by Dan Simmons
Holmes swung himself around the already turning killer and began clambering up Lucan’s front like a monkey on a man-shaped climbing bar. His right hand now had a grip around Lucan’s neck, pulling the younger man’s head down like a lover enforcing a kiss, even while his left shifted quickly from Lucan’s belt to grab his right wrist, arresting the blade. But not quickly enough to avoid another wound. James saw blood mist the air again . . . Holmes’s blood.
Henry James looked around wildly. Part of his mind had recorded the sound of the elevator going down and now it was arriving at this level again, but that meant nothing to James. Irene Adler was still lying face-down, possibly dead.
James saw the Mauser rifle. He quickly picked it up—dear Christ it was heavy—and laid it across the top of the metal fence to steady himself while he tried to look through the telescopic sight.
Holding the wood under the barrel tightly, he worked the well-oiled and expertly assembled bolt. A complete bullet—James could see the lead points with little X’s gouged into them—ejected and landed under the German searchlight.
For all James knew, that was the last live round in the rifle. He didn’t have time to check. Nor did he wonder, as anyone who knew firearms would have, just how far off true the telescopic sight had been knocked in all its being thrown here and there.
For a moment nothing made sense and then, fuzzy but solid in the circle, there were Holmes and Lucan spinning as the single-wheeled mechanism flew down the cable. Lucan’s white shirt was torn to tatters and covered with blood—Holmes’s blood, James realized. Holmes’s bare skin was as white, torn, and blood-spattered as his opponent’s shirt.
The only reason they hadn’t reached the bottom of this long guy-wired slide was that Lucan’s wheel mechanism hadn’t been designed for so much weight. It lurched along at high speed for thirty or forty feet, then caught, almost stopped, then lurched down and forward again.
The two men were fighting more like animals than men. When they were still moving quickly, Holmes grabbed Lucan’s right wrist and forced the metal release for the knuckle knife up against the wire. Sparks flew. The blade mechanism bent into itself and was now of little use in the fighting.
Lucan switched his right hand to the handlebar and began to pound on Holmes’s lower head and shoulders with his free hand, even as Holmes locked his legs around Lucan Adler and clambered up his bloody front. The two men butted heads, bit at each other. Lucan used the fingers of his left hand to claw at Holmes’s eyes even as Holmes freed his left hand long enough to swing its wedge into Lucan’s throat.
James realized that sweat had clouded his vision. He wiped at his right eye and found the two men in the circular scope again. Their pulley had slowed and they twisted while they fought, bit, kicked, and gouged, but then the wheel seemed to free itself and began falling again toward the still distant beacon island in Lake Michigan.
James saw whiteness fill the telescopic sight, thought that it was— might be—the back of Lucan Adler. He held his breath and squeezed the trigger. He’d not had the butt of the Mauser pressed solidly to his shoulder and now the recoil knocked him backwards from his half-crouch and firmly onto his rear end.
* * *
A hundred and thirty feet down the two-hundred-forty foot guy wire, Holmes had grasped the handlebar and pulled himself up to Lucan’s level. The two men were now face to face, Lucan grinning wildly, as they fought with elbows, fists, head butts, and knees.
Lucan had been working on the knife mechanism and now he had the blade firmly between his knuckles again, his left hand locked firmly on the bicycle bar. Holmes’s left-handed grip on the bar was more tenuous and left him unable to defend the bare left side of his upper body.
“Die, God damn you!” screamed Lucan Adler, bringing the blade around in a thrust that would reach Holmes’s heart.
Holmes said something Lucan couldn’t make out—it might have been “God forgive me” or “God forgive you”—but whatever the words were, they meant nothing now that the killing blow was already in motion.
Suddenly a bullet ripped through the narrow space between the two men, tore a furrow through Lucan’s upper right arm and shirt, and ripped its way across the back of Holmes’s dropping right hand.
