The Fifth Heart

ONE Thursday, April 13, 10:00 a.m.

My plan for opening the Chicago World’s Fair part of our tale was to explain why Henry James—against all his instincts and habits—would accompany Holmes on this part of the detective’s adventure. But the odd truth is, I don’t know why James did so.

We all know individuals who shield their thoughts better than others, but both Sherlock Holmes and Henry James have been the most difficult minds to penetrate in my long experience both of knowing people and of entering the thoughts of characters. Holmes’s tight grip on his secrets and modes of thinking is understandable: the detective is a self-made gentleman with a base and secret history from the London streets and the majority of his life has been one long, dangerous high-wire act of exercising both his astounding intellect and indomitable will. Holmes’s mind and heart—what there is of a heart—work in ways both too alien and difficult for most of us to understand. Or to bear if we could understand them.

But Henry James’s thoughts and feelings are hidden behind an even thicker layer of psychic armor. Like Holmes, James has created himself—the artist Self, the Master Self, the married-only-to-his-art bachelor Self—out of whole cloth and through sheer effort of will, perhaps following John Keats’s dictum of “That which is creative must create itself.” But unlike the detective, James has attempted to hide the core of himself even from himself. Every word he has ever written—in letters, introductions, and fiction—threatens to reveal something, however ephemeral, that the writer does not want revealed. His self-discipline in avoiding such revelations has been painfully effective. His success in keeping his inner thoughts and his reasons for most of the decisions in his life secret has led us to this point where we can only stand outside that tightly banded and seemingly contradicted construct that is Henry James and wonder at his choices.

At any rate, James has chosen to follow Holmes to Chicago and I ask his pardon and yours for jumping ahead a couple of days in the strict chronology of the tale before doubling back to earlier events.

On their second day in Chicago, Sherlock Holmes insisted on taking Henry James on a brief morning excursion tour by boat of the new White City of the Columbian Exposition. The small steamship left from a pier in downtown Chicago not far from the hotel where they were staying. While never stopping at the Exposition and carefully avoiding the huge pier with its automated people-mover still under construction and extending far out into the lake from the World’s Fair site, the tour gave gawkers a ninety minute glimpse of the Exposition structures from Lake Michigan.

“I’m not sure of the purpose of this outing,” James said as he stood near Holmes at the starboard railing of the noisy little tour boat. The modern, three-decked steamship with rows of seats on each of its roofed levels could safely carry about 300 people—the ship was named Columbus and would be a ferry to the Exposition after the official opening on May 1, coming and going every hour to carry new revelers to the Exposition grounds and exhausted fairgoers back to their downtown hotels—but today there were about fifty people aboard to take the short scenic cruise down to Jackson Park, and with the exception of James and the almost always impassive Holmes, all aboard seemed profoundly excited about the simple act of glimpsing some unfinished buildings.

“I’m showing you the future,” said Holmes.

There had been a haze along the lakeshore when the tour boat left the downtown Chicago pier but now, as they approached the Jackson Park area which held the Fair, the haze lifted and the sunlight took on an almost personal presence, warming the tourists and illuminating everything along the shoreline as if a huge searchlight had been trained on it. James knew that, technically, Jackson Park had been a southern extension of Chicago proper—away from the shore, 63rd Street had boasted a few shops and homes already—but this square mile of lakefront now housing the Exposition had been the worst sort of swampy, sandy, dead, and desiccated place, unwanted even by the land speculators who’d hurled the boundaries of Chicago further and further out onto the prairie following the deliberate extensions of the city’s railroad system miles beyond the edges of the existing Chicago.

America’s newspapers, for almost two years, had enjoyed telling the tale of how the famous eastern architects—the best in the nation—chosen by the Exposition czar Daniel Hudson Burnham, had been horrified to learn that under a foot of black soil all throughout the swampy islands of this Jackson Park site, construction diggers would encounter only more unsettling sand and super-saturated soil. Burnham had been asking these famous architects to design what would, for the duration of the Exposition, be the largest structures in North America (and, when Mr. Ferris’s Wheel would be completed in June, the tallest) on mud—quicksand, really—rather than on the bedrock these architects were so used to in New York and elsewhere in the East.

It took about an hour for carriages to travel from downtown Chicago to the Fair site in Jackson Park, less time for the many yellow rail-cars—called “cattle cars” by the Exposition-savvy Chicagoans—that had been laid on to take the special spur line south straight to Jackson Park and the gates of the Fair. When speculators had refused to rent or sell airspace over the avenues leading south to the Fair for less than 100% profit for themselves, the railroad execs had designed the elevated special rail line to the Fair with its constant stream of yellow cars tailored to fit down the narrow north-south alleys where no air-space needed to be purchased.

It took the Columbus tour boat about twenty-five minutes to reach the Fair site in Jackson Park.

“Good heavens,” said James.

In almost three decades of living and traveling abroad, James had seen enough architectural wonders that most of the new structures that Americans seemed so proud of seemed small or ugly or far too utilitarian in comparison to the millenniums of beauty he’d seen in Europe. But the White City was something totally new to him. For a moment he could only grip the rail and gawk.

“My heavens,” he said again after a breathless moment.

What had been swampland had been transformed into more than a square mile of white stone walks, countless white buildings of immense and staggering size, soaring sculptures, giant domes, gracefully arching bridges, green lawns, a forested island, and fields of flowers.

The daylight on the white buildings seemed to make the White City incandescent. James found himself squinting. Downtown Chicago was a relatively new city—most of the buildings had been built since the terrible 1871 fire—but now the author realized that it was a dark, dirty, Black City compared to the vision before him. In Chicago itself, dark brick buildings grew ever taller to block the light from reaching the shorter buildings and sidewalks all around them. The cavernous streets were made even darker by the tracks for the elevated trains running overhead. Except for the rare buildings facing Lake Michigan, Chicago was a box-canyon city of darkness, dirt, noise, and grime. James knew that his beloved London was equally dirty—or more so—but at least it had the good grace to hide its filth in the thick, dangerous coal fogs a good part of the year.

Quiet until now, Holmes suddenly started playing the part of tour guide.

“There are fourteen of those so-called Great Buildings in the White City. The huge one we’re approaching now is called the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building and encloses one point three million square feet of space. The roof itself is a clear span some three hundred sixty-eight feet long and two hundred and six feet high. It alone had thirteen acres of surface to paint. Besides the Great Buildings, there are two hundred more buildings in the White City, including one representing each of the forty-seven states in the Union plus all territories.”

James smiled, amused at having his own tour guide with a British accent. Some were edging closer along the railing to hear what Holmes was saying.

“When President Cleveland turns on the switch on the first of May,” continued Holmes, either not noticing or simply ignoring the other listeners, “the White City’s dynamos will provide three times the total amount of electric power available in Chicago and more than ten times that provided for the eighteen eighty-nine Paris Exposition. The White City has more than a hundred and twenty thousand incandescent lights, and seven thousand arc lights to illuminate its boulevards, grounds, pathways, and fountains. There will be very few if any dark corners in the White City and the designers have hired their own police force—the two thousand members of the Columbian Guards—not only to apprehend those who have committed crimes or disturbed the civic peace but to stop those crimes before they occur. No other city in Europe or America has what I consider so enlightened a law-enforcement policy.”

“What’s the huge but ugly and unfinished thing there, some distance north and a bit west of the big Manufactures Building?” asked James, gesturing with his walking stick. “It looks as if they are building the hull for Noah’s Ark.”

“That’s to be the White City’s answer to the Eiffel Tower that was such a hit at the Paris Exposition,” said Holmes. “A certain Mr. Ferris is building a giant Wheel that theoretically will carry up to forty people in each of its thirty-six railcar-sized viewing cabins. The passengers will ascend some two hundred sixty-four feet into the air at the height of each revolution, giving—Mr. Ferris and the White City designers promise—an amazing view of Lake Michigan, the White City including the Midway Plaisance with all of its other diversions, and the Chicago skyline. What you see there is only the framework of the bottom half of the huge Wheel. They’ll soon be bringing in and mounting an axle that I’m told is the heaviest piece of steel ever constructed on this continent. The axle shaft will be some forty-five feet long and will weigh forty-six tons and will have to be strong enough to bear a burden of the Wheel’s own steel, carriages, and people that will amount to six times the weight of some cantilever bridge across the Ohio River at Cincinnati that you Americans seem so proud of. The White City people and Mr. Ferris keep promising that the great Wheel will be finished and carrying passengers by the middle of the summer, if not earlier.”

“Where did you get all this information, Holmes?” said James. “All these facts and figures don’t sound like you.”

Holmes turned his back on the White City, leaned back against the railing, and smiled. “It’s true that I’m often arithmetically challenged, as my brother Mycroft has pointed out on far too many occasions. But I had a private tour yesterday while you were in the hotel talking to the ailing Mr. Clemens and even a dullard can remember certain facts for a short period of time. It’s how one passes through Cambridge or Oxford with Honors, as I’m sure you know.”

James watched the White City as the Columbus made a wide, cautious arc around the 2,500-foot-long pier extending into Lake Michigan, its surface covered with workers and carts as the linear and then circular Movable Sidewalk took its final shape down the center of the wide pier.

“It will cost ten cents to ride on the Sidewalk the length of the pier where the steamers will drop you the half-mile to the entrance of the Exposition,” said Holmes without turning around to look at it. “My guess is that most first-time visitors will try it just for the novelty.”

James marveled at the tidy lagoons and carefully groomed streams that ran through the entire White City. Someone had turned a muck-ridden swamp into a cleaner, wider, airier version of James’s beloved Venice.

“All in twenty-one months,” said James as if reading the author’s mind. “Where then will President Cleveland be doing his opening speech and switch-turning?”

Holmes turned and pointed with his own stick. “Do you see through the pillars or the Peristyle to that dome rising at the far end of the Lagoon—right in line with that canvas-shrouded tall pedestal that will be revealed as Saint-Gaudens’s huge Statue of the Republic? Yes, the one with the four pavilions, one at each corner. That is the Administration Building where the president and other dignitaries will speak. They will be facing this way—east, toward the Lake and the statue—and one assumes that all the concourses will be flooded with excited American humanity, all the way back to the Peristyle gates.”

Holmes handed James a small, folding telescope. The author put the object to his eye, brought the dome into focus, and said, “Are those angels on the upper promenade of that Administration Building . . . right below the dome?”

“Eight groupings of angels, actually,” said Holmes. “All trumpeting the victory of Peace, although I fear they may be a bit overly optimistic about that reality. Besides hundreds of incandescent lights outlining the upper reaches and dome of the Administration Building at night, that upper promenade you’re looking at is ringed with those huge gas torches designed to illuminate the golden dome.”

“Good heavens,” said James, turning his telescopic gaze on the myriad of what looked like huge marble palaces, each festooned with its own multitude of statuary, pinnacles, towers, arches, entablatures, and wildly decorated friezes. “I’m surprised that the denizens of Chicago won’t wish to move into the White City once the Exposition is over,” he said softly.

“They’d be out of a home after a winter or two, or even after a few months of strong Chicago rainstorms,” said Holmes.

James lowered the telescope. “What do you mean?”

“While there’s plenty of steel and iron—more than eighteen thousand tons of those metals in the Great Buildings alone, I’m told—not to mention wood, most of what looks like white marble to you is actually made of staff.”

“Staff?”

“That’s what it’s called,” said Holmes. “Evidently it’s an exotic composition of plaster, cement, and hemp—or some similar fibrous material—that was sort of painted on or sprayed on to look like permanent stone. All of the Great Buildings, most of the State Buildings, and a vast majority of the statuary and bas relief you see is made of staff . . . in its semi-liquid form a very plastic material, I understand. And lighter than wood. Still, they used more than thirty thousand tons of the stuff to create most of the White City’s structures.”

“Not meant to be permanent?” asked James with a strange pang of disappointment. He found himself, against all reason and odds, taking pride in what his fellow Americans had created in so short a time.

“No,” said Holmes, “although if painted regularly, it might last several years. Left to the elements, all those amazing structures you’re admiring are going to melt and rot like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake in a year or less.”

James handed back the telescope, which Holmes folded and set in his large outer pocket. The Columbus made a wide easterly arc and headed back along the shoreline toward the Black City. He was thinking that no nation was better at creating metaphors for itself than America; in this case, the vision of a beautiful, sane, safe, marble future that is all dream and no marble to sustain it.

“Well,” said James, still disappointed that his American Venice turned out to be so much marzipan, “I guess the future of the White City is not our problem.”

“No,” agreed Holmes. “One way or the other, all our problems will be over by the end of May first.”

