The Six Messiahs

chapter 8

When the ringing at his door woke him from a dead sleep in President Cleveland's bed the next morning, Doyle had completely forgotten his appointment with Peregrine "Presto" Raipur, the alleged Maharaja of Berar. Elaborate apologies from both men as Doyle rang down for breakfast. Jack, who had spent what remained of the night in one of the suite's vast parlors, materialized like a wraith as Innes and Stern—wonderful, capable, reliable Innes—arrived with a timely pot of coffee. Doyle on his feet, trying to work the persistent kinks out of his joints, mildly concerned about the scene he'd caused in the lobby last night, arriving after midnight covered with grime, bloody knees poking out of the rips in his trousers; another tourist finding fun and adventure in Old New York.

Jack and Presto sized each other up like opposing chess players, Jack finally outlasting the stranger, but Presto did not rattle easily. Although he was still dressed for the part—riding jacket, jodhpurs, high boots, a red velvet vest—the foppish persona he had projected at the party was clearly an invention. His gaze level, steady, and assured, his voice a pleasing baritone; instead of fluttering like startled pigeons, his hands moved in silky, confident gestures that underscored his story about another missing book.

A rare manuscript edition of the Upanishads, centerpiece of the Rig Vedas, the constellation of books that formed the foundation of the Hindu religion: stolen six months ago from a holy temple in the city of Golcanda, in the princely state of Hyderabad, India. The theft had been kept a state secret by order of the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, the ruling maharaja, estimated by many to be the richest man in the world. When he tapped someone to investigate the crime, the Nizam called on his distant cousin and contemporary, high-born, English-educated Presto Raipur, one of the few members of his privileged generation who had devoted his life to anything other than the pursuit of self-indulgent pleasures.

"Does that mean you're actually a prince?" asked Innes.

"In a word, and I say it with some embarrassment, yes: I am, technically speaking, the Maharaja of Berar, which I assure you sounds more impressive than it actually signifies." As he spoke, Presto effortlessly rotated a silver coin back and forth between his long, tapered fingers.

"Why so?"

"Forty years ago, in a spasm of misguided loyalty, my grandfather deeded our ancestral lands to the Nizam, ruler of the neighboring province of Hyderabad; the Nizam promptly turned over control of our holdings to the British as settlement of a long-standing debt. My outraged father, denied his title and left virtually penniless, further scandalized the family name by marrying an Englishwoman, taking a job as a banker, and living in London, where I was born and raised."

Presto paused, made the coin disappear, and with formidable self-possession took careful stock of their reactions.

"My interest in magic began as a child, attending the English music hall. I've grown accomplished enough to perform the occasional benefit myself: Presto, the Prestidigitating Barrister!"

He gestured; the coin reappeared in his hand. Doyle stopped pacing, gulped down his coffee, and for the moment forgot about the pain in his knees. Stern and Innes leaned anxiously forward. Only Jack's expression did not change, his eyes frigid, analytical.

"I see that I have your attention," said Presto.

"Please go on," said Doyle.

"I spent each summer as a boy visiting my grandfather, who still lives as a retainer in the Nizam's court at Chow Mahalla; the Nizam's son, the current Nizam, and I were playmates together. My friend the Nizam ascended to the throne of Hyderabad eleven years ago, at the age of eighteen; I had seen him only briefly in the intervening years while starting my career as a barrister—one of the first men of mixed racial heritage to practice before the English bar, a matter of some pride to me—when I received an urgent summons to visit the Nizam in Madras six months ago; I thought surely my grandfather's health must be failing so I undertook the journey. Instead I discovered my grandfather to be, as they say, in the pink, and living with a most extraordinarily nubile fifteen-year-old dancing girl—"

"Really?" blurted Innes. "How old is he?"

"Eighty-five and still a dedicated libertine. I should explain that their culture does not share our Christian conviction that earthly delights have a corrosive effect on the soul: Quite the contrary, some of the most devout Hindus believe the road to heaven is paved with sensual gratification."

Doyle cleared his throat theatrically, and Innes retrieved his jaw from the floor.

"As happy as I was to find Grandfather in such high spirits—this nymph was truly quite delectable—my purpose in being there remained obscure for three more days until the Nizam returned from a tiger hunt. That night we shared a dinner in his private quarters—my friend has spent the last decade decorating his palace to compete with the excesses of Louis Quatorze: a solid-gold water closet for starters; appallingly tasteless but nonetheless impressive for it—and then he told me of the missing Upanishads. The crime had been committed in the dead of night; there were no clues and no offers had been received to return the book for ransom, which the Nizam would have been only too willing to pay.

"With my background in English law, the Nizam had assumed, however illogically, that of all the men he knew in the world I would be the one most able to shed light on this mystery. When I attempted to graciously decline, citing the fine but crucial distinction between a barrister and a policeman, the Nizam expressed sympathy for my position then casually intimated that it would be a shame if he were unable to retain Grandfather in the manner to which he had throughout his life been so thoroughly accustomed."

"Why, that's just plain extortion," said Innes.

"And spoken with a smile; my friend the Nizam has the personality of a cobra. As you can imagine, any thought of bringing the old man to London after eighty-five years of princely extravagance was unsupportable—and an absolute disaster to my social life—so I agreed to lend a hand as best I could. For my troubles, I received what is by any man's standard a staggering amount of money from the Nizam to cover my expenses, not thinking for one moment that accepting this assignment would lead me to the highest levels of English government and then to America."

Presto paused dramatically to take another sip of coffee.

"Don't you find this to be the most peculiar country?" he asked pleasantly.

"Absolutely," said Doyle.

"Fantastic," said Innes.

There's the pots calling the kettle black, thought Stern, the only American in the room, glancing around at these odd English ducks.

"What involvement with English government?" asked Jack.

"When I returned to London and began making inquiries about stolen holy books of my acquaintances in the Foreign Office, I was greeted with an increasing chorus of astonishment, steadily ushered up a ladder of ever more eminent representatives of state—each of whom made the mistaken assumption that I appeared in some official diplomatic capacity, which I'm afraid I did nothing to disabuse them of—finally landing in no less than the office of the Prime Minister."

"Gladstone?" asked Doyle.