The impact was just enough to turn Lucan’s dagger thrust to Holmes’s heart into a razor-sharp slashing motion that cut through flesh and skidded across a rib.
Holmes pulled the tiny lemon-squeezer cyclist’s pistol from his right trouser pocket, pressed it hard into Lucan’s belly—high, at the diaphragm just below where the assassin’s heavily muscled flesh met bone—squeezed the pistol’s handgrip tightly to release its silly lemon-squeezer safety, and fired twice into Lucan Adler’s body.
* * *
James realized that Drummond and some of his gray-suited men had run up to him while two others were checking on the still unconscious Irene Adler. Drummond heard the two pistol shots, but was sure it was a double-echo of his own rifle shot.
Drummond helped him to his feet just as Lucan Adler, still seventy feet in the air, opened his arms and fell away. Holmes was clinging weakly to the pulley device’s handlebars as it picked up speed toward the buoy post.
Lucan fell gracefully, his arms fully extended in what James could only see as a Christlike pose, his head arched back as if he were looking at the sky. James was sure that he would reach the water, but at the last instant, the back of Lucan Adler’s head hit the concrete sea wall with a sound that could be heard all the way to where James and the other men stood numbly, dumbly.
Then James saw Holmes either let go or lose his grip and he dropped at least forty feet—but to the water just short of the concrete slabs that supported the beacon-light post. James, Drummond, and two of the agents leaned forward and strained to see if Holmes came to the surface. Drummond looked through his binoculars and then handed them to James.
Holmes hadn’t come up. He hadn’t come up. He still hadn’t come up. But suddenly Holmes could be seen weakly pulling himself up and over the gunwales of the power boat that Lucan Adler had anchored there. The bloodied Holmes lay on his back on the bottom of the boat and did not move again.
Drummond took back the binoculars and stared. “I think he’s breathing. Here come the boats.”
From behind the mass of the S.S. Michigan warship came roaring eight police boats—three belonging to the Chicago Police Force and five belonging to the Columbian Guard. They all slowed and centered on the boat where Holmes lay bleeding. James saw a man with a doctor’s bag step into the blood-washed boat.
Then James had to sit down. On the pavement. Sit and try to breathe.
Drummond crouched next to him and lifted the Mauser with his left hand while patting James on the back with his right.
James shoved the rifle away from him. He knew he would never touch one again as long as he lived. Once again he thought of his brothers Wilkie and Bob, who had carried such death with them into the War and, even after their terrible wounds and pain and in the presence of real Death, eventually rose to carry and use their rifles again. He thought of his cousin Gus, so beautiful that day in the drawing class, whose pale and freckled body was now rotted in mold somewhere under Virginia dirt after a Confederate sniper had expertly done exactly what James had just tried to do. He shook his head.
The joy of dramatic engagement that had affected him like too much strong American whiskey at the Chicago stockyards had drained completely out of him now. It was not worth being a fictional character—or a real person, he realized—if ending someone’s life through violence was part of the role. It was not civilized. It was not right. It was not Henry James. Nor was it honest to the hard-earned truth of his art.
“Lucan Adler’s body hasn’t come up yet,” said one of the agents still standing at the railing.
Drummond crouched next to the seated writer and repeated that to James as if James had become hard of hearing.
“I . . . don’t . . . care,” said James and lowered his head
to his raised knees.
11
Who knew that the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 had its own infirmary? Actually, it was a well-stocked little hospital with squadrons of nurses and five full-time doctors on duty, one of them a woman.
Sherlock Holmes was the seventh person ever brought to the sparkling new infirmary—four women and two men had fainted during the crush and heat of the Opening Ceremony—and the two doctors checking him over (neither one a woman) decided to ask a surgeon more skilled in dealing with thoracic wounds to come down from Chicago General and give his opinion. He came—in a police wagon with a siren wailing and horses nearly out of control—and pronounced the wounds simple enough to deal with. No major organs had been punctured or slashed.
