The Fifth Heart (62 page)

“There’s a lesson here, boy,” hissed King. “If you’re coming to a knife fight, bring a
knife
. Otherwise you’ll end up with a Heidelberg scar.”

King flicked the blade right across the young thug’s cheek and blood geysered.

The boy screamed, clasped both hands to his opened cheek to hold together the bloody flaps now exposing his molars, stood, and ran off into the night.

James could only stare at the two men unconscious on the ground as the sound of the boy’s pounding boots dwindled down the dark alleyway. He jumped slightly when someone touched his elbow, but it was only Roosevelt. “That move of yours was rather neat, Mr. James.”

“Very neat, I thought,” said King, cleaning off the stone head of his cane in the dirt and cinders.

“Your right sleeve is ripped and bloody,” said young Theodore. “Did that young brat do that?”

“No,” said James, astounded at how steady his voice sounded, “I . . . fell when getting off a trolley a short while ago. Just tore it up a bit on the gravel.”

King and Roosevelt exchanged a glance, but said nothing. They stepped away from the two forms on the ground, one moaning and weeping, the other still unconscious.

King twirled his newly cleaned cane. “We really were headed for Hay’s place for dinner. Would you care to accompany us, Mr. James?”

“I would, Mr. King,” said the writer.

Two blocks further—where the street lights were closer together, shops were open, the street was evenly paved, and the true sidewalks began again—they saw a cab passing that was large enough for the three of them and Roosevelt hailed it with a whistle that made the horse jump.

M
ost of the dinner guests had not yet arrived when Roosevelt, King, and James knocked on the door, but Hay immediately took in Harry’s dishabille and told his head butler Benson and another servant named Napier to help Mr. James up to his room. Dr. Granger, who’d arrived early just so that he could have a whiskey and quiet conversation with his old friend Hay, looked at James’s sleeve and said, “I’d best come up to your room with you and have a look at that.”

“It’s nothing,” said James.

“I’ll just get my bag from John’s man,” said the doctor.

Roosevelt, wearing his pince-nez again, grinned and said, “Dr. Granger brings his medical bag to social occasions?”

“Dr. Granger brings his medical bag everywhere he goes,” said Clarence King.

Upstairs, James kicked off his spats first, and when Napier swept them up and said “I’ll have these cleaned immediately, sir,” James snapped, “No, burn them.” He would always see the contemptuous tobacco stain on the one spat no matter how clean it might be.

“Come into the bathroom where it’s bright,” ordered Dr. Granger. “Imagine, a guest room with its own bathroom, running water, and electric lights. Will wonders never cease?”

The sumptuous bathroom was as bright and sterile as a surgical operating room and, when James had removed his sodden and torn shirt and thrown it in a corner, Dr. Granger looked at the lacerated forearm and said, “How did you say you injured your arm?”

“Jumping off a trolley a bit too soon and falling on cinders,” James said, having to avert his gaze even as he spoke.

Granger’s blue eyes could sometimes be as playful as Teddy Roosevelt’s and he only gave James a glance before saying, “All right, but this particular bit of street or alley appears to have been paved with bird shot.”

Napier had brought a small, curved white pan and Dr. Granger used some sort of tong-like instrument to remove the shotgun pellets one by one, each clanking as the round bit of shot dropped into the pan making James blush yet again. Dr. Granger removed twelve of the pellets and put iodine—or something equally as painful—over the extraction cuts and other lacerations where there had been no shot.

“None touched muscle,” said Dr. Granger. “Most barely penetrated the skin. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you’d been in a slight hunting accident, suffering from a shotgun fired from some distance.”

“I don’t hunt, sir,” said James. He started to pull on the clean white dress shirt Benson had brought from the wardrobe.

“Just a minute,” said Dr. Granger. “You don’t want to get iodine stains all over your shirt sleeve and I don’t want those wounds to get infected. Hold your arm steady . . . there . . . against the wash basin.”

Granger removed a roll of bandage and some scissors from his bag and within a minute James’s entire forearm had been carefully wrapped and taped.

“Feel any better?” asked Dr. Granger.