"Lord Gladstone himself. We chatted briefly about some mutual friends, and he then explained that a book of equal importance to the Anglican Church had similarly gone missing and that the trail as far as they could tell led to New York, with grounds for suspicion that a wealthy American collector of books might be responsible."

Doyle glanced at Jack for his reaction; there was none.

"I arrived here two weeks ago and have been making the rounds of society in the ridiculous guise with which I greeted you last night, Mr. Conan Doyle: This is regrettably what people seem to expect from a maharaja, and I have succeeded in making a perfect ass of myself, if I do say so____"

"Smell-A-Rama?" said Innes.

"The most outrageous attention getter I could think of; you'd be amazed at the offers I've received from potential investors...."

"How stupefying," said Doyle.

"Americans seem able to sniff out a potential for profit the way sharks find blood in the sea. And all the while, I've been busy dropping hints about my interest in the illicit traffic of rare religious books...."

"Why did you approach Doyle?" asked Jack, still holding his approval in reserve.

"Fair question: I received a wire direct from the prime minister's office day before yesterday that upon Mr. Doyle's arrival I should attempt to contact him and enlist his assistance; here, I've brought the wire along."

Jack snatched the telegram from Presto's hand and studied it, finding no fault with its credentials. Then he stared at Presto with an unnerving intensity, as if realizing some secret about him.

"What were you trying to warn me about last night?" asked Doyle.

"I saw a man watching you from the corner of the room: a tall, blond man with a look of unmistakable bad intent. When he began to approach you from behind, reaching into his jacket for what I imagined might be a weapon, I simply acted on instinct."

"A tall, blond man?" said Doyle, remembering the man who had replaced the young lieutenant on the bridge of the Elbe. Before Presto could elaborate, Jack pulled the paper with Rabbi Stern's sketch from his pocket and held it out to him.

"Does this mean anything to you?" asked Jack, pointing to the drawing of the tower.

Presto's dark-rimmed black eyes widened, and he blinked repeatedly. "Good God; you'll think I'm absolutely mad."

"Why is that?"

"I have been dreaming about this place."

Later that same day, in a rat-infested alley outside his headquarters, two patrolling policemen found the body of Ding-Dong Dunham, notorious leader of the Houston Dusters. No tears were shed at the precinct over this discovery, but even the most hardened cops expressed shock at the loathsome brutality of the murder: Whatever Ding-Dong had done to inspire this mutilation must have been off the scale they used to calculate his previously established low standards of behavior.

Only one witness came forward, one of the Dusters, a mental defective named Mouse Malloy, who, no longer able to function productively as a street criminal after being kicked in the head by a horse while trying to knock over a beer wagon, had since served as their clubhouse mascot and errand boy. Shaken and terrified, he claimed to have watched from a room in the back as a tall, blond German man came into headquarters earlier that day with a suitcase full of gold coins. When Ding-Dong refused to hand over to the German an old leather-bound book, demanding to know why he wanted it, the man smiled, pulled a knife, and went to work on Ding-Dong like a priest carving a Christmas turkey.

Like most of the rest of what Mouse told the cops—he had a reputation for running his mouth, and his stories tended to veer toward the fanciful ever since the horse had made such a strong impression on him—they paid no mind to his unlikely account, figuring Ding-Dong had simply met up with the sordid, inevitable end that awaited every gangland leader, and from their point of view the sooner the better. Case closed.

The only difference being that this time Mouse Malloy was telling the God's truth.

PHOENIX, ARIZONA

In spite of Bendigo Rymer's histrionics, or maybe because of them, the authorities at the Phoenix station would not allow the mail train to leave for Wickenburg until the cars were searched upside and down and every last member of the Penultimate Players had been questioned. And no, as it turned out, ' none of them had seen a Chinaman running around the train station waving a sword—which was what Rymer had ordered , them to say even if they had. The delays incurred by having members of his troupe held over as witnesses at a murder trial could puncture the solvency of their tour as quick as a spike through a pneumatic tire.

Bendigo himself was actually the only Player who had caught sight of Kanazuchi; from a distance he hadn't clearly seen his face, but he did look Chinese, and as he ran off from behind the cotton bales, the man had been brandishing something that looked to Rymer's well-trained eye for steel-edged weapons suspiciously like a scabbard.

Railroad cops found the dead guard stashed behind the bales, uniform missing, his neck badly broken, but they couldn't find his assailant. Rumors had started to circulate about a series of gruesome murders committed at a railway yard in Yuma. Atrocities, crimes against nature: men with heads chopped off and mounted on spikes, women raped, children devoured; the usual human embroideries. And word was spreading fast that this smorgasbord of crimes had been committed by a crazed Chinaman.

If their delayed departure wasn't irritating enough, this annoying old rabbi had now decided to travel with the Penultimates at least as far as Wickenburg and perhaps beyond. He wasn't prepared to say why, but what reason could he possibly have except a ridiculous infatuation with Rymer's leading lady? And her doing everything this side of decency to encourage him: The woman knew no shame! Bendigo kicked himself as he watched the two of them billing and cooing in their seats three rows in front of him: Trouble usually showed up wearing a skirt and this English strumpet was just the latest in a long line the enemy camp had sent to torment him. He should have obeyed his instincts and booted her unceremoniously out after that first night in Cincinnati when she either seduced him or refused to sleep with him; the memory was a little hazy.

His heart beat like a caged bird. How could he go on? The strain of holding the Players together in order to faithfully interpret the eternal works of the Masters simply shredded a man's soul. Bendigo threw back his head and laid his hand against his forehead—his fondness for melodramatic gestures was so ingrained he used them even when no one was around to watch. He glanced around the train car at his company— no one had noticed him suffering, damn their miserable hides—and his upper lip curled in disgust: These blocks, these stones, these worse than senseless things; wild donkeys have more appreciation for genius. And did they ever bother to thank him for providing them a life and a livelihood? No; instead it was always "Bendigo my room's too small," "Mr.

Rymer, there's no hot water," and inevitably, "What about my money?"

Look at me, Bendigo wanted to rail at the heavens, I'm running a provincial tour in the middle of a desert! There has been a terrible mistake; I was supposed to be one of the great men of the stage! If Booth hadn't ruined my career, they'd been naming theaters after me on Broadway!

"Actors," muttered Rymer bitterly.

Staring this cruel fate in the eye was enough to reduce a strong man to tears, and he was no Hercules; a couple of big, wet ones rolled forlornly down his cheeks—Bendigo had always prided himself on his ability to cry on cue, but it never hurt to practice.

