Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

So cathedrals and great buildings of any age did not move Sherlock Holmes to any level of emotion—with the few exceptions such as London Bridge or Big Ben, the latter heard more often than seen through the City’s deadly fogs. They were touchstones of the city he worked in and, in his own rigidly controlled way, loved.

But now, looking up, Holmes had to admit that the stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge—they were just passing under the first one set out in the river—were impressive indeed. For many decades, the tallest structure in New York City had been the spire of Trinity Church at 284 feet. Just three years earlier, New York’s World Building, at the corner of Park Row and Franklin Street, became the tallest structure in the city at 309 feet. And while this stone arch in the tower that the train was presently passing through was only 117 feet and the height of the towers only 159 feet above the roadways and rail tracks, 276 and a half feet above the river itself, the sheer stone-Gothic strength of the towers impressed the unimpressionable Holmes to some degree.

Holmes knew that remembering such precise numbers was just a waste of his precious mental attic space—remembering the heights of the arches and towers and roadway of this bridge would almost certainly never help him in a case—but he’d encountered the information during one of his many sleepless nights spent reading one of the twenty-five volumes of his newer, 1889, 9th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica . Watson had called that purchase a foolish waste of money since Holmes already owned the 6th and 8th Editions, but Holmes treasured his 9th Edition. Unfortunately—and although his brother Mycroft was the one with the amazing mathematical abilities—once Sherlock Holmes was exposed to facts in the form of numbers, he found it all but impossible to forget them.

This seemingly miraculous bridge supported by cables descending from two stone towers that rose 276 feet above the river .

America , he thought, and not for the first time, is a nation with huge dreams and not infrequently the ability to realize them .

Meanwhile, the car descended the grade beyond the second tower and slowed as it approached the Brooklyn terminal, even more of an elaborate and painted iron structure than on the New York side, with a gentle release of the ingenious “Paine’s grip” device freeing them from the cable. Holmes knew about Colonel W. H. Paine’s gripping-releasing device only because he’d been hired in the mid-1880’s by one of Paine’s executives to look into a patent infringement of the grip, then in use only in San Francisco, by a would-be cable-car company in Paris.

Holmes followed his man down onto the street and then to a short series of horse-drawn trolley rides, finally walking half a block behind the man as he strolled southeast down a rough cobblestoned extension of Flatbush Avenue. His target never looked back over his shoulder or paused at a window front to check in the reflection to see if he was being followed.

Brooklyn, Holmes vaguely knew, had once been—save for Irish and Negro areas along the river to the north—a wealthy and self-satisfied city of wide, leaf-shaded avenues and many stately homes. The neighborhood they were in now, not that far from where they had demolished so many old structures to allow for the approaches to the Bridge, was far from stately. An apparently self-respecting three-story home, its trim and siding brightly painted in the most popular current colors of rose or aqua or mint green or sunset orange, might have on either side of it a rundown old structure whose inhabitants had abandoned all efforts at repair or upkeep.

It was at one of the nicer homes on Hudson Street that Holmes’s man bounded up the four front steps, unlocked the front door, shouted something that Holmes could not quite hear from his place more than half a block away, and was immediately engulfed in hugs from two little girls and a woman with a babe in arms.

The girls and babe and woman were Negroes—the woman especially ebony in color. The two girls in clean, white shifts were lighter shades of tan in complexion but had kinky hair carefully brushed, braided, and tied up in fresh ribbons. There was no doubt that this was an affectionate homecoming. This surprised Holmes a bit. The man Holmes had been tailing all day was white.

“Yeah, they got three children. The two older ones are girls,” said Mrs. Banes, the woman with a missing front tooth.

“The littlest one, the baby’s a boy. They had a boy before, he was their first, but he died,” said Mrs. Youngfeld, an older woman with gray hair. It was her house across the street on Hudson. “They named the first boy, the one who died, LeRoy.”

Le roi, thought Holmes. The king .

Holmes had lost the excessive facial hair, wig, and prominent front teeth, and parted his own hair in the middle with a generous use of hair crème. He now wore thick but frameless spectacles. There were seven pencils visible in his left jacket pocket. From his briefcase he had produced an oversized ledger filled with what looked to be official forms.

It was late and several homes on Hudson Street had not responded to his knocking—a white man knocking in what was obviously a colored neighborhood—but Mrs. Youngfeld and her visitor and good friend from down the street, Mrs. Banes, had peeked through the sidelights and decided that the prissy-looking Holmes was not a threatening character.

They’d had no interest when Holmes had explained that his name was Mr. Williams and he was taking a “local census” so that the Brooklyn Benevolent Neighborhood Association could upgrade local parks and facilities, but when he’d brought out the two dollars he’d pay each of them in return for their brief time answering a few questions about their neighbors, they warmed to him.

“And the family’s name is Todd?” said Holmes, pursing his lips and fussing with the complex form of boxes and printed lines on the leaves of paper in his ledger.

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “James and Ada Todd. You want the children’s names too?”

“I don’t believe that will be necessary,” said Holmes. “But you say there are the two girls and one baby boy in the household.”

“Another baby on the way,” said Mrs. Banes. “Ada told me that their old house there is getting too small for them.”

“Would you happen to know their ages? Approximate ages will suffice.” Holmes was speaking with a slight whistling lisp through his permanently pursed lips. He was a government bureaucrat who liked being a government bureaucrat. (A charge he’d once, in pique, leveled at his brother Mycroft, who had responded at once in his slow, unexcitable drawl—“But, Brother, I do not work for the British Government. At times I am the British Government.”)

“Mr. Todd, he about fifty-one, fifty-two. Ada’s going to be thirty-two this coming April nine,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.

Holmes made no comment on the disparity of ages. He’d seen that with his own eyes in the failing light of evening.

“And would you have any idea of when they were married?” asked Holmes, pursing and whistling ever so slightly. Just another line to fill. Just another box to check.

“What’s it matter to the Benevolent Whatever of Brooklyn when a legally married couple got married?” demanded Mrs. Banes. Her hands were now fists and her fists were on her bony hips.

“September twenty-two, eighteen eighty-eight,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.

Mrs. Banes turned a wide-eyed stare on her friend. “Ella, how . . . do . . . you . . . know . . . that? The exact date that Ada got hitched? I can’t even remember my own anniversary.”