The Fifth Heart (75 page)

James started to say no—stopped—started to ask a question—and stopped again. He just stood there with the telegrams about his dreaded 50th birthday crumpled in his hand and glared at Sherlock Holmes.

“Good then,” said Holmes. “I shall meet you in the lobby promptly at eight p.m.”

* * *

During the night, between his bouts of nausea—an old foe of his along with constipation and diarrhea—James had weighed his decision. He’d studied the railway tables. A train leaving the new North Station at 9:45 a.m. went to Pittsburgh where he could transfer for a non-stop express to Washington. The train to New York left from the old downtown station at 9:00 and passed through Cleveland and Buffalo on its way to New York, where he could immediately book passage to Portsmouth on the highly praised new transatlantic steamer the S.S.
United States
.

In the end, it was the thought of the sunny warmth of his De Vere Gardens rooms, his waiting writing desk, the salons he would be revisiting, the country houses of gentlefolk he’d be invited to . . . that and the visceral sense of safe encirclement by all his books that made him decide for New York and home.

He’d found a porter to carry his baggage piled high on a cart and bought his ticket at the downtown station when, concealed as he was behind the high mound of his luggage and an iron post, he saw Professor James Moriarty moving up and down the first-class coaches peering in the windows.

He’s hunting for me
, was James’s first gut-chilling thought. A thought that carried all the weight of certainty.

Two thuggish-looking men came up and reported quickly to Professor Moriarty, who dispatched them up and down the line of waiting cars. Moriarty stepped aboard and began striding through the first-class cars. James could watch his advance—like a high-domed scarecrow with white-straw hair, a mortician’s overcoat, and long strangler’s fingers—as Moriarty strode from carriage to carriage.

It made no sense that Moriarty would be looking for him, for Henry James. He was sure he’d not been seen on the evening he’d lain on that terrible beam high over the heads of Moriarty and his small army of anarchists and thieves. The only person he’d told was Sherlock Holmes.

But Holmes would have informed Drummond, the Washington and Chicago chiefs of police, and God knows how many other people here in the States and across Europe, to put them on their guard for the assassinations and uprisings of May 1.

Now it made perfect sense. James knew of Moriarty’s vast crime networks across Europe and even in the United States. Someone in police enforcement—so many of them crooked in this Gilded Age—had told one of Moriarty’s operatives.

It was possible, of course, that Moriarty and his thugs were checking the train for Sherlock Holmes and, for all James knew, Holmes might be on it and murdered at any moment, but down deep Henry James knew
Professor James Moriarty and his killers are looking for me this cold and rainy morning
.

As if confirming his intuition, Moriarty stepped out of the coaches and stood looking as three other thugs came up to him for orders. James stared at Moriarty’s terribly long, long fingers with their long yellow nails, his hands on his hips now as he showed visible exasperation. The fingers were like great white spiders crawling up black velvet.

Moriarty dispatched the three thugs and then turned quickly to stare in James’s direction, but not before James ducked down behind his piled-high mass of luggage. It took half a minute for James to work up the nerve to peek again and he let out a long breath when he saw that Moriarty was again walking the length of the train, looking in all uncurtained windows.

“Shall I load your luggage now, suh?” said the porter who’d been waiting patiently and showing no expression at James’s sudden pallor or his absurd concealment.

“No, no,” said James. “Find me a cab, any cab, as quickly as you can, and get these things loaded equally quickly. Here . . . for your trouble.” He handed the porter some bill from his wallet, but it had been so long since he’d trafficked in American money it might have been a $50 bill or a $1 bill. Either way, the porter touched his cap and said, “At once, sir.”

James kept the baggage between himself and Moriarty all the way out to the busy cab stand, nodded his head when the porter pointed to an expensive closed carriage cab, held his breath while the trunks were loaded with maddening slowness, and breathed again only when the cab started moving quickly away from the central station and Professor James Moriarty.

James, obviously still feeling edgy, almost jumped when the trap door opened above him for a second, just slitted to keep the pouring rain out, and the driver called down, “Where to, sir?”

“The new North Station,” said James in a strangely high voice. “And quickly, please. I have to catch a 9:30 train. There’s an extra quid in it if you get me there with time to spare.”

“A
quid
, sir?” asked the driver out there in the downpour.

“Five
dollars
extra if you get me there at all possible speed and with time to spare before that nine-thirty train’s departure,” said James.

The driver used the whip. The carriage flew through traffic as though there were a derby stakes race in progress. James had to brace both hands against the seat cushions or be thrown left and right as the racing cab swerved around all slower traffic. Other drivers and pedestrians shouted profanities as James’s carriage soaked them through with splashes.

The night before, at dinner, James had asked Holmes, “What are you doing next?”

Holmes, already smoking his cigarette after quickly finishing his dinner, touched a finger to his tongue to capture a mote of tobacco. “Oh, several things have to be looked into here and there. I should be busy until we meet again on Mr. Cabot Lodge’s private train on the twenty-eighth.”

James had to use all his control to avoid near-shouting—“
I won’t be on Lodge’s damned train!
And I won’t be your Boswell. And I don’t appreciate being abandoned like this in a city strange to me on the eve of my birthday. And I’m tired. And I’m going home.”

He’d said none of that, of course. A graceful telegram—
two
graceful telegrams—sent from New York before his ship sailed would send his thanks and regrets to Henry Adams and the Hays.