TWO Monday, April 10, 11:20 a.m.

Three days before James’s boat tour to the White City and the day after he’d left his friends in Washington, the author stood at the family cemetery plot in Cambridge. He’d last visited this spot a little more than a decade earlier when he’d rushed to America to be by his dying father’s side only to learn when his feet touched the Boston pier that his father had died an hour earlier. On the day of New Year’s Eve 1882, James had walked alone up the snowy hillside to his father’s grave that had been filled in with the frozen earth only ten days earlier. William, unable to return from Europe in time, had sent a most personal letter to his father but the letter, like Henry, had arrived after the awful fact of death. It had been a very cold day—although with a clear Massachusetts winter sky—and James remembered both the ghost-smoke of his breath in the air as he read the long letter and the growing numbness in his freezing toes. William’s long letter had begun “Darling old Father” and had passed through several pages of metaphysical speculation that seemed to Henry much like the continuation of debates and outright arguments William had been having with their father for decades. The letter had ended with “Good-night, my sacred old Father. If I don’t see you again—Farewell!! a blessed farewell!” James was sure he had not wept that day a decade earlier because, if he had, the tears would have frozen to his cheeks.

This April day was the antithesis of the last time he was here. In the winter then he’d been able to see the whiteness of a distant field beyond the Charles River, but now leaves blocked most of that view and as they shifted in the warm April breeze, James caught glimpses of homes and shops that hadn’t been there in 1882.

A year earlier, when William was in Italy, he’d had a marble urn engraved for sister Alice’s ashes. Henry read the words that William had chosen:

ed essa da martiro

e da essilio venne a questa pace

James had recognized the passage at once—from the Tenth Book of the Paradiso in the Divine Comedy—and his translation from the Italian was roughly—“and from martyrdom and banishment it came unto this peace.” It seemed appropriate for Alice’s pain-filled and largely bedridden life. She had indeed embraced death as an escape for the final decades of her life, although James knew—better than anyone else in the family—that the pain and death-welcoming was, until very near the end, leavened by Alice’s mischievous sense of humor and penchant for parody. When William had ordered her diary published, just for the family members, without asking Henry’s opinion, Henry had been shocked by the names named and ridiculed. He would have edited the diary severely to avoid such insults to the living (and some recent dead), but perhaps older brother William was right . . . perhaps Alice defied editing.

In one hand James held the elegant snuffbox containing the small amount of his sister’s ashes he’d pilfered after the cremation in England, while in the other hand he held the small gardening trowel he’d purchased in a hardware store not far from their old home on Bolton Street. But James had been as good as his vow not to go look at the now empty-of-family Bolton Street home, or to walk past the impressive home of William and his Alice—Alice the wife and mother—on the corner at 95 Irving Street here in Cambridge.

James felt like he’d failed his sister. His plan had been honorable enough—to have one of the brothers (himself, as it had to be) rather than Miss Katharine Loring help spread Alice’s ashes, but spread them somewhere Alice had been truly happy. James had simply failed to find such a spot—at least one where the happiness hadn’t been dependent upon his sister’s Boston Marriage to Miss Loring, such as at the two’s Newport home. James knew that he was being foolish and selfish with this after-the-fact jealousy of Katharine Loring. He’d never felt that way while Alice was alive—he’d simply been happy that someone could bring a smile to his sister’s face or coax a laugh out of her—but since sister Alice’s death and Miss Loring’s monopoly in bringing the ashes back here to this sacred spot, the Jameses’ burial ground, the jealousy and sense of stubbornness about finding a spot for these ashes had grown rather than diminished.

But in the end he had surrendered. There had always been a certain unique oneness about his sister Alice James, and her ashes should be together . . . or at least in close proximity. James wasn’t about to try to pry open the sealed marble urn.

Making certain that no one was watching him, James knelt and dug a small grave for the snuffbox. The jade and porcelain box had been given to James as a gift in the late 1870’s by Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton, a friend of Henry James, Sr. His father had described Houghton as energetic and fun-filled—Henry Adams back then had told young James that Houghton was “the first wit of London and the maker of men . . . a great many men”, but the lord was 68 or 69 when Henry, Jr., finally met him and was given to using elaborate breakfasts and dinners to “capture” famous artists and writers as if they were so many butterflies.

The ivory snuffbox, for which James had no use save to own it as an object of art, was of the finest Delft porcelain interset with tiny and delicately carved androgynous human figures which, in their flowing and blowing robes, seemed to be saints or cherubs descended from some 17th Century painting. There was something spiritual in this little box and it was made infinitely more so now by holding his beloved sister’s ashes.

As James set the little snuffbox into the small but deep little hole and began troweling dirt back into place, he recalled an early dinner he’d had with Lord Houghton where the fellow diners had included Tennyson, Gladstone, and Dr. Heinrich Schliemann, the fellow who had found and excavated Troy.

Finished with his own excavation and filling-in, Henry stood—feeling the sudden pang of pain in his always-aching back—and brushed off his trousers at the knees. He realized that he should say a little prayer, but there was no prayer in his heart or mind at the moment. He’d already said his good-byes to Alice—she was the only member of the family whose deathbed and long, difficult dying he’d actually attended. He took one last glance at the urn to fulfill any ceremony required.

ed essa da martiro

e da essilio venne a questa pace

In the hansom cab he’d kept waiting for him in the cemetery, James knew that he’d have to decide what he was going to do. There was only one sane and sensible course of action: the train for New York, for which he had a first class ticket, left from Boston’s old central station in one hour. He’d made arrangements with the German steamship company to go aboard the Spree with all his baggage this very evening, as soon as he arrived in New York. He would have an excellent dinner and a good night’s sleep in his first-class cabin aboard the elegant ocean liner and the Spree would depart for Southampton (then London by rail, then home!) in the morning. James would not even have to get dressed to go to the deck to watch the departure since no one was seeing him off; he’d simply sleep late and enjoy breakfasting in his cabin.

But there was the double issue of that damned telegram from Holmes—ordering him to meet the detective on Beacon Hill this afternoon, long after his train had departed, Holmes arrogantly moving him around as if he were a chess piece with no mind of his own—and, more importantly, James’s news for Holmes about Professor Moriarty and the astounding meeting of thugs and anarchists that James had risked his life to witness. That was hardly something that James could put in a letter—even if he knew where in damnation Sherlock Holmes was at any given time—much less in a telegram.

Well, he’d have to decide soon. The hansom driver was showing signs of irritation and so was his horse.

Logically, there was only one choice he could make. He had to get out of this nightmare. He had to get to the train station, get on that train to New York, have his luggage and himself transferred to the ship, and settle into his stateroom on the Spree. Every bit of logic and reason screamed to James that it was time to return to his flat at De Vere Gardens and get back to work on the play that was going to make him a fortune.

“Driver,” he called. “To the central railway station. And quickly.”

THREE Monday, April 10, 3:38 p.m.

Holmes ostentatiously checked his watch when the hansom—which had been moving almost at a gallop—came to a stop and a red-faced Henry James stepped out.

“You’re almost eight minutes tardy, James,” said Holmes. “I was about to give up on you and go on about my business.”

James had paid the driver and now his face grew even redder. “Don’t you dare chide me for being late for this rendezvous! First of all, you insult me in a public telegram telling me to come if it’s convenient or even if it is not convenient. That may have been a misfired attempt at humor, Mr. Holmes, but it was not something a gentleman would do when communicating via public telegraphy with another gentleman. And as for the time . . . first of all, you very well remember that I lost my valuable watch when you were dragging me through Rock Creek Cemetery and less speakable places at midnight, so I’ve had to depend upon public timepieces, which are notoriously unreliable in America. And finally, I had to rush to the central Boston railway station to get my luggage and accompany it through heavy traffic to this new North Union Station which isn’t really north at all, but far west of the city center. Then I had to store my luggage at the new station, which is deucedly crowded this time of day, and then fight Bostonians, who are only half a step up on the Darwinian scale from South Seas cannibals when it comes to refusing to learn how to queue, for a hansom cab to bring me back here. And I shan’t bother to tell you what important plans of my own that this has ruined for me since . . .”

James stopped because Holmes was openly smiling at him, which made James all the more angry and red-faced.

“Such as missing the sailing of the Spree tomorrow evening?” said Holmes.

“How do you . . . how could you know . . . where did you . . .” spluttered James.

“Alas,” said Holmes, “even our beloved telegraphy, whether sending communications between gentlemen or just to book a ship’s passage, is not as private as it should be. There remain papers and copies of papers, easily accessible to the dedicated voyeur—especially if that dedicated voyeur enters the telegraph office only a moment after the cable-sender has departed. And it is helpful if one can read words upside down, a small trick which I mastered as a child.”

James folded his arms across his chest above the curve of his significant belly while attempting to hold in the angry words and sentences that flowed into his mind.

The cab hadn’t left and Holmes called to the driver, “Wait here another fifteen minutes or so, my dear man.” He handed up some folded currency; the cabbie nodded, touched the brim of his hat, and pulled the hansom to the curb on the opposite side of the street.

“You think this business here will take only fifteen minutes?” hissed James in low tones so the driver would not hear. “I missed my train and ship to England for something that will take only fifteen minutes?”

“Of course not,” said Holmes. “As promised, we leave for Chicago in”—he checked his watch again—“a little under ninety minutes. But our immediate problem, as you can see, is that there is no four hundred twenty-six and a half address here . . . the houses on this side of the street go straight from four-twenty-six to four-twenty-eight.”

James sighed, obviously wondering at the denseness of a man whom too many people had called a “genius”.

“The custom here on this part of Beacon Hill is to have a little room on the upper floor of a carriage house,” said James. “Those are the ‘halves’ that the postal service delivers to.”

“Aha!” said Holmes as if he’d been the one to come up with this widely known fact. “There’s a carriage house or garage down this driveway at four-twenty-six,” he said as he started walking down the paved lane.

James caught the tall detective by the sleeve. “The protocol is to approach the carriage-house apartments by walking down the alley. We’ll need to go down this way and turn left to find the alley entrance.”

“What an absurd protocol,” said Holmes, following reluctantly. “The carriage house is visible right there.” He flung out his left arm although they’d already lost sight of the carriage house at the end of the sloping driveway.

As they turned left on another street—all these streets and many of these homes were familiar to James from both his childhood and his visits home to Bolton Street as an adult—the writer grasped Holmes’s upper arm and said, “I have urgent information for you, Holmes. Seriously urgent. Far more important than checking on this address, which shall almost certainly be a dead end. Let me tell you how two days ago I . . .”

Holmes gently removed the author’s hand from his arm and said softly, “I have no doubt that you do have something important to tell me, James. But one thing at a time, old boy. We shall speak to whomever lives at this address and then be on our way to North Station and you may tell me whatever you have to say more at your . . . let’s say . . . leisure.”

James almost turned around and left then. His face grew as red as it had been when he’d arrived and he glared at the side of Holmes’s head. He promised himself that he wouldn’t say a single word about anything until Holmes asked him for it. So what if he, Henry James, knew the details for Professor Moriarty’s plans for multiple assassinations and an anarchist and mob uprising set for May first? If Holmes was going to continue acting this way, Henry James would be damned if he’d share such vital intelligence with the detective.

“Who lives in these one-half numbered carriage-house apartments?” Holmes asked as if that were the most important thing for him to learn that day. “The servants?”

James considered not answering, but his cultivated nature demanded he answer a simple question. “No. Just as in England, if a family can afford servants, they live in the main house, up on the top floor under the eaves usually. These cottages have a tradition of being rented at very low prices to white people—cultivated people—whose jobs or vocations have steeped them in poverty. Local teachers, for instance, or the occasional college student, although the latter is often considered too volatile for these quiet neighborhoods . . . unless vouched for by multiple letters of reference, of course.”

“Of course,” said Holmes. He’d found the stairway up to the room or rooms over the still-active carriage house—active if the strong scent of manure from the barn level was any indicator—and took the steps upward two at a time in his eager anticipation.

After several knocks, giving James time to climb the steps more slowly and stand puffing a bit on the landing outside the door, a small, gray-haired lady with cataracts clouding her right eye cautiously opened the door.

Holmes removed his top hat. “Good afternoon, madam. My name is Sherlock Holmes and this is my associate Dr. . . . excuse me . . . Mr. James. We’ve come because I’m an old friend of Miss Irene Adler, the lady to whom you forward the letters sent here to a certain Miss Rebecca Lorne Baxter, and I wish to find her most recent address.”

“What did you say your name was?” asked the old lady.

