—he was wearing no jacket of any kind—and held the Mauser aimed at the president who was in the process of being introduced. But Lucan was also watching Sherlock Holmes approach and was smiling.
When Holmes was about twenty-five long paces away, Lucan swung the rifle in his direction and said, “Stop.”
Holmes stopped.
“I can get off three rounds in less than two seconds,” said Lucan Adler and Holmes was surprised by the metallic sharpness of his voice. Nothing like his mother’s voice. Perhaps more like his father’s, Holmes could not be sure.
“Two into the fatboy president’s chest and the third round into your belly before you get five feet closer,” added Lucan. “If you move your hands toward your jacket or any pocket, I’ll kill you first and put two or three rounds into the president before anyone looks up to see what the first noise was.”
Holmes knew that he could and would do precisely that. He stood very still.
The president had not begun his short address, but Director-General Davis’s introduction was winding down. Holmes knew, and Holmes knew that Lucan knew, that when Davis had introduced Cleveland and the oversized president actually stood at the podium, there’d be a full 90-seconds of “Hail, Columbia” being played and the added time and noise of the audience’s loud approval.
The rifle shot killing Holmes during that time wouldn’t be heard by anyone down there in the din and probably not by Drummond’s sharpshooters either.
Holmes looked at the guy wire that ran from the post at the corner where Lucan hid himself and ran almost three hundred feet out to the warning beacon in the lake. He’d known that Lucan would rig some device there, but the simplicity of it was impressive: just a flywheel atop the wire within a welded unfinished square of metal to hold the wheel on the cable, with a modified bicycle handlebars, completely covered with rubber grips, hanging below it.
“Elegant,” said Holmes, nodding toward the escape apparatus. He was sure that a fast powerboat was waiting at anchor next to that tiny beacon island of concrete. “But the police and Secret Service already know about the Zephyr.”
Lucan Adler shrugged and smirked. “The Zephyr was always meant to be a distraction.”
Davis introduced the president and the band and chorus launched into “Hail, Columbia” as the president came up to the low podium. Holmes did not turn his head to look over his right shoulder to see it.
Lucan Adler raised the rifle higher, sighting it on Holmes’s chest. “Use just your left hand,” Lucan said, just loud enough to be heard over the roar of noise below, “and take off your jacket, waistcoat, and shirt. Quickly! If you don’t have them all off in thirty seconds I’ll shoot.”
Holmes’s left hand fumbled with buttons and clasps. But before thirty seconds were up—just a third of the scheduled time for the music and pre-presidential jubilation below—Holmes was standing naked from the waist up.
Lucan continued looking through the sight. “Two exit wounds. Nice cluster for the distance. Turn around. Now.”
Holmes turned and looked back toward the searchlight under which he’d hidden for the past six hours.
“Oh, that third entry scar looks very nasty, Mr. Holmes,” hissed Lucan. “Is that bullet still in there? No, I think not. Did some humble Tibetan shepherd gouge around with a rusty spoon to dig it out? My, that must still be painful. Turn around and look at me! Now.”
Holmes turned to face the young man, hardly more than a boy but with the black-marbled stare of a cobra. Holmes’s hands hung loosely by his sides. The sunshine felt good on his naked upper body.
“It makes more sense to kill you before I kill Cleveland,” Lucan said, obviously enjoying himself. “But it might be more fun to allow you to watch the president being shot, and then dispatch you within those fast two seconds. What do you think, Mr. Detective?”
Holmes said nothing. Behind him, the elevator doors opened.
* * *
Henry James tried to remain in the elevator cage, but the woman—taller and stronger than he was—jerked him out by the arm and pulled him along as they walked east along the Observation Deck.
There was Sherlock Holmes facing the other way, his scars like rays radiating from the moon craters in the bright daylight, and Lucan Adler had swung the rifle in their direction.
“Why Mrs. Baxter,” said Lucan with an audible sneer. “Stop there by dear old Dad and keep that goddamned Bull Dog revolver pointed downward.”
Stepping beyond Holmes so he could see her, Irene Adler aimed the pistol at Holmes’s chest and said, “I don’t want to point it downward. I want to point it at his heart.” She did just that.
Lucan laughed, a sound like steel rending steel. Above the music and noise below, he said, “And you are Mr. Henry James, the writer, whom Holmes has been dragging around behind him this month and more like a pet lamb on a string. Well, know that you will live out this day, Mr. James. I admire your writing. It is painful to read. I like pain. It should continue.”
The music stopped. The crowd cheered and then, like a tide shushing out, fell as quiet as it could.
President Cleveland began to speak. He had a big, space-filling voice, said all the newspapers, but his words were inaudible at this distance. Mouse squeaks followed by wild applause.
“The target first,” muttered Lucan and lifted and laid the Mauser along the flange of the searchlight, focusing on the president. Holmes knew that Cleveland’s chest and belly would be filling Lucan’s ’scope.
“No, Holmes first!” cried Irene Adler, aiming the pistol at Holmes from only seven or eight feet away and cocking the Bull Dog pistol.
At seeing her cock that hammer back, James reacted as he had never reacted before. He jumped at Irene Adler, managing to grab her wrist and force it down even as he realized, too late, that she had already swiveled the pistol away from Holmes and at her son.
The blast of the revolver deafened James.
Instead of hitting Lucan Adler in the chest, where she’d been aiming, the deflected shot struck the young man’s right foot. Lucan lost his balance and fell to the deck, but rolled like some jungle cat and came to one knee with the Mauser shouldered, swinging it their way.
Holmes had begun sprinting toward Lucan before the pistol fired, but James saw in an instant that he wouldn’t be able to cover the distance in time.
Cursing in pain as he knelt there, but still holding the rifle with absolute confidence, Lucan Adler aimed and fired.
James felt the bullet buzz past his right ear and Irene Adler cried out and fell face forward. He had the presence of mind to look for the pistol, but she must have been lying on it.
The wounded, cursing Lucan started to swing the rifle barrel at Holmes but Holmes had closed the gap and kicked it aside. The heavy rifle went rattling across the paved promenade.
Lucan Adler turned, leaped over the fence, grabbed the bicycle grips, cut the restraining string with one swing of his bladed hand, and began plummeting out of sight down the long guy wire.
Sherlock Holmes had not paused a second. With his blood still misting the air, he ran at the fence, jumped to its top, and leaped out into two hundred feet of open space.
10
The unseen crowd of a hundred thousand people roared as if applauding Sherlock Holmes’s suicide. Running toward the south fence beside the searchlight, Henry James saw, in his peripheral vision, huge flags unfurling from the Agriculture and other giant buildings, the huge Statue of the Republic in the Lagoon directly south of him finally dropping its veil, fountains leaping into life. Part of him realized that President Cleveland had lived long enough to depress the gold telegraph key on its velvet pillow.
Later, James had the thought that any true gentleman would have first checked the condition of Mrs. Irene Adler Lorne Baxter, and helped her if he could. But at that moment Henry James didn’t give the least goddamn about the condition of Lucan Adler’s mother.
He reached the fence at the southeast corner of the building and gasped.
* * *
Holmes hadn’t been able to leap far enough to get his hands on the rubber-tipped bicycle handlebar. Instead, one hand caught Lucan Adler’s belt, the other hand gripped his shirt collar.
The collar came off and the shirt ripped down the seam, even as Lucan began to twist his body toward Holmes. With Lucan’s sleeve torn open, James now saw the knife mechanism strapped on his forearm work again—slipping a wide, flat blade between the assassin’s knuckles.