Holmes received stitches over his lower abdomen, his upper belly, his right ribs, his right wrist—which had a strange but shallow bullet-furrow in it—and on his scalp and back. He had a concussion, serious contusions around the head and shoulders, and it turned out that he’d also broken two fingers on his right hand and his right wrist in the “scuffling”, as doctors who didn’t know the details of the Opening Day’s incident called it.
Few people ever did hear about this “incident”. Neither Daniel Burnham, Director Davis, Mayor Harrison, nor President Cleveland wanted word of an assassin’s presence or violent death on Opening Day known. Almost none of the crowd had seen the incident and most of those few who had thought that it had been a madcap part of the Opening Ceremony. The press was not told about it.
Henry Cabot Lodge’s guests didn’t mind staying two more days at the Fair until Mr. Holmes would be released; it turned out that the concussion was what kept him in bed the longest. On the third day he left with his torso tightly bound with bandages and his right arm in what he thought was an unnecessary sling, but movement without it hurt his wrist enough that he decided to keep it on for the time being.
Both Andrew L. Drummond and Henry James had visited Holmes in the infirmary, and James was there when Drummond told the detective that Irene Adler was in a room on the floor above him. A room guarded 24-hours a day by two armed Columbian Guardsmen.
“How is she?” asked James. He had been sure she’d been lying dead up there on the promenade deck.
“The slug passed through her shoulder without breaking her collarbone or hitting any major artery,” said Drummond. “The lady is very lucky. One bone was nicked but she should heal quickly enough.”
“Is she going to face charges?” asked Holmes from his hospital bed.
“Absolutely,” said Drummond.
“Charges of what, exactly?” asked Holmes.
“Of . . . of . . . she was . . . of . . . God damn it!” said Drummond.
“Well, keep a good guard on her,” said Holmes. “She’s a dangerous woman.”
* * *
Henry James had decided that he was sailing on the United States from New York to Europe, probably to England but possibly all the way to Genoa from whence he could travel to Florence and then north to join his brother William’s family in Lucerne. Over James’s loud and sincere objections, the Lodges and the Camerons decided that they would go home by way of New York, dropping Harry off—perhaps actually seeing him off at the pier—and staying a week or so to allow the wives and Helen to do some serious shopping while the men had some serious conversations with their Wall Street friends and brokers.
In Buffalo, New York, they had a three-hour layover as a new engine was attached to their private train, and that gave everyone time for luncheon at a decent restaurant there and to stretch their legs.
James returned early and alone to the personal carriage, and one of the valets who helped him said, “There is a gentleman waiting in your compartment to see you, Mr. James.”
“What the devil is he doing in my compartment?” snapped James.
“He specifically asked to wait there, sir,” said the valet, his face crimson with shame. “He said that he knew you, sir. He said that it was vitally important for him to talk to you as soon as you returned, sir. I apologize if I did wrong by allowing him in your private compartment.”
James whisked that away with a movement of his hand, but he was not pleased. Not pleased at all.
James had stepped into his small but luxurious compartment and closed the door behind him before he realized that it was almost as dark as night in the room. Someone had pulled down both the lighter and darker shades over his compartment’s windows. It took James a second to see the man sitting in the easy chair—the chair in the corner near the lamp sconce, the chair James used for reading—and another second to register just who the man was.
Professor James Moriarty. The dim light showed the overhang of that luminous, deathly brow, the thin white lips, the cadaverous cheeks and white sticks of hair sticking out over his vulpine ears. The tongue kept darting in its reptilian manner over the dried lips. The nails on the long, white fingers were inches long, curved, and yellowed with age and evil.
“We meet at lassst, Mr. Henry Jamesss,” hissed Moriarty and stood up.
Lacking even his walking stick with which to fight, James flung open his compartment door when a too-familiar voice behind him said, “You’re not leaving so quickly, are you James?”
James spun around.