“Ah . . . Mr. Sherlock Holmes, madam,” he said more slowly. “And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

The woman with the white hair, pale white skin, and white cataract paused before saying, “Mrs. Gaddis.”

“Were you, by any chance, a teacher for many years, Mrs. Gaddis?” asked Holmes. “Your diction suggests you were.”

“I taught for twenty-eight years before retiring with commendations and honors and I don’t receive a decent enough pension to afford these tiny two rooms over a smelly stable,” said Mrs. Gaddis. “But your name was never mentioned to me by the lady who pays me five dollars a month to forward her mail, so I’m afraid I must close the door, Mr. Holmes.”

As gently as he could, Holmes blocked the door from closing with his left foot and a seemingly casual hand set flat on the windowless door. “She must have left some instructions for my arrival,” he said quickly. “I know how playful Miss Adler is. Some puzzle or question by which I could identify myself and receive her address from you.”

Mrs. Gaddis squinted with her one good eye. “The lady who pays me for passing along her mail—and I shan’t say where that final destination for her mail is nor even if it’s under a different name than the Mrs. Lorne-Baxter you mentioned—did say that someday an Englishman with a Yorkshire accent might come knocking at my door, and if he did, I should put a question to him to verify his identity.”

Holmes had been holding his silky top hat in his hand but now he almost set it atop his greased-back hair and tipped it symbolically. “I am that London gentleman she designated,” he said happily, trying to jolly the dour Mrs. Gaddis into greater cooperation. “Perhaps you can tell by my English accent.”

“Accents can be put on like hats or socks,” said Mrs. Gaddis, still frowning. “But I shall ask you the question my benefactress told to me . . . if I can remember it properly.”

James almost smiled as Holmes’s face showed a quick glimpse of panic at this being a dead end in his quest to find Irene Adler, all because of an elderly former-teacher’s faulty memory.

But age obviously hadn’t clouded her mind as thoroughly as her vision. “Here’s the question I’m to put to the Englishman caller,” said Mrs. Gaddis, pulling it from her memory as if taking an aging sheet of parchment down from some high shelf. “What were my last words to him at our last brief meeting?”

Holmes laughed. “Her last words to me were—‘Good-night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes’,” he said. “But I didn’t recognize her when she said it because my friend Dr. Watson and I were in the act of unlocking the door of our home on Baker Street when this thin young lad, short hair slicked back under a derby and wearing an oversized ulster with the collar turned up, said it in passing. Miss Adler was an actress and enjoys . . . or at least enjoyed . . . disguises almost as much as I do.”

“The words were correct,” said Mrs. Gaddis, still frowning. “You wait here and I’ll find the copy I made out of her forwarded mail address.”

Mrs. Gaddis was back in less than half a minute—James peered past Holmes into her small but tidy, almost cozy, apartment—and she handed Holmes the note card and said, “I believe that completes our conversation, Mr. Holmes.”

The detective held up a finger in protest. “Not at all,” he said happily. “Common decency, to say nothing of courtesy, compels me to pay you a very little something as mere metaphor for my sincere appreciation of the service you have been carrying out for my friend, Miss Adler, as well as for your help to me in finding that old friend.”

Mrs. Gaddis shook her head, held up a blocking hand, and was about to say no when Holmes handed her a $20 bill and released it so she had to grasp it. Whatever she was going to say, she didn’t.

“Teachers are the most underappreciated and least recompensed of all our esteemed professional classes,” Holmes said quickly, ignoring Mrs. Gaddis’s half-hearted attempts to hand the bill back to him. This time he did tip his hat and secure it firmly on his head before clattering down the steps. James nodded and smiled his own faux-appreciation before following Holmes.

While riding to North Station, James asked to see the address the retired teacher had given Holmes. It was, he recognized, very near if not quite on Dupont Circle in Washington.

“So she never left Washington after all,” murmured the author. “I’m quite sure that Henry Adams and John Hay have believed her gone all these years.”

“It’s Adams that gave me this Beacon Hill mail address,” said Holmes. “And she’s been responding from there for years. Obviously Irene Adler posts the return letter from Washington with an envelope included with her handwriting and the Beacon Hill return address, and Mrs. Gaddis dutifully transfers the letter and posts it from Boston. For five dollars per month help on her rent.”

“You’re certain that Rebecca Lorne and Irene Adler are . . . were . . . the same person?” said James.

“Absolutely certain. If I hadn’t been before, the ‘identifying question’ of her last words to me that night in London—I believe Watson wrote that case up under the title ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, a nonsensical title because he felt that he had to hide the identity of the English Royal Personage.”

“I’m only surprised that your friend Dr. Watson did not have the king exit, pursued by a bear,” said James.

Holmes looked at James blankly for a few seconds and then exploded in that high, almost-cawing, full laughter that James had heard only a few times. Holmes’s sharp barks of laughter always startled James.

“Anyway, it was, I believe, the first telling of my cases . . . the first short story about the Sherlock Holmes character, I should say . . . that appeared in The Strand Magazine.”

James had read that story the previous week. It had been in Clara Hay’s collection of Holmes’s stories. Or Arthur Conan Doyle stories . . . James was not sure which description applied to reality, if any reality there was.

“I always suspected that Irene Adler had remained in Washington,” Holmes was saying.

“Why?”

Holmes reminded James of the bouquet of white violets that appeared as if by magic on Clover Adams’s grave every December 6.

“But you’re not rushing to Washington to confront her,” said James. They were approaching Union Station here in the western reaches of Boston.

“No,” said Holmes. “We have tickets for Chicago and much to do there. Besides, the mailing address near Dupont Circle will not be Irene Adler’s address. Only another dead end . . . and this one quite deadly.”

James nodded and made an almost swimming-motion in the air, moving that finished discussion aside.

“May I now tell you the details of what I discovered in Washington this past Saturday?” said James. “I assure you it’s of the utmost importance.”

“We’re at the station already and we have to meet someone here,” said Holmes. “Why don’t you tell me when we get to our first-class carriage? It will just be the three of us.”

“Three of us?” repeated James.

FOUR Monday, April 10, 4:10 p.m.

To Henry James, the new North railway station was Boston’s celebration of the modern age. The architecture was noble and the layout oozed common sense: rather than wait outside in the cold and damp under a gigantic open shed roof as in London’s great and small stations, here one went down a ramp inside the sprawling structure, and the train came in to you on a warm and well-ventilated lower level.

When they’d arrived, James had said, “I’ll have to go claim my bags for transfer,” but Holmes had taken the handful of baggage check tickets and said, “I’ll find some expert help in getting that done for us” and had disappeared for only a moment into the Grand Lobby crowd before returning.

“Are you sure . . .” began James. His continuing nightmare was having his steamer trunk or other pieces of his baggage, including the portmanteau filled with beginnings of his stories and the long, thrice-bescribbled scripts for his current and future plays, disappear during one of these American railway adventures. How much happier he would have been, he realized, if both he and his luggage were safely aboard the good ship Spree and safely out of sight of land by now.

Holmes led the way through the mob and down the graceful ramps to where signs announced that their train to Chicago would be leaving in fifteen minutes.

“’Ere you are, Mr. ’olmes, Mr. James, sir,” piped up an unmistakably cockney voice.

James was startled at the sight of a short, rail-thin lad whose unselfconscious grin showed where adult teeth had grown in only to be knocked out. The boy was obviously of that group known in London as “street Arabs” since before Charles Dickens’s day. Yet he was dressed well in English spring tweed suit with tailored jacket and waistcoat, proper knicker trousers and quality wool knee socks, and well-polished quality London-made shoes. Even his cap, which he’d swept off when he’d presented Holmes and James with the baggage cart piled high with their luggage, was new and well-made, probably in Scotland.

“Give the tickets to that porter two coaches down and he’ll arrange our luggage properly,” directed Holmes. “Bring back to our compartment Mr. James’s portmanteau—it has his initials on it—and my briefcase and small tan carrying case.”

“Right you are, guv’ner,” said the boy and disappeared in the gathering crowd, pulling the massive baggage cart behind him.

“You trust that strange child?” asked James.

Holmes gave him a strange half-smile. “More than you can know, James,” he said softly. “More than you can know.”

The detective went to a nearby stand to purchase some newspapers and magazines for the trip, so they hadn’t yet boarded when the boy returned, handing James his portmanteau and Holmes two well-traveled pieces of personal luggage along with a new set of baggage-check slips. The boy stared straight at the author with a look that fell just short of insolence but certainly was not appropriately deferential.

“Nice to see you again, Mr. James,” said the boy. James heard the “Misteh Jimes” and could almost name the streets within hearing distance of the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church where this young cockney had eked out his living in London.

James thought of all the porters and messengers they’d met or used on this trip, but none matched up with this strangely well-dressed lad—and he was sure he’d never seen the boy before this trip—so he said coolly, “I don’t believe we’ve ever met, young man.”

Again that too-wide, unselfconscious, missing-toothed smile. “But you saw me and I saw you a-seeing me, sir.”

James smiled but shook his head. “I don’t believe so.”

The boarding area had emptied out as most of the rushing passengers up near the first-class cars had already gone aboard to claim their cabins. James and the boy were about ten or twelve feet apart when the youngster walked quickly toward the writer—so quickly and with such a sense of confidence bordering on aggression that James found himself gripping his walking stick with both hands—but the boy stopped only a pace or two in front of James, threw both arms in the air as if he were celebrating something, and, almost faster than the eye could follow, did two arching back handsprings—landing on his hands, flipping even higher to come down on his feet again, and not pausing even an instant there before performing a complete somersault in mid-air, his body descending parallel to the concrete boarding platform in the fraction of a second before Holmes grabbed the spread legs—now wrapped securely around Holmes’s middle—and held the boy poised there horizontally with nothing but Holmes’s powerful fingers and hands keeping him up.

Then Holmes gave a sort of juggler’s cry, the boy put his palms together, arms straight above him as if he were diving into water rather than onto an unyielding concrete platform or iron tracks, and in a display of strength almost beyond James’s comprehension, Holmes gripped the rigid boy’s calves and extended the diver’s form higher than the detective’s or James’s shoulders, then giving another cry—James realized dully that it was one acrobat’s communication with another—he tossed the boy spinning out over the platform, caught him by the ankles, and held the lad there vertically, the boy’s praying hands almost touching the platform.

Then Holmes went to one knee, the boy used that knee as a diving board, and leaped forward in a perfect head-first arc, hugging his knees as he turned in the air, to land lightly on his feet in front of James, arms still over his head.

The movements had jogged James’s memory.

“Good God . . . the two of you . . . the chimney sweeps on the Camerons’ rooftop . . .” gasped James.

Holmes gave one of his quick twitches of a smile.

“You had a Mohawk strip of orange hair,” accused James, pointing at Holmes. “And you, spikes of green hair,” he said to the boy.

“It’s nice to be ’preciated, guv’ner,” grinned the lad.

James was still blinking like a sun-blinded lizard. He turned toward Holmes again. “Why the ‘Flying Vernettis’?”

“My grandmother on my mother’s side was a Vernet,” said Holmes, giving the name its proper French pronunciation. “The Vernets were artists. I felt that the Flying Vernettis sounded suitably acrobatic.”

“To what possible purpose?” cried James. “All that week, Hay and others told me, the two acrobatic chimney sweeps had done the Cabot Lodges’ home, Don Cameron’s where I saw you perform, even Hay’s house where you’d stayed . . .”

“I needed certain documents,” Holmes said coolly. “Old letters, to be precise, although at least one lady’s diary was included. It’s so nice, after the sweeps have laid down newspapers on every surface in m’lady’s boudoir to keep the soot from covering everything, they lock the door to the room and tell servants to stay clear.”

“Those bedroom fireplaces are tiny things . . .” began James.

“Mr. Henry James,” said Holmes stepping forward, “I take great pleasure in introducing you to Wiggins Two.”

James remembered the telegram from Holmes’s brother Mycroft he’d sneakily read—“Wiggins Two arrived safely in New York today.”

“What happened to Wiggins One?” he heard himself asking.

“Oh, he grew up to where he was of no further use to me,” said Holmes.

“Also,” laughed Wiggins Two, “my brother’s in the clink.”

“For what crime?” asked James.

“Ah . . . the Holy Trinity, sir,” said Wiggins Two. “Breakin’, enterin’, and resistin’ arrest. ’E’ll be there a few years, sir.”

“Wiggins Two also answers to the name Moth,” said Holmes. “Sometimes pronounced in the old English form that rhymes with ‘mote’.”

“Since a mere mote but a mighty mote I am indeed, Misteh Jimes,” said the boy.

A conductor stepped down and spoke through a cloud of steam. “It is time to board, gentlemen.”