A shimmering mirage swam before his eyes, and he sought refuge in it: the twenty-five thousand dollars he'd cleared from past tours. He visualized his fortune as great chunks of gold bullion, resting in the impregnable vault of his Philadelphia bank. Add the six grand he'd pocketed from the current tour, plus the four he had signed to receive from this religious outpost they were on their way to play, and he was ready to mount his triumphant return to New York—lose a little weight first, cut back on the drinking—producer, director, and star of Bendigo Rymer's once-in-a-lifetime production of the Bard's immortal Hamlet!

Bendigo had spent every spare moment of his twenty years in theatrical exile restructuring and simplifying Hamlet's convoluted text to play to his strengths—more swordplay, a sunnier relationship with Ophelia, less morbid introspection—and finally his apotheosis was within reach. How many hundreds of times had he rehearsed the scene in his mind: opening night; Booth seated front row center, reduced to a sobbing puddle by the magnificent soaring humanity of his performance, falling to his knees and begging Bendigo's forgiveness for his rank, vicious stupidity, right in front of a crowd that always included all the important critics....

His reverie was broken by the sound of Eileen's happy laughter: the old man laughing, too.

What could those two possibly have to laugh about? Bendigo fumed and snuck a healthy pull from his flask. Something humiliating about her interest in the old man. It was enough to make him want to sleep with Eileen, if it had ever actually happened, all over again.

When Buckskin Frank and his posse arrived in Phoenix by special train that afternoon, he was pleasantly surprised to find this crime scene had been roped off and left largely intact: The guard's neck was broken—snapped like a twig; worse than a hanging—and a set of footprints he found behind the bales matched the tracks he'd spotted leaving the Yuma yards: a flat print, no heel, like the slippers he'd seen coolies wear. Furthermore, a guard who'd fired the shot at the killer had managed a clear look at him and yes, the man was indisputably a Chinaman, which was as specific as the guard could get. That qualified as good news.

The bad news was that Frank wouldn't be able to trail whoever the hell they were after down into Sonora, shake this bunch of greenhorns, carve out a little grubstake for himself, and settle into a slow decline of pan mining and tequila sipping while leisurely shopping around for the best bordello south of the border: That defined the honest limit of Frank McQuethy's remaining life ambitions.

Frank lit a cigarette, stood tall, and strolled down the tracks away from the swarm of lawmen and volunteers: Whenever he tried to look like he was thinking hard, they cut him a wide berth. With his high hat and boots, he towered above the crowd; that yellow buckskin gleamed in the sunlight; his handlebar moustache advertised brawny, unselfish heroism. He was dimly aware of a gaggle of women watching from the passenger platform, giggling and chattering like barnyard hens; apparently they'd recognized his jacket: A story had already appeared in the local paper about Frank's newsworthy release and involvement in the manhunt.

Women: There was the bedrock of his mountain in life. Try as he might, Frank had never completely grasped the nature of his indestructible appeal to the fairer sex: What did they see when they looked at him? He didn't have a clue what it was, but he knew it wasn't him. Did it have something to do with his having killed a woman in front of a crowd—poor Molly; the best of him had died right along with her—and getting his name in the papers that made the rest of them swarm around like flies?

Most of the women who tried to visit him in prison couldn't hear enough about the who, how, and why of every human life he'd ended; some sort of sick electric thrill ran through them. He failed to find any sense in that and none in them: Like any man of principle, all he wanted to do was forget about the people he'd killed. Maybe their interest was another side effect of all those dime novels over the years with his stupid picture on the cover that in hindsight he hadn't done enough to discourage. Hell, he'd even tried writing a few himself; the guards had a pile of 'em back at the prison they used to hawk to the tourists. Buckskin Frank: Geronimo's Nightmare. I Rode with Wyatt: Tombstone's Invisible Man. Half a dozen others. Big sellers, every one.

He had to face facts; through some fault of his own, fame had destroyed his privacy and it made Frank's brain ache like a rotten tooth. Five years in prison had brought him a peace uninterrupted by a woman's ceaseless demands that he behave like some crazy idea she had in her head—obedient, mild-mannered, devoted to her every mood: in other words one hundred percent back-asswards from his actual personality. This tranquil stretch had led Frank to conclude that the main reason a woman wanted a man around in the first place was so she could bombard him with the arsenal of dumb questions ricocheting around in her head:

Did he like this dress? Didn't she look too fat in it? What about this new shade of rouge? Did he like his steak red or pink? Could he believe how much they wanted for a yard of calico at the dry goods store? Did he want to hold hands and sit swinging on a glider in the moonlight? Well, no. He liked a poke in the hay well enough, but beyond that he couldn't figure out why they expected so much from him. He didn't know any of the answers to their questions: As far as he was concerned, all these choices having to do with daily existence were equally weighted and to fuss and bother like it was life-or-death about what to eat for breakfast or wear to the square dance squeezed the juice right out of living. Molly was the only woman who'd ever figured that out about him, and look what happened to her.

Husbands were men who brought home the bacon, never drank before dark, and always woke up in the same bed they started the night in. Before they got down to doing the deed for the first time, he had always meant to stop and ask one of these hungry gals flat out: Did he honestly look like husband material to them? And if the. answer was yes, he would reach for his hat because that was a conclusion that could only be made by a lunatic. What Frank wanted, what he thought any man who'd lived life as he had wanted—more than fame, more than fortune—was to be left alone.

Frank felt pathetic: Here he stood scarcely twenty-four hours out of the calaboose and already feeling sentimental about it The trustees used to smuggle in a whore for him once a month or so—there'd been no shortage of soiled doves lining up for the assignment. To his astonishment, he had discovered that, with Molly gone, this turned out to be all the feminine companionship he required.

Wait, thought Frank, and the clouds parted: Who was to say he couldn't work out the same arrangement now that he was nearly free again? Was he doomed to keep hitching his fate to some sage hen's apron strings the minute she salted her tail for him? No. He felt joy bubble up inside him like springwater. That was it: He would blaze a new trail for himself. No more box canyons. No more cow bunnies putting their brand on him.

