The Fifth Heart

1

On Monday, April 24, after a whirlwind visit to more than half a dozen large American cities, Sherlock Holmes returned to Washington and checked into the same Kirkwood House hotel at 12th St. N.W. and Pennsylvania Avenue where he’d stayed earlier. He knew it was dangerous to do so—if Lucan Adler had been searching him out, he would know about Holmes’s earlier stay there and have someone keeping a lookout for him—but this part of Holmes’s American visit had to be dangerous. If he could lure Lucan Adler to him before May 1, it would be the best for everyone—save perhaps for Sherlock Holmes.

Early that spring evening he went to the address near Dupont Circle that Mrs. Gaddis, the retired school teacher in her alley carriage-house apartment in Boston, had given him. This was also a calculated risk. Holmes did not believe that the odds favored Lucan Adler being there for long stretches of time, but there was no doubt that the assassin visited there.

It was a stately brick house on a quiet street just off the Circle. When Holmes knocked on the door, a tiny woman, barely four feet tall, dressed out in European livery of a maid, opened the door and squinted up at him.

“Is Mrs. Rebecca Lorne Baxter home?” asked Holmes, removing his hat.

“Nie, ona nie jest teraz w domu,” said the tiny maid.

“Oh, a shame,” said Holmes. “Would you please give her my card and this message?” He handed the dwarf-maid his business card and an envelope containing a short message:

Irene—Would you be kind enough to meet me tomorrow evening (Tuesday) between 7 and 8 p.m. at Clover Adams’s Memorial?—S. Holmes

The maid took the card and the envelope without saying a word—in Polish or any other language—and shut the door.

Holmes walked slowly away from the house and back to Dupont Circle, but all the time he was still in view of the house, the spiderwebs of scars on his back itched as if someone had painted a target on his back with turpentine.

2

Holmes arrived at Rock Creek Cemetery just before seven p.m. He told the cab driver not to wait. One way or the other, he would not need a cab home this night. The sun had just disappeared behind the forest to the west of the cemetery grounds but the soft spring twilight lingered and promised to light the sky for most of the next hour.

He walked directly to the Clover Adams memorial. He had his sword-cane in one hand and the little lemon-squeezer pistol in a jacket pocket, but he knew that neither would be of any use if Lucan Adler was lying in wait with his sniper rifle. He’d stipulated this night, Tuesday, to give Irene Adler a full day to contact Lucan with the information about this meeting.

He knew from his terrible experience in the Himalayas that it was true that one does not hear the rifle bullet—or in his case, three steel-cased bullets—that rips through your flesh since the bullet travels well above the speed of sound. In his instance, it had been three sharp sounds immediately following three unbelievable intense blows to his back and lower side. And, because of the mountains, those three sounds had echoed.

And the pain from those wounds still filled Holmes. He’d taken a second injection of the liquid heroin just before leaving the hotel.

And he knew there would be no echo of the shot here in the cemetery.

He reached the opening in the barrier of hedge and trees around the memorial without mishap, but paused just outside that entrance for a full minute so that his shadow from the lowering sun sending horizontal shafts of light through the trees should show his shape to maximum advantage. Then he entered.

He was the first one there. Good, he thought and crossed the triangular space to sit on the section of the three-sided concrete bench closest to Saint-Gaudens’s statue. It was also the furthest from the opening in the hedge and would be invisible from anyone looking through any telescopic sight on the outside. If Lucan Adler wanted him tonight, he’d have to come within speaking range to have him.

At twenty-five past the hour, just as the dusk was settling gently, a dark form filled the opening. Then it approached him through the twilight scent of newly mown grass.

Holmes stood. Despite the years that had passed, Irene Adler looked no older to him than she had the last time he had seen her. Nor any less beautiful. Far more beautiful than the opera-ad image he’d shown other people. Contrary to style, she wore no gloves this evening and her sleeves were cut short enough to show her pale, bare forearms. She carried a small cloth handbag. Large enough for a 2-shot Derringer pistol, thought Holmes and immediately banished such thoughts from his mind. Now, later, much later—it no longer mattered to Sherlock Holmes. He only knew that the young man in black had spoken the truth when he said, “The readiness is all.”

“Sherlock,” she said and the sound of her voice moved something deep within him. She crossed the space, offered her hand in the American handshake mode, but he lifted it gently and kissed it.

“Hello, Irene.” He pronounced her name the way she had taught him when they’d first met—I-wren-ay.

He realized he was holding her hand for too long a period of time and, suddenly embarrassed, he stepped back, gestured to the high-backed bench next to where he’d been seated closest to the sculpture, and said, “Will you sit with me?”

“By all means,” she said.

They sat next to each other, silent, not quite touching, for what must have been a full three or four minutes. Holmes could sense that the leaves on the hedge behind them were moist with dew. The twilight deepened but the stars were not yet visible.

Finally Adler said, “Do we talk about us first, Sherlock? Or about this game we find ourselves in?”

“This is no game,” said Holmes in a voice harder and sterner than he’d meant to use.

“Of course not,” said Irene Adler and looked down at her hands folded on the small bag on her lap.

“Let us speak of personal things first,” Holmes said in an infinitely softer tone.

“Very well. Which of us should start?”

“You should, Irene,” said Holmes.

She turned a mock-stern face to him in the dim light. “Why did it take you almost two years to come to America to try to find me?” she demanded.

Holmes felt his face grow flushed. He looked down at her hands. “No one told me that you’d gone back to America. No one told me that you were pregnant. I worked for almost a full year in British theater troupes, looking for you.”

“Idiot,” said Irene Adler.

Holmes could only nod.

“And you practicing and preparing during your entire childhood to become the World’s First and Foremost Consulting Detective,” she said, but this time her tone was lighter, almost bantering.

Holmes nodded again but looked at her now. “I never found you in my time in America, either,” he said, his voice sounding hollow even to his own ear.

She reached with her right hand and laid it on both of his. “That is because as soon as I heard—through the players’ secret telegraph wires—that you had come to New York and Boston, I took the next ship to France.”

“With the baby,” said Holmes in something not quite a whisper.

“Yes.” Her answer had been even quieter.

“When did Colonel Moran take him from you?” asked Holmes.

“When Lucan was four years old,” said Irene Adler. “The day after his fourth birthday.”

“How could you let that . . . that . . . brigand . . .” began Holmes and then fell silent.

“Because of the hold Colonel Moran had over me,” said Adler. “The same hold that Lucan now uses.”

Holmes, forgetting himself, took her by her upper arms, his strong hands then moving to her shoulders, as if he was about to draw her to him . . . or strangle her.

“Irene, you’re the strongest, bravest woman I’ve ever met. How could a cad like Sebastian Moran have such a hold over you that you would surrender your child to him . . . our child?” The last two words had emerged as a sort of moan.

“Colonel Moran threatened to assassinate you if I did not do as he wished,” she said tonelessly. “Just as Lucan does now.”

Speechless, Holmes could communicate only by squeezing her arms more tightly. The pressure must have pained her, but she made no effort to pull away.

She turned to him, setting her own hands on his upper arms, until they must have looked to some stranger most like two people consoling one another. “You live a careless life, Sherlock Holmes,” she said fiercely, no hint of apology in her voice. “You always have. That idiot doctor friend of yours—or Conan Doyle, I have no idea which—celebrates and publicizes your little front-parlor detection victories as if you were Achilles. But you sit at your window in plain view. You walk the streets lost in thought, oblivious to almost everything around you. You let the world know your street address and your daily habits. Colonel Moran—or others like him—have not long since murdered you because I’ve done what they want.”

Holmes dropped his hands and sat brooding for a long moment. Finally, “But the child . . .”

“The child is evil,” snapped Irene Adler. “The child was evil at birth.”

Holmes’s head snapped backward as if he’d been slapped. “No child can be evil from birth, for God’s sake. It must take . . . years . . . parenting . . . evil influences . . .”

“You didn’t hold this baby to your breast and watch its first actions,” said Adler in a totally cold voice. “One of his first acts was to pluck the wings off a butterfly I was showing him. And he enjoyed it. It was as if I’d given birth to another Coriolanus.”

“But even Coriolanus was shaped by . . .” he stopped.

“His mother,” cried Irene Adler as if in physical pain. “Volumnia bragged to her hag friends about how her little boy Coriolanus loved to torture animals, give pain to any living thing. But never in the four years that I was with Lucan did I ever give him anything but love and training to love and respect others.” She turned her face away and moved away from him on the bench.

He closed the distance again. “I was going to say that Coriolanus was shaped by warped Roman values,” whispered Sherlock. “That’s always been my understanding of what Shakespeare was trying to say.”

Irene Adler laughed and it was a bitter, sad sound. “Don’t you remember, Sherlock? We met in London during Henry Irving’s troupe’s presentation of Coriolanus. I a veteran of theater playing the old hag Volumnia at the advanced age of twenty-two and you an eighteen-year-old understudy, fleeing your first months of schooling in Cambridge, wet behind the ears and everywhere else.”

“I’ve forgotten everything about the play,” said Holmes. “But remembered every other second of our time together.”

She touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. “You were so young, my dear.”

Holmes took her in his arms. She seemed to resist for a second or two and then melted into him. Then she set her hand on his chest and firmly pushed him away.

“Now,” she said, “shall we discuss this not-a-game game we find ourselves in?”

Holmes couldn’t speak for a moment and, when he did, his voice was ragged. “All right.”

“What horrible thing first?” She’d obviously meant her tone to be light, but it came out as choked with emotion as Holmes’s voice.

“The annual typed cards on December six,” he said.

He could tell immediately that she had no idea what he was talking about. She was a consummate actress but Holmes now had decades of experience studying liars’ faces and eyes when they lied. She was not faking her lack of understanding.

“What cards? I put flowers on Clover’s grave every December six—white violets, she loved them—and I’ve sent a few flowers to Henry Adams on that date, but I’ve never included a card.”

“Ned Hooper, Clover’s brother, came to see me in London two years ago—he’s dead now, by the way,” said Holmes. “He offered me two thousand dollars and said he wanted me to solve the mystery of a card that each of the four surviving members of the Five of Hearts receives each December six—and has since December ’eighty-six. It’s typed and always says the same thing . . . ‘She was murdered’.”

Irene Adler stared at him. “That’s barbarous. I would never do that. There’d be no reason for Lucan to do that. No, he never would.”

Holmes nodded. “I didn’t think it was either of you but I owe it to Ned’s memory—and the one-dollar retainer he paid me in eighteen ninety-one—to ask.”

“That was the year that the papers said you died,” Irene Adler said quietly. “In Switzerland, while fighting with some Professor Moriarty whom no one had ever heard of.”

Holmes nodded again.

“I didn’t believe it then,” said Adler. “And I didn’t believe it the next year when Lucan bragged that he’d killed you in Tibet.”

Holmes smiled. “He nearly did. He put three rifle bullets through my back at a distance of almost a mile.”

She seemed startled. “I’d always assumed he was lying. How could you survive three strikes like that from the kind of rifles Lucan uses?”

“I don’t know,” said Holmes. “But let’s talk about Rebecca Lorne.” The words clicked into place like the clack-clock of a bolt-action rifle bringing a live round into the chamber. “Was it for blackmail?”

“Of course,” said Adler.

“Why Clover and Henry Adams?”

“They were rich. She was weak. At the time, in eighteen eighty-five, Lucan needed money for what he had to do in Europe. Blackmailing the Adamses was an obvious way. Clover was so lonely and lost that I became her best friend in two days.”

“But you continued the pretense for seven months,” snapped Holmes.

“After the first days, it was no pretense,” Irene Adler said softly. “I did like Clover. I admired her talent—as a person, as a photographer—far more than her arrogant, self-centered husband ever had. He used every possible chance to make her feel . . . less. Less important. Less capable. Less than an equal human being. Have you read his novel Esther that came out not long before she died?”

“Yes,” said Holmes.

“It’s obviously a portrait of her . . . of poor Clover . . . and she’s shown to be foolish and inept in her art, foolish in her life, and always dependent upon some merciful man for anything she might ever need or reach for in her life. If I’d had a husband who wrote a novel like that about me, I would have shot him twice . . . the second bullet to the head to put him out of the misery of where I’d put the first round.”

“Yes,” said Holmes. And smiled this time.

“So you’d asked why I made her a victim,” continued Irene.

Holmes nodded.

“I thought it was the fastest way to get Lucan out of her life,” she said bitterly. “My dear Cousin Clifton. A mere boy.” Her white hands became white fists in the dim light. “A mere boy who was a cancer . . . a cancer which needed thousands of dollars to go back to Europe to murder someone alongside his hero, the great tiger-hunting Colonel Sebastian Moran.”

“How did he . . . Lucan . . . find out about the romantic letter Henry Adams had sent Lizzie Cameron?” asked Holmes. “I presume that was the direction your blackmail took.”

Irene Adler made a noise like a small dog choking. “Of course. That circle of friends was so small and so inbred that even young Lucan knew that there would be scandal just beneath the surface. After I’d become dear friends with Clover, and thus allowed into that tiny little circle of highest-society ladies, Lizzie Cameron herself bragged to me of Henry Adams’s love letter to her. Lucan had said that there must be something, and in the end we didn’t even have to dig. One of Clover’s closest friends—quotation marks all around that phrase—gave us, gave me, the deadly dagger with a laugh.”

