Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“So you get the King of Scandinavia to do your bidding with a cable?” said Clarence King, who’d decided to sit down in the chair Holmes had just vacated. “Including having one of the most respected diplomats in Washington and his wife and daughter lie to two people so respected as John Hay and Henry James? And you expect us to believe that?”

“Believe what you will,” Holmes said carelessly. He’d crossed to a window and opened the slats of the louvered wooden shutters and was peering out onto the street.

“The dialogue in Norwegian . . .” said Henry James.

“Was far from fluent on my part,” said Holmes, half turning from the window so that his rather distinctive silhouette was visible against the light. “My greatest fear was that the daughter, young Oda—despite being coached by her father to go along with the fiction that I was Norwegian—would blurt out a criticism of my pathetic Norwegian, most of which I picked up while spending time with His Majesty King Oskar the Second in London for two months in eighteen eighty-eight, and again for nine weeks in the winter-spring of eighteen ninety-one, shortly before my ‘death’ at Reichenbach Falls.”

“You must have handled a very delicate domestic problem,” King said sarcastically, “to put European royalty so deeply into your debt.”

“I did, actually,” said Holmes. “But that is not the reason that His Majesty the King of Scandinavia ordered his emissary to lie during a social occasion. Rather, King Oskar the Second well knows the reasons both for my mission to Tibet and my mission here in Washington. He knows the enemies we face . . . and they are his enemies as well, gentlemen. Should these people have their way, His Majesty is on a long and distinguished list of targets who will be murdered in the next few months or years.”

Clarence King sighed and steepled his fingers. “ ‘These people . . . ’ Now we have the conspiracy talk and the paranoia. Are there no traits of madness you will not trot out for our distraction, Mr. . . . Whoever You Are?”

Holmes laughed almost boyishly at King’s comment. Without answering, he fished in his inside jacket pocket and removed what looked to be four photographs. Setting two of them back in his pocket, he handed the first of the two remaining photos to King. “Would you hand that around to Mr. Hay and Mr. James? Thank you.”

James waited. When the photograph finally came his way he saw that it was almost certainly blown up in size since the subject was in two-thirds profile against a grainy and blurry background of a crowded street. The photo was of a dark-complexioned man with black hair brushed straight back, a carefully trimmed mustache that looked rather military in origin, and fiercely angled eyebrows. The man looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, but only a tendency toward jowls betrayed his age.

“That is Colonel Sebastian Moran, a veteran of the Indian Army and formerly of the First Bangalore Pioneers. He was mentioned in various dispatches during the different Afghan wars, received a medal for killing nine Afghans in a hand-to-hand fight in Kabul, and was considered by many to be the finest hunter and rifle marksman in Asia . . . perhaps in the world. His full name is John Sebastian ‘Tiger Jack’ Moran, although very few people know that.”

“Colonel Sebastian Moran . . .” muttered Clarence King when James handed the photograph back to him. “By God, I read his books! Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas and Three Months in the Jungle . Hunting memoirs . . . and cracking good tales!”

Holmes, now standing with his back to the window, nodded. “He published both of those in the early eighteen eighties. He gave his publisher his birth date as being eighteen forty, but in truth it was eighteen thirty-four. Colonel Moran will be sixty years old next February.”

“He certainly does not look that old in the photograph,” said John Hay. “When was the photo taken?”

“A year and a half ago. In Calcutta,” said Holmes. “You see, Colonel Moran followed me to India from Switzerland in order to assassinate me. He was paid quite a large amount of money for my assassination . . . assassination is the Colonel’s major source of income, just ahead of guiding fat, rich gentlemen-hunters to where they can kill dangerous animals and far ahead of his less taxing profession of separating fat, rich gentlemen from their money at various card tables.”

“Hired to kill you . . .” sighed King. “And now comes the paranoia.”

“Oh, yes,” said Holmes. “Colonel Moran tried twice . . . once in Calcutta, again in Darjeeling . . . but was unsuccessful in both attempts. Then, having spent almost all of the money paid to him for the botched job and not wanting to wait for me to re-emerge from Tibet, the good colonel returned to London. For one of the world’s greatest hunters, Moran has surprisingly little patience.”

“I fail to see what any of this has anything to do with . . .” began John Hay.

“Imagine my surprise then, when I came back to Sikkim from Tibet over the high passes, to be shot three times by a high-velocity rifle fired from almost a mile from my position.”

The room fell thickly silent. James could hear a servant’s shoes against carpet on the main staircase and a carriage passing outside.

“Shot three times by a high-velocity rifle,” said Clarence King at last. “Then you are . . . must be . . . quite dead. So we have been dealing not only with a liar and imposter but with a ghost.” King checked his watch. “And my time here is almost up. I must . . .” He looked up, saw what Holmes was doing, and fell silent—aghast.

Holmes had removed his jacket and waistcoat and collar and cravat and was in the process of unbuttoning his shirt.

John Hay stood. “My dear sir . . .”

“This will take only a few seconds,” said Holmes. He was wearing no undershirt. He folded his shirt carefully across the back of the closest chair, turned sideways to the window, and opened the louvered shutters.

For the second time—and even more clearly now—Henry James saw the two terrible round wounds on Holmes’s upper right back near the shoulder blade—“entrance wounds” he believed they were called when caused by bullets—and the livid spiderweb tracery of scars radiating from them. There was a third pattern of white scars just above the man’s right hip.

Holmes turned around so that the light fell on his chest and belly and right side.

There was another cratered round scar—the “exit wound” James had heard it called—on Holmes’s upper right chest and below and to the left of it a few inches, a more complicated and ghastly scar, not circular, with even more scars radiating from it. Just above his right hip was the pattern of exit scars of the third wound.

Holmes’s long, white fingers touched each of the wounds starting with the highest just under his collarbone. “As I said, the assassin fired from almost a mile away and struck me three times, ratcheting the bolt-action of his powerful rifle and firing three times in less than two seconds. This third wound . . .” He touched the latticework of scars above his hip. “Struck me as I was falling.” He moved his fingers, which were as steady as a surgeon’s, back up to the terrible white web of scarring of the second wound. “The second round did not pass through me and my savior—and surgeon in this instance—had to dig it out. She started from the back and then realized that it was closer to the surface in the front, under my chest muscles. It was a long process and she had no anaesthetic.”

“She?” Clarence King said in a strangely dulled voice.

“My savior and surgeon?” said Holmes, calmly putting his shirt back on. “She is an English missionary named Annie Royle Taylor who had just made an attempt to travel to Lhasa— her Saviour had spoken to her in a dream and said that her destiny was to carry Christ’s word to Lhasa, the Dalai Lama, and to all of the Forbidden Kingdom. So Miss Annie Taylor had shaved her head and dressed herself in Tibetan males’ clothing, but she was discovered far from Lhasa, turned back, and escorted back to the border by Tibetan guards. My own Tibetan helpers, assigned to me by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to escort me over the newly opened passes, had just bidden me farewell on the south side of the final pass and were heading their ponies homeward north again when they heard the three shots and were kind enough to return to where they’d last seen me. I was unconscious and bleeding badly. My Tibetan friends brought me to the nearby border trading post of Yatung. There was no doctor there, but the Tibetans and Sikkimese had grudgingly allowed Miss Taylor to take up residence nearby as she waited for her next covert attempt to enter Tibet. Perhaps the locals allowed her to stay there because her first name, ‘Annie’, sounds very much like the Tibetan word for ‘nun’—and so this missionary, who’d studied medicine and had occasion to practice it in the slums of London and again in China—staunched the bleeding, dug the second bullet out of me, and arranged blood transfusions that saved my life.”