As he ground out his cigarette, the tubby stationmaster came running up with the schedule of trains that had left Phoenix that morning: two freights, two passenger, one local mail run. Why they had let any train out of the yard under these circumstances was beyond Frank, but he'd long ago given up any hope he'd be put in charge of running the world. A small crowd of anxious volunteers gathered around him waiting for his response.

"You wire ahead to the next stop on all of these trains?" asked Frank.

The stationmaster screwed his face into a ball; he'd read a couple of Buckskin Frank books and felt plainly intimidated. "You think we should?"

"Well. Yes."

"But, but we searched through all the trains before we let them go."

"So?"

The station master grinned like he had a painfully full bladder, took the schedule back from Frank, and headed back to the terminal.

I'll give him ten before he breaks into a trot, thought Frank, watching the man go. It took eight.

Frank sighed heavily and scanned the crowd; nearly a month had passed since his last conjugal visit at the hoosegow. He wondered idly how complicated it would be to get his wick dipped before the manhunt moved on. He rolled another cigarette and walked away from the gawkers like he was searching for clues and they left him alone again.

Thirty paces later he found a puddle of blood in the dirt. He dipped in his finger: dry. At least two hours old. A trail of gouts led away and ended at an empty set of tracks; the stationmaster would know which train had been sitting on these rails.

"Mr. McQuethy?"

He turned: a group of five women, the ones he'd seen watching him from the platform, standing ten yards away. He tipped his hat.

"Ladies."

The one who'd spoken stepped forward; a big-boned strawberry blonde. Best looking one in the bunch, which said less than he might have hoped for. "If you'll forgive the intrusion: We read about your release in the paper this morning."

"Uh-huh."

The woman blushed. "And we, well, I guess we're just about your biggest fans here in Phoenix; we've read all your books and followed your career with a great deal of interest."

"Uh-huh."

"I think you knew a cousin of mine down in Tombstone a few years back, Sally Ann Reynolds? She was a waitress there at the Silver Dollar Saloon?" The blonde blushed red as an apple when Frank didn't immediately respond. "Anyway ..."

"How is Sally Ann?" he said with a smile, and not the slightest idea who she was talking about.

"Fine; she's married now, living in Tucson, has a couple of kids."

"You must be sure and give her my regards."

"I can't tell you how excited she'll be to know we've spoken."

There was that look in her eye: the flash of light in a cheap diamond. Frank felt simultaneously cornered and stimulated. Story of his life.

"We know you have a terribly busy time ahead of you, but we were wondering if it would be possible to invite you to lunch sometime while you're here in town."

Frank smiled again and, as was perpetually the case, every memory of every unhappiness ever visited on him by a woman vanished like tax money.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Her name was Mary Williams: Dante Scruggs found that out from two old biddies at the boarding house. She'd told them that she came from a small town in rural Minnesota, where she'd been a schoolteacher, and that she was hoping to find the same work in Chicago. They took her at her word. Dante told them he was from the school board and wanted to check her references: Better if you don't tell Miss Williams I stopped by, he said with a smile. What a charmer, the old ladies thought.

Mary was of Greek heritage, they had decided; that accounted for her dark exoticism without violating any squeamish racial borders. The fools had no idea she was an Indian.

She left the house each morning at eight o'clock sharp. The first day she bought a map of Chicago; following the map, she methodically walked each block of the downtown area, looking for something. Dante followed her around that way for three days. Always stayed far back in the crowd, never moving too close. Once she turned sharply around as if she had forgotten something and marched straight at him; he turned his back and stared into a shop window. He was sure she didn't see him, but she kept to the busiest streets and always returned to the boarding house before dark.

On the third afternoon, she seemed to find what she was looking for: They called it the Water Tower, on Chicago Avenue. One of the few buildings that had survived the Great Fire; spires of sandstone arrayed around a pale central tower like something from a fairy tale dropped into this hub of modern commerce.

She wandered up and down the street for over an hour, examining the Water Tower from every angle, but never went inside: What was the woman doing here? Dante wondered.

He asked himself that question a hundred times that day: She stayed on that street corner in front of the Tower until twilight. Never said a word to anyone, just watched people coming and going. Like she was waiting for somebody. An odd one, Dante decided, watching from a soda fountain across the street, sipping a root beer float. He followed her back to the boarding house just as the lamplighters started to make their rounds.

The man who had spent the last few months watching Dante Scruggs, the dark-eyed man with the tattoo on his left arm, trailed quietly behind. He would watch Dante enter his apartment and then return to their local office to finish up his report; the man's superior was arriving the next day by train from New York—he had the book with him—and then they would take action in the matter of Mr. Dante Scruggs.

NEW YORK CITY

As the Toast of Manhattan, Doyle drifted through his responsibilities, dutifully playing the part of the Famous Author but feeling as if his real self lagged one step behind this frantic routine; the cloud of intrigue swirling around Jack and the missing books was far more compelling than endlessly answering the same set of questions about his dead fictional character, a level of journalism on par with the now almost fondly remembered Ira Pinkus. But pressing the flesh in bookstores, feeling the honest enthusiasm of his readers firsthand, restored him; occasionally some dear soul who had even read his historical novels materialized with a rare copy for signature.

His dramatic reading at the Fifty-seventh Street Calvary Baptist Church that night was a smash; Doyle had decided to give his audience, packed to the rafters with the faithful, exactly what they had come to hear: Holmes, Holmes, and more Holmes. Applause deafened the hall. Celebrities crowded the reception afterward—the same faces showing up at these things with depressing regularity—elbowing each other out of the way to grab Doyle's hand and pump his arm in that peculiar American way, as if they expected oil to gush from his mouth.

A distressing percentage of them came equipped with business investments to propose; from a line of Holmes-inspired apparel to an English-style pub called Sherlock's Home, complete with waiters wearing deerstalker hats and cloaks. I ought to introduce these two, thought Doyle; it's a match made in heaven.

An intense, muscular young man named Houdini made an indelible impression: He eagerly offered to demonstrate for Doyle how he could escape, while wearing a chained strait-jacket, from inside a locked safe deposited at the bottom of a river.

I'd be far more interested if you could show me how to escape from this party, confided Doyle.

The young man laughed; at least he had a sense of humor.

