The Fifth Heart (26 page)

While they rumbled north, Holmes thought about Henry Adams, the late Clover Adams, Clarence King, John Hay, and Clara Hay. They all held secrets relevant to Holmes’s investigation, even Clover Adams. The dead, Holmes knew, hug their secrets tightly in the grave, but not as tightly as the living.

He was aware that Henry James had known Clover Adams a long time, even before she had married Henry Adams. And Holmes had met few men in his life and career who hugged their secrets closer than did Henry James. But he already knew the secret-of-secrets that James would die to protect.

They hadn’t discussed it, of course, but both Sherlock Holmes the detective and Henry James the writer were celibate. Holmes had given up any plans for a romantic or a sexual life so that he could devote one hundred percent of his time and vital energies to his career. If pressed, James would—Holmes knew—claim the same; and he’d already written that now, as an “old bachelor”, he should never marry because he was already married to his art.

But Holmes knew that there was more to the story. There had been many attractive young women and men on the ship coming over from France—the men and women often walking the promenade deck arm-in-arm, men with men, women with women.

The detective didn’t know whether James played whist or poker or bridge or any other card game where concealment was a great part of the game, but he knew that James’s impassive countenance would be an asset in such a competition. He showed little reaction, even to surprising statements or revelations. But once, unaware that Holmes was even looking his way, Henry James’s gaze had paused for no more than a second on two loud, laughing, carefree young American men, walking arm-in-arm along the deck in the way American men do so freely, and Holmes caught the complex flicker of reactions in James’s gaze: envy, wistfulness, longing, and—again—that vague hunger. The hunger had not seemed primarily sexual in nature to Holmes’s trained eye but it was most certainly an emotional reaction.

Holmes didn’t care about this fact, only that it was James’s deepest secret—that and some hidden shame about his health and back pains and relationship to his older brother William—and what made Holmes care even less was that it could not have any direct bearing on either the serious business that had brought the detective to America or on this odd little case of Clover Adams’s death.

* * *

After far too many suburban stops, the train from Washington finally pulled into New York’s Grand Central Depot at the junction of 42nd Street and Park Avenue. This three-story Victorian pile was not the new six-story “Grand Central Station” that both Holmes and James would see after the turn of the century, much less the “Grand Central Terminal” that would stand at the same spot from 1913 on for a century into the future.

This “Grand Central Depot”, Holmes could see, was a hodge-podge wedding-cake of a place with dark portals opening for more rails that would allow a few horse-drawn trains to continue toward downtown Manhattan and oversized signs for the
NEW YORK AND HARLEM, NEW YORK AND NEW HAVEN
, and
NEW YORK AND HUDSON RIVER
lines.

Holmes’s man, obviously familiar with the maze of connections here, hurried out of the stopped carriage, up flights of stairs, across a crowded open space, and outside, where he ran to catch a horse-drawn trolley headed down Park Avenue. There was nothing Holmes could do but run even harder—a solid sprint with his side whiskers flying and one hand holding his homburg in place—and leap onto the trolley at the last second.

If his prey looked back, he would be most obvious. But Holmes could see that the man he was following had already settled into a seat far forward on the trolley and was paying no attention to anything but the newspaper he’d opened in front of him.

Holmes knew that his man belonged to several rather elite (for Americans) clubs, including two where he kept a room—the Union Club at 69th Street and Park Avenue and the Century Club at 42 East 15th Street. The man also had a permanent room at the Brunswick Hotel at Madison Square at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street.

Holmes knew that the Union Club was not the immediate destination, because his target stayed on the slow trolley as the horses took it further south on Park Avenue. The Union Club’s 69th St. and Park Avenue address obviously would mean that Holmes’s man would have gone north from Grand Central Terminus at 42nd Street. The same applied to his quarry’s rooms at the Century Club, since that elite institution had recently moved to 7 West 43rd Street, which would also have required a turn north from the terminal.

If the man he was following was heading toward the Brunswick Hotel—where Holmes knew he kept a permanent room—he should get off the trolley no further south than 25th Street, since the Brunswick was two blocks east where Fifth Avenue crossed 25th St.