“Why did you go with Clover to see Lizzie Cameron on her sickbed thirty-six hours before Clover’s death?” asked Holmes.

“I wanted Lizzie to deny that any such letter existed,” said Adler. “I’d asked her, Lizzie, just hours before, to deny it. She finally said she would.”

“And did she?”

“She wouldn’t. She was ill with the flu and all of her darker humours were in full control of her. She teased poor, silly Clover about the existence of the letter, playing dumb about it one minute, obviously acknowledging its existence the next. I almost strangled the woman in her four-posted silken-canopied bed. Clover went home that night certain that she’d so failed her husband Henry—at being his real wife as she always put it, she was terrified of sexual intercourse, you see, it was always strange and painful to her—that she decided that everything, including her husband’s cheating attentions to Lizzie Cameron, was her fault.”

“I can’t see how driving Clover Adams to suicide could help Lucan or you in any way,” said Holmes. “That’s always been the sticking point of this conundrum.”

“Not a very complicated one,” said Adler. “Lucan had found other funding for his list of assassinations. Steady funding. Funding he has even today. He no longer had to wait for a neurotic woman to help us blackmail her husband.”

“Did Lucan poison Clover Adams?” asked Holmes.

The long silence seemed to make the gathering darkness deeper.

“I don’t know,” said Irene Adler at last. “I know he brought the poison to her bedroom that Sunday morning . . . and the glass from downstairs. Suspecting that he would try something to get rid of her—she knew ‘Cousin Clifton’ too well to be on her guard—I rushed to her house that morning. But she was already dead on the floor. I heard footsteps on the servants’ stairs—Lucan leaving, I believe—but somehow I don’t think he forced the poison down her throat. Or even allowed her to see him, for that matter. It was just the bottle of potassium cyanide that had strangely moved from her photographic laboratory and the mysterious appearance of that single drinking glass that sent her off the edge. Perhaps she took it as a message from her husband . . . or God.” After another silence, “But I was still as complicit in Clover Adams’s death as Lucan was, whatever he did or didn’t do. I even took the glass away in my handbag before I went down to meet Henry Adams returning from his walk.”

“When you say he has steady funding, whom are you speaking of?” said Holmes. “The anarchists?”

Irene Adler laughed. It sounded almost authentic this time. Holmes remembered that she’d always had a beautiful laugh.

“The anarchists have no money to speak of, my darling,” said Irene Adler. “They’re anarchists, for God’s sake. Most of them can’t even find work in the factories where their fathers worked they’re so drunk or crazy or lazy.”

“Then who . . .” said Sherlock.

“I saw Lucan on Saturday,” said Irene Adler. “He bragged about following you and that writer you’ve been dragging around with you all through the Chicago World’s Fairgrounds. You were within fifty yards of an entire building at the Fair dedicated to one of the primary companies funding Colonel Moran and Lucan Adler—they provide the list of targets to be assassinated—and you didn’t even peek into the building!”

“Krupp,” Holmes said at last.

“Of course.”

Colonel Rice had gone on about how one of the great highlights of the World’s Fair—at least for men and boys—was to be “Krupp’s Baby”, a 250,000-pound cannon so large that it needed its own building, tucked in between the Agriculture Building and the lake. The cannon, built by Fritz Krupp’s Essen Works, was said to be capable of firing a one-ton shell twenty miles and still penetrate three feet of wrought-iron armor plating. Since the building hadn’t been in a sniper’s line of sight with the Administration Building, Holmes had had no interest in it.

“What do they want to come from these random assassinations?” asked Holmes and heard the one-syllable answer in his own mind a split second before Irene Adler spoke it aloud.

“War.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere will suit them,” she said. “As long as the major European powers are involved. From the list that Lucan has mentioned, I believe they place their fondest hopes for the fire starting in the Balkans.”

“Then why on earth kill an American president?” said Holmes.

“A little test,” said Adler. “And an easy one. American presidents are always so . . . accessible . . . aren’t they?”

“Do you know where Lucan will be shooting from, Irene? His choice of a sniper’s roost?”

“No.”

He seized her upper arms again and squeezed hard enough to make a large man cry for mercy, but all the time he was looking into her eyes in the last of that April twilight. She was telling the truth. He let her go and said, “I’m sorry.”

“I know that he expects you to figure out his shooting position,” she said softly. Holmes noticed that she did not rub what must now be her bruised arms.

“Why?”

“Because he’s already told me that he’ll be killing you at almost the same time he will kill President Cleveland.”

“Do you know when he’ll kill the president?”

“He hasn’t told me, but I know Lucan,” said Irene Adler. “He’ll shoot Cleveland during his short speech. When everyone is quiet and attentive. It will be the brightest spotlight on Lucan Adler’s genius. He even described it in those terms.”

“Do you know how he plans to escape?” asked Holmes.

“Not from wherever his sniper’s roost might be,” said Adler. “But I know the . . . vested interests who are paying him . . . have bought the swift-sailing ship the Zephyr and it will be waiting for Lucan in the lake just offshore. According to Lucan, the Zephyr with its sails, its German-trained racing crew, and new steam engine–driven propellers can outrun any police boat or yacht on the Great Lakes.”

“Thank you for that,” said Holmes. “Thank you for everything.”

Irene Adler touched her locket, opened it, and held it up in the failing light, and for a second Holmes thought she might have a daguerreotype of him or some lock of his hair in there, but it was only a miniature watch.

She said softly, “Our hour is up, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

“ ‘Ill met by moonlight’?” he asked.

She smiled without effort, the way he remembered her smiling freely when he was not quite nineteen years old. “That’s not the inconstant moon over the hedge tops, my lovelorn Romeo,” she said. “It’s one of the gaslights along the paved road in the cemetery.”

He stood when she did. He made no move and neither did she. Then she turned toward the lighter opening in the monument’s hedged-in space and he walked half a step behind her.

“I’ll see you to your carriage,” he said, taking her arm. They walked that way across the dew-wet grass where headstones were becoming vague and vaguely threatening inconstant outlines in the last of the twilight.

There were sidelights burning on her elegant enclosed coach. Holmes had an instant’s perfect image of Lucan Adler thrusting his arm out the door of the coach and shooting him in the chest with a Colt .45 pistol.

He shook his head once, waving the eager driver/doorman aside, and helped Irene Adler step up into her empty coach.

“When shall we meet again?” asked Holmes, still holding the door as she settled into the cushioned bench.

“Oh, at your funeral or my hanging is most likely,” said Irene Adler.

“NO!” said Sherlock Holmes in a voice so loud and so commanding that the horse twitched its tail in alarm and the driver turned around on his box.

She leaned forward and kissed him passionately on the lips. With her hands still on his cheeks she said softly,

Now to scape the serpent’s tongue,

We will make amends ere long:

Give me your hands, if we be friends . . .

Holmes immediately took both her hands in his and squeezed them.

And luck or Prov’dence shall restore amends.

She pulled the door shut and cried, “Drive on, driver.”

Holmes stood there for a while in the dark. Then he walked back to Clover Adams’s grave, stopped at the granite back of the monument, and pounded on it with his fist.

The stone door hinged open. Chief of the Treasury Department Andrew L. Drummond stepped out and pushed the granite shut behind him.

“Did you hear it all?” asked Holmes in a strained monotone.

“Yes, everything,” said Drummond. “It shall be very helpful.” He gripped Holmes’s forearm in a man’s more aggressive way than Irene had done just a few minutes earlier. “Holmes, the personal things . . . I swear to you upon my word of honor, upon my children’s lives . . . that no one shall ever hear a word of them from me.”

Holmes shrugged as if to say he’d known how naked and vulnerable he would be after this session.

“We’ll find and start following the Zephyr immediately,” said Drummond.

Holmes nodded tiredly. “But let it anchor there near the World’s Fair,” he said in the same monotone as before. “Nothing must let Lucan Adler know that we’re on to his plan.”

“We’ll have to put Miss Adler under arrest,” said Drummond.

“Not now, for Christ’s sake!” exploded Holmes. “We’d just as well send Lucan Adler a telegram saying that we were on to him. Follow her if you can do so subtly—and I mean so totally subtly that a snake like Lucan Adler wouldn’t spot the tail—but, better yet, leave her alone, unfollowed, and free until . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Until when?” asked Drummond.

“Until I tell you otherwise,” said Holmes and turned to walk away.

Behind him, Agent Drummond blew a police whistle, and more than a dozen men—shadows among shadows—came from behind distant trees, boulders, headstones, and monuments to join their chief. Wagons were arriving at the park entrance. By their lamps, Holmes could see that most of the men were armed with pistols, as Drummond had been, but several carried long guns. None of them could have stopped Lucan Adler from shooting Sherlock Holmes—the sniper would have been too concealed for that—but the plan had been to capture Lucan after the fatal shot had revealed his position.

Holmes was waved into a comfortable open carriage that would carry just him and Drummond back into town.

Remembering the timbre of Irene Adler’s voice, Holmes surprised Drummond by crying, “Drive on, driver!”

3

Early on the morning of Friday, the twenty-ninth of April, Henry Adams and Henry James rode together to the main railway station to meet the “special train” that Henry Cabot Lodge had laid on for them.

It was a short ride, but Adams used it for what he obviously thought was an important conversation. “Harry,” he said, leaning forward toward the portly writer, “I need to tell you—before we meet up with all the others—how very important your visit has been to me the last two weeks.”

James’s gray eyes came alert. “And to me as well, Henry. I shall always treasure the hospitality and our nightly conversations.”

“And you did get some work done on your play?”

James smiled ruefully. “Some. Then rewrote it. Then rewrote it again. Then I tossed it all out. But I did start to expand a short story I’d written—a slight thing about an impoverished tutor who loves the young child in his care more than do the child’s careless parents.”

“It sounds all too real,” said Adams.

James made a slight gesture with his hand. “I shall see.”

“Thank you for allowing me to speak freely about Clover—her life as well as her death—after my years of silence,” said Adams. “I shall always be grateful to you for that.”

James’s eyes seemed to fill. “The honor and gratitude was all mine, my friend. I assure you.”

Suddenly Adams grinned. “Do you remember what you said to Clover in eighteen eighty-two in what you said was your last letter, from the ship before it sailed? Why you had chosen her to receive what you called ‘my last American letter’?”

“I said that I considered Clover the incarnation of her native land,” said James.

“And do you remember her response to me when she read that? I shared it in a letter to you so many years ago.”

Henry James said, “Clover told you that mine was, I believe her exact words were, ‘a most equivocal compliment’, and that it left her wondering, and I do remember her wording exactly—‘Am I then vulgar, dreary, and impossible to live with?’ ”

Both men laughed heartily.

Adams held out his closed hand. Presuming his friend wanted to shake hands, James held out his hand, but Adams turned it over and dropped something cold and solid into it. James realized that it was his watch, the watch given to him by his father, the watch he’d lost that mad night he and Sherlock Holmes had been hiding in the Saint-Gaudens monument, Henry Adams’s most cherished secret.

James blushed but, when he looked up, Adams was smiling.

“Clover and I will always love you, Harry.”

James quickly lowered his face but could not hide the tears that dripped from his cheeks and chin onto his open hand holding the beloved watch.

4

Holmes appeared at the Washington railway station at the appointed time and was amazed at what Henry Cabot Lodge’s casually offered “lay on some special private cars” amounted to. It was an entire private train unto itself. After the engine there was a car for servants’ quarters. Then a lavish car just for dining. Then a comfortable car for smoking, conversation, and taking in the passing view. Then no fewer than four even-more-lavish private cars for Lodge and his guests.

Henry Cabot and his wife Nannie had the end suite, half a car at the end of the train. Senator Don Cameron and his beautiful wife Lizzie had an equally spacious suite—an entire suite, complete with water closet, on a railway carriage!—and the Hays had an elaborate compartment which adjoined a smaller one where their daughter Helen slept. Clarence King had chosen not to make the trip, claiming necessary meetings in the West concerning mining interests, but Augustus Saint-Gaudens had accepted Lodge’s invitation. So the three bachelors—Saint-Gaudens, James, and Holmes—had smaller compartments, but each lavishly appointed and equipped with its own private toilet and sink. When told that the three gentlemen would have the constant services of only two valets—the servants’ car was overcrowded as it was—James had sighed and said, “Well, we shall just have to rough it then all the way to Chicago.”

James had received Holmes quite coolly when they’d met after two weeks of separation and silence, but the detective had seemed too distracted by some thought to notice James’s carefully calculated snub. During the first hours of the voyage, James was irritated that he would be forced to break the mutual silence and talk with Holmes privately.

He found his chance after the elaborate dinner when the women went to the common social area on the first half of the fourth carriage and the men went into the smoking-room carriage with brandy and cigars. James pulled the detective into the dining room and told the servants to step out until he said they could enter again.

“What is it?” asked Holmes. The detective still seemed preoccupied with something and had barely spoken during dinner, even though Hay’s daughter Helen had tried to draw him out with half a dozen questions.

“I saw Moriarty,” whispered James. “I sent a note to that effect to your damned cigar store but they sent it back to me unopened with a scrawl saying that you were no longer picking up your mail there.”

“That’s true,” said Holmes. He was applying his fancy modern lighter to a Meerschaum pipe and puffing offending aromatic fumes into the air that still smelled of beef and wine. “I’ve been traveling and wasn’t checking for mail at that cigar store. Where and when did you see Moriarty?”

