The Fifth Heart (51 page)

Holmes walked stealthily around the right corner of the enclosure, toward the side where the cleft in the trees allowed access. No light escaped from that opening. Holmes was taking care where he put his feet but did not want to walk too slowly. Surprise, after all, and perhaps a sudden shaft of light in Lucan’s eyes, were almost certainly Holmes’s only hope for surviving the next few minutes.

He got to the opening in the trees and stopped, finally leaning forward to put only his head forward in a fast peek around the edge. Even that movement, he knew, would be target enough for a master assassin with a pistol ready. Holmes knew that even though clouds had occluded the stars, it was still lighter outside the enclosure than within, and his head would be in silhouette.

No shot. No sound.

Holmes looked again, eyes straining, but could not make out the flowing cigarette or the form of the man on the bench. It was simply too dark in that enclosure now. He realized that when the clouds had come in sometime in the last forty-five minutes, he and James had been watching the red glow of the cigarette rather than the dark outline of the man in the blackness.

No further reason to wait
, thought Holmes. Raising the lantern high, seeing nothing but darkness ahead in and beyond the entrance cleft, Holmes strode quickly forward, the sound of his brushing branches as loud as an avalanche in his ears.

The instant he was through the cleft in the trees his fingers swept open the shutter on the lantern, his right arm flexing as he hefted the cosh.

The place on the bench where the man had been sitting was empty.

Where had he moved?
Anywhere in the enclosure would afford him a perfect shot.

Holmes considered slamming shut the lantern’s shutter—Lucan’s sharpshooter advantages eliminated, just two men in blackness, feeling for each other, and Holmes had the knife and the cosh—but he found he was too impatient for whatever the showdown would bring to follow that saner tactic.

He moved quickly, in erratic patterns, holding the lantern away from his body, aiming the beam this way and then that way. The benches were empty. The graveled hexagon in front of the sculpture was empty. The area around the granite and bronze monument was empty.

Behind the benches
. It would have been Holmes’s first choice for a hiding place if he were waiting to shoot a man here.

Holmes leaped up onto the bench and then over the high back, going to a quick crouch on the back side of the bench closest to the opening in the trees, lantern beam illuminating the narrow corridor ahead of him between the stone bench and the trees.

Empty.

Rushing forward, still in a crouch so that his head was below the level of the back of the stone bench, he reached the first corner and set the lantern on the ground, its aimed beam shooting to the left.

No shot. No sound.

Holmes looked around, saw this second corridor of space empty, saw no new breaks in the wall of foliage to his right, and he hurried to the last turn, not bothering to pause before he swept around it. He was ready to dash down the lantern in a second if he couldn’t get close enough to blind his opponent with it.

Nothing.

Holmes came out into the opening and checked all the walls of foliage. Someone
could
have forced his way through the tree branches and hedges and out into the opening, but Holmes certainly would have heard him do so as he approached.

Satisfied that no one else was in the enclosure, he held the lantern high again and walked toward the bronze sculpture on its two-level base. He approached it obliquely, visualizing Henry James dead, his body dropped into the vertical shaft, and Lucan’s young hunter’s eyes at one of the eyehole openings and a pistol pressed against the other opening. The eyes were large enough to pass a bullet from a revolver.

His cape-coat brushed against foliage as he crept toward the seated, brooding, still-powerful sculpture. The combination of darkness and harsh lantern light brought out the draped folds in the robe, the shadows under the cowl, the straight nose and solid chin, the up-raised and folded-in right arm with its fingers disappearing under bronze cheek and chin.

“James?” Holmes had used a normal, conversational voice and the loudness of it in the thick night made him jump.

No response.

Louder—“James?”

“I’m here,” came the oddly muffled reply from the statue’s head.

Holmes imagined the portly writer under duress, the muzzle of a pistol pressed under his double chin. For that matter, he hadn’t been certain that the muffled voice belonged to Henry James.

“What was the name of that novel of yours that I said I liked?” said Holmes, still standing close to the right side of the monument so that he could not be seen or targeted from inside the sculpture.