Major Pepperman glowed like a signal fire as they totaled the box-office receipts; his ship may not have come in yet, but if this was any indication of how the tour would go, his fleet was drawing within sight of the harbor. After wrestling his way through a crowd to his carriage, Doyle again declined Pepperman's invitation to dine—hate to disappoint, responsibility to this taxing schedule etc., etc., leaving Pepperman no reasonable objection—and he and Innes returned to the more abiding concerns awaiting them in his Waldorf suite; Jack, Presto, and Lionel Stern, already convened for a briefing of their day's activities.

After attending Rupert Selig's funeral in Brooklyn, Stern had found waiting for him a detailed wire from Rabbi Isaac Brachman in Chicago: Jacob Stern had been with him there as recently as four days ago. When he left, Brachman assumed Jacob had traveled back to New York and was shocked to hear he hadn't arrived; no other destination had been discussed, and regrettably he had no idea where Lionel's father might have gone.

Rabbi Brachman's telegram brought another serious matter to light: The Tikkunei Zohar, the book Lionel had obtained last year for Brachman to study, had disappeared five weeks before from the archives of his temple. Brachman did not elaborate beyond a tantalizing hint that he suspected the theft held some connection to the Parliament of Religions, part of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an event Jacob Stern had attended as a representative of American Orthodox Judaism.

Presto gave his report: He spent the day returning to rare book shops he had visited upon arriving in New York, and one Lower East Side shop owner reported an intriguing encounter.

"A well-spoken German gentleman—good-looking, tall, athletic build—came into this man's store just yesterday, representing himself as the agent for a wealthy private collector interested in purchasing rare religious manuscripts. He understood that such documents were exceedingly difficult to come by and usually resided in the hands of established scholars or institutions. He expressed particular interest in the Gerona Zohar and wondered if the man had heard about the book recently coming into this country. This bookstore"—Presto paused for effect; melodrama an inescapable part of his nature—"is less than two blocks away from the offices of Mr. Stern."

"The German bloke again," said Innes.

"He told the shopkeeper that he had recently returned from Europe," said Presto.

"And he's undoubtedly by now in possession of the false Zohar we left on the railroad tracks," said Doyle. "Any idea who he claimed to be?"

With his flashing smile and a flourish worthy of a magician, Presto produced a business card out of thin air: "Mr. Frederick Schwarzkirk: Collector. No other title. Offices in Chicago."

"Schwarzkirk? Odd name."

"That means 'Black Church,' " said Jack.

Doyle and Jack looked at each other: the dream about the tower. This was no coincidence. Silence in the room.

"Is your tour scheduled to take you to Chicago?" asked Jack.

"As a matter of fact, it is," said Doyle.

"We travel tomorrow," said Innes.

"We're going with you," said Jack.

"Capital," said Doyle. Jack continued to stare at him. "What is it?"

"Someone I want you to meet tonight."

"Late in the day for a social call."

"My friend doesn't keep regular hours," said Jack. "Up to it?"

Doyle looked to Innes, who was nearly bursting with eagerness.

"Lead the way," said Doyle.

The wind blew colder as they rode uptown, the streets empty, leaves beginning to turn. Even this deserted, you could feel the immense restless dynamism of the city, thought Doyle, coursing up through the ground like the hum of a massive turbine engine.

As they trotted past the terraced palazzos and mansions on Fifth Avenue, he felt a twinge of self-reproach, realizing that a part of him still yearned after a style of living scaled to these grandiose dimensions. The homes of the ruling class sat silent as medieval fortresses, eye-popping shrines to vanity and greed, and yes, he still wanted one. In England, the rich handled fortunes discreetly, tastefully tucked away in the country behind the tall hedges—Doyle had a country house himself now, albeit a modest one. In America the robber barons erected these self-celebrating monuments along the busiest street in the world: By God, look at me, I've done it! Cracked the bank! Beaten the gods at their own game!

Telephone wires clogged the air between the mansions and the street, connecting the rich to each other by means of this latest craze; they hardly had anything to say to each other when they were face-to-face, thought Doyle, why did they need so many telephones?

What an exhausting interior life the wealthy must lead, driven to these superhuman accomplishments by fitful longings for immortality; the thought of all that misguided passion filled Doyle with melancholy before he corrected himself: Who was he to say these titans of enterprise had it wrong? Two thousand years from now, with this great city fallen into dust, there might be little else left standing besides these sturdy secular temples for archaeologists to sift through, weaving together from their artifacts the life of a dead and distant culture. A hairbrush, an urn, a privately commissioned bust, these intensely personal possessions might one day find themselves behind museum glass, transformed into relics of worship. What if some fragment of a dream or, to put it more plainly, a few resilient molecules of its owner survived embedded in the matter of the object? That seemed to Doyle to be as close to immortality as any human could hope for; the body would fail, memories would fade, but we might live on for centuries in the form of a toothbrush or a hatpin.

After they turned west and reached the Hudson River, a ferry conveyed their coach-and-four to the palisades of New Jersey. The four men inside settled into the rhythms of a long carriage ride through the dead of night. No one but Jack knew where they were going, and he sat above them in the driver's seat, holding the reins lightly in his mangled fingers. As they rode, Presto entertained them with tales about the princes and maharanis of Gwalior and Rajputana; cursed jewels, palaces of ivory and gold, man-eating tigers, marauding elephants, and, of the most interest to Innes, the illicit mysteries of the harem: Did these girls really paint certain essential parts of themselves crimson? Indeed they did, confirmed Presto: Oiled, polished, and sheened, the houris lived a life devoted to the giving, and receiving, of pleasure. In each other's arms, as well as those of their master. Innes's mind spun like a pin-wheel in a stiff breeze: Had Presto actually visited any of these perfumed seraglios?

"But how different are these women, finally, from the well-kept wives of our Western high society?'' said Doyle, sparing Presto the indignity of confessing the obvious. "I don't mean all of them, but those who spend their lives maintaining their physical charms—facial massages, six-gallon shampoos— transforming themselves into a prize or accessory to decorate their wealthy husbands' arms."

"You can't keep up to fifty of 'em at a time, for starters," argued Innes.

"You'd be surprised," said Presto, with a salacious grin. "Provided money was no object."

"Putting the issue of multiples aside," said Doyle.

"I can think of one important distinction," said Stern. "In the West the sort of wife you're describing can leave the house if she wants to."