“On the day I was prepared to leave Chicago for New York,” said James, his temper short. “On the fifteenth. The same day you left for heaven knows where.”

“Where did you see him, James? And what was he up to?”

The writer thought that Holmes was being damnably offhanded about such a serious topic. “He was at the central Chicago railway station, looking through the carriages. Looking for me, Holmes. He had some thugs helping him search. I barely got away without him seeing me.”

Holmes nodded and puffed. “Why do you think that Professor Moriarty was looking for you, James?”

“Well, you weren’t taking the morning train from Chicago to New York that morning, were you?” demanded James.

Holmes shook his head without removing the stem of the pipe from between his teeth.

“Moriarty and his thugs were there with their eyes full of business,” said James. “And that business was, I am certain, murder. And I was to have been the victim. Somehow . . . from someone you told about my earlier eavesdropping on Moriarty and the anarchists and mobs . . . somehow word got out. He was stalking me, Holmes. I am certain of it.”

“Then it’s a good thing you didn’t get on that particular train,” said Holmes.

James’s jaw dropped. “That’s all you have to say about this? That’s your response to my news? Where have you been the last two weeks?”

“Oh, here and there,” said Holmes, having to re-light his oversized pipe.

“And what have you been doing about the threat that Moriarty and his anarchists and his criminals pose to Washington, and New York, and Philadelphia, and Chicago, and the other cities I heard him say would suffer uprisings after President Cleveland is assassinated? Is the army involved? Have you spoken to all the mayors and chiefs of police of all those cities? I can think of little else that could warrant your two-week absence and your obvious . . . obvious . . . insouciance in the face of this imminent threat of what amounts to national revolution.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Moriarty,” said Holmes, patting James on the shoulder like a tutor reassuring a child. James was not fast enough to bat away Holmes’s hand, but he wished for hours later that he had been.

“Not worry about Moriarty?” cried James. “But certainly he must take priority in your searches. Professor Moriarty is the . . . in your words, I believe . . . the mastermind behind all the murders and violent uprisings to come. Surely you must seek out Moriarty as your primary duty and allow others to take care of this . . . this . . . boy . . . Lucan Adler.”

“No,” Holmes said bluntly. “What we have to concentrate on first is stopping Lucan Adler from killing the president. Then I shall deal with Professor Moriarty. You need to trust me on this, James.”

James could only shake his head in frustration and amazement. “And do you know how to do that? Stop the assassination from happening?” he asked at last. “Do you know where the assassin will be shooting from, how he plans to escape, and . . . most of all . . . what on earth you could do to stop him?”

“I believe so,” said Holmes. “We shall find out in less than three days, shan’t we? Oh, and I shall expect you to help me when that time comes, James.” He had the effrontery to pat Henry James on the shoulder again before Holmes went to the connecting door, waved the waiting servants in, and said, “Shall we join the other gentlemen in the smoking car?”

Henry James had never in his life felt the urge to kill anyone—save for a few brief stabs of that emotion aimed at his older brother William—but now he felt he could take a carving knife to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He went into the smoking room and found a seat as far from the detective as he could get in the long carriage.

5

Henry Cabot Lodge’s special World’s Fair Express train arrived in Chicago on the morning of April 29 with everyone well-rested and amused. Everyone, it seemed, save for Sherlock Holmes, who seemed further and further lost in his own thoughts.

Lodge had let everyone know that their special cars were going to be parked on a private siding less than fifty yards outside the Columbian Exposition’s western gates where all the trains deposited visitors who went through the gates and onto the Parade Ground, flowing ahead to the Administration Building and the Court of Honor and then into the rest of the White City. All of his guests were free to come and rest or freshen up at any time of the days and nights they’d be there. The servants and cooks were on constant call.

But their first stop that morning was at a downtown-Chicago pier where everyone was ferried out to Don Cameron’s “Great Lakes Yacht”, the stately Albatross, where they were each shown slightly smaller but still luxurious rooms they could use whenever they wanted. The yacht was also heavily stocked with servants who would bring a cold drink or fix a full meal on a minute’s notice. Cameron gathered everyone together before the expeditions to the Fair began and explained that messengers would run any notes from the Albatross to anyone who decided to stay at or visit the luxury train cars and that there would always be at least one, and usually two, steam-powered longboats to rush them to or from Casino Pier at any hour of the day or night.

And with that, the explorations began. John Hay and Cabot Lodge had made sure that everyone—even young Helen—had the all important special visitor badges that allowed them the run of the White City and the newly vitalized Midway Plaisance at any time. Lodge explained that the director of the entire Columbian Exposition, Daniel Burnham, had said that there would be a lot of last-minute cleaning-up going on—rubble moved, temporary tracks being taken out, last-minute fields of flowers and even trees being planted, some of the huge buildings getting their last spray of white paint—but if they were careful, they shouldn’t be in anyone’s way.

Finally, Lodge warned them to be careful on the mile-long strip called the Midway Plaisance. Burnham had told Henry Cabot that everything and everyone was in place save for the . . . Lodge didn’t use the word Burnham had . . . doggoned Ferris Wheel which should be completed in June. Meanwhile, the Midway offered complete Algerian and Tunisian Villages where they could sample the exotic food or watch even more exotic jugglers and dancing girls; the Barre Sliding Railway—a water-propelled ride that guaranteed screams and squeals of delight the whole length of the Midway; the Bernese Alps Electric Theatre where visitors in a hundred-seat diorama took a frigid (thanks to electrical refrigeration) trip over thirty simulated miles of Alpine peaks.

There was the captive balloon, which Lodge didn’t recommend to the ladies, as well as the Chinese Village, Dahomey Village, Turkish Village, and German Village, all populated with hundreds of appropriately dressed natives. For those seeking out culture along the Midway Plaisance, there was Hagenbeck’s Zoological Arena placed conveniently near the Hungarian Concert Pavilion where Gypsy bands would play and dance in native costume. Also nearby was the Vienna Concert Hall and Café.

There was a perfectly realized Street in Cairo—along with native Egyptians in their robes and with their dogs, snakes, and monkeys—as well as a huge building for the Kilauea Volcano for those who wanted a thrill. If they grew too warm in their weekend visit, there was the Natatorium indoor swimming pool. This Saturday night and Sunday night, the White City would be lighted only by its gaslights and the full moon, but Lodge promised that after President Cleveland turned the magic key on Monday, May first, the White City and its extended Midway Plaisance would become the most brightly and dramatically lighted place on the planet.

Everyone—wearing their darker suits and dresses for almost the last time before light summer linen clothing became appropriate on Monday—got onto the waiting power boats and went ashore. Sherlock Holmes left the others when he reached the pier; he had scheduled meetings with Colonel Rice, Agent Drummond, and the Chicago Chief of Police Robert McClaughry.

Henry James decided to stay aboard the Albatross—Lake Michigan was so calm at their anchorage that there was almost no discernible movement of the large yacht—and to take a nap in his mahogany lined, silk-and-velvet-cushioned stateroom.

He awoke sometime after dark to find the yacht empty save for crew members. Everyone must be partying somewhere ashore.

They’d left a power launch and boatman for him and, as James came to the boat ladder, the man at the helm said, “Take you into the White City dock, sir?”

“No,” said James, his heart beating so quickly that he found it hard to take in a breath. “Take me to the main Chicago pier.”

6

He had decided that he—Henry James—would track down the elusive Professor Moriarty. During the hours of his sleepless “nap” that afternoon aboard Don Cameron’s yacht, James had convinced himself that Moriarty and his accomplices at the train station had not been searching for him. Searching for Holmes or someone else, perhaps, but not for him. What was he to Moriarty or Moriarty to him?

No, he’d assured himself, it had just been coincidence that he’d spotted the evil professor at the train station. James trusted again in his own anonymity—at least in terms of being a target for either the Adler boy or his dark master, Moriarty.

Telling the boatman to wait for him there at City Pier, no matter how late it might be, James took a trolley into the dark heart of Chicago and boarded one of the elevated trains there.

He had no real search plans and, of course, had not brought any weapon—the idea of searching night-time Chicago for Moriarty felt strangely thrilling. What reassured James was that the chance of him crossing Moriarty’s path again by sheer accident was so small as to be something that could only occur in a poorly written popular novel.

Chicago’s transit system of elevated trains—called the “L” even then—had only come into service the year before, in 1892. The first cars were wooden coaches open to the elements on either side, but now—as James rode through the night on the Lake Street Elevated Railroad—the carriages were enclosed. James had picked up a transit-system map at the first station he’d found and it clearly showed that, except for the Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad, which now extended south all the way to 63rd Street and Stony Island Avenue, the Transportation Building entrance to the Columbian Exposition, all the other terminals were, most inconveniently, James thought, at the periphery of Chicago’s actual downtown.

On their first day in the city, Holmes had told him that this quirk was due to a state law requiring approval from the businesses and building owners along any downtown street before tracks could be built over that avenue.

James knew that he was headed south on this spur, but he had no intention of going all the way back to the Jackson Park stops at the World’s Fair. Holmes and all of Cameron’s other guests might still be there. Of course, so might Moriarty. But James chose to stay in Chicago proper—the Black City as he now thought of it—for his late-night search for the professor.

He stepped off the “L” train some blocks before the 63rd Street Station that would have brought him back to the Fair and began walking almost at random.

He’d gone several blocks in the poorly lighted section of the city before he realized three things: first, that there were no street lights in this part of town but many people on the sidewalks; second, that there seemed to be an ungodly number of bars and dance halls pounding the night with raucous music; and third, that his was the only white face present in the five- or six-block distance he’d walked from the “L” station.

Realizing (with some small flutter of alarm) that he’d mistakenly got off the elevated train in the south side Negro section of town—he’d heard Holmes refer to it once as “Ebonyville”—James whirled to walk briskly back to the elevated’s platform and realized he’d taken several turns and not paid attention to which way he’d walked. No elevated tracks were visible down any of the cross-streets he was now coming to in a stride so urgent that it almost qualified as running.

Suddenly a Negro man in a rather showy pinstripe suit, amazingly bright tie, and quality straw hat came up to him and blocked his flight.

“Are you lost, sir?” asked the Negro. “Can I be of some help?”

James took three steps back but managed to say, “Would you be so kind as to tell me how to reach the ‘L’ platform that would put me back on the Lake Side train?”

The Negro smiled—perfectly white teeth against the darkest skin James had ever seen—and said, “Certainly, sir.” He pointed the way from which James had just come. “Back three blocks along this street, then left at 48th Street, and it’s just a block and a half to the ‘L’ station there.”

“Thank you,” said James, almost bowing in his relief. But as he headed back the way he had just come—the sidewalks and streets full of colored people who appeared to be celebrating something—he could not resist glancing back over his shoulder to see if his benefactor was following him for some dark reason.

The man in the straw hat was standing exactly where he’d spoken to James, half a block away now, and at James’s glance, the tall Negro again showed that white grin and raised his hat in a friendly wave.

Had that wave been an act of insolence? wondered James. Immediately he was ashamed of himself.

But the truth was that although Henry James now considered himself to be one of the most cosmopolitan of men (especially of Americans), equally at home in the streets of London, Paris, Florence, Venice, Rome, Zurich, Lucerne, or Berlin, he simply hadn’t had much contact with Negroes in anything but their occasional service capacities in American hotels.

But then he was on the “L” platform again, an enclosed-carriage train arrived within minutes, and he was riding north again.

For the next ninety minutes or so, James took the elevated lines as far as he could but then had to take the late-running trolley cars to areas such as Douglas Park, Garfield Park, Humboldt Park, and Logan Square (although the small print on his “L”-system map bragged of opening the West Side Elevated line within another year or two).

James didn’t mind the transitions. The trolleys were more comfortable at any rate.

And in the few sections that had adequate street lighting—and white people on the sidewalks and in the carriages—James would stretch his legs for several blocks, always on the alert for Moriarty’s gleaming bald dome and terrible gaze.

In one of these western, working-class sections of town, James realized that he’d not eaten anything since an early and light lunch that day. It was late enough now that some of the cafés were shutting down for the night, but others were open and several were crowded. Still, it was a working-man’s clientele complete with cloth caps—kept in place even while dining—corduroy or moleskin trousers, and huge boots. There were a few women in these places but judging from the excess of rouge and other make-up, combined with their calculated dishabille, James supposed them to be women of the night.

He decided to eat when he finally returned to the yacht. For now he turned back to find the next trolley stop going west again.

James soon realized that there was a mystery to these trains and trolleys that had nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes or Lucan Adler or his prey for the night, Professor Moriarty. After sitting in more than two dozen mostly empty train carriages and trolleys, he had seen at least a dozen different men reading the same book.

All the men were dressed in poorly fitted wool suits and old but well-shined shoes and a few wore straw hats (but none as clean or well-blocked as that of his Negro interlocutor hours earlier) and each man held the book up close to his face as if he were near-sighted. But few of the men wore glasses. And, compounding the mystery for James, he would stay on for several stops and none of the reading men ever turned a page.

They simply seemed to be holding the book open in front of their bored (and sometimes closed) eyes. What bothered James most was that it was the same book in each case.

The title was MAGGIE: A Girl of the Streets, the volumes looked crude enough—to James’s professional gaze—to be self-published, and the author’s name was Johnston Smith.

Finally, near the southwestern end of the line on the trolley James was then on, he dared to sit in the empty seat in front of the “reading man”, turned toward him, and cleared his throat loudly. The man did not lower the book.

