Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“I remember numbers and dates,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “Totty, your anniversary is on December fourteen . . . not that it matters since Henry run off four years ago.”

Mrs. Banes looked away and stomped her foot.

“Ada told me that she and James got married over in New York at her aunt’s place on West Twenty-fourth Street,” Mrs. Youngfeld continued to Holmes, who scribbled quickly to keep up. “She said they brought a colored Methodist minister down from a church on Eighty-fifth Street to do the ceremony. They had an organ brought in to play and a cake with white icing.”

Mrs. Banes stared daggers at her friend but said nothing.

“Almost done here,” said Holmes. “Mr. James Todd’s occupation . . . he is employed by the gas works?”

“No, you got that wrong!” laughed Mrs. Banes. “Ada’s man James is a railroad porter, ’riginally from Baltimore. A head porter. He works for the New York Central Railroad, but . . . poor Ada . . . the railroad keeps sending him all over the place: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts . . . even up into some places in Canada.”

“Ontario and Quebec,” said Mrs. Youngfeld.

“ Wherever they send him, he’s gone a whole bunch of the time,” said Mrs. Banes, clearly exasperated at her friend and neighbor’s vast store of information. “Ada’s home alone, expecting again, alone all by her own self with the two girls and the baby boy to take care of most of the time. That man may make good money as a chief porter, but he’s not home two days out of fifty.”

“I shan’t take up any more of your time, ladies,” said Holmes, putting away his ledger and adjusting his glasses on his nose. “You’ve been most helpful. Your census information on the Todds and other neighbors may well enable the Brooklyn Benevolent Neighborhood Association to fund a fine playground near here.”

“The childrens got plenty of empty lots ’round here to play in,” said Mrs. Banes. “What we really could use is a nice, clean, respectable saloon like the ones that used to be up on Flatbush Avenue before the Bridge squashed everything.”

“Oh, hush up, Totty,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. Looking Holmes in the eye, she said, “She doesn’t mean that, Mr. Williams.”

Holmes nodded, raised his hat, backed down to the sidewalk level, made as if to turn away, but then turned back to the two women. “You’ll forgive me if this question is insensitive . . . it is supposed to be part of the neighborhood census, but I rarely have to ask it . . .”

The two ladies waited.

“Coincidentally, I have had the occasion to see Mr. James Todd without having the pleasure of actually making his acquaintance,” Holmes said softly, showing visible signs of embarrassment. “The gentleman has blue eyes, blond hair—not much left, but definitely blond—and a very fair complexion . . .”

Mrs. Banes laughed heartily. “So he fooled you, too,” she said, the missing tooth even more visible in an otherwise perfect wide expanse of white teeth.

“Fooled . . .” began Holmes.

“James Todd is passing,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. She also sounded embarrassed. “He told Ada that he’s been passing since he was a boy.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Banes, still laughing. “James Todd, he good at passing.”

“Passing?” said Holmes. “You mean, passing as . . .”

“White,” said Mrs. Youngfeld. “James Todd doesn’t look black, but his wife Ada told us a dozen times that his grandpa and mama were field slaves down in Carolina. Lots of ’scegenation going on with those field slaves and lots of children of those ’scegenations trying to pass up here. Though not many looks as white as James Todd.”

“At least he kept to his own kind in marryin’,” said Mrs. Banes.

Holmes tipped his hat a final time. “Thank you again, ladies.”

On the late-night train back to Washington, Holmes realized he was very tired. Tomorrow would be busy because he would have the mystery of who sent the annual She-was-murdered cards solved by afternoon and he would have to break into Henry Adams’s mansion after dark—always a delicate proposition in such a swanky and well-policed area as the Hays and Adamses had chosen to live in.

He knew one of the original Five of Hearts secrets now—Mr. Clarence King, “America’s most eligible bachelor” according to his friend John Hay and an editorial writer in Century Magazine , had been married to a colored woman named Ada Copeland since September, 1888. There seemed no doubt—at least to his neighbors—that the two girls, living baby boy, deceased baby boy named LeRoy, and baby on the way were all his. And Holmes himself had noticed how light-skinned the baby and one of the girls had been, especially when compared to their attractive ebony mother.

Uncovering one such secret of the Five of Hearts was a start, Holmes knew, but there remained secrets he would have to ferret out of John and Clara Hay’s lives, of Henry Adams, and even of the late Clover Adams.

Every man or woman alive, Holmes knew, had secrets. Most, like Clarence King—deliberately misleading his closest friends with his boisterous talk of being attracted only to “swarthy South Sea Island beauties”—had secrets within secrets.

A few, like Henry James and Holmes himself, had secrets within secrets within secrets.

One of Holmes’s small secrets had asserted itself before he left Brooklyn. It had been too many hours since that early morning’s injection of the heroic drug, and before Holmes took a ferry across the river back to Grand Central Terminus, he found an empty shed in Brooklyn in which he could cook-up his little solution of heroin and inject it with some privacy. He’d been in pain, both physical and psychological, for the entire afternoon, and the relief in the moment after the injection was heavensent.

Now Holmes closed his eyes and literally nodded off as the train rushed south through the night.

My dear Harry,” cried John Hay, “you simply cannot desert me now!”

“Not deserting, surely,” said Henry James. “Merely drawing a polite boundary to my intrusion, despite your and Clara’s generous and obviously boundary-less hospitality. You remember that you helped find a room for me to rent near here in eighteen eighty-three when I was here last and visiting the Adamses.”

“But that’s quite different!” said Hay. Both men were standing in Hay’s study this Tuesday morning. Hay had informed James that the servants had reported “Mr. Sigerson”—hat brim low and collars high—coming in and retiring to his room not long before dawn.

“We have Holmes and his mysteries now,” continued Hay. “This is all simply too fascinating to face alone. You must share this excitement with us.”

“I apologize again for bringing the detective here in disguise and under false pretenses . . .” began James.

“Nonsense,” cried Hay, waving away the apology with his long, elegant fingers. “It’s a profoundly exciting experience and one that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. Look at what he’s had my secretaries doing all yesterday afternoon and this morning.”

James looked at the boxes of envelopes and cards which covered every desk and table surface in the study.

“Surely you are not going to allow this . . . stranger . . . to read your personal and business correspondence,” said James. He was unable to keep his sense of shock out of his voice.

Hay laughed. “Of course not, my dear Harry. These are envelopes and cards with typed addresses only, although he will be comparing the first line or so of some harmless correspondence to the ominous cards all of us in the Five of Hearts receive annually. All these addresses and notes have been typewritten, you see. Holmes told me yesterday morning that, and I believe I quote him correctly—‘A typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting’.”