Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

After several knocks, giving James time to climb the steps more slowly and stand puffing a bit on the landing outside the door, a small, gray-haired lady with cataracts clouding her right eye cautiously opened the door.

Holmes removed his top hat. “Good afternoon, madam. My name is Sherlock Holmes and this is my associate Dr. . . . excuse me . . . Mr. James. We’ve come because I’m an old friend of Miss Irene Adler, the lady to whom you forward the letters sent here to a certain Miss Rebecca Lorne Baxter, and I wish to find her most recent address.”

“What did you say your name was?” asked the old lady.

“Ah . . . Mr. Sherlock Holmes, madam,” he said more slowly. “And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

The woman with the white hair, pale white skin, and white cataract paused before saying, “Mrs. Gaddis.”

“Were you, by any chance, a teacher for many years, Mrs. Gaddis?” asked Holmes. “Your diction suggests you were.”

“I taught for twenty-eight years before retiring with commendations and honors and I don’t receive a decent enough pension to afford these tiny two rooms over a smelly stable,” said Mrs. Gaddis. “But your name was never mentioned to me by the lady who pays me five dollars a month to forward her mail, so I’m afraid I must close the door, Mr. Holmes.”

As gently as he could, Holmes blocked the door from closing with his left foot and a seemingly casual hand set flat on the windowless door. “She must have left some instructions for my arrival,” he said quickly. “I know how playful Miss Adler is. Some puzzle or question by which I could identify myself and receive her address from you.”

Mrs. Gaddis squinted with her one good eye. “The lady who pays me for passing along her mail—and I shan’t say where that final destination for her mail is nor even if it’s under a different name than the Mrs. Lorne-Baxter you mentioned—did say that someday an Englishman with a Yorkshire accent might come knocking at my door, and if he did, I should put a question to him to verify his identity.”

Holmes had been holding his silky top hat in his hand but now he almost set it atop his greased-back hair and tipped it symbolically. “ I am that London gentleman she designated,” he said happily, trying to jolly the dour Mrs. Gaddis into greater cooperation. “Perhaps you can tell by my English accent.”

“Accents can be put on like hats or socks,” said Mrs. Gaddis, still frowning. “But I shall ask you the question my benefactress told to me . . . if I can remember it properly.”

James almost smiled as Holmes’s face showed a quick glimpse of panic at this being a dead end in his quest to find Irene Adler, all because of an elderly former-teacher’s faulty memory.

But age obviously hadn’t clouded her mind as thoroughly as her vision. “Here’s the question I’m to put to the Englishman caller,” said Mrs. Gaddis, pulling it from her memory as if taking an aging sheet of parchment down from some high shelf. “What were my last words to him at our last brief meeting?”

Holmes laughed. “Her last words to me were—‘Good-night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes’,” he said. “But I didn’t recognize her when she said it because my friend Dr. Watson and I were in the act of unlocking the door of our home on Baker Street when this thin young lad, short hair slicked back under a derby and wearing an oversized ulster with the collar turned up, said it in passing. Miss Adler was an actress and enjoys . . . or at least enjoyed . . . disguises almost as much as I do.”

“The words were correct,” said Mrs. Gaddis, still frowning. “You wait here and I’ll find the copy I made out of her forwarded mail address.”

Mrs. Gaddis was back in less than half a minute—James peered past Holmes into her small but tidy, almost cozy, apartment—and she handed Holmes the note card and said, “I believe that completes our conversation, Mr. Holmes.”

The detective held up a finger in protest. “Not at all,” he said happily. “Common decency, to say nothing of courtesy, compels me to pay you a very little something as mere metaphor for my sincere appreciation of the service you have been carrying out for my friend, Miss Adler, as well as for your help to me in finding that old friend.”

Mrs. Gaddis shook her head, held up a blocking hand, and was about to say no when Holmes handed her a $20 bill and released it so she had to grasp it. Whatever she was going to say, she didn’t.

“Teachers are the most underappreciated and least recompensed of all our esteemed professional classes,” Holmes said quickly, ignoring Mrs. Gaddis’s half-hearted attempts to hand the bill back to him. This time he did tip his hat and secure it firmly on his head before clattering down the steps. James nodded and smiled his own faux-appreciation before following Holmes.

While riding to North Station, James asked to see the address the retired teacher had given Holmes. It was, he recognized, very near if not quite on Dupont Circle in Washington.

“So she never left Washington after all,” murmured the author. “I’m quite sure that Henry Adams and John Hay have believed her gone all these years.”

“It’s Adams that gave me this Beacon Hill mail address,” said Holmes. “And she’s been responding from there for years. Obviously Irene Adler posts the return letter from Washington with an envelope included with her handwriting and the Beacon Hill return address, and Mrs. Gaddis dutifully transfers the letter and posts it from Boston. For five dollars per month help on her rent.”

“You’re certain that Rebecca Lorne and Irene Adler are . . . were . . . the same person?” said James.

“Absolutely certain. If I hadn’t been before, the ‘identifying question’ of her last words to me that night in London—I believe Watson wrote that case up under the title ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, a nonsensical title because he felt that he had to hide the identity of the English Royal Personage.”

“I’m only surprised that your friend Dr. Watson did not have the king exit, pursued by a bear,” said James.

Holmes looked at James blankly for a few seconds and then exploded in that high, almost-cawing, full laughter that James had heard only a few times. Holmes’s sharp barks of laughter always startled James.

“Anyway, it was, I believe, the first telling of my cases . . . the first short story about the Sherlock Holmes character , I should say . . . that appeared in The Strand Magazine .”

James had read that story the previous week. It had been in Clara Hay’s collection of Holmes’s stories. Or Arthur Conan Doyle stories . . . James was not sure which description applied to reality, if any reality there was.

“I always suspected that Irene Adler had remained in Washington,” Holmes was saying.

“Why?”

Holmes reminded James of the bouquet of white violets that appeared as if by magic on Clover Adams’s grave every December 6.

“But you’re not rushing to Washington to confront her,” said James. They were approaching Union Station here in the western reaches of Boston.

“No,” said Holmes. “We have tickets for Chicago and much to do there. Besides, the mailing address near Dupont Circle will not be Irene Adler’s address. Only another dead end . . . and this one quite deadly.”

James nodded and made an almost swimming-motion in the air, moving that finished discussion aside.

“May I now tell you the details of what I discovered in Washington this past Saturday?” said James. “I assure you it’s of the utmost importance.”

“We’re at the station already and we have to meet someone here,” said Holmes. “Why don’t you tell me when we get to our first-class carriage? It will just be the three of us.”