The Fifth Heart (16 page)

“Do you know this man?” barked Holmes. “Have you ever seen him?”

“No.” Culpepper’s baritone was now a soprano’s quaver.

“Make sure,” said Holmes. “I don’t know which of the Southwest Toughs’ bosses you report to—Dillon, Meyer, Shelton—but it would have been at their headquarters, maybe in their office. Or perhaps this man and your boss dining together.”

“I’ve never seen him!” screeched the dangling man. Every time Culpepper tried to bring his arms back to grab at Holmes, the detective let him tilt a little more over the drop. Culpepper quit trying to grab and let his pudgy hands and arms flap like a pigeon’s broken wings.

Holmes pocketed that photo and brought forth the photograph of the much younger man. In profile—thin lips, long, straight nose, hair combed back, eyes as light as a reptile’s. The image terrified Holmes even in the perfectly disinterested state the heroin had granted him.

Culpepper’s hesitation told Holmes what he needed to know. “Tell me. Now!” he said and let the big man tilt a few more inches forward. Holmes’s left arm and hand were growing tired; he knew he’d almost dropped Culpepper three stories by accident right then. That would never do. But he couldn’t change hands. Not yet. “Tell me
now!
” he bellowed.

“I think I saw this fellow . . . maybe . . . once. Dear Jesus, don’t drop me!” Holmes pulled him a few inches closer.

“A couple of years ago,” babbled Culpepper. “Maybe three. At Shelton’s office on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“What was his name?”

“I just saw him, from a distance,” quavered Culpepper. “I swear to God. If I knew anything more about him I’d tell you. I swear to God.
Please
don’t push me!
Please
don’t drop me. I’ll change my life. I swear to Jesus Christ.”

“And
this
man?” demanded Holmes, showing the third photograph. The oldest of the three in the photographs—one of a shockingly pale and cadaverous-looking, hollow-cheeked, and balding man. But the sharpness of features does not create sympathy in the viewer; this face is one of a predator, not of a victim or prey. One’s first impression is of an almost disturbingly large shelf and dome of white forehead looming above deep-set eyes magnified by old-fashioned pince-nez spectacles. The sense of the older man being an intellectual created by the oversized forehead and glimpse of old-fashioned collar, ribbon tie, frock coat, and pince-nez is immediately counteracted by the sharp and strong jut of the older man’s chin, from which various and strong—and somehow angry-looking—cords of wrinkle and muscle rise to the sharp cheekbones and to both sides of the vulpine blade of a nose. It is a predatory face made even more raptor-like by the hunched shoulders rising like a vulture’s black feathers on either side of the grub-white blade of a face.

“Never seen him . . .” gasped Culpepper. “I’m slipping! I’m slipping! Oh, Jesus . . .”

“Perhaps you’ve heard his name,” said Holmes, feeling the strength in his restraining hand beginning to fade. “Moriarty. Professor James Moriarty.”

“No! Never!” cried Culpepper, and Holmes could see in his eyes that he was lying.
Perfect
.

Holmes shot a brief glance at the surviving Finn, still slumped against the wall and holding his bleeding head. He’d ceased moaning and had seen and heard everything well enough. But there was no fight left in him. Blood from the scalp wound had soaked his fingers, wrists, and sleeves.

Holmes put away the photos and pulled Culpepper back from the edge. He didn’t believe he’d get any more. What had he learned? That Lucan might or might not have been in Washington two or more years ago. That Culpepper had definitely
heard
of Professor Moriarty but almost certainly hadn’t seen him.

Holmes released his grip on the stocky man and looked at the floor. Blood had pooled completely around the dead Finn’s head. Murtrick’s body lay across the dead man’s legs, his bullet-shattered head no longer recognizable as something that had once been human. The surviving Finn had managed to scrunch back further from his dead brother and boss. The bleeding Finn’s eyes were as big as saucers staring at Holmes through his carmine-stained fingers.

All this for the information that Lucan
might
have been in Washington and in touch with the Toughs a few years ago? And that the criminal organization here simply
knows
of Moriarty?
He was assailed by a sudden sadness, amplified to something like grief by the fading of the first-freedom of the heroin.