It turned out that the Wiggins Two Moth had his own first-class bedroom right next to the one shared by Holmes and James, but the boy stayed in their compartment until the train had left the Boston suburbs behind and they were flashing past small white farms, stone walls, and green pastures.

“Well, I guess I’ll go check on what the Yanks call a club car and round me up a pint,” Wiggins Two said, sliding open the compartment door.

“They won’t sell alcohol to a boy,” said James.

“Oh, no, sir,” agreed the Moth, clinking coins together in his pocket. “But they understand that I’m just fetchin’ a couple of glasses for me two guardians, kindly gentlemen that they are.”

Then they were alone and Holmes leaned forward and spoke to James where he sat dazed on the bench opposite. “You had something private and important to tell me, James.”

Caught off guard, James needed a minute to arrange the events of the previous weekend in succinct but complete form, but then the words came rolling out of him.

“You actually saw Professor Moriarty on the street and followed him?” interrupted Holmes with a tone of amazement.

“Yes, that’s what I’ve been telling you!”

“How did you know it was Moriarty?”

“Because I looked at his photograph in the mathematics-physics magazine at the Library of Congress,” spluttered out James. “And he was photographed in Leipzig just last year, eighteen ninety-two, so I knew you’d lied twice—once to the world with your and Dr. Watson’s tale of you and the Professor dying at Reichenbach Falls, and then you lying to me about having only made up Moriarty—created him as a figment of your imagination, were your exact words. Why did you lie to me, Holmes?”

The detective’s cool, gray gaze met the author’s angry, gray glare.

“Anything I’ve said that distorted the truth in some small way was done to protect you from harm, James,” said Holmes.

“ ‘Distorted the truth in some small way’,” repeated James with a dramatic scoffing noise. “I’d say that denying the existence of Professor James Moriarty and his plans for assassinations and widespread anarchy and riots is a bit more than ‘some small way’!”

Holmes only nodded slowly, as if not in full agreement yet on the seriousness of his infraction to honor, trust, friendship . . . and it just made Henry James all the more angry. “Professor Moriarty is a fiend in human form, Holmes! I saw him! I heard him! He was planning and coordinating the deaths of hundreds of people—the unwitting police in a dozen cities, the President and Vice-President of the United States, God knows how many innocent bystanders—as coolly as a businessman might announce a new sales campaign to his staff.”

“That’s rather well put, James,” Holmes said with another twitch of an approving smile. “Well said, indeed.”

James only grunted. He was in no mood to receive Mr. Sherlock Holmes’s approval.

“Continue with your story of Saturday afternoon’s encounter,” said Holmes.

Later, James was surprised to see from Holmes’s watch that it had taken him another half hour to tell the whole story. He was blushing slightly, since the part about concealing himself while the mob members took turns firing shotguns and rifles at the “rat” was more florid and less likely than any fiction he’d ever produced.

James readied himself for a long cross-examination, an interrogation, from the slightly frowning detective, but all Holmes said was, “How did you feel?”

“How did I feel?” James realized that he had almost shouted the words, glanced apprehensively toward the compartment’s closed doors, and moderated his tone. “All that information for you—times of the assassination, plans for mob uprising and anarchists’ murders across the United States, in London and in Europe, and you want to know how I felt?”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “For instance, when you thought they were shooting at you and the shotgun blast shook the entire beam you were hiding on. How did you feel, James?”

The author had to pause a moment. He knew that the question really did not deserve an answer—there were far too many important questions he could and should have answered about the assembly of thugs and Professor Moriarty’s plans—but he also realized that he’d quietly been asking himself the same question for the last two days. How had he felt during this, the most out-of-all-context almost absurdly unreal-feeling event of his lifetime. Frightened? Yes, but that was not the primary sensation.

“Alive,” he said at last. “I felt very much . . . alive.”

Holmes grinned his full grin, patted James’s knee as if the master author were a retriever dog who’d brought back the pheasant unchewed, and said, “That being the case, I think you are going to enjoy the next couple of weeks.”

FIVE Wednesday, April 12, 8:05 a.m.

Holmes arrived in Haymarket Square and immediately spotted Inspector Bonfield standing across the street near the alley. Carriage and cargo traffic was heavy on Desplaines Street as was pedestrian traffic. Holmes waited for a break in the traffic and jogged across the street, accepting the inspector’s eager handshake almost before Holmes had come to a stop.

“It’s very good to see you again, Mr. Holmes,” said Inspector Bonfield.

“And you, Inspector. Congratulations on your various promotions.” Holmes had been here in May and June of 1886, gathering evidence for the trial of the anarchists who’d been behind the Haymarket riot where 8 policemen and 3 civilians had died. Bonfield had been a Captain then but the information he’d brought to the prosecution in the trial of the 8 anarchists had quickly earned him “Inspector” status and the supervision of the Chicago Police Department’s Detective Bureau. Bonfield had also been detached to the Columbian Exposition to train and supervise the 200 or so plainclothes detectives who, among them, knew the face and modus operandi of every pickpocket, thief, and con artist in a seven-state region. The so-called “Columbian Guard”, all decked out in baby-blue uniforms and, on occasion, their red and yellow capes, carried a cute little ornamental sword. Bonfield’s plainclothes boys carried a heavy sap, a pair of brass knuckles, and a loaded pistol in their suit pockets.

“The promotions were aimed poorly,” said Bonfield, who still seemed as quiet, reserved, and competent as Holmes had found him seven years earlier. “All accolades should have gone to you, Mr. Holmes.”

The detective waved that away. “I see you have a statue commemorating that May fourth,” said Holmes. “And a uniformed police officer to guard it.”

Bonfield nodded. “That’s a twenty-four-hour guard, Mr. Holmes. Vandals—either the anarchists or those countless thousands who’ve come to look at the anarchist-killers as social heroes—have beaten the statue apart with sledgehammers, scribbled obscene graffiti on it, painted it green—very disrespectful. So now we keep a man here all day and all night.”

Holmes pulled out his pipe and began tamping in tobacco. Henry James had convinced him, for the sake of his American friends if for no other reason, to use a more expensive and less shockingly aromatic brand of tobacco while he was here in the States.

“You will never guess what is scheduled for Waldheim Cemetery for the day of May fourth,” said Bonfield, showing more anger in his expression than Holmes had ever before seen in that stable younger man.

“Waldheim,” repeated Holmes, puffing his pipe to life and setting away in his trouser pocket—next to the .38-caliber lemon-squeezer pistol—the unique lighter. “That’s where the four hanged anarchists were buried, was it not?”

“It was,” said Bonfield. “Now it’s a shrine to the ‘brave union organizers’ who ambushed my men and me here seven years ago. They’re unveiling a monument to the killers—or martyrs, to the popular press’s point of view—and the monument is said to be taller than this twenty-foot statue memorializing the eight police who died that day. Early estimates suggest that there may be eight thousand or more people turning out in Waldheim Cemetery for the radical ceremony. We wouldn’t get a dozen citizens if we held a memorial service here for the policemen who died.”

“History is a perverse mechanism,” said Holmes between puffs. “It demands the blood of martyrs—real or invented—the way a machine requires oil.”

Inspector Bonfield grunted, checked the brief gap in the traffic, and stepped out onto the street, motioning for Holmes to follow. “This has been paved over by hot top since the riot and trial,” said Bonfield, “but you’ll remember that it was about here”—the Inspector’s polished shoe came down on an unremarkable spot—“that you showed me the egg-shaped indentation in the cedar-block paving of that time, where the heavy bomb had first struck and . . .” Bonfield stepped further out into the street. “It was here where you noticed the smooth, oval crater where the bomb had actually exploded. By lining up the small impact dent with the actual crater—using red string in the model you provided us—we were able to show that the bomb had been thrown from the alley, not from somewhere south of the advancing police as the defense would have had the jury to believe.”

Inspector Bonfield was so immersed in the memory that he failed to notice a large dray wagon with four huge horses bearing down on him. Holmes gathered the police detective by the elbow and moved him safely to the curb opposite the alley.

“The bomb went off right beneath Patrolman Mathias Degan,” continued Bonfield, speaking as if from a mesmeric trance. “Degan was a friend of mine. The shrapnel that killed him was no bigger than your thumbnail, Mr. Holmes. The doctor gave it to me and I have it, in my bureau. But it severed Mathias’s femoral artery and he bled to death, right there on where the cedar paving blocks used to be. And in my arms.”

“We proved that six of the eight policemen who had been shot—rather than those wounded by bomb shrapnel—had been shot at a downward angle,” said Holmes. “Someone firing a rifle from that window up there, next to the alley.” He pointed at the window of the corner shop facing Desplaines Street.

“The prosecution made that case but the jury made nothing of it,” said Inspector Bonfield. “But your evidence, Mr. Holmes, did prove that the carpenter Rudolph Schnaubelt was the man who threw the bomb from that alley right at the cluster of police.”

“Showed it beyond a doubt,” agreed Holmes. “But you’ve never apprehended or arrested him.”

Inspector Bonfield held his hands out. “How can we arrest him if we can’t find him, Mr. Holmes? We’ve tracked down leads saying Schnaubelt was in Pittsburgh, in Santo Domingo, that he’d died in California, that he was begging in the streets of Honduras, that he was living in wealth in Mexico. That socialist rag—the Arbeiter-Zeitung—published a letter reportedly from Schnaubelt and the letter had been postmarked from Christiania, Norway. The man is a phantom, Mr. Holmes.”

“The man—Schnaubelt—has been making a good living as a manufacturer of farm machinery in Buenos Aires,” said Holmes. “He arrived in Argentina a month after the Haymarket Square riot and has lived and prospered there ever since.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this?”

“I cabled all the information—including Schnaubelt’s work and living address—to your major and superintendent of police in early eighteen eighty-seven,” said Holmes. “There was no reply. I sent a second cable with the same information, this time including various aliases Schnaubelt had used. Again . . . I received no response.”

Bonfield had taken off his cap and looked as if he was preparing to rip clumps of his hair out by the roots.

Holmes glanced at his watch and removed his pipe. “It’s getting late, Inspector. You’re my liaison while we follow the carriage route that will carry President Cleveland to the Exposition grounds, and then I am scheduled to receive a quick tour of the White City itself. But we’ll have to trot to get to the Lexington Hotel by their departure time.”

“We’ll let the horse do the trotting,” said Inspector Bonfield. He whistled and a sleek black carriage, driven by a uniformed Chicago P.D. patrolman, glided up. The driver jumped down and opened the carriage door for them.

There were two carriages waiting for Bonfield and Holmes outside the Lexington Hotel at the intersection of 22nd Street and Michigan Avenue. The first was an oversized canopy-covered surrey with three bench-rows of seats facing forward rather than the usual two, plus a fourth bench seat looking backward. It was filled with uniformed police officers.

The second was an open carriage—much more comfortable looking—and the driver was a big man with bright blue eyes and a trim salt-and-pepper beard that looked a bit like that of former President Ulysses S. Grant. Holmes estimated from the man’s hands that he might be around sixty, but there were no wrinkles, save for a few laugh-lines, on his face. He wore a working man’s comfortable corduroy trousers and well-worn boots, but also a rather expensive-looking wool hacking jacket. Most noticeable was the black slouch hat set back on his head as if he wanted the April sun to turn his winter-pale forehead pink.

Inspector Bonfield said, “Mr. Sherlock Holmes, may I have the honor of introducing you to our mayor-elect, Mr. Carter Henry Harrison.”

The handshake was firm without being bruising. “I’m delighted, absolutely delighted, to meet you, Mr. Holmes!” said Harrison.

“Mayor-elect?” asked Holmes.

“I was elected for a fifth term—not sequential, I’m ashamed to say—on April fourth,” said Harrison. “But I don’t officially take office until the twentieth. But Mayor Washburne was busy sulking and cleaning out his office so I jumped at the chance to show you the route we’ll be taking with President Cleveland.”

One of the police officers was walking back to the mayor’s carriage and the mayor said in a very soft voice to Bonfield, “Uh-oh, here comes McClaughry.”

Holmes could see by the badges McClaughry was the Superintendent of the Chicago Police Force. Mayor Harrison introduced him as such and again there was a handshake, this one even more enthusiastic.

“Mr. Holmes, I have been so looking forward to meeting you!” said Chief McClaughry. “When I was warden of the Illinois State Prison at Joliet, I was responsible for creating America’s first full system of bertillonage. You use that system, I believe.”

“To be honest, I know and respect Monsieur Bertillon and have worked with him in Paris, but I’ve found that many of his categories of identifying criminals—bone length, centimeters of forehead, and all that—are rather unworkable. So these days I concentrate almost exclusively on fingerprints.”