“I feel like a fool and”—he gestured with the right arm bandaged almost to his elbow—“like an Egyptian mummy.”

“Wait, don’t put on the shirt quite yet,” said the doctor. He was filling a syringe with a dark fluid from a vial.

“Wait, I don’t think . . .” began James but the doctor had already administered the injection in the author’s upper arm. “What was that?”

“Just a little something to help with the pain and to cut down on the chance of tetanus,” said the doctor as he closed the bag.

Damn
, thought James. He’d recognized the morphine and should have spoken sooner. Both he and Katharine Loring had been trained in how to administer the liberal doses of morphine to his sister Alice in her last months of dying . . . she’d actually passed away while lost in her morphine dreams . . . and Henry James had vowed never to allow anyone to put the stuff in his own veins. Too late.

And the pain was less.
Much
less. James thought of Sherlock Holmes and his abominable injections and wondered if this light feeling . . . almost of happiness . . . might be the result of those illicit injections as well.

“If I babble like an idiot during dinner,” said James, “I shall blame it on you and your needle, Dr. Granger.”

“If we’re not
all
babbling like idiots by the third course,” said the doctor, “we shall have to blame it on Hay for not providing sufficient wine and liquor.”

* * *

As the other guests were arriving and just before they repaired to the dining room, Hay saw that James was concerned about something. He gingerly took the author’s left upper arm, led him to the hallway, and said, “What’s wrong, Harry? Can I help?”

James realized that he was biting his lip. “Absurd as it sounds, John,” he said softly, “I find that I simply must get in touch with Mr. Holmes. It’s urgent.”

“Sherlock Holmes?” said his host. “I thought he’d left town.”

“Perhaps he has,” said James, “but I really must communicate something to him. He did leave the address of a cigar store here in town so if perhaps your man could find a boy to carry a message . . .”

“We can do better than that, Harry. We can see if the cigar store has a telephone and contact them directly.”

“Why on earth would a cigar store have a telephone?” said James. He fought down another uncharacteristic urge to giggle aloud.

Hay shrugged as he led the way to his private study. “Strange age we live in, Harry.”

James had noticed the telephone in Hay’s study before, but he’d never seen his host operate it. Now there were several minutes back and forth with someone James understood to be an “operator”—or perhaps general information person—and then Hay grinned, handed the apparatus to James, and said, “Mr. Twill is on the phone. He’s the manager of the cigar store Holmes mentioned and he’s there now.” Hay left the room so that James could have privacy.

“Hello, hello, hello?” said James, feeling rather idiotic.

When he and Mr. Twill had both identified themselves again, James said, “I understand that someone at your store receives and conveys messages to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. It is absolutely imperative . . . urgently imperative . . . that I get in touch with him at once. Or speak to him telephonically if he is there now.”

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, sir?” squawked Twill’s voice through the rumble and scratching of the phone lines.

“Yes.”

“English gentleman, sir?”

“That’s him!”

“No, he hasn’t been around the store, sir, since the day he paid me for this little service of sending along messages. He has a boy come check two or three times a day.”

James sighed. If he didn’t feel so . . . light . . . at the moment, he realized that his chest would be aching with anxiety at giving Holmes the extraordinary news of what he had seen and heard that afternoon.

“All right,” he said. “Could you please take down this message and get it to Mr. Holmes as quickly as possible?”

“As soon as his boy stops by, sir.”

“All right. The message reads . . . have you paper and pen ready?”

“Pencil poised, sir.”

“The message reads . . .” James had to pause a second to frame it. “ ‘I followed Professor Moriarty to a meeting here in Washington today. I overheard’ . . . yes, yes, I’ll slow down.”

“You can go ahead now, sir. You overheard . . .”

“ ‘I overheard Moriarty sharing his plans about May first with several . . . groups. It’s absolutely imperative that you contact me at once. I leave by train tomorrow . . . that’s Sunday, nine April . . . afternoon. Absolutely
urgent
that we speak before then. Signed, James’. Can you read that back to me, please?”