He should have left all this drama aside and simply coldcocked and kidnapped Mr. J and interrogated
him
. He was the only one Holmes had encountered this afternoon who might know if they’d done business with Lucan.

Holmes sighed and turned his back on Culpepper as if to retrieve his dropped club.

The Bowie knife had been sticking hilt-up only inches from Culpepper’s right boot. The big man tugged the blade out with a grunt and leaned forward to strike.

Holmes leaned away from him, his head almost to the moldy wall, his right elbow on the floor, and kicked his left leg straight, his foot flat as he’d been trained in his youth, the leverage in that leg of his suddenly uncoiled body carrying enough energy to have kicked in a locked and barred door.

Culpepper actually flew upward and backward so that Holmes caught a glimpse of the soles of his shoes looking like two exclamation marks hanging in mid-air before Culpepper screamed and the drizzle, no longer golden, seemed to carry him down into the center of the ten-foot-wide hole in the floor.

Holmes paused in the room only long enough to pick up the fallen Beaumont-Adams revolver. It was an old weapon, but not unattractive. Wiping it off with his handkerchief, he disassembled it and dropped the pieces down the wide hole.

The living, still-bleeding Finn tried to push himself further back, literally into the wall, as Holmes passed him with his heavy club swinging idly by his side. The detective could only trust that the surviving Finn had just enough intelligence—and not such a serious concussion—that he could reliably report these proceedings to Mr. J and his other bosses.

Holmes had told Watson more than once that when he, Sherlock Holmes, retired, he was going to write his opus—
The Whole Art of Detection
. But the book he should really write, Holmes knew, was
How to Get Away with a Murder
. Rule No. 8 would be—
Never take away anything of the victim’s. Nothing at all
.

He closed the door behind him, the surviving Finn still shaking in fear as if he thought Holmes would come back around the hole with its rainbow waterfall to finish the job, and then Holmes was stepping carefully down the stairway. It had borne more weight than it was used to this rainy March day. Holmes did stop in the large room off the lobby. A second broad stain had joined the first. Somehow Culpepper had contrived to land directly on the top of his head. His homburg was not the better for it, and the sharp, bloody-white base of the heavy man’s spine had been pushed out through his buttocks.

Holmes rolled the body over, taking care to keep even his disguised-as-poor-American-bloke’s clothes free from stain, and retrieved his $150. He would have use for it in the coming weeks.

It was Saturday, March 25. Holmes expected Henry James to come to his senses soon and return to England or France, but he knew that he himself might have to stay in America at least until the official opening on the first of May. President Cleveland was scheduled to push the button that let the fountains jet high, the battleship to fire, and the chorus to unleash the “Hallelujah Chorus”. Holmes would have to stay here in America that unbearable time unless, of course, circumstances of his own doing—including this encounter—or a telegram from his older brother released him from such long and tiresome obligations.

’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished
, thought Holmes, remembering that evening in 1874 when the 20-year-old Sherlock Holmes, understudy to the lead under a different name entirely, had replaced the suddenly-taken-ill bright new acting star in the firmament and troupe-director Henry Irving for one glorious night not as Rosenkrantz, not as faithful Horatio (“Yes, m’lord,” “No, m’lord” for two and a half aching hours), but as Hamlet. The ovation had been standing. The reviews in
The Times
had been sterling. Irving had fired him from the troupe the next day.

Holmes left the mold- and blood-coppery-smelling old hotel and walked up Casey’s Alley until his feet found pavement again.

His briefcase and other clothes were where he had placed them in the abandoned house in Foggy Bottom. Holmes took care folding away his American clothes and getting into his Norwegian gentleman’s too-heavy tweeds. It took him a minute to get the black cover and silver barking-dog’s head secured in place over the cruder wooden walking stick he’d had to wash along the way.

Holmes peered into a glass pane that threw back his reflection. He’d made sure his hands were clean but now he saw three tiny rosettes of blood line up like crimson snowflakes along his left cheekbone. Wetting his handkerchief in a puddle near a broken window, he dabbed the spots away. Then he tossed away the un-monogrammed handkerchief.