“Ahhh,” said Superintendent McClaughry, seeming a bit cast down by Holmes’s lack of enthusiasm toward the full category of bertillonage. “Yes, well we have fingerprint cards, as well. More than five hundred at present. Do you keep your own cards, sir, or depend upon Scotland Yard’s?”

“I’m sorry to say that Scotland Yard has not yet adopted fingerprinting as a universal practice,” said Holmes. “But I have an assistant who visits the prisons and we make our own cards—photograph of the suspect on front, prints of all fingers and the palm on back. I believe I have about three thousand such cards on file.”

Superintendent McClaughry was visibly startled at this information.

“Bob,” said Mayor-elect Harrison, “it’s time to move out. You’re welcome to ride with us and Bonfield can ride with the patrolmen.”

“No, I shall ride with my men,” McClaughry said stiffly. “It was a great, great pleasure, Mr. Holmes, and I do hope we meet again when we have time to discuss Bertillon’s methods and other forensic matters.” A final handshake and the chief of police marched back to his crowded surrey.

“Hop on up here next to me, Mr. Holmes,” said Harrison. “Bonnie, you get in back with Mr. Drummond. I believe you know Drummond, do you not, Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes nodded at the Secret Service director. “Yes. A pleasure to see you here, sir.”

Drummond smiled and returned the nod.

“All right, it’s time,” said the mayor-elect and touched the two horses gently with his whip.

“I presume that President Cleveland will be staying there at the Lexington Hotel,” said Holmes.

“Yep,” said Harrison. “It’s got the largest suite in town. But if it had been me choosing a hotel for the president, I would have picked one on a paved street.”

Holmes had noticed that this stretch of Michigan Avenue was more yellow dirt than pavement.

“Just so it doesn’t rain on Opening Day, we’ll be okay,” said Harrison. “This was the furthest-south high-quality hotel, built just last year, so I suppose it makes sense. It shouldn’t take more than about twenty, twenty-five minutes to get to the Fair going down Michigan Avenue.”

“Too bad Superintendent McClaughry didn’t choose to ride with us,” said Drummond from his place behind the mayor. “We need to discuss C.P.D. security arrangements as well as the Columbian Guard security.”

Harrison chuckled and adjusted the brim of his black slouch hat to keep the sun out of his eyes. “Chief McClaughry is a good man. And a dedicated reformer. He sent me his letter of resignation on the day I was elected.”

“Why?” said Holmes.

Harrison grinned. “All of the things Bob wants to reform—gambling, kickbacks to party officials, drinking, dallying with the ladies of the night—are more or less the things I most enjoy doing.”

“Mayor Harrison has very strong support amongst the working class,” said Inspector Bonfield from behind Sherlock. “Even among the colored folk.”

Holmes decided that this was all the local politics he needed to hear. More than enough, actually. He said, “How many officers in Chicago’s police force, mayor?”

“A little over three thousand,” said Harrison. “We’ll have mounted officers riding along and ahead when the actual procession from the Lexington gets going, but my guess is that a couple hundred thousand folks will be walking and riding behind us. Joining the parade, so to speak.”

“And there are two thousand–some Columbian Guards inside the Fair,” said Sherlock.

“That number of uniformed officers,” said Bonfield. “Plus about two hundred plainclothes detectives under my supervision on the fairgrounds—both in the White City and along the Midway Plaisance where we expect the pickpockets and others to do most of their work.”

“Hand-picked detectives?” asked Holmes.

“Handpicked not just from the C.P.D. but from all over the United States,” said Inspector Bonfield.

“Mr. Drummond, what about your agents?” said Holmes.

Mayor Harrison broke in. “When Mr. Drummond showed up this morning and told me that he was from the Treasury Department, I was sure the jig was up. All my back taxes catching up to me.”

“Someday, Mr. Mayor,” Drummond said softly. “Someday.” To Holmes he said, “I’ll have fifty-five Secret Service agents in place when President Cleveland gets to the Exposition grounds. Eight of them are master marksmen and they’ve been checked out with the newest army sniper rifles. Six are on permanent detail with the president.”

“Tall men, I hope,” said Holmes.

“None under six foot three,” said Drummond. “But, of course, no one can be standing in front of the president when he gives his opening address.”

“How many carriages will be in this procession?” asked Holmes.

Harrison grinned again. “My guess is somewhere between twenty and twenty-five coaches. Mr. Cleveland and his immediate entourage will be in a landau. Very Important Chicagoans keep coming out of the woodwork like cockroaches and they all want to be in President Cleveland’s procession to the Fair. All I know for sure is that I’ll be in the last carriage, whatever number that will be.”

“Why is that?” asked Holmes.

“Because I’m going to get the most applause and happy shouts from the crowd of anyone in the procession,” said Harrison who was obviously just stating a fact rather than bragging. “I wouldn’t want President Cleveland to hear that if I were ahead of him. It might hurt his feelings.”

“Does the landau have a top?” asked Drummond.

“A foldable top,” said Inspector Bonfield. “It’ll be folded back so that everyone, even those in the higher buildings, can see the president. Unless it’s raining, of course.”

“Pray for rain,” Drummond said softly, speaking to himself.

“Oh, Mr. Mayor,” said Bonfield. “Mr. Holmes informed me that he knows the whereabouts of Rudolph Schnaubelt . . . the Haymarket Square bomb-thrower.”

“You don’t have to tell me who Rudolph Schnaubelt is, goddamnit,” snarled Harrison. “I’ve had enough nightmares about the sonofabitch. Where do you think he is, Mr. Holmes?”

“I know exactly where he is,” said Holmes and gave the mayor Schnaubelt’s farm business and personal addresses in Buenos Aires.

“Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” said Harrison. “Bonnie, can’t you send some of your boys down there to Buenos Aires to get that murdering reptile?”

“We have no extradition arrangements with Argentina, Mr. Mayor.”

“God damn it, I know that,” said Harrison. “I mean get him. A black bag job. Haul that goddamn anarchist back here to Chicago for a fair trial and very public hanging.”

“If the Argentinian authorities were to discover a plot like that, it would mean war,” Bonfield said softly.

“It’ll be a sad day when the United States of America can’t whip some pissant country like Argentina,” said Harrison. “Okay, Bonnie, maybe we could just send someone down to shoot the sonofabitch. Bang! Take a picture of the corpse for the Chicago papers. No muss, no fuss.”

“We should talk about this later,” said Bonfield.

“You’re right!” laughed Harrison. “I have my favorite literary hero of all time right here in my carriage to ask questions of. Tell me, Mr. Holmes, in ‘The Sign of the Four’, you were injecting a seven-percent solution of cocaine into your arm or wrist when you were bored. Was that accurate?”

“A habit I abandoned after my friend Dr. Watson convinced me that—how did the good doctor put it?—that the game was not worth the candle.” Holmes saw no reason to mention his morning injection of this more powerful heroic drug or the fact that he planned to inject it twice more before this day was over.

“Ah, good,” cried Harrison. “So tell me, if you are free to do so, in that same adventure, do you think the lovely Miss Mary Morstan had romantic designs on you? Did she just settle, as we say, by marrying Dr. Watson?”

Holmes looked up at the clear sky and sighed. This was going to be a long carriage ride.

SIX Wednesday, April 12, 3:20 p.m.

Can I get you something to help you feel better?” asked James.

“A .40-caliber six-shooter so that I can blow my brains out,” said Sam Clemens. “Or, since I am a devout coward, perhaps some painless poison that tastes like lemonade.”

“Anything other than that?” asked James. He was sitting on a chair by the window a few feet from where Clemens, in his nightshirt, lay in bed. There were medicines and half-filled glasses on the bedside table and a pile of newspapers tossed on the only other chair.

“One doctor says this is just a bad case of the common grippe and he’s predicted every day in the last eleven days that I’d be up and out of this bed on the next day,” said Clemens between coughs. “The other doctor who’s looked in on me says that it’s pneumonia and that at my advanced age . . . fifty-eight . . . I should get my will in order and start getting measured for my coffin. I have the strongest urge to put these two medicos in a pit and see which one comes out alive.”

James smiled at that.

“What brought you and Mr. Sherlock Holmes to the Great Northern Hotel anyway?” asked Clemens, setting down his awful-smelling cigar long enough to drink from a tall glass of colored fluid, grimace at its taste, and pick up the smoking cigar again.

“Holmes chose it,” said James. Clemens had one of the corner rooms which included three tall windows in the curving bay, and James had all three open to the relatively fresh air of downtown Chicago. This hotel was at the corner of Jackson and Dearborn and this was about all that James knew of Chicago geography.

“He overheard a clerk telling a bellboy to take up a fresh pitcher of water with lemons to your room,” added James. “That’s how I knew you were here. I was surprised. When I was told you were ill, I thought I should check in on you.”

“That’s right neighborly,” said Clemens and stopped to cough. It was a deep, phlegmy cough and James leaned back a little more into the fresh air. “I plan to leave for New York tomorrow, Mr. James, if I have to do so in a coffin with a chunk of aged Limburger cheese on my chest for verisimilitude. I may have to ask you to be my pallbearer.”

Clemens coughed and drank from the glass again. He poured more colored liquid from a quart-size bottle into the glass.

“Is that cough syrup of some sort?” asked James.

“Of some sort,” said Clemens and took another long drink. “It’s laudanum. Liquid opium. A gift from the gods. My second doctor isn’t shy about prescribing it by the hogshead barrel. So far it’s the only thing that’s smoothed this cough.”

Wonderful, thought James. Holmes is injecting himself with that new heroin drug every day and Clemens—Mark Twain!—is busy turning himself into a laudanum addict.

“Did you get your business done here in Chicago?” asked James. “You told us in Hartford that you had people to see.”

Clemens snorted. “I made the rounds of interested investors in Paige’s typesetting machine, but they are small-minded, James. Small-minded. They insist on seeing a working example of the typesetter. They are prejudiced in favor of earning their money back with interest.”

“And Paige doesn’t have a working model?”

“He tells me almost every other week that he has a perfect working model,” said Clemens. “But when I rush to see it and get within fifty miles of him, the machine either quits working or Paige decides to dismantle it and improve it in some arcane mechanical way. He’s in Chicago to set up a second factory to produce the things while the first factory has yet to spit out a model that works for more than two minutes at a time.”

“Did you see Mr. Paige while you were here?”

Clemens drank deeply from his glass of laudanum and refilled the glass from the bottle. “He’s been wonderfully attentive, visited my sickroom at least six times, staying hours each time.”

“And?” said James after a silence that had Clemens staring at nothing.

“And do you remember,” said Clemens, glaring at James from under his bushy white eyebrows, “how I said that Paige could convince a fish to come out of the water and take a walk with him?”

“Yes.”

“Well, this time he convinced this particular fish to come out, take a walk with him, climb a tree, and make noises like a parakeet.”

James didn’t know what to say to that so he remained silent, trying to breathe the fresh air from the open windows rather than the odious air from Clemens’s cheap cigar.

“I came to demand—not request, not ask nicely for, but to demand,” continued Clemens, “that Paige immediately refund me the last thirty thousand dollars I’d put into this project. I need it. I’d borrowed from my little publishing venture to pay for the investment in the typesetter and now circumstances demand that I borrow from the typesetter investment to keep my publishing house afloat. So I came to demand, in no uncertain terms, thirty thousand dollars of the hundred and ninety thousand dollars that I’ve poured into Paige’s bottomless pit.”

“And did he pay up?” asked Henry James.

“It ended with me writing him a check for fifty thousand more dollars,” grumbled Clemens. “So that he can make those ‘last few little improvements’ before the automatic typesetting machine sets the publishing world on its ear and I become a millionaire.” Clemens coughed fiercely and, when he’d caught his breath and drunk some laudanum, said, “I finned myself far up and out of the crick this time. Livy will kill me.”

“I hope it works out,” said James who had never invested in anything save for his own talent.

“Say, where’s your friend Sherlock Holmes these days?” asked Clemens.

“Today he went to meet various people at the White City,” said James.

“Have you seen the Exposition yet, James?”

“Not yet.”

“The White City is yet another thing in this life that I shall never see,” sighed Clemens. Then, without any preamble, Clemens said, “Does Holmes still believe that he might be a fictional person rather than real?”

Taken back a bit, James finally said, “I believe he does.”

“He may be right,” said Clemens.

“Why do you say that, sir?”

“I’ve read the stories in The Strand and the novellas, and the Sherlock Holmes there strikes me as a particularly unrealistic fellow. His adventures sound contrived.”

