Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“Sounds very nice and I like old Granger,” said Adams, “but . . .”

“Before you get beyond ‘but’,” interrupted John Hay, “I forgot to tell you that Clarence King will be there. With his proverbial bells on, he said, and, knowing Clarence, possibly with real ones.”

“King!” cried Adams. “I thought he had headed off for Mexico or Chile or Patagonia or one of those swarthy-lady places he prefers.”

“I thought so too, Henry, but he’s back in town . . . briefly, as I understand it . . . and would love to dine with us.”

“Who else will be there tonight?” asked Adams.

“Teddy and James, of course, King, Rudyard Kipling taking time out from his Cosmos Club . . .”

“I’d come just to hear Kipling tell a tale,” said Adams, “but every time Teddy’s there and tale-telling, Rudyard just curls his legs up under him like a teenaged girl and listens all night, mesmerized.”

“A great story-teller recognizes a great story-teller,” said Hay. “Cameron can’t make it but Cabot Lodge will be there again . . .”

“While his wife pours coffee and cuts cake under the Great Dome,” said Adams.

“Exactly. And about Harry . . . did I tell you that he’s staying with us again? As long as he’ll be in Washington, I believe.”

“No,” Adams said, his voice low. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“Well, he is,” said Hay. “And tonight should be a rather more unbuttoned social evening than our last dinner turned out to be.”

“Harry James unbuttoned,” muttered Adams. “Now there’s an image that refuses to coalesce in the focal lens of my inner eye.” Adams waited a few seconds and had to clear his throat before speaking again. “Will . . . Mr. Holmes be there again?”

Either not picking up on Adams’s tone or ignoring it, Hay said, “Oh, no. Holmes has disappeared. Definitely left town was the last I heard, possibly gone back to England. Either way, he shan’t be at our table tonight and I’m glad of it.”

“Why?” asked Adams.

“Because my daughter Helen has become besotted by the man,” barked Hay. “She asked me the other day how much a detective earns and if such an income might support a married couple in the comfort to which she’s accustomed. She also wondered if great detectives were regularly knighted by Queen Victoria.”

“Good Lord,” said Adams. “She certainly didn’t phrase it all that way.”

“She might as well have,” said Hay. “Oh, Saint-Gaudens will be there tonight, but he says he must leave early, before brandy and cigars—some senator’s wife he’s chiseling in granite.”

“She poses at night?”

“Whenever the senator is out of town,” said Hay.

“Kipling, our dear Clarence King, Saint-Gaudens, Cabot Lodge without Nannie—he rarely speaks at the table when Nannie’s there but can be rather witty when it’s just other men—and then, of course, a chance at a front row seat for the second round between the Boy and Harry,” said Adams. “I can’t pass this up. I’ll be there tonight.”

“With bells on?”

“I do have a jester cap I can bring and possibly convince myself to wear after we open the fourth bottle,” said Adams.

“Save that jester’s cap for young Theodore . . . just in case,” said Hay.

The two were still chuckling when they hung up their telephones.

The roar of the shotgun blast, though fifty feet below him, was deafening to James. Chicken feathers flew into the air on both sides below him where the canvas covered the thinner rafters. His own higher, thicker beam shook as some sort of shot rattled against its bottom and sides. Cringing into the narrowest straight line the portly James could manage, he still felt a shot—almost certainly bird shot—rip at his left sleeve and stipple his left forearm with pinpricks. He clamped his jaws tight so that he would not cry out.

“You missed him!” shouted one of the gangsters below. “Look out . . . let me . . .” Two shots in rapid succession, each with the sharper, clearer report of a rifle rather than a shotgun blast. James felt at least one of the bullets slam into his beam some six or eight feet in front of him. The entire beam shuddered as if it were a tree taking the first, hard swing of an ax.

“Got it!” shouted the man who’d yelled immediately before the rifle shots. The mob roared.

James dared a peek down the left side of his beam.

Most of the men, save for the anarchists, were out of their chairs now, milling in a circle, slapping each other on the back and laughing, the rigid separation of neighborhood gangs forgotten. A man with a rifle was holding up a large gray rat—quite dead—by the tail and turning in a circle to receive the plaudits of his criminal cohorts.

“SILENCE!” Moriarty’s voice was so loud and commanding that Henry James almost lost his balance and rolled off his beam. The mobs fell silent at once.

“Grogan will visit each of your leaders in the next week with precise instructions on where you’ll muster on May one, what armaments you’ll bring and which will be provided for you, exactly where the killing zones for the police will be, your precise positions for the ambushes, and information on where the anar . . . excuse, me . . . socialists will have already begun their bombing. We’re finished for tonight. But leave in small groups to get back to your own gang areas and beer halls. We don’t want the cops picking any of you up tonight, much less arresting clusters of you. And I’ll have Lucan Adler kill any man who speaks to the police—even if that man is being held in protective custody at police headquarters.”

That seemed to sober the mob into true silence. The man with the rifle tossed away the dead rat. The groups began filing out of the main front and back sliding doors of the old warehouse.

James leaned over to peek again at Moriarty, but the derby-hatted hoodlum named Grogan was the only one still standing on the platform. Moriarty had disappeared.

James continued lying on his side on the high beam until his muscles and bones were in such pain that he thought he might scream. He lay there as the last of the anarchists and gang members walked boldly out into the darkness beyond the sliding doors; he stayed there until the man they’d called Grogan had shut off the lights and been the last to leave. And still he lay there, his left arm hurting, for another hour or more, listening to the scurrying of rats in the rafters near him.

He was sure he would hear heavy footsteps coming up the stairway at any second. He’d pulled the panel up behind him using the peg set on the inside for that purpose but he was sure that anyone coming up the steps would turn the gas lamp back on, see the unlatched top corners of the trap door, and open it behind him.

Eventually he could stand the pain and darkness no longer. James got to his hands and knees, feeling dizzy and not trusting his balance in the darkness, and backed up along his beam until his heels contacted the trap door. He tapped it open with the least force and sound he could manage.

Then he was out on the death-black upper landing and all but unable to stand. He had to pull himself up with his hands on the wall above the trap door until he stood weakly there, still leaning on the wall, his knees and back hurting far more than the lacerations on his right arm under what he could feel as the torn sleeve of his jacket and shirt.

There was no light coming through the frosted glass of the office door on the opposite side of the absurdly narrow landing. Could he possibly have been lying on that beam long enough for it to grow dark outside? He started to raise the strength of the single weak gas lamp on the wall but then thought better of it. If someone was waiting on the dark staircase below, the resumption of light on his landing would make him a perfect target.