Twill did so, James corrected a couple of minor infelicities in the cigar-store keeper’s notes, and then the line was dead and the author was fumbling to hang the hearing apparatus onto the speaking stem and then to get the whole contraption back on its shelf.

* * *

Perhaps it was the morphine—if it had been morphine—but the evening’s dinner party was one of the most enjoyable Henry James could ever recall. James could not stop laughing. The day’s events should have been hanging over him like a black shroud, but instead the sharp memories of hiding on the high beam, of Moriarty, of the criminals and anarchists, and of the street confrontation with the ruffians (a bloody confrontation of which neither Teddy Roosevelt nor Clarence King showed the slightest signs either in manner or spatters of this or that on their formal clothing) seemed to buoy James up with a joy and energy he’d not felt for years. He was wearing a fresh shirt and dinner jacket.

Hay sat at one end of the table again, overseeing the conversation and stimulating it when it lagged—which it almost never did with this all-male group. James was given pride of place to the right of their host and to his right was his old acquaintance Rudyard Kipling. James had given away the bride, Miss Carrie Balestier, at Kipling’s 1892 wedding in London and, to complete the bonds of affection, the two men were mutual literary admirers. Why Kipling—who represented so much about Britain, proud and shameful, in his writing—chose to live in America was beyond James’s comprehension.

Henry Adams sat next to Kipling and beyond him was Teddy Roosevelt. This night, Augustus Saint-Gaudens took the chair at the opposite end of the table from John Hay. James admired Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture almost beyond words with which to praise it—he thought the sculpture at Clover Adams’s grave site showed not only consummate skill but tremendous courage, stirring as it did no sense of hope or an afterlife or surcease of sorrow, as James remembered that hack Poe had once phrased it, but only the infinite depths of sorrow and loss.

To Saint-Gaudens’s right on the other side of the table were Clarence King, Dr. Granger, and Henry Cabot Lodge to Hay’s left.

All the men at the table seemed extraordinarily witty this night, but Kipling and Roosevelt stole the show as far as James’s adrenaline- and morphine-muddled perceptions could judge such things. The 27-year-old Kipling, who’d been wintering at their home in snowy Vermont and whose wife Carrie had just had a baby on December 29, was the object of much congratulating and back-slapping. James would someday write—“Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.”

“It was very considerate of Josephine to choose twenty-nine December as her birth date,” the young writer was saying, “since my birthday is on the thirtieth and Carrie’s on the thirty-first. Keeps thing tidy, as it were.”

Dr. Granger—his nose already reddening with drink but his enunciation still perfect—asked if the addition of the baby helped them stay warm up in what the Kiplings had named Bliss Cottage near Brattleboro.

“The dear babe is not big enough to offer much in the way of supportive body heat,” laughed Kipling, “but the exercise of walking back and forth with her on the nights she cries has been very helpful in keeping warm.”

The conversation kept shifting but James could not stop his mind from wandering back to the incredible events of the day and his still urgent need to get in touch with Sherlock Holmes.

Kipling and Roosevelt were queried about their beloved Cosmos Club that sat right across Lafayette Park from Hay’s home, combining the Tayloe House with the Dolley Madison home. Both Kipling and Roosevelt were fanatical about the out-of-doors, and the Cosmos Club, besides being perhaps the most elite and influential men’s club in America, reflected their passions.

“We did start this little organization called the National Geographic Society there five years ago,” said Teddy Roosevelt.

Kipling began laughing himself and when queried, said, “Forgive me, but I remember when friend Theodore first presented himself to the Club with thoughts of joining. Twenty of the older members set out several hundred random fossil-bones on a table in the main dining room and asked Theodore to identify any of them if he could.”

“Could he?” asked Clarence King, obviously very well knowing the answer and already grinning.

Kipling laughed again. James thought it was a pleasant laugh, manly and rich but never caustic at anyone else’s expense. “For the next several hours, Theodore proceeded not only to identify the fossil bones but to separate them into the various living and extinct animals they each represented—he did everything but wire them together, gentlemen—all the while giving a running commentary on the eating, grazing, predatory, and breeding habits of each animal.”