“You may remember Holmes saying in New York that he wasn’t totally happy with Dr. Watson’s representations of either him or his science of deduction,” said James. “The tales may be true, but written by a mediocre mind.”

“In the past weeks I’ve been thinking,” said Clemens. “I doubt that there is any ‘Dr. Watson’. It’s all that Conan Doyle fellow creating a fictional narrator to relate the fictional tales of a fictional detective.”

“Holmes says that Conan Doyle is his friend Watson’s agent and editor,” said James. “He says that Dr. John Watson shuns the spotlight and that he allows Doyle to represent him.”

“But what if Holmes is a fictional character and this whole assassination plot is part of some melodramatic tale? All make-believe?” said Clemens, coughing more and drinking more of the laudanum mixture. “Where does that leave you and me, Mr. Henry James?”

“How do you mean?” said James, knowing full well what Clemens was leading up to.

“It would mean that we are fictional characters in this instance as well,” said Clemens, staring balefully out from under his shaggy eyebrows. “You chosen as his Sancho Panza . . . or perhaps as his Boswell . . . and me as occasional comedy relief.”

“I’ll never be his Boswell,” James said flatly.

“Have you ever thought, James, of the relationship between you and the characters you’ve created?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” James said, knowing full well what the humorist meant.

“I mean that you’re God to them,” said Clemens, “just as I am God to my small worlds of fictional people. You create them. You put them through their fictional paces. You decide their emotions and you decide when it’s time for them to die. In other words, we’re God to our characters.”

James shook his head. “My characters have a certain life of their own,” he said softly.

“Oh,” said Clemens and surrendered to a spasm of phlegmy coughing. “Does that mean that Isabella Archer is having tea in England or Europe right now?”

“No,” said James, “but it means there are depths to her . . . to Isabel’s . . . character that I haven’t explored.”

“This is writers’ doubletalk,” said Clemens, drinking deeply from his glass. “We love to pretend that our characters have some lives of their own . . . but they don’t, James. You know it and I know it. We move them around like puppets in a Punch and Judy show. Have you read any of my books, sir?”

“I’ve not yet had that pleasure,” said James, surprised by the question. Writers didn’t ask other writers for opinions of their work. It just wasn’t done.

Clemens laughed. “Well, I’ve tried to read yours,” said the white-haired author. “I declare, James, reading your prose is like translating medieval German. You have forty-two freight cars loaded with subordinate clauses being pushed along by a tiny cluster of underpowered engine-verbs tucked in at the end of the sentence. Reading your books is like listening to a man on a soapbox argue with himself, interrupting himself every few seconds.”

James smiled thinly. “My brother William would agree with you.”

“But still . . . with Isabella Archer and a few of your other characters . . .” Clemens’s voice trailed off. He turned to stare fiercely at James again. “Do you know why Isabella Archer made that damned-fool self-destructive decision at the end of the book? Was that your plan all along or did the character take on some autonomy and make her life-ruining decision on her own?”

James lifted his hands, palms up. He was not going to discuss Isabella Archer or any of his other books or characters with this laudanum-addled American.

“You hear your characters’ voices in your head or you don’t,” said Clemens, speaking to himself. “Do you happen to remember that I published a book called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn about five years ago?”

“I remember,” said James.

Clemens looked at him again. “For months—years, really, since I’d set the book aside for a long time—I heard Huck’s voice in my head as clearly as I heard my beloved Livy calling me to dinner. Huck was with me when I went to sleep at night and he was waiting for me when I woke up. And then . . . near what should have been the end of the story when they’re off the raft for the last time and Huck’s slave friend Jim has been captured . . . Huck just left me. He just lit out for the territory without me. I could no longer hear his voice, no longer look through his eyes. I was just a man putting words on paper.”

“What did you do?” asked James, more interested in this topic and in the answer than he could show.

Clemens licked his lips. “I brought in Tom Sawyer from his book, turned Huck into the shallow supporting character he’d been in that Tom-Sawyer book, and essentially let the most important book I’ve ever written turn into another boy’s book,” said Clemens. “All games and coincidences and no-harm-done-to-anyone with Tom, a character whom I knew shouldn’t even be in this novel, making the decisions.”

“That sort of situation is unfortunate,” James said softly. “And I am sure that it happens to all of us in writing one novel or the other.”

Clemens shook his head. “Have you read the novel Robert Elsmere?”

“I’ve heard the title but haven’t had the pleasure of reading it,” said James.

“It created quite a sensation about five years ago and caused the rumpus,” said Clemens. “It was written by Mrs. Humphry Ward. It advocated a Christianity based on social concerns and help for one’s fellow man rather than on Scripture or theology. She made a lot of devout enemies.”

James waited.

“Anyway,” continued Clemens after some coughing and expectorating, “I copied a sentence from that long, sometimes dismal book because it relates to what we’re discussing. Mrs. Ward wrote—and I remember it clearly—‘I cannot conceive of God as the arch-plotter against His own creation’.”

“That doesn’t sound very radical,” said James.

Clemens rounded on him again. “But we’re God to the world and characters we create, James. And we plot against them all the time. We kill them off, maul and scar them, make them lose their hopes and dearest loves. We conspire against our characters daily. But in the Huck Finn book, I lost my nerve, James. I lost Huck’s voice and then I lost my nerve. Or maybe—probably—it was the other way around. I so loved Huckleberry Finn that I failed to plot against him and the rest of my creation as I should have. If Huck’s voice had stayed with me—if I’d had the courage to listen to it—I would have had nigger Jim captured and sold down the river to endless slavery in front of Huck’s eyes and in spite of all of Huck’s efforts—or at the very least had the decency and mercy to kill Jim and Huck—rather than bring Tom Sawyer into the tale to end it as a mere boy’s book.”

Clemens spat out the last two words.

“What has this to do with the question of whether Sherlock Holmes is fictional?” James asked bluntly. He hated writers’ self-pity and detested watching it.

Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. “Don’t you see, James?” he said at last. “You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be.”

“Do you have any idea who that God-Writer might be?” asked James. “I’ve thought about this. Conan Doyle would never use living contemporaries in his tales . . . certainly not use their real names or make them so recognizable. Holmes said that Watson had to disguise the Prince of Wales as the King of Bohemia in one story.”

“It doesn’t have to be Conan Doyle,” said Clemens, his chin almost on his chest as he poured the last of the laudanum from the bottle into the glass. “It’s almost certainly some lesser mind, lesser talent, than you, perhaps even lesser than me, certainly lesser than Arthur Conan Doyle, which is saying a lot. And it might be written thirty years hence, or fifty, or a hundred.”

“Well,” said James, trying for a light tone despite the heaviness in his heart, “at least that would mean we’re still being read thirty or a hundred years from now.”

There was a long silence broken only by street sounds some fourteen floors below and the raspy, phlegm-filled effort of Samuel Clemens to breathe.

“If we are only fictional constructs, brought in to give the fictional-construct Sherlock Holmes company, what do we do next?” James finally asked.

Clemens laughed. “I’m going east to New York tomorrow, stopping at Elmira if I feel up to it. I’ll probably be too sick to watch the procession of Great Ships scheduled for this weekend in New York Harbor, but I’d give two toes to see that. No sir, if the God-Writer of this tale . . . hack that he probably is—wants to kill this Sam Clemens off, he will have to do it offstage, the way Shakespeare killed Falstaff.”‘

I need to leave, too, thought James. Regain my autonomy. Regain myself.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” asked Clemens.

“Holmes said that he wanted to take me on a boat tour of the White City.”

“Well, enjoy what I’ll never see,” said Clemens.

“I’ll look in on you tomorrow after my boat tour,” said James. “See if there’s anything you need.”

“You could tell the porter—the little one with the hare lip—to tell the house doctor that I need a new jug of laudanum,” said Clemens. “And a straw.”

James nodded.

“As far as looking in on me tomorrow,” said Sam Clemens, “there’s no reason to. One way or the other, I’ll be written out of this story by then.”

SEVEN Friday, April 14, 10:06 a.m.

Even though Friday morning was gray, chilly, and threatening rain, Holmes had hired an open landau for their carriage ride to the Exposition. James brought along his umbrella. Holmes was wearing the bright red scarf that he favored whenever the temperature dropped below 70 degrees. The driver was bundled in wool up on his perch.

Holmes was as taciturn this day as he had been voluble on their boat tour the day before. When James questioned him as to whether he’d driven to the Fair this way before, Holmes said that the mayor of Chicago had driven him this way on Wednesday.

“What is Mayor Harrison like?” asked James.

“Talkative,” said Holmes. But then, after a moment of silence broken only by the sound of horses’ hooves and passing carriages, he added, “And strangely likeable. Almost certainly corrupt, but loved by his constituencies, I think.”

“What is the object of our outing today?” asked James.

“We’re deciding where Lucan Adler will lurk to carry out his assassination,” Holmes said so softly it was almost a whisper.

“I know nothing about the mental processes of assassins,” hissed James.

“All right,” Holmes said in a regular voice, “but I thought you might like to see the Exposition grounds before you leave Chicago tomorrow.”

“We’re leaving Chicago tomorrow?”

“You are,” said Holmes and threw his red scarf over his shoulder.

The ride to the south side of the city seemed interminable, although James realized it took less than half an hour.

“This will be President Cleveland’s route to the Fair?” whispered James.

Holmes nodded.

James looked at all the buildings, rooftops, alleys. “It would seem that an assassin could secret himself anywhere along here.”

“The Chicago Police Force will have more than a thousand men lining the route so no one can rush the carriage,” Holmes said sotto voce. “Hundreds more behind the procession since Mayor Harrison predicts up to two hundred thousand people following the carriages for at least part of the way.” Holmes leaned closer to James’s ear. “But it won’t matter. Lucan Adler is not going to come in close with a pistol. He will use a rifle. Probably at extreme range.”

James was shocked at the thought. “The last two presidents assassinated in this century were shot at close range with a pistol,” he all but whispered.

Holmes nodded. “Lucan Adler will use a rifle. And we don’t have to worry about the procession route either here or once we’re on the Exposition grounds.”

“We don’t?” said James. “Why on earth not?”

“Lucan Adler doesn’t care a fig for the anarchists’ cause,” said Holmes. “He turns to them because they pay him well. He lives only to kill, preferably from long range. He’s shot and killed eleven foreign leaders or dignitaries in the last two years.”

“Certainly that cannot be the case!” cried James.

From his tweed jacket, Holmes pulled a small piece of paper showing a list of names and countries.

“Good God,” said James.

“He and Sebastian Moran only barely missed assassinating Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in eighteen eighty-eight,” said Holmes. “And Lucan was still a boy at the time. He no longer works with Moran. All the assassinations on that list were his and his alone.”

James was speechless.

They approached the Exposition from the northernmost western gate. Two members of the Columbian Guard, conspicuous in their uniforms of blue sackcloth, checked the special credentials that Holmes showed them, and two other guards swung the main gates wide.

Ahead of them, the Midway Plaisance stretched ahead for more than a mile. James saw signs saying that they were now on the Avenue of Nations. When James had heard of the Midway Plaisance, he’d imagined a slightly larger version of the carnivals and fairs he’d known. But ahead of him for thirteen city blocks were concessions and attractions the size of small towns.

They passed a rugged log cabin, which James thought was a strange attraction.

“That’s the dreaded Sitting Bull’s cabin,” said Holmes. “Unfortunately, Mr. Burnham, the director for the whole Exposition, couldn’t get Sitting Bull since the army killed him three years ago. So Chief Rain-in-the-Face occupies it now, when he’s not performing for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show just beyond the Exposition grounds. Rain-in-the-Face claims that he’s the man who killed General Custer, and his fellow Sioux don’t dispute it.”

James looked at men wearing thick robes of hide and hair. They must have been insufferably hot even in this day’s cool temperatures.

“Lapland Village,” said Holmes. “God help them in July.”

Some brown men wearing almost nothing at all except some leaves around their waists walked by.

“Cannibals,” said Holmes. “From Dahomey.”

“Of what benefit to the Columbian Exposition are cannibals?” asked James.

“It’s a World Exhibition,” answered the detective. “Daniel Burnham is trying to bring the world to a million Americans who could never afford to travel out to it.”

“What kind of man is Burnham?” asked James.

“Handsome. Commanding. Busy. And driven. Very, very driven.”

“I suppose one would have to be to build a complex like this in so short a time. But it looks far from finished.”

“On May first it won’t be quite finished,” said Holmes, “but except for Ferris’s Wheel that is still going up, it will be all tidied up and it will look finished. Burnham is working the crews day and night, quite literally.”