“I beg your pardon,” James said at last and the man started—he’d obviously been dozing—and lowered the book.

“I’ve noticed quite a few gentlemen on public transportation this evening reading precisely the volume you are,” James said, “and I hope you don’t think me impertinent if I ask why it’s so popular in Chicago.”

The man smiled broadly, showing nicotine-stained or missing teeth which suggested that the thick and uncomfortable-looking suit he had on was his only suit. “I’ve been waitin’ for someone to ask,” said the man. “Truth is, I haven’t read a word of this idiotic book. A fellow pays me—and some twenty or so other lads—to just ride around on the trains and trolleys from seven a.m. ’til the transits close down at one a.m. I think the fellow thinks that if other folks see us readin’ this book, they’ll rush out an’ buy one for their own selves. Problem is, the only other people I’ve seen readin’ this here book are other coves like me who’ve been paid to do so. Or to pretend we are.”

“How long have you and the other . . . ah . . . readers been so employed?” asked James.

“Three weeks now, with never so much as a question about the book. Until you come along, that is. I think our guy is runnin’ out of cash though. I’m afraid that by this time next week, I’ll have to find honest work.”

“Is it the author, Mr. Johnston Smith, who is paying you for this . . . advertising effort?” asked James.

“It’s the author all right, but his name ain’t Johnston nor Smith. He’s a young-lookin’ cove, no more’n twenty-one or twenty-two at the oldest with shoes more worn than ours is . . . and his real name is Stephen Crane.”

“Well, it’s an interesting way to promote one’s novel,” said James, wondering if such a stunt might work for him in the more literary crowds of London. But, no . . . the literary crowds in London did not use transit designed for the masses save for railway carriages, and no British man or woman would start a conversation with a stranger in the carriage. It simply was not done.

“You know,” said the man with the book now closed and on his lap, “I’ve read me a book or two in my day, and this MAGGIE thing ain’t even a real book.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean,” said the man, “that it’s only about forty pages long, and that with wide white margins on each side and a bunch of empty white pages in front ’n’ back.”

“A short story bound as a book,” mused James.

The man shrugged. “All I know is I got one more lousy hour to prop this thing up before the trolleys shut down and I can go home to sleep. My arms are killing me from holdin’ this trash up to my nose all day and night, but this Crane fellow checks up on us almost every day. The lot of us’ve compared notes and, if the book ain’t raised right or your eyes ain’t open, you get canned on the spot. And there ain’t many jobs these days where a man gets paid two dollars a day for just sitting on his ass.”

James shook his head as if in sympathy.

The trolley came to a stop in a dark part of town and the driver and conductor got out to swing it around. The end of the line evidently.

James decided to stretch his legs for a moment.

“You’re not getting out here, are you?” asked the paid book man.

“Just for a second,” said James.

But as soon as he was out in the muggy air, he saw, half a block away, under the only street lamp working on that block, the flash of baldness, the glimpse of a frock coat and old-fashioned high collar, and the white-worm movement of the long strangler’s fingers before the darkness swallowed the man up again.

Forgetting about the trolley, James began walking quickly after the apparition.

Beyond that last, weak street lamp, there was not only deep darkness but a sudden end to the tenements and shacks that had lined each side of the street. It was as if James had followed Professor Moriarty all the way out of Chicago and they were on the dark prairie together.

But then the smell struck James. The smell and the sense of hundreds if not thousands of massive but unseen animal hooves, the stench and the atavistic certainty that one is being stared at in the darkness by countless unseen eyes. The street ended in a T and straight ahead through the staggering stench James could make out a great, dark, occasionally moving mass of living, breathing, staring, and excreting organisms. Cattle.

He’d reached the Chicago stockyards. Not a single street light or building’s lighted window pierced the darkness to either side. Far out in the filled corrals there was a gas lamp or two, but they were too far away to shed any light on his immediate surroundings. James saw the strangely dark glistening of horns far out there.

James chose to turn left and walked boldly into the breathing darkness in that direction.

It took a minute or two for him to realize that there was no sidewalk, no paved street under his shoes. Just gravel and dirt. At least it was not mud of the sort he was sure filled the cattle pens to his right. He could hear the squelching as sleeping cattle moved fitfully or others shoved their way through the mass to a feeding trough.

James also realized that he felt . . . different. The apathy and anger of the day had drained away with his bold searching out of Moriarty in the dangerous Chicago neighborhoods. He’d caught no more glimpse of the bald head and long, white fingers since he’d come to this black collision of crumbling city warehouses and the huge stockyards, but he hadn’t really expected to find—much less confront—the mastermind of crime.

Henry James realized it was as if he was outside himself, above himself, watching himself (here where it was too dark even to read the hands of his watch without striking a match). Before this night, he’d been struggling to be a playwright; now he was both actor and audience, watching himself as he acted. Not “performed”, but acted, as in carrying out a physical and purposeful (and somewhat daring) action. If this is how a character in some lesser writer’s novel feels . . . I like it, thought James.

It was hard for him to believe at this moment that a little more than a month and a half ago, he’d been ready to drown himself in the Seine. For what? Sagging book sales?

James almost laughed aloud as he strode along in the night. As much as he still disliked Sherlock Holmes for a myriad of valid reasons, he now realized that the detective—whether real or fictional—had been Henry James, Jr.’s, savior. This strange night in this strange city, James felt younger, stronger—more alive—than any time he could remember, at least since his childhood. And he deeply suspected that the life and energy he’d felt as a boy was merely his lunar reflection of the sunlight of older brother William’s wild energy and spirit.

Drastic engagement. These were the words that now echoed through James’s mind. Not merely a reinvigorated engagement with the stuff of daily life, but an engagement with the dangers and dramas outside any life he’d ever allowed himself to imagine, much less live. For the first time he understood how his brother Wilkie could have suffered such terrible wounds, seen such horrible things—one of the two men carrying Wilkie along the dunes on a stretcher the day after the night battle at Fort Wagner had his head blown to pieces, the spatterings of brains and white bits of skull falling all over Wilkie as the stretcher fell to the ground—yet Wilkie, only partially recovered, had eventually gone back to the war. As had James’s brother Bob after losing half his regiment in a different battle.

Drastic engagement. James suddenly understood why such moments were life to Sherlock Holmes and why the detective had to resort to injections of cocaine or morphine or heroin to get through the dull, backwater days of the quotidian between dangerous cases.

It might have been Moriarty he’d glimpsed from the trolley a half hour earlier, but probably not. It didn’t matter that much to James at that moment.

And then he saw motion. Dark shapes moving toward him. Vertical forms outside the wooden fences of the corrals. Men.

James’s eyes had adapted well enough to the dark—the backs of the warehouses to his left had no lit windows or outside lamps—that he could see that the forms were of four men and that all of them carried clubs, truncheons.

He stopped.

Lifting his gentleman’s stick into both soft hands, James wished that it was Holmes’s sword-cane.

Should he run? James realized that he had more dread of being dragged down from behind on the run, like one of these cattle at a rodeo, than of facing whoever or whatever was striding toward him so quickly in the darkness.

The four assailants—James had no delusions that they could be anything else and whether they worked for Moriarty or not was academic and irrelevant to everything now (he’d never know)—had fanned out and were less than ten feet from him when a voice boomed from a dark alley to his left.

“YOU THERE! STOP! DON’T MOVE!!”

The shield was raised on a powerful dark lantern and a beam of light stabbed out from the distant alley to illuminate Henry James—his cane held at port-arms across his chest—and four thugs in patched and filthy stockyard clothing. What James had imagined were truncheons were truncheons . . . knobbed, stained, deadly.

“FREEZE!” bellowed the God-voice again. James had already obeyed and did not move a muscle, while his four assailants exploded into motion, two vaulting over the corral fence to shove their way into the dark mass of cattle, the other two loping back along the fence into the darkness from whence they’d come.

The light shifted away from them to hold on the squinting James as the figure with the God-voice came closer. Then the beam lowered.

A Chicago policeman. Not one of Burnham’s flashy Columbian Guardsmen for the Fair, but a real Chicago policeman. James took in the double row of brass buttons, the soft cap, the oversized star on the short but burly man’s left chest, the narrowed eyes, and the luxurious mustache.

James felt some relief that the policeman had shown up when he did, but he’d not been frightened. James had not been frightened, even as the four thugs closed on him. He did not understand it. Nor did he understand himself at the moment.

No matter. He realized that he was giving the suspicious police officer a silly smile. James composed himself as best he could.

The now half-shielded beam from the dark lantern moved up and down James, from his soft, expensive black Italian-made shoes and dusty spats to his expensive jacket, waistcoat, collar, cravat, and stickpin.

“What are you doing out here at the stockyards, sir?” said the policeman in a human-leveled voice. “Those men would have robbed you of everything . . . most probably including your life, sir.”

James fought down the strange impulse to grin at the wonderful policeman with his wonderful Irish accent and his wonderful waxed mustache and even at his wonderful short, black, heavy wooden truncheon, which Holmes had told him was called a “billy club” in America.

James tried to reply, but the master of the modern endless sentence could manage only ragged fragments. “I was . . . I wanted . . . to see Chicago . . . got off the elevated train . . . then the trolleys . . . got out to walk . . . suddenly it was all . . . darkness.”

The police officer realized that he was dealing with an idiot and spoke now in a slow, reassuring, nursery-teacher’s voice. “Yes, sir. But this . . . is no place . . . for you . . . sir.”

James nodded his agreement and he realized, to his horror, that he was grinning now. He’d not been afraid.

“Where are you staying, sir?”

It took a few seconds for the meaning of the officer’s question to sink in. “Oh, at the . . . no, not the Great Northern this time . . . no . . . on Cameron’s . . . on Senator Don Cameron’s . . . yacht.”

The police officer squinted at him. James realized that the Irishman was handsome enough, save for a nose that looked like a squashed red potato. He bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing.

“Where is this yacht, sir?”

“Anchored off the Grand Pier of the White City,” said James. He was in charge of his nouns, verbs, and syntax again. (In truth, he hadn’t missed them much. He realized that he’d trade the whole lot for just more of what he was feeling right now.)

“May I ask your name, sir?

“Henry James, Jr.,” James said at once. Then, wondering at his reply, he hurried to correct it. “Just Henry James now. My father—Henry James, Sr.—died about eleven years ago.”

“How did you get ashore from this senator’s yacht, Mr. James?” “The City Pier. There’s a boatman from the yacht in a steam launch. I told him to wait for me.”

The policeman turned his lantern on an inexpensive watch in his palm. “It’s after midnight, sir.”

James did not know what to say to this revelation. He suddenly doubted if his boatman had waited all these hours. Perhaps all his friends presumed him lost. Or dead.

“Come, Mr. James,” said the policeman, putting a gentle arm on James’s shoulder and turning them back toward the dark alley from which he’d so magically emerged. “I’ll see you back to the right trolley stop, sir. The trolleys and the new “L” quit running in less than an hour, now. Even on a Saturday night. You’ll need to go straight back to the pier with no more sightseeing.”

Not minding at all the friendly arm on his shoulders, James walked with the Irishman back toward the lighted parts of the city.

7

On the Sunday before Monday’s May-first official Opening Day of the Fair, Henry Cabot Lodge’s guests had broken into various groups to find their day’s entertainment. During the time Henry James was with anyone exploring the quiescent but soon-to-erupt fairgrounds, he stayed with Henry Adams who was staying close to Lizzie and Don Cameron. But sometime in the afternoon, Adams had wandered off alone again. He’d spent most of the previous day alone as well. Everyone had agreed to meet back on the pier at seven to take the large motor launch back to the yacht. They were going up the lake to be guests at a gala given by the 68-year-old re-elected Mayor Carter Henry Harrison. Even young Helen Hay had been seduced by the old populist’s energy, candor, and charm upon first meeting him earlier that day.

But when everyone gathered on the pier, Adams was missing.

“I believe I know where he is,” said Holmes. “He tends to lose track of time there. You all go ahead but send the boat back . . . I shall be on the pier with Mr. Adams within twenty minutes.”

Senator Don Cameron said, “Lizzie and I shall wait here for you and Adams and ride out to the yacht with you.”

The rest of the happy party boarded and Holmes watched the powered boat churn out to where a cluster of yachts, including the noble Albatross, and even the iron warship U.S.S. Michigan were anchored.

Holmes had been with Adams when they discovered the Machinery Hall, and the older historian’s fascination with the dynamos and other machines producing electricity suddenly became insatiable. Technically, none of the Columbian Exposition’s thousands of electricity-driven machines were supposed to be turned on until noon the next day when President Cleveland would depress a solid gold telegraph key—set on a red velvet pillow—which would, besides causing a thousand flags and banners to unfurl, close a circuit that would start up the gigantic 3,000-horsepower Allis-made steam engine in the Machinery Building.