Leaving the house with the confidence of an absentee owner after an inspection, Holmes headed back through Foggy Bottom and into the lovely Federalist-style-lined streets closer to the downtown and the Executive Mansion. His walk now was the wide and confident stride of a famous explorer. His fancy stick now clacked on perfectly laid bricks.

* * *

Holmes had plenty of time to bathe and change before five o’clock tea time.

When they all met in the smaller parlor, Holmes thought that Henry James looked especially bleak, as if he had been brooding away the day. But it was obvious that James hadn’t yet revealed anything about Holmes’s identity to John or Clara Hay; Holmes could see and hear that in his host and hostess’s joyous welcomes and easy behavior during the energetic conversation at tea.

“Did you find our quiet city as exciting as your explorations in Asia?” asked Clara Hay.

“Just as stimulating, in its own unique way,” replied Jan Sigerson, his Norwegian accent faint but present.

A few hours later, they had roast beef for dinner. It seemed to be a specialty of the Hays’ cook—or perhaps they had made it in honor of Henry James, whom they obviously considered more English than American now.

Holmes chose his slices very rare.

T
he weekend turned out to be one of the most painful in Henry James’s memory.

James’s depression had deepened during the long sleepless night, but with the increase of melancholy had come an increase in clarity; he’d decided sometime before the day began growing gray at his windows that as soon as Holmes left the Hays’ home that Saturday, he would talk to John Hay and make a full confession about his sin (and he fully considered it a sin, against friendship, against all discretion) of bringing this stranger in disguise into the embrace of one of his closest circles of friends. James could not imagine any way that the Hays and Henry Adams and Clarence King would ever forgive him, and the writer was prepared to skulk away at once, taking the mid-day train back to New York there to seek passage back to England. He knew that other fast friends of the Hays and Adamses—including James’s old friend William Dean Howells—would be as equally outraged at his unspeakable behavior. He would accept all their anger and disapprobation; the alternative was to continue this vile charade and James saw now that he could not do that.

He’d hoped to speak to John Hay alone just after breakfast, but business took Hay out of the house, “Jan Sigerson” had left for his walk, and Henry James found himself alone with Clara Hay all morning and into the afternoon. As pleasant as Clara had always been to Henry James, he could not bring himself to reveal the truth to her.

So they chatted about mutual friends, about the weather in England and on the Continent this time of year versus the early spring of Washington, about various artists they knew—including Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent—and then about writers again. After the luncheon dishes were removed, they discussed Turgenev’s work and Mr. Emerson’s essays (which James did not much admire) and others until Clara Hay finally laughed and said, “You’ve seen John’s library, of course, but you should really see my bookshelves of shameful pleasures, Harry.”

James raised an eyebrow. “Shameful pleasures?”

“Yes, you know . . . books I enjoy tremendously that John and Henry Adams and Howells and others simply think I should not stoop to read. But I enjoy them! Perhaps you can offer me some dispensation. Come along.”

She led him up the wide staircase and down the right hallway toward their master bedrooms. For a horrified instant, James thought that this woman with whom he was alone in the house (save for six or eight servants) was going to lead him into her bed-sitting-room, but she stopped in the hall outside. The bookcase there was of polished mahogany and was at least twelve-feet long.

“Yellow-backed books!” he exclaimed.

“Yes. I can’t resist picking them up at the railway stations when I’m traveling in England,” said Clara Hay and set the fingers of both hands against her reddening cheeks. “Have you ever succumbed to the temptation, Harry?”

He smiled with what he hoped looked like friendly benevolence. “Of course, my dear woman. The yellow-backed books are designed to while away a boring railway trip. I see you have Collins’s
The Moonstone
and
The Woman in White
there amongst your other sensationalist novels.”

Still blushing, Clara said, “Oh, yes. How I enjoy Wilkie Collins’s books. And how sorry I was when he passed away four years ago. I
do
read serious books as well, you know.”

“If I remember correctly, you were amongst the first of the Five of Hearts to discover
my
work,” said James, removing a few of the volumes from the bookcase of third- and second-rate H. Rider Haggard–style “adventure romances” and glancing at titles before setting them back. Not all of the books here—not even a majority—were actually yellow-backed British novels that invariably dealt with bigamy, illegitimacy, murder, blackmail, and the like, but all were “sensationalist novels”.