Now, after his wildly whipping and racing cabbie had gotten him more or less in one piece to North Station with plenty of time to spare and he’d purchased his first-class tickets to Pittsburgh and then straight on to Washington, Henry James sat in his almost-empty and overheated compartment, rested his face against the cool glass of the window, and watched the black canyons of Chicago fall behind in the rain. He looked away as the train passed through a fringe industrial wasteland with slag heaps and squalid homes looking for all the world like a clumsy American imitation of a Dickensian nightmare landscape.

Happy Birthday, Henry James
, he thought as they moved out into the country, and the rain, impossibly, pounded down even more heavily.
You’re fifty years old
.

At that moment he found himself wishing that he’d done what he’d gone to the Seine that night to do, meant to do, had steeled himself to do at that dark river. It had been raining that night as well.

O
n Monday, April 24, after a whirlwind visit to more than half a dozen large American cities, Sherlock Holmes returned to Washington and checked into the same Kirkwood House hotel at 12th St. N.W. and Pennsylvania Avenue where he’d stayed earlier. He knew it was dangerous to do so—if Lucan Adler had been searching him out, he would know about Holmes’s earlier stay there and have someone keeping a lookout for him—but this part of Holmes’s American visit
had
to be dangerous. If he could lure Lucan Adler to him before May 1, it would be the best for everyone—save perhaps for Sherlock Holmes.

Early that spring evening he went to the address near Dupont Circle that Mrs. Gaddis, the retired school teacher in her alley carriage-house apartment in Boston, had given him. This was also a calculated risk. Holmes did not believe that the odds favored Lucan Adler being there for long stretches of time, but there was no doubt that the assassin visited there.

It was a stately brick house on a quiet street just off the Circle. When Holmes knocked on the door, a tiny woman, barely four feet tall, dressed out in European livery of a maid, opened the door and squinted up at him.

“Is Mrs. Rebecca Lorne Baxter home?” asked Holmes, removing his hat.

“Nie, ona nie jest teraz w domu,”
said the tiny maid.

“Oh, a shame,” said Holmes. “Would you please give her my card and this message?” He handed the dwarf-maid his business card and an envelope containing a short message:

The maid took the card and the envelope without saying a word—in Polish or any other language—and shut the door.

Holmes walked slowly away from the house and back to Dupont Circle, but all the time he was still in view of the house, the spiderwebs of scars on his back itched as if someone had painted a target on his back with turpentine.

H
olmes arrived at Rock Creek Cemetery just before seven p.m. He told the cab driver not to wait. One way or the other, he would not need a cab home this night. The sun had just disappeared behind the forest to the west of the cemetery grounds but the soft spring twilight lingered and promised to light the sky for most of the next hour.

He walked directly to the Clover Adams memorial. He had his sword-cane in one hand and the little lemon-squeezer pistol in a jacket pocket, but he knew that neither would be of any use if Lucan Adler was lying in wait with his sniper rifle. He’d stipulated this night, Tuesday, to give Irene Adler a full day to contact Lucan with the information about this meeting.

He knew from his terrible experience in the Himalayas that it was true that one does not hear the rifle bullet—or in his case, three steel-cased bullets—that rips through your flesh since the bullet travels well above the speed of sound. In his instance, it had been three sharp sounds immediately following three unbelievable intense blows to his back and lower side. And, because of the mountains, those three sounds had echoed.

And the pain from those wounds still filled Holmes. He’d taken a second injection of the liquid heroin just before leaving the hotel.

And he knew there would be no echo of the shot here in the cemetery.

He reached the opening in the barrier of hedge and trees around the memorial without mishap, but paused just outside that entrance for a full minute so that his shadow from the lowering sun sending horizontal shafts of light through the trees should show his shape to maximum advantage. Then he entered.

He was the first one there.
Good
, he thought and crossed the triangular space to sit on the section of the three-sided concrete bench closest to Saint-Gaudens’s statue. It was also the furthest from the opening in the hedge and would be invisible from anyone looking through any telescopic sight on the outside. If Lucan Adler wanted him tonight, he’d have to come within speaking range to have him.

At twenty-five past the hour, just as the dusk was settling gently, a dark form filled the opening. Then it approached him through the twilight scent of newly mown grass.

Holmes stood. Despite the years that had passed, Irene Adler looked no older to him than she had the last time he had seen her. Nor any less beautiful. Far more beautiful than the opera-ad image he’d shown other people. Contrary to style, she wore no gloves this evening and her sleeves were cut short enough to show her pale, bare forearms. She carried a small cloth handbag.
Large enough for a 2-shot Derringer pistol
, thought Holmes and immediately banished such thoughts from his mind. Now, later, much later—it no longer mattered to Sherlock Holmes. He only knew that the young man in black had spoken the truth when he said, “The readiness is all.”

“Sherlock,” she said and the sound of her voice moved something deep within him. She crossed the space, offered her hand in the American handshake mode, but he lifted it gently and kissed it.

“Hello, Irene.” He pronounced her name the way she had taught him when they’d first met—
I-wren-ay
.

He realized he was holding her hand for too long a period of time and, suddenly embarrassed, he stepped back, gestured to the high-backed bench next to where he’d been seated closest to the sculpture, and said, “Will you sit with me?”

“By all means,” she said.

They sat next to each other, silent, not quite touching, for what must have been a full three or four minutes. Holmes could sense that the leaves on the hedge behind them were moist with dew. The twilight deepened but the stars were not yet visible.