Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

It was the indistinct murmuring as from a loud crowd—perhaps an audience before the beginning of a play. But even the murmurs and half-heard words were coarse. If it was an audience, the play would be a bawdy cockney melodrama.

There was a rectangle in the wooden wall. James crouched low and saw the large wooden flanges near the top corners. He swiveled them to a horizontal position and the rectangular aperture fell back into his hands. The noise was quite audible now and there was light coming up through what seemed to be a floor. James pressed the trap door shut, secured it with a single flange, walked to the gas lamp, and turned the gas off.

Just enough light came through the frosted glass of the doorway across the landing to allow James to find the trap door and its flanges again. Loosening it with exaggerated care, he lowered it to the floor and thrust his head and shoulders into the aperture.

There was no floor, he soon saw, only large, broad beams—the one in front of him at least twenty inches wide—extending out over a great drop. The broad beams were stationed about fifteen feet apart and five or six feet below these major support beams were smaller rafters, mere two-by-four pieces of lumber set narrow-side up. Some sort of cage wire, the kind James associated with chicken coops, was attached to these smaller rafters. Attached to that wire near the walls here was a false floor of some sort of flimsy cardboard or canvas. There was something white, like snow, covering most of this canvas in small heaps and dunes. He was, he realized, in the high attic space of the huge warehouse that Moriarty and the other men had entered.

But about ten feet out, directly ahead of him, the false floor ended and light and noise rose up from below. James heard a deep voice trying to shout the crowd into some sort of attention.

If he were to see anything, James would have to crawl further out on the beam. He set his walking stick in the corner of the landing and began crawling on his hands and knees.

His plan had been to stop before he was over the open drop, but he realized he couldn’t see well from that position, so he lowered himself to the broad beam and kept crawling until only his knees remained in the darkness behind him.

Far below him was a huge space with sawdust on the wooden floor. He must be at least sixty feet above the mobs of men down there, perhaps seventy feet. For a second he clung to the beam with knees and his fingernails, letting a surge of vertigo pass, but there was little chance of his being seen by anyone down there. The space below was brightly illuminated by electric arc lamps in metal shades, but the lamps hung down from the lower rafters on long steel rods. Anything above them would be just a dark blur to the men in the light.

James lay flat, tried to control his breathing, and attempted to make sense of what he was seeing.

There were more than a hundred men sitting on barrels and crates in several distinct groups. To James, they all looked like purse-snatchers and highway thieves, but they clustered in definite groups—tribes—and one group of about thirty men looked more like simple working men. He realized that this group was speaking mostly in German. The other ruffians were bellowing in gutter American English.

All of the groups were facing a raised platform. James saw an abandoned metal scale at the back of this platform, realized that the “snow” he’d seen in the canvas below the rafters further back had been chicken feathers, and decided that the warehouse had once been the final stopping place for thousands of chickens to be processed. That also explained some of the stench that he’d ascribed to the unwashed mobs of men below.

There were two men on the raised platform. Professor James Moriarty was at the rear of the ad hoc stage, sitting in a high-backed chair. The other man, cigar in mouth and a derby cocked at a ruffian’s angle on his squarish head, was the one shouting for silence and attention.

Finally the mobs of men quieted down and focused their attention on the speaker.

“Well, all the important gangs are here and no one’s killed anyone yet,” shouted the thickset man on the platform. “That’s something , at least. We’ve already shown progress.”

No one laughed. Someone in the batch of German-speaking working men was translating for the others.

“Culpepper ain’t here,” shouted someone in the mob.

“Culpepper’s dead!” shouted someone else. “Somebody dropped ’im thirty or forty feet onto that fat head of ’is.”

This did bring laughter. The man on the platform waved them into silence again. “Well, while Culpepper’s people work out who’s going to take his place, we’ll go ahead with our project here and give that gang the word later.”

“ What project?” shouted a fat man near the front. “All we heard was big talk about lots and lots of boodle and not one fucking specific.”

Before the man on the platform could speak again, a man in the front row of the German-speaking group cried, “Why are we brought here with these . . . criminals? ”

The other hundred or so men now roared with laughter, some hooting “these . . . criminals ” back at the German. Several others snicked open their seemingly ubiquitous gravity-blade knives.

The man standing waved them into some sort of order again. “As you’ll hear in a minute, we need the anarchists for . . .”

“Socialists!” cried the German working man who’d just spoken.

“These socialist anarchists,” corrected the man on the platform, “for our plan. They’re necessary. Professor James Moriarty will explain.”

The big man nodded to Moriarty and took his own seat on the platform as the professor slowly stood and took measured steps toward the front of the platform.

“Gentlemen,” began Moriarty, and something about his sunken-eyed skeletal presence brought a deeper silence onto the entire room full of men, “none of you has ever seen me before, but you all know my name. In the last two and a half years, my planning has made more money for each of your . . . organizations . . . than you’ve ever made before.”

There came a low rumble that James realized was one of agreement and approval.

Moriarty held up two fingers. Silence came down like a curtain.

“In the next month,” continued the professor, his voice soft but carrying to every corner of the huge space, “you and I shall make more money . . . more of a true fortune . . . than has ever been realized in the long history of criminal endeavor.”

The silence extended. Finally a shrill, doubting voice shouted, “How?”

“Precisely at noon on the first of May,” said Moriarty, “the President of the United States is going to push a button that shall start every electrical device at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. A hundred thousand people may be watching him. One second after he does that, President Cleveland will be assassinated—shot by a high-velocity rifle wielded by the world’s greatest assassin.”

Somehow the silence deepened.

“In the next fifteen minutes,” continued Moriarty, “the Vice-President of the United States as well as its Secretary of State and Attorney General will also be assassinated. Their demise is expertly planned and guaranteed. Within the next hour, the mayors and chiefs of police of Chicago, Washington, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and more than eight capital cities in Europe will also be assassinated.”

“How does that earn us one single damned penny?” shouted someone at the back of one of the clusters.

Moriarty smiled. Even from his angle so high above, Henry James could see that terrible smile and it made him shake and cling harder to his beam.