“What?” The echoing voice sounded more like James this time. An obviously irritated James.

Holmes repeated his question.

“The Princess Casamassima,”
came the anger-tinged reply. “But what on earth does that have to do with anything?”

Holmes smiled and stepped out in front of the cowled figure. He could not help but glance over his shoulder every few seconds. “Where is he?” he asked the statue.

“I don’t have the vaguest idea, Holmes.” Holmes could hear the voice better from this new vantage point and it was definitely James’s, although muffled by the bronze. “Just after you stepped out, the cigarette glow disappeared. I didn’t see the man move . . . did not see him go out through the entrance. He just . . . disappeared.”

“All right,” said Holmes. “I missed him then. Could you please bring my bag when you come out?”

“It’s too dark,” said James through one of the eyeholes. “I can’t see where to put my feet. The shaft . . . can’t find the lock mechanism . . . I’ll try, but . . .”

“No, on second thought, it’s better that I come fetch you,” said Holmes. “Sit tight for just another moment and I’ll bring the lantern.”

But instead of going outside and to the rear of the monument, Holmes went straight across the hexagon, dropped to one knee, and began examining the graveled ground near the bench. Then he took several minutes to move the lantern close to the ground near all three benches. Then he stepped around behind the bench and did the same careful examination. He was checking the ground in the open space of the hexagon when the statue made another muffled noise.

Holmes walked over to it and held the lantern high. “What was that, James?”

“What in
God’s name
are you doing!” demanded the androgynous face of deepest mourning.

“Looking for the cigarettes and/or ashes,” said Holmes. “We watched Lucan—this figure in the dark—smoke at least three cigarettes to their end—we could both smell the tobacco smoke in the darkness—but there’s not a single ash or remnant of a dead cigarette anywhere. He must have dropped the ashes from the cigarettes into his palm and put the ashes and the cigarette butts in his pocket. Don’t you find that odd behavior for an innocent person, James?”

“
Damn
the cigarette ashes,” said the shadow-sharpened bronze face. “Come get me out of here, Holmes. I’ve needed to relieve myself for more than an hour now.”

* * *

The hansom and its cabbie were not there when they reached New Hampshire Avenue.

“That blackguard!” cried James, referring to the driver. “That cursed driver took your money but left anyway.”

“We’ve been a long time,” said Holmes. He’d done the entire walk from the monument with his shoulders hunched until they ached, waiting for the impact of the pistol or rifle shot whose sound he would not hear. They stayed tensed out in the open of the lightly traveled avenue. There were no street lights or house lights here.

“Maybe our smoking friend took it,” said James. “What do we do now?”

“It’s only a little less than four miles back to Mrs. Stevens’s place, so we walk,” said Holmes, knowing that despite his best efforts to relax, his body would be expecting the impact of a bullet every step of the way. And for every hour and minute of the days and nights to come until this whole matter was resolved.

Some minutes later, they came to a single gas lamp on a post in the lawn of a darkened house. The light drew a yellow oval on the macadam of the road and illuminated both of them as James stopped for a second.

This is the perfect spot
, thought Holmes. Lucan in the darkness behind the house or in the blackness under the trees to either side. His target—or perhaps targets, if Lucan was in an especially bloody mood—frozen like a deer in the beam of an illegal hunting lantern.

“I somehow contrived to lose my watch,” said James. “What time is it?”

Holmes could only hope that the author hadn’t lost the watch
inside
the monument. Tomorrow morning, Holmes was going to let Henry Adams know that
he
had figured out the little mystery, been to and inside the most expensive duck blind in history, but he didn’t want Adams to know about his friend James’s participation.

Now he set down his heavy canvas burglar bag, lifted his watch out of his waistcoat pocket by its chain, and held it so that James could see in the light.

“Quarter past midnight,” said Holmes. James merely nodded, lifted the bag for Holmes, and began walking again.

Past midnight
, thought Holmes as he caught up to the other man, macadam crunching under their soles. It was now Tuesday—the fourth of April—Sherlock Holmes’s birthday.

