Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

James hailed a hansom cab and told the driver to take him to the closest steamship company.

At the rather lavish steamship headquarters, James ordered the cab to wait while he went inside and paid for reservations from New York to London on the North German Lloyd Line’s new greyhound steamship the Spree , sailing at 7:30 p.m. from New York the following Tuesday, April 11. He would spend his birthday at sea.

It was true, James knew, that this German ship hadn’t quite matched the eastward crossing records of say the City of New York (5 days, 23 hours, and 14 minutes) or the City of Paris (5 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes), but James knew the Spree to be lavishly comfortable. He also knew that the American and British steamship companies measured their eastward crossings between Sandy Hook Lightship and Roche’s Point, the entrance to Queenstown Harbor; the North German Lloyd Line and the Hamburg-American measured the trips between Sandy Hook Lightship and the Needles, near Southampton.

He would not be in a hurry once he was on the open sea, and he looked forward to a majority of the passengers speaking German, so he would not constantly have to be drawn into conversations (although he was fluent in German).

Satisfied that he would be sailing to England in three days, James went out to his waiting cab and told the cabbie his next destination.

At the railway station, James made reservations for (and paid for) a first-class ticket to New York City, leaving Washington tomorrow—Sunday—afternoon. He also purchased continuing tickets to leave for Boston on Monday morning, returning to New York early on Tuesday afternoon, allowing plenty of time before the Spree’s evening departure.

He then had the cab take him to a telegraph office where he wired reservations for Sunday night at the upscale New York hotel where he’d stayed when he’d arrived in New York, then another reservation for one night in a familiar hotel in Boston. He’d made up his mind that he would not be looking up old friends there and William and his entire family were in Europe. With some discipline, James thought, on his way to the cemetery to deposit Alice’s ashes at her grave, he might avoid walking past the old house in Cambridge where the whole family, Aunt Kate and all, had lived. He also did not want to see brother William’s huge home at 95 Irving Street in Cambridge. He would plan his walk to and from the cemetery accordingly.

But thinking about his older brother, James wrote out a telegram to be sent both to Florence and Lucerne—William should be moving his family from Italy to Switzerland about now, according to the schedule he’d sent James weeks ago—but James knew that his brother moved his family around while on schedule much as their father had: with no respect for schedules whatsoever.

The telegram may have caused the telegraphist to glance at James with curious eyes but even that made the author smile:

WILLIAM—I AM CURRENTLY IN AMERICA WITH A MAN WHO EITHER BELIEVES HE IS THE DETECTIVE SHERLOCK HOLMES, OR WHO IS SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THEREFORE BELIEVES THAT HE IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER STOP CAN YOU ADVISE? STOP MESSAGES WILL BE FORWARDED TO ME FROM JOHN HAY’S HOME IN WASHINGTON—HARRY

That should confuse his always superior-behaving older brother.

Finally, on a whim, James asked if he could pay one of the Western Union lads to deliver a handwritten note within the city—they said he could for only fifteen cents, and they would provide paper and the envelope—so James put the address of the cigar store through which Holmes had said he could be contacted at any time on the envelope, took the white sheet of paper, and started writing, got through “I am leaving Washington tomorrow, Sunday” and stopped. He could think of nothing else pertinent to say. Nor was anything beyond this any of Holmes’s business. He quickly signed his name (for some odd reason, almost adding the “Jr.” that he hadn’t used for more than a decade), added “To Mr. S. Holmes—Personal” on the envelope above the cigar store’s address, paid the Western Union people for the use of their lad and tipped the lad himself ten cents.

Having made all these arrangements, James had the hansom drop him on Constitution Avenue a few blocks northeast of Lafayette Square so that, with luck, he could walk back to the Hays’ home without encountering the crowds still admiring the Flying Vernettis’ dangerous aerial gyrations. All that energy wasted and death or injury invited only to clean a chimney or two. Absurd.

He was walking south when he came to an intersection and froze in his tracks. For an instant he stood in shock, not quite certain, and then he was certain.

Professor James Moriarty—tall white forehead, lank hair over the ears, old-fashioned collar, swallow-tail black coat, and spidery white hands—was walking quickly down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the adjoining street, headed southwest, away from the direction James was walking.

It is none of my business , James thought fiercely. He’s only an aging mathematics and astral physics professor, you already knew he was alive from the photo in the science magazines at the Library of Congress, and it is none of my business.

James mentally repeated this three times, like a mantra, but then he turned right and began following Professor Moriarty from a discreet distance, taking care to stay back and remain on his side of the street.

Henry James had never “tailed” anyone before, but he soon found that it was a relatively simple affair. All he had to do, he discovered, was to stay a half block or more behind Professor Moriarty and on the opposite side of the street, hurry a bit to keep him in sight when the professor turned left or right onto some new street, and step back into the shadows of a storefront the few times the professor stopped. It helped that Moriarty never looked over his shoulder or—for that matter—paused to look to his left or right as he walked briskly toward whatever destination he obviously had firmly in mind. Whenever James got close enough to hear the regular tap-tap-tap of the tip of the professor’s silver-headed cane on the pavement, he knew he was following too closely and would fall back thirty yards or so.

After twenty or thirty minutes of this clever following, James realized that he no longer had the slightest idea of where in Washington City he might be. He distinctly remembered walking west toward the afternoon sun at one point, and then following the briskly pacing Moriarty left—south—then west and south again more than one time, but he had no clue what neighborhood he was in. It didn’t help that street signs and even street lamps had disappeared blocks and blocks ago and it was with something of a shock that James looked down and realized that there had been no sidewalk under his feet for some time now.

From stately homes and quaint shops, he’d followed Moriarty into an area of crumbling brick warehouses and the occasional sagging hovel. Even the width of the street had narrowed until he was following the professor down filthy lanes that should more properly be called alleys than streets. There was a strange, unpleasant-smelling green fog that hung low over the rooftops. Odd for Washington, D.C., James knew, but nothing compared to London’s thick fogs. He wondered if he’d followed Moriarty into that part of town that John Hay had called “Foggy Bottom”.

But, strangely—and helpful for his anonymity—there were more people and traffic about in these muddy alleys than had been the case in the nicer parts of town. James realized that most of the people walking here walked in groups and that they were almost all men. Once or twice he noticed a slovenly dressed woman, one obviously and loudly intoxicated, rushing to get out of the way of the striding men and rumbling dray wagons filling the center of the street, but most of the pedestrians were men dressed in working-class rags or large, intimidating “swells” wearing mud-tinged suits that were far too boldly striped and waistcoats of appallingly bright colors.