A man with an ostrich on a short rein crossed in front of their carriage.

“California,” said Holmes, which did not enlighten James.

“Good heavens,” said James as they passed what looked to be an entire Austrian village, complete with stone buildings, towers, and inns.

“A good place to get a stein of beer and some schnitzel once the Fair opens,” said Holmes.

James saw a large empty area boldly captioned CAPTIVE BALLOON PARK, but there was no balloon there yet. “What makes a balloon captive?” he asked.

“Ropes,” said Holmes.

They’d come to the center of the Midway and now James saw how large Mr. Ferris’s Wheel was going to be. Only half of the 264-foot-tall structure was completed but the axle near the top of the finished half-frame looked as huge as a horizontal redwood tree made of steel. There was a protective wooden wall around the work site, but suddenly one of the workmen on the upper tiers of steel beams and wooden frame shouted something and swung down from level to level like some arboreal creature. The workman jumped down to a lower level, used the top of the seven-foot safety fence as a jumping point, and landed right next to Holmes’s halted landau.

With a shock, James recognized Wiggins Two—young Moth—dressed in the same workman’s clothing as the other steelworkers and carpenters laboring on the Ferris Wheel site. The boy had slept on a cot in Holmes’s room their first night in Chicago and James hadn’t seen him—or really thought about him—since.

“Mornin’ to you, gennelmen,” said Wiggins.

“Greetings, Moth,” said Holmes. “You appear to have found employment.”

The boy grinned widely. “I ’ave at that, Mr. ’olmes. And at full workman’s wages. The supervisor, ’e says—‘Moth ’ere, ’e’s just a runt’—but Mr. Ferris, who was ’ere supervising the supervisor as it were, says ‘I saw ’im climb, Baines. ’E’s more monkey than runt and stronger than most of your men. Give ’im a job on both the framing and steel work. We need more monkeys,’ ’e says. And so ’e did. Oh, and I ain’t called Moth no more—they call me Monk now, short for ‘monkey’.”

“Do you mind that name?” asked James, leaning forward on his umbrella to see and speak beyond Holmes to his left.

The boy grinned again. “I love it, Mr. Jimes. You see, the tough blokes on London’s streets they called me ‘Moth’ the old English way, what rhymes with ‘mote’, don’t you see. And I was always bein’ a mote in some fellow’s eye and I didn’t like that feelin’. Although I admit that I did like the way my Mote spoke, although maybe Monk shall speak the same.”

“How did you speak when you were Mote?” asked James.

Again the gap-toothed grin. “So me supervisor, Mr. ’iggens, asks the lot of us at lunch—‘How do I woo this Italian lady what lives in the tenement wi’ me and never seems to notice me none?’ And nobody speaks a word ’cause Mr. ’iggens has an ’orrible temper, he does, but I says to ’im, I says—‘My complete master, Mr. ’iggens sir, you must jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary to it with your feet, ’umor it with turning up your eyelids like, sigh a note and then sing a note, something through the throat, you see, as if you swallowed love with singing love, as it were, then sometime through the nose as if you snuffed up love by smelling love, all the time with your ’at penthouse-like all tilted o’er the shop of your eyes and with your arms crossed on your thin-belly paisley waistcoat like a rabbit on a spit, or mebbe your ’ands in your pockets, such as that French geezer in the old painting, and . . . this is important, sir . . . keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away. These are compliments, y’see, these are humors as it were, these betray nice wenches nicely—mostly them what would be betrayed without these tricks, I fully admit—but doing as I say makes you a man of note—do you note, sir?—men that are most affected by these do these. And that concludes my penny of observation,’ I says to ’im.”

Holmes threw back his head and laughed that sharp, barking laugh of his. James could only stare.

“You’ll go far Moth . . . I mean Monk,” said Holmes and handed the boy a ten-dollar bill.

“Thankee, sir,” said the boy, putting the bill in his cap, “and I ’ope it doesn’t inconvenience you none that I h’ain’t going back to England but will seek to find me fortune here by becomin’ an American.”

“Not at all,” laughed Holmes. “You were a pleasure to work with when you were Wiggins Two of Baker Street but now is the time for you to show your true worth to the world.”

“Mr. Ferris says this might not be the last Wheel ’e builds,” said the boy. “Although the others most likely would be smaller, like. If I do well on the ’igh steel ’ere—I might travel with ’is workers to other states, even other countries.”

“May it be so, Monk,” said Holmes and told the coachman to drive on. He turned back to shout at the boy, “If you ever need anything—anything at all, Wiggins—you know where to find me.”

The boy grinned and nodded. “I do,” he said. “I will. And God bless you, Mr. Sherlock ’olmes.”

When they’d traveled further, past what Holmes described as the Algerian Village where robed ladies watched them through their veils as they passed by, then an empty street that Holmes said would be bustling Cairo in a week, complete with real Egyptians, James said, “The lines from Love’s Labor’s Lost. Where on earth did Wiggins pick those up?”

“I take my favorite and most promising lads to the theater,” said Holmes. “I’d say that if they were born into better circumstances many would have grown up to be MP’s, but in truth most are too smart and too honest for Parliament.”

James thought about that as they passed a gigantic zoo, complete with gigantic zoo smells. The author heard a lion roar and perhaps a hippopotamus making hippopotamus noises. He did not look up. Far to the west there came a roar of a happy crowd from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which had been open for weeks and getting huge crowds.

Their carriage turned right into a dazzling array of gigantic buildings interspersed with canals, lagoons, bridges, and ponds. The largest lake was to their left—James could see the well-planned Wooded Island in its center—and the row of Great Buildings lined up to their right reminded James of the cliffs of Dover.

“We’re officially in the White City now,” said Holmes. “That’s the Woman’s Building we’re just passing.”

James could say nothing—he was surprised to find that he was physically stunned by the beauty, size, and layout of the White City, this “mere fairgrounds” as he’d thought of it in Washington. It felt to him like stepping into a clean, white, safe, sane future.

“It’s a little less than a mile to the Administration Building outside of which your President Cleveland will be speaking,” Holmes said softly so the driver could not hear. “Everything from this point forward is a potential assassin’s roost.”

Leaning on his umbrella, James turned to look at the man next to him. Holmes’s eyes were bright with excitement.

“And I need your help, James, to find where Lucan Adler plans to do his deadly deed on the first of May.”

EIGHT Friday, April 14, 10:42 a.m.

The Administration Building where their voyage ended was essentially an 84-foot square supporting an oversized ribbed and octagonal dome. But it was beautifully made and held pride of place in the entire White City, centered as it was halfway between the main western entrance where the trains would dislodge their passengers and the eastern Peristyle entrance where those coming by boat would enter. There was an acre or more of paved open space around the Administration Building, but to the east was the Grand Basin that ran all the way to the Peristyle, to the north were the large Mines and Electricity buildings with glimpses of the Lagoon and Wooded Island down the narrow streets between them. To the southeast of it was a solid high wall of façades—the Annex, the Machinery Hall, and the Agriculture Building, broached only by the South Canal with its graceful bridges and lighted walkways.

Two men met them when Holmes and James alighted outside the east entrance to the Administration Building.

“Mr. Henry James,” said Holmes, “may I have the honor of introducing you to Colonel Edmund Rice, Commandant of the Columbian Guard and chief of security at the Exposition.”

James shook hands. Holmes had told him on the ride in that Edmund Rice had been awarded the Medal of Honor for the day at Gettysburg thirty years earlier when he’d not only helped stop the Confederate General Pickett’s charge, but was gravely wounded in the counterattack. Rice was a short, stocky man, balding, with a magnificent mustache. His natural expression seemed to be that of a scowl but James soon understood that was somewhat misleading. Colonel Rice was an intensely serious man who could, on occasion, be wittily humorous.

The other man, tall, thin, and immaculately tailored and turned out, was Mr. Andrew L. Drummond, head of the Secret Service.

“Good heavens!” said James. “I had no idea that the United States had a spy agency also called the Secret Service like the British.”

Drummond smiled and explained that he was chief agent in the Treasury Department. “Many of our men are well trained in security measures,” said Drummond, “including bodyguard protection, so we’re helping out where we can with the president’s visit to the Exposition.”

“Shall we get started?” said Holmes.

“Started with what?” asked James. He felt that he was in the wrong place with the wrong people doing the wrong things.

“Looking over the grounds to find where Lucan Adler is going to place himself on May first to kill the President of the United States,” said Holmes.

“You mean to guess where he might try such a thing,” said James.

Holmes gave him a frigid look. “You should know by now, James,” he said flatly. “I never guess.”

On the steps up to the higher of the Administration Building’s two promenades, Drummond touched James’s forearm slightly and stopped. James stopped as well.

“I just wanted to tell you, Mr. James, in case I never get another chance,” Drummond said softly, “that I believe that you’re the most brilliant writer alive and that The Portrait of a Lady is the masterpiece of the Nineteenth Century.”

James distantly heard his own voice muttering “Most kind . . . very kind of you . . .” and then they were climbing stairs again to the upper promenade. When they came out into the open air, James’s morning surliness had disappeared.

The torches and angels that James had seen through Holmes’s telescope were all too large and solid close up. The line of fluted pillars holding the gas jets which illuminated the dome at night must have been fifteen feet tall along the railing. In the angel tableaus, some of the angels’ wings rose higher than that.

When Drummond made some polite comment about the statuary, Col. Edmund Rice removed the short, never-lit cigar from his mouth and said, “Those damned angels. Getting them up here was harder than reducing Vicksburg. The straps broke on one of them and the thing fell thirty feet, burying one wing four feet into the frozen ground while the rest of it flew all to pieces.”

The four men gathered along the east railing of the upper promenade.

“Down there,” said Colonel Rice, pointing and moving his finger in a square to show size, “will be the platform from which the president will speak. We won’t let more than fifty people on that platform and . . . Drummond . . . Mr. Burnham has given permission for two of your agents to stand near and behind the president during the speech.”

“Any shot wouldn’t come from behind,” Drummond said softly.

“For security reasons, we’re closing off the two promenades here on the Administration Building and if you agree, Mr. Holmes—the wire to me and Mr. Burnham said that your advice was to be listened to and followed whenever possible, God knows why—but if you agree, we’ll close off the promenades on all the high structures in line of sight and rifle range of where the president will be speaking.”

“Which structures will that include, Colonel?” asked Holmes.

The Commandant of the Columbian Guards—out of uniform in shirt and suspenders as the clouds parted and the April day grew warmer—used the blunt cigar to point to their extreme right.

“The eastern parts of the big Machinery Building there.”

The cigar shifted left, further east. “The Agriculture Building next to it.”

Rice pointed straight ahead with his cigar. “The entrance Peristyle has its own promenade which we’ll shut down during the ceremony.”

The cigar moved left again. “The huge monstrosity of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Long, long promenade, almost as long as the Great Basin that runs down the middle here.”

He pointed left to one of the Great Buildings they could see only part of. “The eastern part of the big Electricity Building there has a straight line to the speaker’s stand. Most of the building doesn’t.”

“And then there are the avenues themselves,” said Drummond.

“Yep,” said Col. Rice. “Look out there now and enjoy the sight of the hundred or so workers you see, because on Opening Day there’ll be at least a hundred thousand people crammed into these open spaces.”

“No place for a sniper in a crowd,” said Drummond. “Our last two presidential assassinations have been with a handgun and at very short range.”

“That’s very true,” said Holmes. “Lincoln, with a small pistol shot from a distance of less than three feet, and President Garfield, shot in the back, point-blank range, by Guiteau.”

“Who used a British-made Bull Dog revolver,” said Drummond.

“Very true,” said Holmes. “An excellent weapon. My particular friend Dr. John Watson owns a Bull Dog revolver.”

“Assuming your theoretical assassin on May first . . .” began Col. Rice.

“There’s nothing theoretical about Lucan Adler, Colonel,” Holmes said briskly.

“All right, we’ll assume that your would-be assassin will want to be somewhere high enough and stable enough and lonely enough that he can use a rifle. That could be from a window or from one of the promenades. Why don’t we look at the four Great Buildings and Peristyle going counterclockwise, starting with the Machinery Building there to the right.”

“Excellent idea, Colonel,” said Holmes.

The roof of the Machinery Hall was all cupolas, arches, and Spanish-Renaissance-ornamented gewgaws to James’s way of seeing things. In his opinion—neither asked for nor stated—any self-respecting sniper would die from the bad taste of all that ornamentation before being able to fire a shot. But Colonel Rice, Drummond, and Holmes focused on the high second-story loggia—an inset veranda that ran the entire eastern length of the building from the parade ground to the east of the Administration Building, where the president and his party would be all too visible, back west to the larger open ground in front of the Terminal Station.