Moriarty flung up the shades until the compartment was flooded with light. Then he carefully plucked off his long, yellow fingernails, one by one. Then he removed all his teeth, changing the shape of his face. Next the tall man clawed at his own face, pulling off pieces of forehead, cheekbone, nose and chin and dropping the fragments on a towel set out for the purpose. The rest of the forehead and bald pate came off in one piece, but with unpleasant ripping sounds.
Henry James stood there and watched silently while Holmes used some sort of cream and tweezers to remove the rest of “Professor Moriarty’s” ears, face, chin, and neck. All the detritus piled up on the large towel atop James’s dresser.
“You don’t have anything to say about my greatest performance?” asked Holmes. He used James’s mirror to brush his hair back into place and then he put his broken right wrist back into the black sling.
“Why?” asked James.
Holmes grinned and rubbed his hands together while ignoring the sling. “My brother Mycroft and I have been building this evil genius, Professor Moriarty, for almost five years now, James. First it was just the rumor of him in Dr. Watson’s little fictions. Then actual appearances.”
“What about The Dynamics of an Asteroid?” asked James. “It’s real. I’ve seen the book.”
“Very real,” said Holmes. “And mathematically accurate . . . or so they tell me. My brother Mycroft and his old tutor at Christ Church, the don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, did the maths for ‘Professor Moriarty’s’ mathematical masterpiece.”
“And Moriarty’s presence at actual astrophysical conferences, as in Leipzig?” asked James.
“All unappreciated performances by yours truly,” laughed Holmes. “But years ago I discovered something very interesting—if one takes extra efforts to look repulsive, to smell repulsive, and to behave in a repulsive manner, other people take far less close notice of you.”
“Why?” asked James, his voice even more tired than before. “Why this elaborate play-acting?”
“As I said, more than five years of elaborate play-acting,” Holmes said softly, sitting on the arm of James’s reading chair. James crossed the compartment and sat on the bed. His face was expressionless. Outside, others were returning from their dining and excursions in Buffalo.
“Moriarty brought regular criminals into a true network of crime,” said Holmes. “As Moriarty, I guided them into masterpieces of criminal endeavor—half a million pounds in scrip from the Second Reserve Bank in London, over a million pounds in pure gold bullion from the Berne Gold Depository, hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Farmers’ Trust Bank in Kansas City, five hundred million lire from Rome’s Central . . .”
“All right, all right,” i
nterrupted James. “So I’m sitting and talking to a felon. Someone who’s created successful criminal networks and robberies in America, England, and on the Continent for five years now. Why are you still free?”
“All the brilliant Moriarty triumphs were orchestrated through Mycroft and Whitehall, the local constabularies, and the local banks, depositories, whatever,” said Holmes. “The stolen scrip turned out to be the highest quality Her Majesty’s Government could counterfeit, and by tracking it we traced a diagram of more than a dozen criminal mobs in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, even Cambridge . . .”
“What about the gold?” said James.
“The criminals had their gold verified by experts,” said Holmes. “But Mycroft and his friends took no chances. We provided the experts.”
“What about the anarchists?” asked James. “Remember, I was at your Washington meeting of thugs and socialists.”
Holmes shook his head in what seemed to be admiration. “And I shall forever admire your courage and initiative in doing so,” said the detective. “I simply could not tell you about our plans when you shared this . . . vital information . . . with me.”
“Plans?”
“On May first, in twenty-three cities in nine nations, the police and authorities have rounded up criminals and anarchists pledged to destroy their societies.”
“And what will they be charged with?” asked James, putting only a fraction of the contempt he felt into the sarcasm in his tone. “Loitering as a group? Unseemly appearance in public?”
“Ninety-five percent of the criminals we’ve enlisted and who gathered for the Big Riots and Big Hauls on May first had warrants out for them already,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Many in more than one country. For the anarchists, those who showed up at the designated places with bombs and guns will be charged immediately, the rest put on a watch list.”