But Adams had poked around and inquired until he found the real dynamo that was already providing power to the White City’s lights and the electrical railroad bringing yellow cars to the Fair. It was the world’s greatest dynamo and it was all but hidden away in the Intramural Railroad Company building set at the far southern end of the grounds, sunken behind trees and grander buildings. Usually the building was empty save for the dynamo’s constant attendants. The curved metal sheath of the actual dynamo was larger than the arched entrance to Henry Adams’s mansion, but the various wheels—at least fifteen feet tall even with half of each wheel disappearing into its groove in the cement floor—dwarfed men and dynamo. Holmes had helped him search it out on Saturday, admired the machinery for a minute, listened long enough to hear one of the technicians shout to Henry Adams above the roar that even at that moment the dynamo was powering six and a half miles of railroad with sixteen cars in motion all at once, and then he left Adams alone in the noise and ozone. He knew that the historian was spending most of his hours on shore in this remote, almost windowless building staring at and experiencing the power of this new source of energy for the human race.

Now as Holmes came in through the shadows of girders and wheels, he saw that Adams kept removing his straw hat and mopping his brow with his linen handkerchief—the unshaded overhead work lamps gleamed on his bald head each time he removed the hat—and was busy talking to a tall young man dressed in a far-too-heavy wool suit who, because of the young man’s long black hair, sharp beak of a nose, copper complexion, and black eyes, Holmes took to be a Red Indian. Adams was lecturing and looked as excited as a school boy.

“ . . . But this! This, Mr. Slow Horse, the ancient Greeks would have delighted to see and the Venetians, at their height, would have envied. Chicago has turned on us with a sort of wonderful, defiant contempt, and shown us something far more powerful even than art, infinitely more important than mere business. This is, alas or hurrah, the future, Mr. Slow Horse! Yours and mine both, I fear . . . and yet hope at the same time. I can revel and write postcards about the fakes and frauds of the Midway Plaisance, but each day I pass through the Machinery Hall and each evening I return here, to this very chamber, to stare like an old owl at the dynamo of the future . . .”

Adams seemed to hear his own lecturing tone, took off his straw hat and mopped his scalp again, and said more softly to the young man as Holmes came up behind them—“I must apologize again, sir. I babble on as if you were an audience rather than an interlocutor. What do you think of this dynamo and the now-quiescent wonders of the Machinery Hall, where I’ve seen you staring each day even as I do, Mr. Slow Horse?”

The tall Indian paused before speaking and his voice shocked Holmes it was so resonant. “I think, Mr. Adams,” said the tall, dark man, “that it is the true and revealed religion of your race.”

Adams launched into another excited speech and Holmes made himself known to him—he knew that the Indian had noticed him enter and knew where he was the entire time he’d been in the vast space with them—and Adams was saying, “The Virgin Mary was to the men of the thirteenth century what this dynamo and its brother shall be to . . .”

He realized that Holmes was standing there and stammered to a stop. He removed his straw hat again and said, “Mr. Slow Horse, may I present my companion at the Fair today, the eminent Sher . . . that is . . . the eminent Norwegian explorer, Mr. Jan Sigerson.”

Instead of offering his hand, Holmes stood straight, heels together, and bowed toward the man in an almost Germanic fashion. The Red Indian nodded back but also seemed as reluctant to touch bare hands as Holmes was. Without knowing how or why he knew, Holmes knew that this young man—not quite so young seen close up, Holmes realized, noting the creases around the eyes probably only a year or two short of Holmes’s own 39 years—was not only a Lakota Sioux of the kind that Holmes had met more than 17 years ago, but was a wičasa wakan—a holy man of that tribe, a shaman, a man touched with the ability to see in more dimensions than most human beings.

“It is a true pleasure to meet you, Mr. Slow Horse,” said Holmes. “We Europeans rarely get the opportunity to meet a practicing wičasa wakan from the Natural Free Human Beings.”

The Indian, whose real name Holmes had known instantly and absolutely was not “Slow Horse”, looked at Holmes in a way even more alert and startled than could be explained by this white man’s use of the proper Lakota term.

Henry Adams, holding the brim of his straw hat in both hands, took two steps backwards from the two men. Adams felt he was looking at two huge eagles staring into one another’s eyes.

Holmes broke the gaze first. He turned to Adams. “I apologize for interrupting, Henry, but Lizzie and the Senator are waiting at Franklin’s steam launch at the main pier. Evidently we’re running a little late for Mayor Harrison’s dinner.”

Adams said something to the Indian and turned to leave. Holmes bowed toward the tall man again—still afraid, for some reason, to touch his bare hand—and said, “It has been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Slow Horse, and I can only hope that someday the wasichu wanagi will no longer be a problem for you.”

Holmes realized that he’d said that he hoped “the Fat Taker’s ghost, that is, the white man’s ghost, would no longer be a problem for the man”, but he had no idea why he’d said it. The Indian responded only by blinking rapidly.

Holmes turned in embarrassment and followed Henry Adams out of the roaring Intramural Railroad Building and had gone about a hundred yards before he stopped, touched the historian’s arm, and said, “Please go out to the yacht with the Camerons. I just remembered one last thing I have to do.”

“Well . . .” said Adams, seemingly shaken by something he’d seen or sensed. “If you must, but it would be a crime for you to miss Mayor Harrison’s dinner . . .”

Holmes nodded even though he hadn’t really heard Adams’s words. He turned and jogged back to the railroad building.

The Indian was gone. Holmes jogged down actual dirt paths and then narrow lanes back to the Parade Ground near the railway entrances, thinking that if the Indian gentleman were there as part of Buffalo Bill’s adjacent show, this would be the way he’d leave the fairgrounds.

It was. Holmes caught up to him just before the man went through the metal turning spokes of the exit.

“Mr. Slow Horse!”

The tall man turned slowly. He looked unsurprised to see Holmes again.

“I . . . there’s something I must . . . if you could help me with . . . I’m sorry,” stammered Sherlock Holmes. “Your name is not Slow Horse, is it?”

“No, it is Paha Sapa,” said the other.

“Black Hills,” whispered Holmes.

“And your real name is not Sigerson,” said Paha Sapa. “You did not even try to hide your Oxbridge English accent.”

“My name is Sherlock Holmes.” He held out his hand and finally the Indian took it.

Holmes felt the greatest shock in his life, at least since the three bullets had struck him in the Himalayas. He saw and knew immediately that Paha Sapa had felt the same energy pass between them.

When their hands released, the energy was still there between them—far stronger than the ozone and charge in the dynamo room.

“I must ask you, Paha Sapa,” said Holmes, “how can I tell if I am real or not?”

“Wicaśta ksapa kiŋ ia,” said Paha Sapa.

Holmes somehow understood. “The wise man speaks . . .”

“But I do not yet know if I am a wise man,” Paha Sapa finished in English.

“Tell me anyway,” said Holmes. “I already know that I am not a wise enough man to answer this question.”

Paha Sapa’s eyes pierced him—it was a physical sensation of being pierced, as with arrows.

“All men born to women are real,” said Paha Sapa. “But even some of them are . . . faint. Weak in reality. The strongest beings are those who sing themselves into existence.”

“I don’t understand,” said Holmes.

“The Six Grandfathers were not born of women, but they are real,” said Paha Sapa. “I and all my fathers and grandfathers before me have helped sing them into reality.”

Holmes’s expression asked the question—How?

“By telling their stories,” said Paha Sapa and afterwards Holmes could not remember if it had been said in Lakota or English. “By telling their own stories. But mostly by having others tell their stories.” Paha Sapa paused a second before saying almost fiercely, “Telling them and believing them!”

“Yes,” said Holmes, not sure exactly what he was agreeing with but knowing that he agreed with all his heart and soul. “Pilamayaye,” said Holmes. “Thank you.” It was not enough, but it was all he could get out.

He had nodded and started to turn away when Paha Sapa gripped him firmly by the upper arm. Again it was as if Holmes had walked into the spinning coil of the dynamo.

“Lucan, kte,” said Paha Sapa. Lucan, he kills thee.

Holmes felt the cold fist of absolute fate start to close around his heart but pushed that away.

“Holmes, uŋktepi! Yakte!” It was said almost in a whisper but it struck Holmes like a shout, a wild war cry in the prairie wind. Holmes, you kill him. Thou killest him!

“Yes,” whispered Sherlock Holmes.

Paha Sapa smiled. His deep voice came softly in normal tones as he said—“Toksha ake čante ista wascinyanktin ktelo. Hecetu. Mitakuya oyasin!”

Holmes understood it completely—I shall see you again with the eye of my heart. So be it. All my relatives!

“ Mitakuya oyasin!” replied Holmes. All my relatives!

The two men walked away in opposite directions and it took Holmes almost two minutes before he remembered that he was supposed to go to the pier where the boat should be waiting.

8

The full moon was still in the paling western sky beyond the White City when Sherlock Holmes brought Henry James with him to the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building before six a.m. on Monday.

“I don’t understand why I have to be part of this . . . whatever this is,” said the sleepy and irritated James.

“Because you do,” said Holmes. “You have been from the beginning and today there must be an ending. You need to be there. Besides, I gave the lady your name for the key . . .”

“What lady? What key?” stammered James, but fell silent as he saw Colonel Rice, Agent Drummond, and Chicago Police Chief McClaughry waiting for them at the largest of the Great Buildings.

Rice unlocked the door, let them all in, and locked the door behind them. Holmes led the way to the Otis-Hale Company’s exposed elevator. There was a metal gate surrounding the elevator area that stayed locked when the lift was closed to the public. Colonel Rice unlocked that outer gate now and handed the key to Holmes, who used it to unlock the actual gate to the elevator.

“You see, Mr. James,” said Holmes, handing him the key, “the same key opens both gates. Use it only if a certain lady shows up and asks to go to the promenade roof level. She may be . . . persuasive.”

“But I have no idea of how to handle . . . to control . . . to operate . . .” said James.

Drummond stepped into the elevator and showed a lever to the left of the doorway. “Pull to the left to go up. Further left you go, the faster you ascend. Don’t forget to stop at the roof level or we’ll have to look for you and your passenger on the moon.”

“There’s a mechanical sensor that slows it to a stop there no matter what the operator is doing,” said Colonel Rice, obviously worried that James would take Drummond literally.

James still shook his head and tried to hand the key back to Holmes.

“Nonsense,” said Holmes, refusing to take it. “You’ve been in a thousand lifts, Mr. James.”

“Not so many,” grumbled the writer. It was certainly true that London had little use for the modern elevator, any more than his beloved Rome or Florence.

As if the matter had been settled, Holmes turned to Drummond, the two standing within the cage of the elevator car. “How many marksmen did you decide on?”

“President Cleveland is adamant about refusing to have men with rifles visible on the rooftops,” said Drummond. “He says that it would make this joyous day feel like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural with soldiers stationed on every building.”

“Fine, fine,” said Holmes. “How many subtle, out-of-plain-view marksmen did you settle on?”

“Twelve,” said Drummond. “Prone or otherwise hidden on the top levels of every other Great Building that visually aligns with the full south promenade of this building.”

Holmes nodded. “Telescopic sights?”

“Twenty-power,” said Drummond.

“Do not forget to remind them that they are not to shoot unless I either give the signal or have been shot down,” said Holmes. “We don’t want a gun battle raging above the heads of one hundred thousand people.”

“How can you be so sure that Lucan Adler will choose the promenade of this building for his sniper’s nest?” asked Colonel Rice.

“I just am,” said Holmes. “He will be at the easternmost end of the promenade deck. Essentially beside or behind the giant German spotlight mounted there.”

“A difficult target from all the angles the marksmen will have,” said Chief McClaughry.

“Precisely,” said Holmes.

“But we’ll never let him get out of this building alive,” said Rice.

Holmes smiled and turned to James. “People will be going up and down to the Observation Deck all morning until ten a.m., James,” he said softly. “Then men from Colonel Rice’s Columbian Guard will make a clean sweep of the entire rooftop area to make sure no one has stayed behind and after that, they will lock both the elevator door and the cage door. You will have the key.”

“To give to what lady?” asked James. His voice was shaky.

“You will recognize her from the Irene Adler photograph I’ve shown you. Auburn hair. Strong chin. Amazing cheekbones. Eyes that are almost violet.”

Holmes held out his hand. “Good-bye for now, old boy. Thank you for everything.”

James shook the hand and gave one apprehensive glance up at the two hundred vertical feet through which he was supposed to guide that elevator. The four men left the building and Colonel Rice locked the outside door again.

“The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building will open at its usual scheduled time,” Rice said to Henry James. “At ten a.m., my men will make their sweep to empty the Observation Deck and rooftop level and then we’ll put up the sign saying that the elevator attraction and promenade deck will be closed to the public between ten a.m. and two p.m. Many will want to get up to get a better view of the president, but all the high walkways will be closed through those hours. You need to be here at ten.”

James looked at the large key and put it in his waistcoat pocket. “What should I do until then?” he asked somewhat plaintively.

“If I were you,” said Agent Drummond, “I’d take that waiting power boat back to Senator Cameron’s yacht and catch another couple of hours’ sleep. Just make sure someone wakes you so that you can be here—with the key in your pocket—at ten a.m. You won’t have to say anything to anyone—the sign will explain the closure, the outer cage door will be locked, and the disappointed public will go outside on the ground level to see the president.”

Later, James didn’t remember even nodding before he turned and walked back to the pier.

9

The morning grew chill and cloudy and was threatening rain until minutes before the President of the United States arrived, when the sun emerged on cue and bathed spectators and dignitaries with rich light.