But the man, hunched over slightly and seeming lost in the afternoon edition of the New York paper he’d picked up at Grand Central, stayed on the trolley past both the 25th and then 23rd Street stops. So the destination wasn’t the Union Club, the Century Club, or his much-frequented Brunswick Hotel.

At Union Square, the trolley took the slight jog to avoid the transition from Park Avenue to Broadway and followed 4th Avenue for five blocks to Lafayette Street. Holmes’s man showed no interest in getting off anywhere along these blocks just above and below Canal Street. When Lafayette Street merged with Centre Street, and City Hall came within view, the man stood on the running board to hop off the trolley. Holmes let the horses plod on another half block before he also jumped off and doubled back through the throng of pedestrians, keeping his target’s head and shoulders in view at all times.

Holmes immediately saw their destination and was a little surprised. He’d imagined that if they were going to cross the East River, his quarry would take one of the ferries. The fact that they weren’t going to a ferry landing pleased Holmes; he’d been in New York City several times since the Brooklyn Bridge was finished a decade earlier in 1883, but he’d never had reason or opportunity to cross it before. As with Henry James a week and a half earlier, a ferry had always seemed a more reasonable way to make the switch of railway connections from Manhattan to Staten Island or Brooklyn.

He watched his man pay his toll at the ornamental iron tollbooth and climb the broad iron stairway to the waiting platform. Half a dozen heads behind him in the queue, Holmes paid his nickel and joined the crowd on the platform. The train cars crossing the bridge followed their course in the center of the span with the pedestrian walkway above it and the roadbeds for carriages and other conveyances running along on either side, and Holmes knew that the trains made no stops on the bridge. Thus he felt perfectly comfortable taking a seat and relaxing in the rear of the car his man had entered, his back to his quarry. He could see reflections of the front of the car in nearby windows, but it would be difficult—not to mention senseless—for his target to jump from one of the train cars in mid-span.

Holmes noted for future reference—although he doubted he’d ever have a case concerning the Brooklyn Bridge railway cars—that the cars were very much like the newest and most luxurious cars on New York’s elevated trains: double-sliding doors opening from open platforms decorated with elaborately worked wrought-iron, comfortable rows of seats, and large windows.

New Yorkers and Brooklynites had long since grown accustomed to the fact that the cars had no engines pulling or pushing them, but the occasional tourist exclaimed when their car began moving smoothly away from the station, seemingly under its own power. Holmes knew that down under the rails there was an ever-moving steel traction cable that the cars hooked onto for motivation. Holmes knew that San Francisco had a much more elaborate web of cable cars and that the grades were much steeper there. Still, one could feel this Brooklyn Bridge car climbing up the visible grade of the suspended roadways and superstructure.

Sherlock Holmes was not a man who usually went out of his way to be impressed either by works of nature or works of man. The latter he found largely irrelevant to his work except for the layouts of interior murder scenes and the like; the former he always considered ephemeral in terms of the expanse of time and mankind’s tiny part in it. Holmes had studied his Darwin when he was a boy and it had left him not only with the feeling that he and everyone he might know had their place in the world, and then would know it no more, in a blink of an eye, but even the Pyramids and other “great works” were as ephemeral as a castle of sand on the beach at Brighton.

So cathedrals and great buildings of any age did not move Sherlock Holmes to any level of emotion—with the few exceptions such as London Bridge or Big Ben, the latter heard more often than seen through the City’s deadly fogs. They were touchstones of the city he worked in and, in his own rigidly controlled way, loved.

But now, looking up, Holmes had to admit that the stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge—they were just passing under the first one set out in the river—were impressive indeed. For many decades, the tallest structure in New York City had been the spire of Trinity Church at 284 feet. Just three years earlier, New York’s World Building, at the corner of Park Row and Franklin Street, became the tallest structure in the city at 309 feet. And while this stone arch in the tower that the train was presently passing through was only 117 feet and the height of the towers only 159 feet above the roadways and rail tracks, 276 and a half feet above the river itself, the sheer stone-Gothic
strength
of the towers impressed the unimpressionable Holmes to some degree.