"Right, she's not a slave per se," said Doyle. "But what I'm getting at is, aren't they in a similar way slaves of the spirit? The wife here may leave the house as you suggest, but can she leave the situation? Fed up with her lot, can she run off and make a life of her own?"

"Why would she want to?" asked Innes.

"Theoretically speaking, old boy."

"She should be able to," said Presto. "And she certainly has legal recourse under Western law."

"But the reality is quite different: Western society is rigged to support free action on the part of the male and defended against the same rights being accorded the female. I believe it's something to do with unconscious protection of the reproductive function; the species must survive, at any cost; the woman must be shielded from harm, even if we aren't aware of it."

"I've always been too busy to take a wife," said Stern sifting through his regrets.

"Harem life doesn't sound so bad to me," said Innes. "Not much work. Lots of free time."

"You're lost in a dream about the harem's compliance and round-the-clock availability; do you have any idea what can happen to one of these girls if she runs afoul of the ruling male?" Doyle turned to Presto.

"Torture, disfigurement. Beheading," said Presto.

"Really? That's dreadful."

"But how would you feel if these women were granted the same equality of sexual freedom you enjoy? If they could choose to make love with whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted?"

"What an appalling thought," said Innes. "I mean the whole point of the thing is lost then, isn't it?"

"My argument is that while men have made the civilized world as it is, they have done so at the expense of these partners our Creator had the good sense to grace us with; they are the invisible oppressed among us."

"Are you in favor then of giving women the vote, Mr. Doyle?" asked Presto.

"Oh good God, no," said Doyle. "You have to go about these things sensibly. We should educate them first; they need to know what they're being asked to vote on. Rome wasn't built in a day."

"Maybe it wouldn't be so bad," said Innes, summoning up a rosy world of sexual equality. "Be a lot less expensive getting a bird in the bed; no flowers, no fancy dinners for two in some pricey bistro."

"I'm afraid the prospect fills me with despair," said Presto. "To abandon the ritual of the hunt, the thrill of conquest, and have everything I desired about a woman handed to me from the first moment without resistance or some modest reticence would ruin the entire experience."

"So you didn't actually enjoy your visits to the harem, then?'' said Innes, like a dog digging up his favorite bone.

The discussion continued, lively and spirited, nothing laid to rest, as if in this delicate and fertile area anything could ever be settled. Doyle looked up at Jack driving the carriage, missing his participation in exactly the sort of philosophical free-for-all in which he used to take particular delight. Certainly, Jack could hear what they were saying from up on that lonely perch, but he never glanced their way, remote and purposeful as a lighthouse keeper watching a storm out at sea. How far had Jack journeyed beyond the reach of these essential animal concerns; and if they were lost to him forever, could he still in the same way be thought of as a man?

It was nearly one in the morning when their destination appeared, in a valley spreading below them illuminated by an impossible volume of light: a quadrangle of long brick buildings ringed with electric lamps and a high white picket fence. No identifying signs. After a whispered conversation with a guard stationed at the gate, their carriage was admitted; Jack drove them to the tallest structure in the center of the square and parked outside; through its large windows, they could see vast rooms crowded with machinery, laboratory apparatus, and scientific supplies.

They followed Jack through a steel door, down a corridor, and into a great hall sporting a thirty-foot ceiling; second-floor galleries flanked either side of bookshelves climbing the far wall—at least ten thousand books, estimated Doyle. Immense glass cases displayed stores of minerals, compounds, and prototypes of various inventions. Greek statues filled corners; photographs and paintings packed every available inch of wall. The room felt both cluttered and spacious; objectively grand and intensely personal.

At a simple rolltop desk in the middle of the room, a rumpled middle-aged man slumped in a tilt-back chair, angled away from them, his worn boots resting on the edge of an open drawer. He appeared to be asleep; a steel bowl sat in his lap below his folded hands. Touseled, graying hair lay every which way on his large, noble head. Jack signaled the others for silence, and he crept closer to the man in the chair. Lionel Stern suddenly gasped.

"Do you know who that is?" whispered Stern.

Two steel balls fell from the man's hand and clanged in the steel bowl. The sound woke him; instantly alert, looking up to face them; broad brow furrowed to a deep cleft between bushy white eyebrows, a wide frowning mouth, and the keenest intelligence in his eyes. He spotted Jack first and beckoned him to the desk, shaking his hand, exchanging quiet pleasantries.

"That's Thomas Edison," said Stern.

Jack waved them over and made the introductions: Edison lit up like his famous incandescent bulb when he met Doyle.

"The Holmes generator, in the flesh," said Edison with a laugh; to their puzzled silence he explained that the "Holmes generator'' was well known in scientific circles as a precursor to the electromagnetic engine.

"Oh," said Doyle.

Edison seemed unable to express strongly enough his enthusiasm for Sherlock Holmes: Most novels teemed with creatures of such uninspired and feeble dimwittedness it was a wonder any author could be bothered to write about them; but what a joy to encounter such unapologetic brilliance in a fictional character! Doyle was flattered into utter befuddlement.

Edison leaped to his feet with the spring of a teenager, shimmied up the rolling ladder bolted to his library stacks, pulled down a leather-bound volume of Holmes, and insisted Doyle sign the title page for him.

"Any more Holmes stories in the works?" Edison eagerly wanted to know. "Surely our man's sharp enough to have found a way to survive that little problem at the waterfall."

"There's been some talk about it," said Doyle, hating to disappoint the great man. Innes stared at him as if he'd just spoken in tongues.

They chatted about Doyle's work habits, Edison keen on facts: How many hours a day did he write? (Six.) How many words did he produce a day? (Eight hundred to a thousand.)

Did he write by hand or with one of the new mechanical typewriters? (Fountain pen.) How many drafts of each book? (Three.) Then the conversation shifted to the mysterious origins of creativity in the mind. They agreed that the brain's relentless appetite for order resulted in the spontaneous development of organized ideas attempting to simplify the problems of daily living, be it a story that shed light on some troublesome aspect of human behavior or a machine that reduced the difficulty of essential physical labor.

"We're all detectives," said Edison, "wrestling with that question mark at the end of our existence. A large part of the universal appeal of your Mr. Holmes, I think."

"But he's just a machine, really," said Doyle modestly.

