Dan Simmons: The Fifth Heart

He said nothing.

James was dying to know how Holmes—this cut-rate street-corner magus—“knew” that sister-Alice’s ashes were in the snuffbox, but he would die rather than bring up the subject here in this public place. It was true, however, that between the din of chatting, laughing diners and the placement of their table, it would have been terribly hard for anyone to eavesdrop on them. But that was not the issue.

As they sipped the rather good champagne, Holmes said, “Did you read my obituary in The Times almost two years ago?”

“Friends brought it to my attention,” said James.

“I read it. The paper was three weeks old—I was in Istanbul at the time—but I did get to read it. That and the later interview with poor Watson describing my death at Reichenbach Falls while struggling with the ‘Napoleon of Crime’, Professor James Moriarty.”

Henry James would have preferred to stay silent, but he knew he was expected to fulfill his role as interlocutor.

“How did you survive that terrible fall, Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes laughed and brushed crumbs from his bristling black mustache. “There was no fall. There was no struggle. There was no ‘Napoleon of Crime’.”

“No Professor James Moriarty?” said James.

Holmes chuckled and dabbed at his lips and mustache with the white linen serviette. “None whatsoever, I am afraid. Invented from whole cloth for my own purposes . . . purposes of disappearance, in this event.”

“But Watson has told The Times of London that this Professor Moriarty had authored a book— The Dynamics of an Asteroid ,” persisted James.

“Also invented by me,” said Holmes with a smug smile under the Sigerson mustache. “No such book exists. I cited it to Watson only so that he could later give the press—and his own inevitable publication of the events preceding Reichenbach Falls in his only recently released tale ‘The Final Problem’—some . . . what do you authors call it? . . . verisimilitude. Yes, that’s the word. Verisimilitude.”

“But might not,” said James, “after this detail has been mentioned in the various newspaper accounts of Moriarty and your demise, might not people attempt to find this Dynamics of an Asteroid book, even if just out of simple curiosity? If it does not exist, your entire Reichenbach Falls story must collapse.”

Holmes laughed this away with a flick of his hand. “Oh, I stressed to Watson, who has in turn stressed to the press, that Moriarty’s book was of the most unreadable and difficult advanced mathematics—I believe my exact words to Watson were ‘it was a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it’. That should give pause to the merely curious. I also remember telling Watson that so few copies of Moriarty’s famous book—famous within mathematical circles only—were published that copies were extremely rare, perhaps not even findable today.”

“So you deliberately lied to your friend about this . . . this ‘Napoleon of Crime’ . . . only so that Dr. Watson would repeat these total fabrications to the press?” said James, hoping that the chill in his tone would get through to Holmes.

“Oh, yes,” said Holmes with a slight smile. “Absolutely.”

James sat in silence for a while. Finally he said, “But what if Dr. Watson were called to give sworn testimony . . . perhaps in an inquest into your demise?”

“Oh, any such inquest would have been completed long before this,” said Holmes. “It’s been almost two years since Reichenbach Falls, after all.”

“But still . . .” began James.

“Watson would not have been perjuring himself in such testimony,” interrupted Holmes, showing the slightest hint of irritation now, “because he sincerely believed that Moriarty was, as I explained to him in such detail, the Napoleon of Crime. And Watson believes with equal sincerity that I died with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.”

James blinked several times despite his best effort to show no reaction to this. “You have no remorse about lying to your best friend? The press has reported that Dr. Watson’s wife has died in the interval since your . . . disappearance. So presumably the poor man is now mourning the loss of both his wife and his best friend.”

Holmes helped himself to more fruit. “I did more than lie, Mr. James. I led Watson on a merry chase—pursuing the mythical Moriarty, you understand—across England and Europe, ending at the fabled waterfall from whose waters neither my body, nor Professor Moriarty’s, shall ever be recovered.”

“That was beastly,” said James.

“That was necessary,” Holmes said with no anger or emphasis. “I had to disappear completely, you see. Disappear without a trace and in a manner that convinced the multitudes—or at least that small share of the multitudes that has shown interest in my modest adventures—that I was dead. Was there much mourning in London upon news of my demise?”

James blinked at this and was sure it was levity. Sure, that is, until he saw the serious expression on Sherlock Holmes’s disguised face.

“Yes,” he said at last. “Or so I hear.”

Holmes waited. Finally he said, “Watson’s telling of the Reichenbach tale, his story called ‘The Final Problem’, appeared in The Strand only three months ago—December of ’ninety-two. But I’m curious about the reaction when the news stories appeared two years ago.”

James resisted a sigh. “I don’t read The Strand ,” he said. “But I’m told that young men in London, both when the news of your death was first published and then again this winter when Dr. Watson’s story appeared, started wearing black armbands.”

It was true that James would never read the kind of cheap-romance fiction and casual science-fact and household gossip that appeared in The Strand . But his younger friends Edmund Gosse and Jonathan Sturges both did. And both had worn black mourning armbands for months in solemn memory of Holmes’s presumed death. James had thought it all ridiculous.

Sherlock Holmes was smiling as he finished the last of his mousse.

Henry James, still terrified that the conversation would turn back to the contents of his snuffbox if Holmes were allowed to guide it, said, “But why carry out such a hoax, sir? Why betray your good friend Dr. Watson and thousands of your loyal readers with such a ruse if there were no grand criminal conspiracy—no Napoleon of Crime—pursuing you? What could be your motive? Sheer perversity?”

Holmes set his spoon down and stared directly at the writer. “I wish it had been something so simple, Mr. James. No, I decided that I had to fake my own death and disappear completely because of discovering through my own ratiocination . . . through the inductive and deductive processes by which I’ve become the most famous consulting detective in the world . . . a fact so shocking that it not only irrevocably changed my life but led me, as you found me tonight by le Pont Neuf, ready to end it.”

“What single fact could possibly . . .” began Henry James and then closed his mouth. It would be the worst of manners and presumptuousness to ask.

Holmes smiled tightly. “I discovered, Mr. James,” he said as he leaned closer, “that I was not a real person. I am . . . how would a literary person such as yourself put it? I am, the evidence has proven to me most conclusively, a literary construct. Some ink-stained scribbler’s creation. A mere fictional character.”

Henry James now knew beyond a doubt that he was dealing with a crazy person. Something had driven this Sherlock Holmes person—if this was the Sherlock Holmes he had met four years earlier at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party—to and beyond the raveled edge of rationality.