Holmes knew that remembering such precise numbers was just a waste of his precious mental attic space—remembering the heights of the arches and towers and roadway of this bridge would almost certainly never help him in a case—but he’d encountered the information during one of his many sleepless nights spent reading one of the twenty-five volumes of his newer, 1889, 9th Edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Watson had called that purchase a foolish waste of money since Holmes already owned the 6th and 8th Editions, but Holmes treasured his 9th Edition. Unfortunately—and although his brother Mycroft was the one with the amazing mathematical abilities—once Sherlock Holmes was exposed to facts in the form of numbers, he found it all but impossible to forget them.

This seemingly miraculous bridge supported by cables descending from two stone towers that rose 276 feet above the river
.

America
, he thought, and not for the first time,
is a nation with huge dreams and not infrequently the ability to realize them
.

Meanwhile, the car descended the grade beyond the second tower and slowed as it approached the Brooklyn terminal, even more of an elaborate and painted iron structure than on the New York side, with a gentle release of the ingenious “Paine’s grip” device freeing them from the cable. Holmes knew about Colonel W. H. Paine’s gripping-releasing device only because he’d been hired in the mid-1880’s by one of Paine’s executives to look into a patent infringement of the grip, then in use only in San Francisco, by a would-be cable-car company in Paris.

Holmes followed his man down onto the street and then to a short series of horse-drawn trolley rides, finally walking half a block behind the man as he strolled southeast down a rough cobblestoned extension of Flatbush Avenue. His target never looked back over his shoulder or paused at a window front to check in the reflection to see if he was being followed.

Brooklyn, Holmes vaguely knew, had once been—save for Irish and Negro areas along the river to the north—a wealthy and self-satisfied city of wide, leaf-shaded avenues and many stately homes. The neighborhood they were in now, not that far from where they had demolished so many old structures to allow for the approaches to the Bridge, was far from stately. An apparently self-respecting three-story home, its trim and siding brightly painted in the most popular current colors of rose or aqua or mint green or sunset orange, might have on either side of it a rundown old structure whose inhabitants had abandoned all efforts at repair or upkeep.

It was at one of the nicer homes on Hudson Street that Holmes’s man bounded up the four front steps, unlocked the front door, shouted something that Holmes could not quite hear from his place more than half a block away, and was immediately engulfed in hugs from two little girls and a woman with a babe in arms.

The girls and babe and woman were Negroes—the woman especially ebony in color. The two girls in clean, white shifts were lighter shades of tan in complexion but had kinky hair carefully brushed, braided, and tied up in fresh ribbons. There was no doubt that this was an affectionate homecoming. This surprised Holmes a bit. The man Holmes had been tailing all day was white.

* * *

“Yeah, they got three children. The two older ones are girls,” said Mrs. Banes, the woman with a missing front tooth.

“The littlest one, the baby’s a boy. They had a boy before, he was their first, but he died,” said Mrs. Youngfeld, an older woman with gray hair. It was her house across the street on Hudson. “They named the first boy, the one who died, LeRoy.”

Le roi, thought Holmes.
The king
.

Holmes had lost the excessive facial hair, wig, and prominent front teeth, and parted his own hair in the middle with a generous use of hair crème. He now wore thick but frameless spectacles. There were seven pencils visible in his left jacket pocket. From his briefcase he had produced an oversized ledger filled with what looked to be official forms.

It was late and several homes on Hudson Street had not responded to his knocking—a white man knocking in what was obviously a colored neighborhood—but Mrs. Youngfeld and her visitor and good friend from down the street, Mrs. Banes, had peeked through the sidelights and decided that the prissy-looking Holmes was not a threatening character.

They’d had no interest when Holmes had explained that his name was Mr. Williams and he was taking a “local census” so that the Brooklyn Benevolent Neighborhood Association could upgrade local parks and facilities, but when he’d brought out the two dollars he’d pay each of them in return for their brief time answering a few questions about their neighbors, they warmed to him.