"Oh, but I disagree; with all apologies to Sherlock, and the prevailing medical wisdom, our brain is not a machine. When induced into the appropriate state of readiness, the brain, I believe, enters into contact with a field of pure ideas; not a physical place as we understand it, but not a purely theoretical one, either. A dimension of abstract thought that parallels our own, overlaying and informing our world in ways hard to imagine. We experience it directly only through the auspices of a properly prepared human mind. And drawing down the visions that we find while visiting this 'other place' is the source of all great human inspiration."

"May I ask, sir, what you were doing with those balls and the steel bowl when we arrived?" said Doyle.

"I can see where our Mr. Holmes comes by his observational acuity," said Edison with a smile. "I discovered early in my life that the best ideas took shape in my mind when I passed through the dreamy borderland we cross on our way either into or falling out of sleep; I've come to believe this brief passage is when the brain reaches its optimum state of receptivity for making contact with this realm of pure reason. The difficulty comes in trying to maintain ourselves in that dreamy middle ground: We quickly fall either deeper into sleep or back toward wakefulness. So ..."

Edison picked up the bowl and the balls and sat down in his chair to demonstrate.

"Whenever I feel drowsy, I sit just so with my hand holding these over the bowl and let myself drift into that in-between territory. If I fall asleep, the balls drop from my hand and the clanging brings me back—I'm somewhat deaf, I need a good racket to do the job; I quickly pick the balls up and float away again. The more I practice, the longer I'm able to stay there. The thoughts come. Good things result. Any man can train himself to learn this technique, and I have found that with an hour or two spent in this productive state, I feel more rested than after a full eight hours in bed."

"Why, this is very much like the meditative states attained by the yogis in the Far East," said Presto.

"Is that a fact?" said Edison, who had not paid much attention to the other men beyond an occasional friendly glance. "I'm very interested to know this; are you a Hindu yourself?"

"I am the Episcopalian son of an Irish-Catholic mother and a Muslim father who fled a Hindu culture to live in England," said Presto with a bow.

"Well, America certainly sounds like the right place for you."

With a glance at his pocket watch, Jack suggested they not take up too much of Mr. Edison's valuable time but should proceed with their reason for the visit. Edison, who seemed more grateful for the interruption than annoyed, marched them through the massive laboratories they'd glimpsed through the windows. Sixty full-time employees did the lab work, as teams assigned to various projects. Most of Edison's time was now taken up with administrative details, he explained grumpily; his investors insisted on it. Money drove everything now, not like the good old days in Menlo Park when energy was boundless and trust of one's fellows came unquestioned.

They left the main building, walked to a far corner of the quad, and entered a low oblong wooden shack fifty feet long, topped by a strange sloping hinged roof. Black tar paper covered the interior walls; black curtains draped a small raised platform at the far end. Doyle decided the hinging at the tops of the wall allowed the roof to slide open, for what reason he could not imagine. The men took seats on folding chairs before a square white screen hanging straight down from the ceiling, while Edison disappeared behind a black box of curtains at the back.

The room went dark and Doyle took advantage of the pause to lean over to Jack and ask, "How did you come to know him?"

"Came to his door unannounced. Three years ago when I reenlisted," said Jack. "Identified myself, showed my credentials: agent to the Crown."

"Why?"

"Mysteries I'd come across. Ideas. Questions I wanted to ask. He was surprisingly cooperative; he found me quite exotic. I lived on the grounds for two months. He told his people I was a visiting engineer. We shared a few ideas for applications of his new technologies...."

A rhythmic humming issuing from behind the curtain cut him off; moments later a narrow beam of light shot out of a peephole cut in its center, flooding the screen with a square of brightness painful to the eye.

Edison reappeared and stood beside them. Writhing black squiggles danced across the screen.

"Dust on the lens," he explained. "There is some extraneous footage attached to the front of the reel, Jack, but be patient; this does lead to the material you asked me to show you."

The screen went dark again, and then suddenly two prizefighters appeared before them, circling around a roped-off ring, slapping punches at each other; there was no sound, the image leeched of color to a flat black and white and the figures moved with an almost comical jumpiness, but the spooky, larger-than-life spectacle appearing out of thin air astonished them.

"That's Gentleman Jim Corbett, world heavyweight champion," said Edison, pointing to the larger of the men. "Filmed in this same room a few months ago. His opponent's a local fellow we recruited from an obscurity—"

On the screen, Corbett floored the man with a single punch.

"—to which he quickly returned."

The image changed to an exterior landscape; a train tunnel cut in the side of a mountain, tracks running from it directly at the screen. Moments later, a steaming locomotive charged out of the tunnel and hurtled toward them; the men yelled involuntarily. Innes dove out of his seat.

Edison guffawed and slapped his thigh. "No matter how many times I see people react to that it still gives me a chuckle."

The screen changed again to an intimate boudoir draped with tasseled gauzes and Silks, lush pillows crowding a leopard-skin rug. A shapely larm encircled with silver bracelets slithered out from behind the curtains, followed by a barefooted leg; then their owner revealed herself, a sinuous, dark-haired dancing girl in diaphanous harem pants and a filmy halter; flowers adorned her hair, pearls ringed her neck, a hefty dew-drop jewel ornamented her navel. She flirted with them from the screen, flashing her kohl-rimmed eyes, and began to shake and shimmy in a way that could only be described as extraordinarily professional.

"Good night!" said Innes. "Who is that?"

"Her name is Little Egypt," said Edison. "Actually her name is Mildred Hockingheimer from Brooklyn. Our nation's foremost practitioner of the hootchy-kootchy. And she is going to be very, very famous."

They watched her for a while and could find no basis for disagreement.

"Very talented girl," said Stern.

"From Brooklyn?" said Presto. "It hardly seems possible."

"She found the inspiration for her act in a Syrian woman— not so coincidentally also named Little Egypt—who scandalized last year's World's Fair: There are currently twenty-five Little Egypts plying their trade around the country. We've got the jump on them, though: Our Little Egypt is already the biggest attraction in every Kinetoscope parlor we've put her into; we could charge a quarter a peep and men would still be standing in line."

"Worth every penny," said Innes.

"And all a trick, her sense of motion, that is. Retention of vision; a trick the eye plays on us. Separate still photographs shown so quickly in succession the mind perceives the movements as continuous."

"The possibilities," said Doyle, thinking well beyond the scope of her current performance, "are limitless."