“You could get a thousand people on this veranda,” said Drummond as if speaking to himself.

“More than that,” said Colonel Rice. “Pack ’em ten or fifteen deep between these Corinthian columns and this grand loggia’ll hold five thousand people, easy.”

“Perhaps a bit crowded and joggly for rifle work,” said Holmes.

“ ‘Joggly’?” said James.

Holmes flashed one of those thin, fast, tight-lipped smiles.

Moving toward Lake Michigan, Colonel Rice led them to the Agriculture Building, a domed Roman-style structure encompassing half a million square feet of display space. Before they got too close, Col. Rice pointed out Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s gold Statue of Diana, poised on one leg with her bow at full pull, that graced the top of the dome. “It was supposed to go on top of the new Madison Square Garden Building,” grunted Rice, “but it was too damned big. It serves as a good weather vane here.”

Before they entered the building, James gawked at the presence of dozens, perhaps scores, of whirling full-sized windmills, of all shapes and sizes and materials—wood, iron, steel—that filled an area near the Lagoon outside the Agriculture Building.

“That army would prove too much even for Don Quixote,” said James.

The other three men looked at him and said nothing.

“If you’re hungry, gentlemen,” said Col. Rice as they climbed steps to the upper regions, “Canada sent a twenty-two-thousand-pound hunk of cheese to be exhibited down there. It’s encased in iron and, the Canadians say, took sixteen hundred milkmaids to milk ten thousand cows to produce the twenty-seven thousand gallons of milk used to make the cheese.”

“A fascinating bit of information,” said Holmes who, unlike James, was not in the least winded by the endless flights of steps. “And now that I’ve learned it, I will eliminate it from my memory.”

James thought it just a figure of speech, but Col. Rice stopped and faced Holmes. “You can do that, sir? Remove things from your memory?”

“I have to do that,” Holmes said in a serious tone.

“Why?” said the Colonel.

“I was born with what some experts are now calling a ‘photographic memory’,” said Holmes. “It is my misfortune to remember everything. Give me a page of a magazine and, after glancing over it, I can recall every word, comma, and full stop on the page. But the mind is a little attic, as I once tried to explain to my associate Dr. Watson, and someone with a profession as defined as mine must be careful what to store there. If I know for certain that the information cannot help me in my detection—say the fact that the sun does not go around the Earth or the details of this great mass of Canadian cheese—I simply delete it from memory.”

“Delete it?” said James with wonder and doubt in his voice.

“I imagine a red delete button, mentally push it, and the memory is gone,” said Holmes. “Otherwise my brain would be a grab bag of odds and ends rather than a finely tuned engine for ratiocination.”

“Delete button,” said Colonel Rice and shook his head. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

NINE Friday, April 14, 2:45 p.m.

Mr. Drummond, Holmes, James, and the colonel had toured the upper regions of the Agriculture Building, the east-entrance Peristyle, the gigantic Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, and the south side promenade of the Electricity Building, sharing a quick and late lunch with Colonel Rice in the canvas-covered temporary cantina set up for the workers.

It was at the northeast corner of the Agriculture Building that Holmes pointed to a post set at the end of the narrow promenade. A cable ran from the post down for several hundred feet to a 7- or 8-foot tall, lighted channel marker thirty feet or more from the seawall.

“Does this have a purpose?” asked Holmes. “Perhaps holding down the Agriculture Building in high winds?”

Colonel Rice clamped down on his cigar stub and grinned. “There’s another one just like it at the southeast corner of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building across the way. Someone had the idea of dangling the flags of all the nations along the cables so that folks on the ships docking at the end of the pier would feel sort of welcomed with open arms.”

“Is it still to come then?” asked Holmes.

Rice shook his head. “The halyards just wouldn’t rig right, the wind was tearing the test flags all to hell, so the idea was abandoned. They just haven’t got around to removing the cables yet.”

“That cable is rather low to the beacons, light posts, whatever they are,” said Drummond. “Isn’t that a navigation hazard for small boats?”

Rice shook his head again. “Those beacons are there to warn away even the smallest crafts. All the area under water out to the beacons’ tiny little concrete islands is filled with chunks of rock and concrete dumped when we built the sea wall. They’d rip the bottom out of a skiff.”

James was deeply impressed by the Peristyle with its long row of Corinthian columns and great triumphal arch through which passengers arriving from the water would enter the Fair and see the grand view.

“The Peristyle connects the little casino building at the end of the main Casino Pier there to the south to the Music Hall there on the north end,” said Col. Rice. “Forty-seven giant columns . . . one for each of the states and territories. This has a promenade up there, but just accessible by a stairway at the south end.”

“By all means, let us enjoy the view,” said Holmes.

Above the Columbian Arch at the center of the Peristyle Promenade—which did offer an amazing view both into the White City and out onto Lake Michigan—they were perfectly lined up with the front of the Administration Building where the president would be giving his talk.

“What is the distance, do you estimate, Colonel?” asked Holmes.

Rice squinted. “Five hundred thirty yards. No more than five-fifty.”

“Certainly that is too far for someone with a mere rifle to aim and shoot with any certainty,” said Henry James.

Rice, Drummond, and Holmes exchanged glances.

Rice spoke first. “The best of modern military rifles can give you five-inch groups at up to a thousand yards,” he said softly, removing the cigar as if out of respect for such an achievement. Rice turned to Holmes. “Do you know what kind of weapon this Lucan Adler intends to use?”

“Yes,” said Holmes, “we believe we do. He’s assassinated four powerful figures in Europe since last autumn and in each case he’s used a Model Eighteen Ninety-three Mauser rifle, most probably with a twenty-power telescopic sight attached. He doesn’t leave casings behind, but each dead man seems to have been killed by seven-millimeter rimless bullets. The ’ninety-three Mauser—which was released early last autumn in major sales to Spain and the Spanish troops in Cuba—is a bolt-action with a five-round clip.”

Colonel Rice seemed to grimace. “I don’t know the Mausers—much less this new one. Do you know the muzzle velocity?”

“Twenty-three hundred feet per second,” said Holmes.

“And actual operational range?”

“A little over two thousand yards. I believe twenty-one hundred and sixty is the precise number.”

This meant nothing to James, but it seemed to affect Colonel Rice almost viscerally. For the first time, the stocky gentleman not only took the soggy stogie out of his mouth but removed his worn derby and rubbed his balding head. “My God,” he whispered. “If we’d had that rifle at Gettysburg.”

Holmes nodded. “You could have used aimed fire—individual targets—almost as soon as the Confederates came out of the trees a mile away across that wide, deadly space. With five rounds without reloading.”

Rice let out a deep breath. “Well, it doesn’t matter much. Your Lucan Adler fellow will want to get in as close as he can.”

“Why is that?” asked James. “Especially if he can shoot a target a little more than a mile away?”

Rice smiled. “A man ain’t a paper target,” he said and James sensed that the failure in grammar was deliberate with this man who’d ended the war as a Brigadier General. “Walking at an average rate—two miles per hour—a man walks about two feet in the time it would take a bullet to reach him.” He pointed at the Administration Building due west of them down the long Lagoon. “That would be a miss. Of course, President Cleveland will be standing still and facing this way, but the shooter has probably sighted in his rifle he’d have to hold over eighteen inches.”

“I don’t understand,” said James.

Agent Drummond held out his hands as if framing the target area in front of the distant Administration Building. “That means, Mr. James,” he said softly, “that to shoot accurately enough to hit the president in the chest—and we admit that it is a broad target—Lucan Adler would have to use his telescopic sight to aim about eighteen inches high—say at the top of the president’s forehead.”

“I would think that shooting for the head would be preferable,” said James, appalled at hearing his own words.

Colonel Rice said, “Our heads move around a lot more than we think—especially when giving a speech. Center of the body’s mass is the surest target.”

They were all silent for a long, sickening moment. Finally Rice said, “Well, shall we tour the Manufactures and Electricity Buildings, have some lunch, and get this over with?”

Holmes, Drummond, and James followed him down from the Peristyle Promenade without speaking.

The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building was by far the largest and most imposing structure they visited. The interior was chaos this day—a very controlled chaos once carefully observed—as thousands upon thousands of major displays were uncrated, assembled, and made ready. Far across the vast, cluttered floor, James caught a glimpse of an elegant telescope that must have been at least sixty feet tall.

“You should have seen this hall when it was empty,” said Col. Rice as they waited for the Otis-Hale elevator to drop down in clear sight, the car now seeming to be suspended in mid-air among the iron beams some 200 feet above them.

“We had the Dedication Ceremony in late October last year,” continued Rice. “This floor’s thirty-two acres and it was filled that day with more than a hundred and forty-thousand Chicago folk. The carpenters had to build a platform that would hold five thousand grandees in their little yellow chairs. Ex-Mayor Harrison had a seat up on the platform, but he spent most of the time shaking hands with every one of the hundred forty-some thousand citizens standing. And it was a cold day . . . cold as a witch’s tit. Men kept their overcoats and hats on and women tried to hide down in their fur collars and keep their hands in their mink muffs when they weren’t waving white hankies to the music. And it was a bloody long ceremony, too. After an hour or so I heard a sound like a marching army approaching and realized it was all the men standing out there stamping their feet to stay warm. You could see your breath in front of you during the entire overblown ceremony and I swear that after the first half hour, little clouds formed under them iron trusses twenty stories up there, just from our breath.”

“Could anyone hear any of the speeches?” asked James.

“About ten people up on that platform and closest to the podium,” said Colonel Rice. “The place was so damned big and echoey that the organizers had to use ex-military fellows I provided to wave semaphore flags to cue the five-hundred-musician orchestra and five-thousand-voice choir when it was their time to play or sing.”

“Did anything interesting come out of that day?” asked Drummond.

“Well,” said Rice, “some fellow who edits some children’s magazine wrote out a pledge that the Bureau of Education sent to every damned school in the country so that on that October twenty-one Dedication Day last year all the young brats in all the schools of the nation would be contributin’ something to their nation.”

“A pledge?” James said dubiously.

“I don’t remember it but for the beginning,” said Rice. “It goes ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands . . . ’ ”

“Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me,” said James.

“No,” agreed Holmes. “It sounds German. Very German.”

The elevator ride up to the promenade level was a surprise for Henry James. It literally took his breath away. The Otis-Hale Company had built a super high-speed elevator that was a simple cage, open on three sides, and it whisked upward so quickly through rings of electric lights and occasional high platforms that one felt both exposed to the height and heavier at the same moment. When it came to a stop at the top, the rear doors opening to the promenade, James thought for a moment that his feet had left the floor of the lift.

“That elevator should be a major attraction all on its own,” said James when he could get his breath back.

“I’m sure it will be,” said Colonel Rice.

“I’m not sure I would care to ride it more than once,” said Drummond.

The promenade on the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building was called the Observation Deck and it went all the way around the thirty-two-acre building. Instead of stone or plaster railings, the barrier was a simple metal chain link fence, which made the sense of height all the more palpable. The views were astonishing. James realized that if Mr. Ferris ever got his giant Wheel built, citizens on this Observation Deck would be looking at it almost at the height of its highest carriages as it revolved.

Naturally, Holmes, Drummond, and Rice were interested only in the parts of the Observation Deck that would allow a madman to murder a president from afar.

“Three corners of the Observation Deck have one of these huge searchlights,” Holmes said as if to himself.

Rice answered anyway. “Yes, sir. They’re German and terribly bright and focused. They will be used to illuminate buildings, fountains, the Wooded Island, and other things during the night. One of these lights could show us a rabbit a mile away.”

Each German searchlight had a six-foot-square black base about two-and-a-half feet high. The steel was painted with black enamel.

They were at the southwest corner of the Observation Deck, the one that gave the best view of the Administration Building and area where President Cleveland would be standing in a little more than two weeks.

Holmes crouched, pointed to a lock along one side of the base of the searchlight, and said, “Would you happen to have a key for this compartment, Colonel Rice?”

Again Rice grinned around his cigar stub. “You’ve heard me clinking and clanking along the last two hours. I’ve got a key on this ring for everything in the fairgrounds.”

In a moment he produced a small key that unlocked the compartment.

Holmes lay on his belly to look inside and Drummond joined him, but James refused to get his suit dirty doing so, and he crouched as best he could to look over the detective’s shoulder. The dark space showed various thick insulated wires going through the floor and some iron support struts, but was mostly empty. The knee-high black steel square was obviously there primarily to be a base for the seven-foot-high heavy searchlight.

“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:

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.

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.