He had just turned 39 years old.

T
he morning after the absurd and disturbing melodrama in Rock Creek Cemetery, Henry James awoke with the immediate and determined resolution to do
something
. He just could not decide what. Return immediately to England. Go to Henry Adams with a confession and abject apologies for invading his most hidden privacy? (No, no . . . the thought of that bed in that sarcophagus of stone under the ground on the subterranean level close to Clover’s buried remains not only still gave James goosebumps, but made him slightly nauseous. He could never bring it up with Adams, nor hint in any way that he knew about the secret world inside Clover’s sculpture and monument stone. Nor tell John Hay. Never.)

As James bathed and trimmed his short beard and dressed that rainy Tuesday morning—wishing for the hundredth time that he had the Smiths, his mediocre cook and her less-than-mediocre tippler husband of a manservant, with him from De Vere Gardens—he decided to tell Mrs. Stevens’s slow-witted daughter that he would again take his breakfast in the privacy of his room. He was in the hall looking for her when the last man he wanted to see—Mr. Sherlock Holmes, looking damp and red-cheeked and in the process of shrugging off his waterproof macintosh—was preparing to knock him up.

“Just the man I wanted to see!” cried Holmes, as good-naturedly as if they hadn’t invaded a good man’s mind and most sacred secret the night before. “Come down to Mrs. Stevens’s breakfast room and we’ll talk over a good breakfast.”

“I was going to have mine in my room,” James replied in a cool tone.

Holmes didn’t seem to perceive the frost in the air. “Nonsense. There’s much we have to talk about and very little time in which to do it, James. No, now come on down to the breakfast room like a good fellow.”

“I have no intention of discussing any part or aspect of last night’s . . . events,” said James.

Holmes actually smiled. “Good. Neither do I. This is more important news. I’ll see you down in the breakfast room.”

And Holmes turned with one of his sudden, almost spastic (although strangely graceful), moves and bounded down the stairway, shedding rain from the macintosh folded over his arm as he went.

James paused at the head of the stairs. Should he snub Holmes now and set their relationship on the new and definitely colder and more formal level to which it needed to be adjusted? Or should he suffer hearing this “more important news”?

In the end, James’s hunger for breakfast won out over the higher moral arguments. He went downstairs.

* * *

“I have moved out of Mrs. Stevens’s comfortable abode,” said Holmes, eating his bean and egg and sausage and fried-toast English-style breakfast which he’d charmed Mrs. Stevens into making for him each morning.

For some reason, James was stunned. “When?” he said.

“This morning.”

“Why?” asked James a second before he realized that he did not want to know the answer and that it was none of his business anyway.

“Things have become too dangerous,” answered Holmes, almost gulping his coffee. Usually, James had noticed, the detective was indifferent to food, but there were times—such as this morning—where he seemed to be stoking a steam engine with fuel more than merely eating.

“Whoever that man was smoking his cigarettes at the monument last night, odds are that he was someone who had followed us there with an intention to do me harm . . . in short, to kill me,” said Holmes, eating his eggs with gusto. “My continuing to reside here would put you, Mrs. Stevens, her daughter, and everyone else around me in some danger.”

“But you’re not sure that the man last night was . . . an assassin,” said James, almost stumbling over that last melodramatic word.

“No. Nowhere near certain,” agreed Holmes. “But for the time being, I should take no chances with my friends’ well-being.”

Something about that phrase—“my friends”—made James feel warm inside. And he hated himself for feeling that way. He certainly had not included this Sherlock Holmes person in his rigidly vetted and constantly reviewed list of friends, and for Holmes to suggest that their association had reached that plane was pure presumption.

Yet James still felt the warm glow.

Holmes finished eating and lit a cigarette. The detective never ate the yolk of his fried egg and this was one reason that James dreaded having breakfast with the man; invariably, when finished with his cigarette, he would stub it out in the runny yolk, leaving the butt end sticking up like some artillery shell that had failed to detonate. The repulsive habit always bothered Henry James and this morning, he knew, it would actively nauseate him.