Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

Holmes had nodded.

Now Chief O’Malley said loudly, “What do you mean when you say that the Chicago Police Department won’t be responsible for President Cleveland’s safety?”

“From the door of the Lexington Hotel until he reaches the Exposition grounds—the so-called White City down in Jackson Park—the C.P.D. will be the responsible agency,” said Holmes. “But once the procession enters the sacrosanct grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the group directly responsible for the safety of the President of the United States—not to mention the forty or fifty other dignitaries there that day, the President of Brazil, I’m told, being the people’s favorite—shifts to the Columbian Guard.”

“What the hell is the Columbian Guard?” asked O’Malley.

Drummond answered, “It’s the private police force that Daniel Burn-ham put together just for the World’s Fair.”

“No Chicago police?” said Moore.

“None,” said Secret Service Chief Drummond. “On the fairgrounds, the Columbian Guard have the power to detain, interrogate, and arrest—there’s a nice little Columbian Guard jail just off the Midway Plaisance, but mostly of course they will be rounding up lost children, giving directions, intervening before private drunkenness becomes a public problem, and being courteous to hundreds of thousands of customers who’ve come to the Exposition to have a wonderful time.”

“How many of these Columbian Guardsmen are there?” asked Vice-President Stevenson.

Holmes answered, “Just over two thousand, Mr. Vice-President.”

“Two thousand!” exploded Washington P.D. Major and Superintendent Moore. “That’s an army.”

“That, I believe,” said Holmes, “was Daniel Burnham’s intention. The so-called White City will be electrified far beyond the current dreams of Chicago, New York, Washington, or any other major American city. Pleasant street lights and glowing electrical ‘lanterns’ and radiant store fronts and searchlights and lighting from huge windows and path lights illuminating more than six hundred acres of World’s Fairgrounds—combined with the highest percentage of trained police officers, uniformed and plainclothes alike, to the number of citizens—will make the White City the safest urban environment in the world.”

“As long as it’s safe for President Cleveland during the hours he shall be there,” said Vice-President Stevenson.

“What kind of weapons do these Columbian Guardsmen carry?” asked Moore.

Holmes smiled. “Most of them carry a whistle and a short sword in a scabbard.”

Henry Adams came into his study wearing his dressing gown and slippers. He frowned at the detective, who remained seated. “I see you’ve made yourself comfortably at home, Mr. Holmes.”

Holmes smiled and nodded.

“And no doubt taken the time to ransack my drawers and cabinets.”

“Only to the extent of pouring myself a drink for the long wait, Mr. Adams. An excellent whiskey.”

“I hadn’t planned on ever seeing you again,” said Adams.

Holmes nodded.

Adams went around to his side of the desk, hesitating as if debating whether he would acknowledge Holmes’s presence more by sitting or by standing. He sat.

“I thought that I had made it abundantly clear at our last meeting, Mr. Holmes,” said Adams, “that it was our last meeting. That we have nothing more to discuss, either in public or private.”

Holmes removed one of the small She-was-murdered cards from his pocket and set it on Adams’s green leather desk blotter.

“This has nothing to do with me,” said Adams. He tore the card into shreds and dropped them into his wastebasket.

“Ned Hooper hired me to find out who was sending out these cards to you and survivors of the Five Hearts each year, and since he’s now also dead, you were the closest relative, through your late wife, to whom I could report,” said Holmes.

“By your own admission,” said Adams, “you met my wife’s late brother for less than an hour some two years ago. That hardly gives you the right, Mr. Holmes, to call Edward ‘Ned’ as his family and friends did. If you must refer to him, you may use ‘Mr. Fowler.’ ”

Holmes nodded. “I was paid by Mr. Fowler to use my skills to discover who was sending these cards—and also, in his very words, ‘To see if Clover actually died by her own hand or by some means more sinister’—so in Mr. Fowler’s absence, I shall report to you.”

Adams had turned his face toward the windows but now he shot a glance at Holmes. “You know who’s been sending those cards the last seven years?”

“Yes.”

A charred log collapsed in Adams’s small fireplace. Even on warming spring days, he evidently kept a small fire burning in his study. Holmes wondered if the widower historian suffered from a permanent chill.

After a stretch of silence, Adams snapped, “Well, are you going to tell me or not?”

“No,” said Holmes.

Henry Adams’s face flushed even while his lips grew whiter. “You said that because your client, Ned, took his own life in December, you were duty bound to report to me. Now you say you won’t tell me the identity of this person who has been hounding and harassing the four of us these past six years? Such insolence! If I were a few years younger, Mr. Holmes . . .”

Holmes nodded as if he could see such a prospect as scholarly Henry Adams giving the detective a beating. “I’ve deduced who the person is who typed and sent those cards,” he said, “but I require a private, personal interview with that person. Such an interview isn’t possible right now, but will be carried out by the first week in May.”

“In other words,” spat Adams, “you’re guessing!”

“I never guess,” said Sherlock Holmes. He’d steepled his long, pale fingers under his chin and his gaze seemed fixed on something very far away. His expression, which so often seemed impassive when not in the throes of excitement or strong intellectual emotion, now looked stern. That sternness was not directed at Henry Adams, but it still made the historian uneasy.

“I don’t suppose you’ve discovered anything about the rest of this ‘mystery’ of my poor wife’s death . . . which was never a mystery,” said Adams. It had been a clumsy sentence and Adams, the constant writer and consummate editor, frowned at it.

Holmes seemed to return from wherever his thoughts had taken him. “Oh, yes,” he said almost off-handedly, “I’ve confirmed beyond doubt that Clover . . . Mrs. Adams . . . was murdered.”

Adams’s bearded jaw dropped and, although he quickly shut his mouth and attempted to control his expression, it was thirty seconds or more before he could speak. “Murdered? How? By whom? And for what possible reason?”

“I expect to have the answer to all three of your new questions before the fortnight is out,” said Holmes. “As to the ‘how’, there is no doubt that her death resulted from the administration of arsenic from her own photographic developing liquids. But the question stays on the list because we’re not certain of how that poison was administered.”

“So, in truth, you’re still blindly guessing about everything,” said Adams.

“I never guess, sir.”

“Do you even have . . . what are they called in your cheap mystery tales? . . . suspects?”

“I know the murderer was one of three people,” said Holmes, “with your name being the third on that list of possibilities.”

“Me!” cried Adams, jumping to his feet. “You have the insulting, insufferable . . .” Words failed him and Adams reached for his walking stick propped behind him.

“You had the time, the knowledge of and access to the poison, and, as for motives, murders of a spouse always have the most complicated, personal, and opaque of motives,” said Holmes. “In this case, everyone around you knows that your wife had always had a melancholy streak—she herself had written letters home during your long honeymoon in Egypt and elsewhere in which she admitted to her father that she’d been too . . . ‘overcome by my old nemesis of melancholy’ was how she put it, I believe . . . even to speak to you, her new husband, or to anyone else for almost two weeks. Such melancholy, always hovering nearby over the years, grows wearing on a spouse and you yourself have described how more deeply lost in unhealthy sadness she’d been for much of that last year after the death of her father in March of eighteen eighty-five.”