Holmes heard the huge crowd gathered on the Parade Ground around the Administration Building cheer and clap the sun even before the president’s procession of carriages came into sight. The detective peered out of the long, narrow slit he’d had Colonel Rice’s crew cut out of the metal base below the giant searchlight on the southwest corner of the Observation Deck on the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. He could see the length of the walkway to the identical searchlight and metal base on the southeast corner of the building. If Lucan Adler had chosen some other place for his sniper’s roost, the world-famous detective Sherlock Holmes would be the fool lying, sweltering and sweating, in the tight airless box despite the cool morning, curled up like a useless fetus while the President of the United States was shot dead from some other sniper’s roost.

Unless one of Colonel Rice’s Guardsmen carrying handguns or Agent Drummond’s marksmen with rifles saw and shot Lucan Adler before he struck.

Holmes knew they wouldn’t.

His watch, which he had laid on the floor in the narrow strip of light coming in, said precisely eleven o’clock when the orchestra played “Hail to the Chief” as President Cleveland climbed the stairs to the speakers’ platform. Curled and cramped because of the massive insulated wires filling so much of the space in the steel base, Holmes kept his vigil through the slit but saw no movement. The president was now an easy target for Lucan’s ’93 Mauser—if that’s what he chose—from a hundred other places surrounding the open square massed with people. Holmes guessed correctly from the noise of the applause given the president’s arrival and the first of the speakers—voices barely audible to Holmes—that the crowd must be lining both sides of the Lagoon all the way back to and possibly through the Peristyle, spilling out into every side street and out onto the pier itself.

Holmes knew the schedule to the second, so that he knew they’d already fallen at least three minutes behind schedule when the crowd quieted as a blind chaplain gave the Opening Day blessing.

After the debacle of the previous autumn’s endless (and freezing) Dedication Day Ceremony, Daniel Burnham and the other Fair directors had decided to keep this opening ceremony as short as possible. But almost a full hour had passed between the president’s arrival on the speakers’ platform—Holmes heard faint echoes of badly written Odes to Columbus and other time wasters—and Director-General Davis rising to speak briefly and then introduce the president.

Through his east-facing slit, Holmes could see the supposedly locked door of the base of the searchlight at the far east end of the Observation Deck swing open silently. Lucan Adler uncurled himself from the dark space, reached in, and pulled out a long, cloth-covered object. He shook off the black cloth and, even from this distance, Holmes could see that it was indeed the ’93 Mauser with the five-round clip and an attached 20X telescopic sight.

Holmes kicked his own door open, got to his feet, and began walking straight toward Lucan.

For two hours Henry James stood near the inoperative elevator and heard would-be president-seers express their anger and frustration at not being able to travel to the Observation Deck promenade. But now the president was about to be introduced—the huge hall had emptied out around him and James could faintly hear voices through the opened doors—and James stood alone near the elevator.

Until a few minutes before noon, that is, when a well-dressed woman perhaps in her early forties, a woman with auburn hair, a strong chin, high cheekbones, and violet eyes, came up to him and said, “Are you by any chance the writer Henry James?”

Blinking at being recognized in public, not something that happened to him in America, James said, “Why, yes, I am.”

He was about to tip his hat to her when the woman took an ugly-looking and obviously heavy revolver pistol from her cloth handbag and aimed at James’s belly.

“Take out the key,” she said. “Open these two gates. And then take me up.”

James hurried to comply although he almost fumbled and dropped the key at the outer gate and fussed too long with the elevator cage door as well. She all but pushed him into the lift cage and stepped in behind him, the pistol still trained on him.

“Take me up,” she said. “Quickly.”

James jerked the lever too far to the left, causing the car to lurch up like a rocket, and then he compensated too far to the right, causing it to slow to a near stop only forty feet above the floor.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” snapped the woman, moved James aside, and pushed the lever left so that the elevator hurtled upward.

Lucan Adler, even leaner and more aquiline in profile than his famous father, had settled in against and partially behind the large searchlight, the Mauser braced on one of the light’s metal ridges. Squeezed in between the Observation Deck’s fence and the searchlight as Lucan was, Holmes doubted whether he offered a clear target to any of Drummond’s men, even if they’d caught his brief movement out and up.

Lucan finished adjusting the telescopic sight with a tiny screwdriver he set back into his shirt pocket—he was wearing no jacket of any kind—and held the Mauser aimed at the president who was in the process of being introduced. But Lucan was also watching Sherlock Holmes approach and was smiling.

When Holmes was about twenty-five long paces away, Lucan swung the rifle in his direction and said, “Stop.”

Holmes stopped.

“I can get off three rounds in less than two seconds,” said Lucan Adler and Holmes was surprised by the metallic sharpness of his voice. Nothing like his mother’s voice. Perhaps more like his father’s, Holmes could not be sure.

“Two into the fatboy president’s chest and the third round into your belly before you get five feet closer,” added Lucan. “If you move your hands toward your jacket or any pocket, I’ll kill you first and put two or three rounds into the president before anyone looks up to see what the first noise was.”

Holmes knew that he could and would do precisely that. He stood very still.

The president had not begun his short address, but Director-General Davis’s introduction was winding down. Holmes knew, and Holmes knew that Lucan knew, that when Davis had introduced Cleveland and the oversized president actually stood at the podium, there’d be a full 90-seconds of “Hail, Columbia” being played and the added time and noise of the audience’s loud approval.

The rifle shot killing Holmes during that time wouldn’t be heard by anyone down there in the din and probably not by Drummond’s sharpshooters either.

Holmes looked at the guy wire that ran from the post at the corner where Lucan hid himself and ran almost three hundred feet out to the warning beacon in the lake. He’d known that Lucan would rig some device there, but the simplicity of it was impressive: just a flywheel atop the wire within a welded unfinished square of metal to hold the wheel on the cable, with a modified bicycle handlebars, completely covered with rubber grips, hanging below it.

“Elegant,” said Holmes, nodding toward the escape apparatus. He was sure that a fast powerboat was waiting at anchor next to that tiny beacon island of concrete. “But the police and Secret Service already know about the Zephyr.”

Lucan Adler shrugged and smirked. “The Zephyr was always meant to be a distraction.”

Davis introduced the president and the band and chorus launched into “Hail, Columbia” as the president came up to the low podium. Holmes did not turn his head to look over his right shoulder to see it.

Lucan Adler raised the rifle higher, sighting it on Holmes’s chest. “Use just your left hand,” Lucan said, just loud enough to be heard over the roar of noise below, “and take off your jacket, waistcoat, and shirt. Quickly! If you don’t have them all off in thirty seconds I’ll shoot.”

Holmes’s left hand fumbled with buttons and clasps. But before thirty seconds were up—just a third of the scheduled time for the music and pre-presidential jubilation below—Holmes was standing naked from the waist up.

Lucan continued looking through the sight. “Two exit wounds. Nice cluster for the distance. Turn around. Now.”

Holmes turned and looked back toward the searchlight under which he’d hidden for the past six hours.

“Oh, that third entry scar looks very nasty, Mr. Holmes,” hissed Lucan. “Is that bullet still in there? No, I think not. Did some humble Tibetan shepherd gouge around with a rusty spoon to dig it out? My, that must still be painful. Turn around and look at me! Now.”

Holmes turned to face the young man, hardly more than a boy but with the black-marbled stare of a cobra. Holmes’s hands hung loosely by his sides. The sunshine felt good on his naked upper body.

“It makes more sense to kill you before I kill Cleveland,” Lucan said, obviously enjoying himself. “But it might be more fun to allow you to watch the president being shot, and then dispatch you within those fast two seconds. What do you think, Mr. Detective?”

Holmes said nothing. Behind him, the elevator doors opened.

Henry James tried to remain in the elevator cage, but the woman—taller and stronger than he was—jerked him out by the arm and pulled him along as they walked east along the Observation Deck.

There was Sherlock Holmes facing the other way, his scars like rays radiating from the moon craters in the bright daylight, and Lucan Adler had swung the rifle in their direction.

“Why Mrs. Baxter,” said Lucan with an audible sneer. “Stop there by dear old Dad and keep that goddamned Bull Dog revolver pointed downward.”

Stepping beyond Holmes so he could see her, Irene Adler aimed the pistol at Holmes’s chest and said, “I don’t want to point it downward. I want to point it at his heart.” She did just that.

Lucan laughed, a sound like steel rending steel. Above the music and noise below, he said, “And you are Mr. Henry James, the writer, whom Holmes has been dragging around behind him this month and more like a pet lamb on a string. Well, know that you will live out this day, Mr. James. I admire your writing. It is painful to read. I like pain. It should continue.”

The music stopped. The crowd cheered and then, like a tide shushing out, fell as quiet as it could.

President Cleveland began to speak. He had a big, space-filling voice, said all the newspapers, but his words were inaudible at this distance. Mouse squeaks followed by wild applause.

“The target first,” muttered Lucan and lifted and laid the Mauser along the flange of the searchlight, focusing on the president. Holmes knew that Cleveland’s chest and belly would be filling Lucan’s ’scope.

“No, Holmes first!” cried Irene Adler, aiming the pistol at Holmes from only seven or eight feet away and cocking the Bull Dog pistol.

At seeing her cock that hammer back, James reacted as he had never reacted before. He jumped at Irene Adler, managing to grab her wrist and force it down even as he realized, too late, that she had already swiveled the pistol away from Holmes and at her son.

The blast of the revolver deafened James.

Instead of hitting Lucan Adler in the chest, where she’d been aiming, the deflected shot struck the young man’s right foot. Lucan lost his balance and fell to the deck, but rolled like some jungle cat and came to one knee with the Mauser shouldered, swinging it their way.

Holmes had begun sprinting toward Lucan before the pistol fired, but James saw in an instant that he wouldn’t be able to cover the distance in time.

Cursing in pain as he knelt there, but still holding the rifle with absolute confidence, Lucan Adler aimed and fired.

James felt the bullet buzz past his right ear and Irene Adler cried out and fell face forward. He had the presence of mind to look for the pistol, but she must have been lying on it.

The wounded, cursing Lucan started to swing the rifle barrel at Holmes but Holmes had closed the gap and kicked it aside. The heavy rifle went rattling across the paved promenade.

Lucan had time to crouch and suddenly there was a flat, deadly blade protruding from between the knuckles of his right hand. His right sleeve was torn and James could see the elegant mechanism that had thrust the blade forward. He swung at Holmes’s bare belly and, although the detective arched his back like a bow, James could see blood fly.

Lucan Adler turned, leaped over the fence, grabbed the bicycle grips, cut the restraining string with one swing of his bladed hand, and began plummeting out of sight down the long guy wire.

Sherlock Holmes had not paused a second. With his blood still misting the air, he ran at the fence, jumped to its top, and leaped out into two hundred feet of open space.

10

The unseen crowd of a hundred thousand people roared as if applauding Sherlock Holmes’s suicide. Running toward the south fence beside the searchlight, Henry James saw, in his peripheral vision, huge flags unfurling from the Agriculture and other giant buildings, the huge Statue of the Republic in the Lagoon directly south of him finally dropping its veil, fountains leaping into life. Part of him realized that President Cleveland had lived long enough to depress the gold telegraph key on its velvet pillow.

Later, James had the thought that any true gentleman would have first checked the condition of Mrs. Irene Adler Lorne Baxter, and helped her if he could. But at that moment Henry James didn’t give the least goddamn about the condition of Lucan Adler’s mother.

He reached the fence at the southeast corner of the building and gasped.

Holmes hadn’t been able to leap far enough to get his hands on the rubber-tipped bicycle handlebar. Instead, one hand caught Lucan Adler’s belt, the other hand gripped his shirt collar.

The collar came off and the shirt ripped down the seam, even as Lucan began to twist his body toward Holmes. With Lucan’s sleeve torn open, James now saw the knife mechanism strapped on his forearm work again—slipping a wide, flat blade between the assassin’s knuckles.

Holmes swung himself around the already turning killer and began clambering up Lucan’s front like a monkey on a man-shaped climbing bar. His right hand now had a grip around Lucan’s neck, pulling the younger man’s head down like a lover enforcing a kiss, even while his left shifted quickly from Lucan’s belt to grab his right wrist, arresting the blade. But not quickly enough to avoid another wound. James saw blood mist the air again . . . Holmes’s blood.

Henry James looked around wildly. Part of his mind had recorded the sound of the elevator going down and now it was arriving at this level again, but that meant nothing to James. Irene Adler was still lying face-down, possibly dead.

James saw the Mauser rifle. He quickly picked it up—dear Christ it was heavy—and laid it across the top of the metal fence to steady himself while he tried to look through the telescopic sight.

Holding the wood under the barrel tightly, he worked the well-oiled and expertly assembled bolt. A complete bullet—James could see the lead points with little X’s gouged into them—ejected and landed under the German searchlight.

For all James knew, that was the last live round in the rifle. He didn’t have time to check. Nor did he wonder, as anyone who knew firearms would have, just how far off true the telescopic sight had been knocked in all its being thrown here and there.

For a moment nothing made sense and then, fuzzy but solid in the circle, there were Holmes and Lucan spinning as the single-wheeled mechanism flew down the cable. Lucan’s white shirt was torn to tatters and covered with blood—Holmes’s blood, James realized. Holmes’s bare skin was as white, torn, and blood-spattered as his opponent’s shirt.

The only reason they hadn’t reached the bottom of this long guy-wired slide was that Lucan’s wheel mechanism hadn’t been designed for so much weight. It lurched along at high speed for thirty or forty feet, then caught, almost stopped, then lurched down and forward again.

