Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

He walked directly to the Clover Adams memorial. He had his sword-cane in one hand and the little lemon-squeezer pistol in a jacket pocket, but he knew that neither would be of any use if Lucan Adler was lying in wait with his sniper rifle. He’d stipulated this night, Tuesday, to give Irene Adler a full day to contact Lucan with the information about this meeting.

He knew from his terrible experience in the Himalayas that it was true that one does not hear the rifle bullet—or in his case, three steel-cased bullets—that rips through your flesh since the bullet travels well above the speed of sound. In his instance, it had been three sharp sounds immediately following three unbelievable intense blows to his back and lower side. And, because of the mountains, those three sounds had echoed.

And the pain from those wounds still filled Holmes. He’d taken a second injection of the liquid heroin just before leaving the hotel.

And he knew there would be no echo of the shot here in the cemetery.

He reached the opening in the barrier of hedge and trees around the memorial without mishap, but paused just outside that entrance for a full minute so that his shadow from the lowering sun sending horizontal shafts of light through the trees should show his shape to maximum advantage. Then he entered.

He was the first one there. Good , he thought and crossed the triangular space to sit on the section of the three-sided concrete bench closest to Saint-Gaudens’s statue. It was also the furthest from the opening in the hedge and would be invisible from anyone looking through any telescopic sight on the outside. If Lucan Adler wanted him tonight, he’d have to come within speaking range to have him.

At twenty-five past the hour, just as the dusk was settling gently, a dark form filled the opening. Then it approached him through the twilight scent of newly mown grass.

Holmes stood. Despite the years that had passed, Irene Adler looked no older to him than she had the last time he had seen her. Nor any less beautiful. Far more beautiful than the opera-ad image he’d shown other people. Contrary to style, she wore no gloves this evening and her sleeves were cut short enough to show her pale, bare forearms. She carried a small cloth handbag. Large enough for a 2-shot Derringer pistol , thought Holmes and immediately banished such thoughts from his mind. Now, later, much later—it no longer mattered to Sherlock Holmes. He only knew that the young man in black had spoken the truth when he said, “The readiness is all.”

“Sherlock,” she said and the sound of her voice moved something deep within him. She crossed the space, offered her hand in the American handshake mode, but he lifted it gently and kissed it.

“Hello, Irene.” He pronounced her name the way she had taught him when they’d first met— I-wren-ay .

He realized he was holding her hand for too long a period of time and, suddenly embarrassed, he stepped back, gestured to the high-backed bench next to where he’d been seated closest to the sculpture, and said, “Will you sit with me?”

“By all means,” she said.

They sat next to each other, silent, not quite touching, for what must have been a full three or four minutes. Holmes could sense that the leaves on the hedge behind them were moist with dew. The twilight deepened but the stars were not yet visible.

Finally Adler said, “Do we talk about us first, Sherlock? Or about this game we find ourselves in?”

“This is no game,” said Holmes in a voice harder and sterner than he’d meant to use.

“Of course not,” said Irene Adler and looked down at her hands folded on the small bag on her lap.

“Let us speak of personal things first,” Holmes said in an infinitely softer tone.

“Very well. Which of us should start?”

“You should, Irene,” said Holmes.

She turned a mock-stern face to him in the dim light. “Why did it take you almost two years to come to America to try to find me?” she demanded.

Holmes felt his face grow flushed. He looked down at her hands. “No one told me that you’d gone back to America. No one told me that you were pregnant. I worked for almost a full year in British theater troupes, looking for you.”

“Idiot,” said Irene Adler.

Holmes could only nod.

“And you practicing and preparing during your entire childhood to become the World’s First and Foremost Consulting Detective,” she said, but this time her tone was lighter, almost bantering.

Holmes nodded again but looked at her now. “I never found you in my time in America, either,” he said, his voice sounding hollow even to his own ear.

She reached with her right hand and laid it on both of his. “That is because as soon as I heard—through the players’ secret telegraph wires—that you had come to New York and Boston, I took the next ship to France.”

“With the baby,” said Holmes in something not quite a whisper.

“Yes.” Her answer had been even quieter.

“When did Colonel Moran take him from you?” asked Holmes.

“When Lucan was four years old,” said Irene Adler. “The day after his fourth birthday.”

“How could you let that . . . that . . . brigand . . .” began Holmes and then fell silent.

“Because of the hold Colonel Moran had over me,” said Adler. “The same hold that Lucan now uses.”

Holmes, forgetting himself, took her by her upper arms, his strong hands then moving to her shoulders, as if he was about to draw her to him . . . or strangle her.

“Irene, you’re the strongest, bravest woman I’ve ever met. How could a cad like Sebastian Moran have such a hold over you that you would surrender your child to him . . . our child?” The last two words had emerged as a sort of moan.

“Colonel Moran threatened to assassinate you if I did not do as he wished,” she said tonelessly. “Just as Lucan does now.”

Speechless, Holmes could communicate only by squeezing her arms more tightly. The pressure must have pained her, but she made no effort to pull away.

She turned to him, setting her own hands on his upper arms, until they must have looked to some stranger most like two people consoling one another. “You live a careless life, Sherlock Holmes,” she said fiercely, no hint of apology in her voice. “You always have. That idiot doctor friend of yours—or Conan Doyle, I have no idea which—celebrates and publicizes your little front-parlor detection victories as if you were Achilles. But you sit at your window in plain view. You walk the streets lost in thought, oblivious to almost everything around you. You let the world know your street address and your daily habits. Colonel Moran—or others like him—have not long since murdered you because I’ve done what they want.”

Holmes dropped his hands and sat brooding for a long moment. Finally, “But the child . . .”

“The child is evil,” snapped Irene Adler. “The child was evil at birth.”

Holmes’s head snapped backward as if he’d been slapped. “No child can be evil from birth, for God’s sake. It must take . . . years . . . parenting . . . evil influences . . .”

“You didn’t hold this baby to your breast and watch its first actions,” said Adler in a totally cold voice. “One of his first acts was to pluck the wings off a butterfly I was showing him. And he enjoyed it. It was as if I’d given birth to another Coriolanus.”

“But even Coriolanus was shaped by . . .” he stopped.

“His mother,” cried Irene Adler as if in physical pain. “Volumnia bragged to her hag friends about how her little boy Coriolanus loved to torture animals, give pain to any living thing. But never in the four years that I was with Lucan did I ever give him anything but love and training to love and respect others.” She turned her face away and moved away from him on the bench.