"Do you think so? I'm afraid it may not have much application beyond the prurient or purely sensational. Eye-catching, of course, but something kind of shameful about it finally, isn't there?"

"For two hundred years, the most popular attractions in England were public executions, followed closely by bear-baiting and cockfights," said Presto. "If your marvelous invention moves the masses toward voyeurism, they shan't have much distance to travel."

"Hope you're right. People are usually suspicious of new inventions," said Edison. "For the longest time, they were afraid diseases could be transmitted over the telephone. But not moving pictures; I've never seen anything like it; people take to it like camels to water."

"How ever did you find her?" asked Innes, untroubled by Edison's concerns, his mind doing handsprings around some pretext—a convention; a class reunion of sorts—that would unite all twenty-five of the Little Egypts.

"Dancing at Coney Island, although this performance was recorded right here in our Black Maria. Quite a gal, Mildred; she likes to tell you her dance is patterned after the secret ceremonies of the ancient Egyptian temple. How they happened to fall into her hands in the middle of Flatbush remains a mystery she will carry to her rest."

Little Egypt vanished without revealing any of the secrets she seemed to have been leading up to: A stunning vista of white Grecian and Italianate pavilions took her place on the screen, immense crowds scurrying in and out of the buildings like insects.

"This is the World's Fair now," said Edison. "Ran for six months last year—any of you gentlemen have the good fortune to attend?"

No, none of them had, they said.

"Sorry to say you missed one of the great spectacles in creation. Originally the town fathers wanted to show the world how Chicago had recovered from the great fire in '71, but it quickly became clear that the unseen forces which occasionally conspire to push forward the progress of man had something more significant in mind. In the middle of our worst economic crisis in forty years, the Fair was visited by twenty-seven million people; nearly half our country's population. And between my company's efforts and those of our competitors, it was the most widely photographed event in human history."

A dazzling flood of images cascaded over the screen: exhibition halls filled with gargantuan manufacturing displays; dynamos, hydroelectric power, models of machines from the new Golden Age of Science. An entire building full of turbines and generators, seemingly the work of a race of giants. Steam-powered fire engines. Horseless carriages. The latest advances in luxurious rail travel; gloriously appointed sleeping cars with silk curtains and silver washbasins. In its central chamber, a tower of electricity reached to the roof of the vast steel hall, the words "Edison Light" flashing around its pinnacle—as he stood beside them, Doyle watched the flickering shadows play off Edison's face, marveling at the riches of inspiration that must animate his mind; godfather to the march of progress they were witnessing.

A separate pavilion displayed Edison's Inventions of Tomorrow, machines predicted to better the lives of every man, woman, and child; vacuum cleaners, laundry machines, refrigerated ice boxes. And most astonishing: the Telectroscope, a viewing tube, like a telescope, that when perfected would allow a man in New York to see the face of a friend in Chicago as if they were standing side by side.

Rising from an amusement area called the Midway, a gigantic wheel of light carried passengers in swinging baskets, up, down, and around in a fiery circle—invented by a local man named George Washington Ferris, Edison told them—as if a wonder from Mount Olympus had fallen among the mortals. One dizzying shot demonstrated the point of view of someone sitting in the revolving chairs; from its apex the fairgrounds spread out beneath the wheel like the dawning of a new civilization.

"Two hundred and fifty feet in the air: Our cameraman nearly fainted and fell to his death," said Edison.

Now pictures documented groups of men and women gathered on stairs in front of various Fair pavilions; in wide-angle shots, a banner in their center announced the group's identity—Pan American Association of Horse Breeders; the Chicago Club; United Women's Congress—followed in each instance by closer shots of the camera slowly panning across each stationary membership, most of them, used to posing for still photographers, standing as rigidly as statues with unwavering smiles on their faces.

This is all very interesting, thought Doyle, on the verge of asking: What was the point?

Then came the Parliament of International Religions: one of the largest groupings, a swell of clergy populating the steps around their banner and a second sign that read: Not Men, but Ideas. Not Matter, but Mind.

Lionel Stern leaned forward in his seat. The closer examining shots began: bishops, cardinals, deacons, vicars, Protestant and Catholic in their clerical collars standing shoulder to shoulder with rabbis, both Orthodox and the more contemporarily outfitted Reform....

"There, there he is, there's my father," said Lionel Stern, leaping forward to the screen and pointing at a briefly glimpsed angular figure in the center of the group. "Is there any way to stop the picture?"

"I'm afraid not," said Edison.

The camera continued to slip to the right across the congregation; Lionel watched anxiously as Jacob's grainy image drifted to the edge of the screen and disappeared. Now the many races and religions of the East made their appearance, eyeing the camera with more variety of expression—from quiet humor to outright suspicion—all wearing their distinctive traditional vestments: clusters of draped and turbaned Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists in dark saffron robes, ascetic Confucianists, Coptic Christians, Tibetans, elegant Shinto priests, forbidding Eastern Orthodox patriarchs.

As the camera reached the far margin of the group, it stopped moving and held the frame. A lone figure in the back row captured their eye: a tall, arresting man, thin as a scarecrow, wearing a high stovepipe hat and a severe black frock coat, cut like an undertaker's. Long, scraggly hair flowed to his shoulders; out of his back on the left side rose a spiny deformed hump. The features of the face remained blurry; alone among the entire membership, this man was moving his head from side to side....

Jack stood straight up, jolted from his seat. He moved quickly to the screen and studied the faint image; moments later the film ended, the screen trailed off in a congestion of lines, sprockets, motes of dust. Edison turned off the projector and the room went silent. Jack turned to Doyle, eyes wide with alarm, caught for a moment in the stark white light on the screen.

"I must see it again," said Jack.

"I'll have to rewind the reel first," said Edison.

"No; let me see the film plain, in my hands, one picture at a time."

"Of course," said Edison.

"What is it, Jack?" said Doyle, watching him closely.

Jack didn't reply.

Minutes later, in Edison's lab, the length of film spread out across a glass panel lit from below, Jack pored over its individual frames with a magnifying glass as the others stood quietly by.

In one of the frames, between his constant movements, Jack found an image of the humpbacked preacher that caught the outline of the man's features nearly distinct.

Jack went instantly pale: Doyle noticed his hands shaking.

"We know this man, Arthur," said Jack gravely.

"Do we?"

"We know him all too well," he said, handing the glass to Doyle.