The two men were fighting more like animals than men. When they were still moving quickly, Holmes grabbed Lucan’s right wrist and forced the metal release for the knuckle knife up against the wire. Sparks flew. The blade mechanism bent into itself and was now of little use in the fighting.

Lucan switched his right hand to the handlebar and began to pound on Holmes’s lower head and shoulders with his free hand, even as Holmes locked his legs around Lucan Adler and clambered up his bloody front. The two men butted heads, bit at each other. Lucan used the fingers of his left hand to claw at Holmes’s eyes even as Holmes freed his left hand long enough to swing its wedge into Lucan’s throat.

James realized that sweat had clouded his vision. He wiped at his right eye and found the two men in the circular scope again. Their pulley had slowed and they twisted while they fought, bit, kicked, and gouged, but then the wheel seemed to free itself and began falling again toward the still distant beacon island in Lake Michigan.

James saw whiteness fill the telescopic sight, thought that it was— might be—the back of Lucan Adler. He held his breath and squeezed the trigger. He’d not had the butt of the Mauser pressed solidly to his shoulder and now the recoil knocked him backwards from his half-crouch and firmly onto his rear end.

A hundred and thirty feet down the two-hundred-forty foot guy wire, Holmes had grasped the handlebar and pulled himself up to Lucan’s level. The two men were now face to face, Lucan grinning wildly, as they fought with elbows, fists, head butts, and knees.

Lucan had been working on the knife mechanism and now he had the blade firmly between his knuckles again, his left hand locked firmly on the bicycle bar. Holmes’s left-handed grip on the bar was more tenuous and left him unable to defend the bare left side of his upper body.

“Die, God damn you!” screamed Lucan Adler, bringing the blade around in a thrust that would reach Holmes’s heart.

Holmes said something Lucan couldn’t make out—it might have been “God forgive me” or “God forgive you”—but whatever the words were, they meant nothing now that the killing blow was already in motion.

Suddenly a bullet ripped through the narrow space between the two men, tore a furrow through Lucan’s upper right arm and shirt, and ripped its way across the back of Holmes’s dropping right hand.

The impact was just enough to turn Lucan’s dagger thrust to Holmes’s heart into a razor-sharp slashing motion that cut through flesh and skidded across a rib.

Holmes pulled the tiny lemon-squeezer cyclist’s pistol from his right trouser pocket, pressed it hard into Lucan’s belly—high, at the diaphragm just below where the assassin’s heavily muscled flesh met bone—squeezed the pistol’s handgrip tightly to release its silly lemon-squeezer safety, and fired twice into Lucan Adler’s body.

James realized that Drummond and some of his gray-suited men had run up to him while two others were checking on the still unconscious Irene Adler. Drummond heard the two pistol shots, but was sure it was a double-echo of his own rifle shot.

Drummond helped him to his feet just as Lucan Adler, still seventy feet in the air, opened his arms and fell away. Holmes was clinging weakly to the pulley device’s handlebars as it picked up speed toward the buoy post.

Lucan fell gracefully, his arms fully extended in what James could only see as a Christlike pose, his head arched back as if he were looking at the sky. James was sure that he would reach the water, but at the last instant, the back of Lucan Adler’s head hit the concrete sea wall with a sound that could be heard all the way to where James and the other men stood numbly, dumbly.

Then James saw Holmes either let go or lose his grip and he dropped at least forty feet—but to the water just short of the concrete slabs that supported the beacon-light post. James, Drummond, and two of the agents leaned forward and strained to see if Holmes came to the surface. Drummond looked through his binoculars and then handed them to James.

Holmes hadn’t come up. He hadn’t come up. He still hadn’t come up. But suddenly Holmes could be seen weakly pulling himself up and over the gunwales of the power boat that Lucan Adler had anchored there. The bloodied Holmes lay on his back on the bottom of the boat and did not move again.

Drummond took back the binoculars and stared. “I think he’s breathing. Here come the boats.”

From behind the mass of the S.S. Michigan warship came roaring eight police boats—three belonging to the Chicago Police Force and five belonging to the Columbian Guard. They all slowed and centered on the boat where Holmes lay bleeding. James saw a man with a doctor’s bag step into the blood-washed boat.

Then James had to sit down. On the pavement. Sit and try to breathe.

Drummond crouched next to him and lifted the Mauser with his left hand while patting James on the back with his right.

James shoved the rifle away from him. He knew he would never touch one again as long as he lived. Once again he thought of his brothers Wilkie and Bob, who had carried such death with them into the War and, even after their terrible wounds and pain and in the presence of real Death, eventually rose to carry and use their rifles again. He thought of his cousin Gus, so beautiful that day in the drawing class, whose pale and freckled body was now rotted in mold somewhere under Virginia dirt after a Confederate sniper had expertly done exactly what James had just tried to do. He shook his head.

The joy of dramatic engagement that had affected him like too much strong American whiskey at the Chicago stockyards had drained completely out of him now. It was not worth being a fictional character—or a real person, he realized—if ending someone’s life through violence was part of the role. It was not civilized. It was not right. It was not Henry James. Nor was it honest to the hard-earned truth of his art.

“Lucan Adler’s body hasn’t come up yet,” said one of the agents still standing at the railing.

Drummond crouched next to the seated writer and repeated that to James as if James had become hard of hearing.

“I . . . don’t . . . care,” said James and lowered his head to his raised knees.

11

Who knew that the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 had its own infirmary? Actually, it was a well-stocked little hospital with squadrons of nurses and five full-time doctors on duty, one of them a woman.

Sherlock Holmes was the seventh person ever brought to the sparkling new infirmary—four women and two men had fainted during the crush and heat of the Opening Ceremony—and the two doctors checking him over (neither one a woman) decided to ask a surgeon more skilled in dealing with thoracic wounds to come down from Chicago General and give his opinion. He came—in a police wagon with a siren wailing and horses nearly out of control—and pronounced the wounds simple enough to deal with. No major organs had been punctured or slashed.

Holmes received stitches over his lower abdomen, his upper belly, his right ribs, his right wrist—which had a strange but shallow bullet-furrow in it—and on his scalp and back. He had a concussion, serious contusions around the head and shoulders, and it turned out that he’d also broken two fingers on his right hand and his right wrist in the “scuffling”, as doctors who didn’t know the details of the Opening Day’s incident called it.

Few people ever did hear about this “incident”. Neither Daniel Burnham, Director Davis, Mayor Harrison, nor President Cleveland wanted word of an assassin’s presence or violent death on Opening Day known. Almost none of the crowd had seen the incident and most of those few who had thought that it had been a madcap part of the Opening Ceremony. The press was not told about it.

Henry Cabot Lodge’s guests didn’t mind staying two more days at the Fair until Mr. Holmes would be released; it turned out that the concussion was what kept him in bed the longest. On the third day he left with his torso tightly bound with bandages and his right arm in what he thought was an unnecessary sling, but movement without it hurt his wrist enough that he decided to keep it on for the time being.

Both Andrew L. Drummond and Henry James had visited Holmes in the infirmary, and James was there when Drummond told the detective that Irene Adler was in a room on the floor above him. A room guarded 24-hours a day by two armed Columbian Guardsmen.

“How is she?” asked James. He had been sure she’d been lying dead up there on the promenade deck.

“The slug passed through her shoulder without breaking her collarbone or hitting any major artery,” said Drummond. “The lady is very lucky. One bone was nicked but she should heal quickly enough.”

“Is she going to face charges?” asked Holmes from his hospital bed.

“Absolutely,” said Drummond.

“Charges of what, exactly?” asked Holmes.

“Of . . . of . . . she was . . . of . . . God damn it!” said Drummond.

“Well, keep a good guard on her,” said Holmes. “She’s a dangerous woman.”

Henry James had decided that he was sailing on the United States from New York to Europe, probably to England but possibly all the way to Genoa from whence he could travel to Florence and then north to join his brother William’s family in Lucerne. Over James’s loud and sincere objections, the Lodges and the Camerons decided that they would go home by way of New York, dropping Harry off—perhaps actually seeing him off at the pier—and staying a week or so to allow the wives and Helen to do some serious shopping while the men had some serious conversations with their Wall Street friends and brokers.

In Buffalo, New York, they had a three-hour layover as a new engine was attached to their private train, and that gave everyone time for luncheon at a decent restaurant there and to stretch their legs.

James returned early and alone to the personal carriage, and one of the valets who helped him said, “There is a gentleman waiting in your compartment to see you, Mr. James.”

“What the devil is he doing in my compartment?” snapped James.

“He specifically asked to wait there, sir,” said the valet, his face crimson with shame. “He said that he knew you, sir. He said that it was vitally important for him to talk to you as soon as you returned, sir. I apologize if I did wrong by allowing him in your private compartment.”

James whisked that away with a movement of his hand, but he was not pleased. Not pleased at all.

James had stepped into his small but luxurious compartment and closed the door behind him before he realized that it was almost as dark as night in the room. Someone had pulled down both the lighter and darker shades over his compartment’s windows. It took James a second to see the man sitting in the easy chair—the chair in the corner near the lamp sconce, the chair James used for reading—and another second to register just who the man was.

Professor James Moriarty. The dim light showed the overhang of that luminous, deathly brow, the thin white lips, the cadaverous cheeks and white sticks of hair sticking out over his vulpine ears. The tongue kept darting in its reptilian manner over the dried lips. The nails on the long, white fingers were inches long, curved, and yellowed with age and evil.

“We meet at lassst, Mr. Henry Jamesss,” hissed Moriarty and stood up.

Lacking even his walking stick with which to fight, James flung open his compartment door when a too-familiar voice behind him said, “You’re not leaving so quickly, are you James?”

James spun around.

Moriarty flung up the shades until the compartment was flooded with light. Then he carefully plucked off his long, yellow fingernails, one by one. Then he removed all his teeth, changing the shape of his face. Next the tall man clawed at his own face, pulling off pieces of forehead, cheekbone, nose and chin and dropping the fragments on a towel set out for the purpose. The rest of the forehead and bald pate came off in one piece, but with unpleasant ripping sounds.

Henry James stood there and watched silently while Holmes used some sort of cream and tweezers to remove the rest of “Professor Moriarty’s” ears, face, chin, and neck. All the detritus piled up on the large towel atop James’s dresser.

“You don’t have anything to say about my greatest performance?” asked Holmes. He used James’s mirror to brush his hair back into place and then he put his broken right wrist back into the black sling.

“Why?” asked James.

Holmes grinned and rubbed his hands together while ignoring the sling. “My brother Mycroft and I have been building this evil genius, Professor Moriarty, for almost five years now, James. First it was just the rumor of him in Dr. Watson’s little fictions. Then actual appearances.”

“What about The Dynamics of an Asteroid?” asked James. “It’s real. I’ve seen the book.”

“Very real,” said Holmes. “And mathematically accurate . . . or so they tell me. My brother Mycroft and his old tutor at Christ Church, the don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, did the maths for ‘Professor Moriarty’s’ mathematical masterpiece.”

“And Moriarty’s presence at actual astrophysical conferences, as in Leipzig?” asked James.

“All unappreciated performances by yours truly,” laughed Holmes. “But years ago I discovered something very interesting—if one takes extra efforts to look repulsive, to smell repulsive, and to behave in a repulsive manner, other people take far less close notice of you.”

“Why?” asked James, his voice even more tired than before. “Why this elaborate play-acting?”

“As I said, more than five years of elaborate play-acting,” Holmes said softly, sitting on the arm of James’s reading chair. James crossed the compartment and sat on the bed. His face was expressionless. Outside, others were returning from their dining and excursions in Buffalo.

“Moriarty brought regular criminals into a true network of crime,” said Holmes. “As Moriarty, I guided them into masterpieces of criminal endeavor—half a million pounds in scrip from the Second Reserve Bank in London, over a million pounds in pure gold bullion from the Berne Gold Depository, hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Farmers’ Trust Bank in Kansas City, five hundred million lire from Rome’s Central . . .”

“All right, all right,” interrupted James. “So I’m sitting and talking to a felon. Someone who’s created successful criminal networks and robberies in America, England, and on the Continent for five years now. Why are you still free?”

“All the brilliant Moriarty triumphs were orchestrated through Mycroft and Whitehall, the local constabularies, and the local banks, depositories, whatever,” said Holmes. “The stolen scrip turned out to be the highest quality Her Majesty’s Government could counterfeit, and by tracking it we traced a diagram of more than a dozen criminal mobs in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, even Cambridge . . .”

“What about the gold?” said James.

“The criminals had their gold verified by experts,” said Holmes. “But Mycroft and his friends took no chances. We provided the experts.”

“What about the anarchists?” asked James. “Remember, I was at your Washington meeting of thugs and socialists.”

Holmes shook his head in what seemed to be admiration. “And I shall forever admire your courage and initiative in doing so,” said the detective. “I simply could not tell you about our plans when you shared this . . . vital information . . . with me.”

“Plans?”

“On May first, in twenty-three cities in nine nations, the police and authorities have rounded up criminals and anarchists pledged to destroy their societies.”

“And what will they be charged with?” asked James, putting only a fraction of the contempt he felt into the sarcasm in his tone. “Loitering as a group? Unseemly appearance in public?”

“Ninety-five percent of the criminals we’ve enlisted and who gathered for the Big Riots and Big Hauls on May first had warrants out for them already,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Many in more than one country. For the anarchists, those who showed up at the designated places with bombs and guns will be charged immediately, the rest put on a watch list.”

“So you . . . and your brilliant brother Mycroft . . . invented Professor James Moriarty, went to great pains to give him a believable mathematical background, turned him into the Napoleon of Crime, and then had the fictional villain kill you at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, to free you up, I presume, to spend three years running around in your little Moriarty disguise enlisting burglars and anarchists.”

“Yes,” said Holmes. “That is about it. I did ask for six months of my own time after my death at Reichenbach Falls so I could visit Tibet and ask some questions of the Dalai Lama. But that became a rather longer stay due to young Lucan’s skill with a rifle.”

“Three bullets through you,” Henry James said softly. “I saw the size of those rounds . . . cartridges . . . bullets . . . whatever you call them, when I worked the bolt-action of that Mauser and one ejected. It was huge. How could you not have died?”

“Perhaps I did,” said Holmes.

“To hell with this metaphysical tommyrot you’ve been shoveling onto me since we met,” snapped James, standing suddenly. “You can go spend the rest of your life . . . if it is a life . . . asking yourself and everyone you meet if you’re real. Sooner or later some drunk in some pub smelling of urine and sweat will give you a definitive answer.”

“I’ve already received a good answer,” Holmes said softly. “Just a few days ago.”

James said nothing.

“Have you ever heard of singing yourself into existence?” asked Holmes. “Or others singing someone—perhaps you—into existence by telling stories about them? Passing the stories along? Is that what you’re doing with your writing, Henry James . . . singing yourself into greater existence every day you work at your craft?”

James ignored all that twaddle. “Why,” he said sharply, “were you and a bunch of thugs at the central Chicago railway station that Saturday morning when I was trying to get to New York?”

“Looking for you, James. And the ‘thugs’ were some of Colonel Rice’s men he loaned me . . . there were too many carriages for me to check in the short time before your scheduled train left.”

“Why were you, as Professor Moriarty, looking for me when I was trying to get out of all this . . . leave this fever dream . . . and go home to England?”

Holmes stood. “I was going to show you my Moriarty disguise that morning and ask you not to leave yet. To see our shared mystery through.”

“Shared mystery,” repeated James, pouring scorn into every syllable. “You never even solved poor dead Ned Hooper’s question of who sends those typed cards every December six. ‘She was murdered’, remember?”

“The game’s not over yet,” said Holmes. His bandaged right hand and broken wrist obviously were hurting him and he shifted his arm in its black sling.

“Do you want to know what I think about your precious game?” asked Henry James.

“I do, very much, yes,” said Holmes.

Henry James had never done this in his life, not even as a boy wrestling with William or Wilkie, not even at his angriest, but now he turned his right hand into the most solid fist he could and hit the Great Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes on his pointed chin as hard as he could.

Holmes flew backward onto the bed, totally surprised. When he could sit up, he used his good left hand to rub his jaw. “I deserved that, I guess,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, James. Especially since I’ve come to think of you as a friend and I really have no friends.”

James turned and left his own compartment and walked forward through carriages until he reached the ladies’ common area where he sat and listened to them for a while, pretending to be the tame cat that he often longed to be.

Holmes waited until a stop in Albany where John Hay and most of the others got out to stretch their legs before he approached Clara Hay, who had stayed behind with one of her headaches.

“May I speak to you privately, Mrs. Hay?”

She smiled wanly and touched her temple. “I have a bursting headache right now, Mr. Holmes. Perhaps later?”

“Now is a better time, Mrs. Hay,” said Holmes and walked into her compartment and sat on a straight-backed chair.

“Well, I’ll call for some tea,” said Clara Hay. When the serving girl hurried in with a tray of hot tea and plates of scones and biscuits, Holmes said, “You may step out now and close the door behind you, Sally.”

Shocked at the man in Mrs. Hay’s compartment giving her orders, Sally looked to Clara Hay to see what to do. Mrs. Hay also looked shocked, or at least nonplussed, but she nodded for Sally to leave. Then she sat in her overcushioned embroidering chair, about as far away from Holmes as she could get in a train compartment. Even a luxury train compartment.

“What is it, Mr. Holmes?” she asked in a tiny voice. “Shouldn’t John be here to be part of this discussion?”

“No,” said Holmes. He picked up his cup of tea and saucer, added a bit of cream, and drank the steaming liquid. Clara Hay remained very, very still and watched him as if she had found herself in a room with a rattlesnake.

“I know that you typed and delivered all the ‘She was murdered’ cards, Clara,” said Holmes. “You should probably stop doing that now.”

“That is the most offensive and ridiculous thing that I have ever . . .” began Clara Hay, raising both hands to her cheeks.

“You and Mr. Hay stayed three days at Mr. Clemens’s Hartford home in the year after Clover Adams died,” said Holmes. “You were often alone and Clemens even remembered you asking how to operate his new typing gadget.”

“Ridiculous . . .” managed Clara Hay, but could say no more than that.

“I tracked down two of Mr. Clemens’s servants who remembered the sound of typing coming down from the billiards room when Clemens and Hay had gone out for a walk and you were alone in the house all afternoon, Clara,” said Holmes. “But in the end it was the money, Mrs. Hay, that tipped me off to your involvement.”

“Money?”

“In the spring of eighteen ninety-one, shortly before I had to leave for the Reichenbach Falls charade, Clover’s brother Ned asked me to come to America to investigate the ‘mystery cards’ that appeared each year on the anniversary of Clover’s death. I’ve told people the truth, that I took one dollar from him so that I would be on retainer and get to the puzzle when I could . . . too late for poor Ned, I’m sorry to say . . . but he offered me three thousand dollars to come to America right then and to solve this disturbing card case before I went on to anything else.”

“Ned never had three thousand dollars in his life,” whispered Clara Hay.

“Precisely what your husband and Henry Adams said when I mentioned the sum,” said Holmes. “They insisted that Ned had fantasized that amount of money, Mrs. Hay. But Ned showed me the three thousand dollars in my room at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street. He begged me to take it and to follow him back to America immediately where, he said, there would be more money if I did my job correctly. I sensed even then that Ned Hooper had never even had the funds to travel to England alone. It was someone else’s money. Someone else’s need for a detective.”

Clara Hay looked Holmes in the eye with a bold defiance that he never thought she could muster. “Are you asking for the three thousand dollars now, Mr. Holmes? Now that you have . . . how does Dr. Watson put it in the story magazines? . . . Now that you have ‘cracked’ this insoluble case? Or do you want more to keep your silence? My private checkbook is here.” She actually removed it and a pen from a drawer in the nearby secretary.

“All I want to know is why, Mrs. Hay? Why seven years of making sure that all the four survivors of the Five of Hearts received that note every December sixth?”

“Because I knew something was wrong,” said Clara with a near growl of defiance. “I never even liked Clover Adams that much, Mr. Holmes. I thought she was arrogant and condescending and often acting above her real station. We had the Five of Hearts, Mr. Holmes, but in the five p.m. conversations and tea in front of the Adamses’ fireplace every evening, Clover was always the First Heart . . . Henry Adams and my own John have referred to her that way ever since her suicide . . . and I wasn’t even the Fifth Heart. The men used to joke with Clarence King that he needed to marry one of his swarthy South Seas women so that we could have a Sixth Heart, but I was already the Sixth Heart. Never fast enough with a witty rejoinder. Never witty enough when I did say something. Never knowledgeable enough about any of their fast-moving discussion topics at the right time . . .” She did not so much stop talking as she just ran down like a wind-up toy. She had been pointing the pen at Holmes like a stiletto or a pistol, but now she capped it and put it back on the secretary with her oversized checkbook. “I knew that when that Rebecca Lorne went out of her way to make friends with poor lonely, miserable Clover Adams that someone—most probably Rebecca or her hideous cousin Clifton—was up to something. Something harmful. Something that would be too much for Clover to handle. I still believe in my heart that this was the reason for Clover’s suicide, if suicide it actually was.”

The two sat in deep silence for several minutes.

Finally Holmes said softly, “But that’s not the real reason you sent Ned Hooper over to London to hire me with that fortune to investigate things about the Five Hearts.”

She jerked and then sat absolutely upright. She was almost unable to get her next words out through her tightened throat.

“What can . . . you . . . possibly . . . mean . . . Mr. Holmes?”

The detective reached into his jacket pocket and brought out four letters, each still in its mauve envelope and addressed in John Hay’s bold, manly hand.

“I’ve seen you at dinners, Mrs. Hay,” Holmes said softly. “I watch people and observe. While you were always the perfect hostess, you were also busy observing every word your husband said to the women at the table, every way he spoke to them, observing his every glance and move. Especially toward Nannie Lodge, who had these letters from Mr. Hay hidden in her bedroom.”

Clara audibly gasped. “How could you possibly . . . stealing someone’s private correspondence . . . breaking and entering . . .”

“Not at all,” Holmes said with a smile. “I just had a small and wiry confederate with spiky green hair and instructions on where to look in the places where married women hide love letters from married men not their husbands. These letters—and others, but these were the important ones as I suspect you know—were taped to the bottom of Nannie Lodge’s lingerie drawer.”

The same place Lizzie Cameron’s love letters from Henry Adams were hidden in her boudoir, thought Holmes. Women are conniving, but I think too much like them to allow them to outsmart me. Then he had to smile. All save for Irene Adler.

“Here,” said Holmes and handed her the four letters. She accepted them as Cleopatra must have accepted the serpent that was going to nurse Death from her breast.

“If I read them . . .” she began hesitantly.

“You’ll never forget some of the wording and images,” said Holmes. “But you need to know that these are always the words and images that men suddenly encountering middle-age and their own mortality use in their foolish love letters. It is pure insanity. And purely male insanity.”

Clara Hay spoke as if Holmes were not even there. “John used to send me love letters. And wonderful poetry I’d never heard of. And flowers. But then . . . as I got heavier after the children . . . I came home from church one Sunday and heard John laughing with that lout Samuel Clemens about how I . . . this is the way my darling husband put it . . . ‘Clara didn’t get out of the hotel much during our Chicago visit but she certainly tucked into her victuals with enthusiasm.’ ”

She looked at Holmes as if first noticing his presence. “I love John more than life . . . I’ve given my life to John and the children . . . but at that minute I could have shot both him and that idiot Clemens dead on our parlor rug.”

Holmes nodded and said nothing.

Clara kept staring at the letters, holding the envelopes away from her as if they could strike like serpents. “Won’t Nannie Lodge notice that these are missing?” she whispered.

“Oh, yes,” said Sherlock Holmes and allowed himself his rare grin. “She shall. I promise you she shall. And then . . . well, the concern about where those particular letters might have gone will be very great. I think you will see a change both in Nannie Lodge’s behavior and in your husband’s. Perhaps a permanent one.”

“Then I don’t really have to read these after all,” she whispered.

“No,” said Holmes and held out his hands, cupped slightly, palms up, as if he were ready to give or accept some Holy Communion.

He saw the recognition ignite in Clara Hay’s eyes and, holding one envelope after another over his hands, she tore each into tiny shreds and had Holmes use his fancy cigarette lighter to burn each scrap above an oversized crystal ashtray. Soon Sherlock Holmes’s hands were filled with tiny confetti—despite the bandage on his right hand, he’d not let one scrap of torn paper escape the flames—and now he used his good left hand to put that confetti into his jacket pocket.

“I’m going to go now, Mrs. Hay,” he said, standing. “Go into the men’s room in this station and flush some unwanted and useless scraps of paper down the toilet.”

She stared at Holmes with luminous eyes, then touched her checkbook again. “The . . . money . . . ?”

“I never came to America for money’s sake,” said Holmes. “I did so for Ned’s sake. And, I think, for yours. Good afternoon, Mrs. Hay. We may not have the chance to talk again until I leave the train in New York.”

The revelers gave Henry James a raucous bon voyage party, both at a fine restaurant on 32nd Street and then again at the wharf where the great S.S. United States was making final preparations to shove off. The tugs were already pushing their netted snouts into position.

“Funny that Holmes didn’t come to dinner or stop to say good-bye,” mused James when all the farewells fell silent for a moment.

“Perhaps he forgot the time,” said Henry Cabot Lodge. “He’s always struck me as a preoccupied fellow.”

“Perhaps his injuries were bothering him,” said young Helen.

“Or more likely he had another case to solve,” said John Hay.

“Well,” said Senator Don Cameron, his arm around his wife Lizzie who was smiling at Adams, “we had about enough of that man’s company for one year. But you, Harry, you must hurry back to visit again.”

James shook his head. “You need to come to London or Paris or Italy to see me.”

Cameron and Lodge exchanged odd glances. “With the bank and Wall Street panic that we think is coming like a tsunami,” said Henry Cabot Lodge, “I suspect that most of New York’s, Boston’s, and Washington’s better families will be living on the cheap in Europe by July or August, leaving their servants here to fend for themselves and their great houses shut up until this particular storm is past. Then they’ll come wandering home in a year, or two, or three. Those that survive the storm, I mean.”

“Now stop it, darling!” cried Lizzie Cameron, pretending to hit her husband on the shoulder. “No gloomy talk while we’re wishing Harry bon voyage.”

“It’s not gloomy if it means you’ll be in London to see me soon,” said James and lifted his hat as he walked up the gangplank at the ship’s final all-passengers-aboard, all-visitors-ashore whistle of steam. “Adieu!” he called over the scream of escaping steam.