Dan Simmons: The Fifth Heart

Henry James cleared his throat but could think of nothing to say.

“Then there is the odd fact of our residence itself,” bore on Holmes, taking no clue to stop based on his interlocutor’s obvious boredom. “I have lived—Watson and I have lived—at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street since shortly after we met in January of eighteen eighty-one.”

“Is there a paradox in that?” asked James.

“When these doubts of mine began and multiplied in the winter and spring of eighteen ninety and eighteen ninety-one,” Holmes said very softly, “I went to the office of the City Surveyor and looked at the most recent maps of our neighborhood. As of eighteen ninety-one, a full ten years after we took up residence at two-twenty-one-B, the residences and structures on Baker Street ended at Number Eighty-five.”

“Incredible,” muttered James.

“But mostly . . .” continued Holmes as if he’d not heard Henry James speak, “it is the . . . cloudiness, lack of daily detail, emptiness . . . for me of the periods between my actual cases that most makes me doubt my existence separate from some fictional page. It’s as if I’m alive . . . real . . . only when investigating a case.”

“Could not your . . . ah . . . disposition toward indulging in certain drugs account for that?” asked James.

Holmes laughed and set his coffee cup down with a clatter. “You do read my adventures in The Strand after all!”

“Not at all,” said James. “But as I mentioned, some younger friends of mine do. I remember their commenting on your frequent injections of . . . cocaine, was it not?” James well remembered Edmund Gosse’s fascination with Holmes’s dependence upon the drug. It had made Henry James suspect that Gosse himself had experimented with injecting it upon occasion.

“Only a seven-per-cent solution,” laughed Holmes. “Quite tame by any opium-eater’s scale. But since my death on twenty-four April eighteen ninety-one, I have successfully cured myself of that self-indulgence.”

“Very good,” said James. “How did you manage that?”

“By the replacement use of a much less harmful injected substance called morphine,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And in the past weeks, I have discovered an even more miraculous and innocuous replacement—distilled by our German friend who created aspirin, Mr. Bayer himself—a drug so habit- and side-effect-free that both Bayer and those who use it have named it after its heroic qualities.”

“Yes?” said James.

“It is called heroin,” said Sherlock Holmes, “and I look forward to finding greater . . . and less expensive . . . quantities of it in America when you and I go there next week. Morphine has been sold in abundance on the streets of the United States—much more so than in England—since so many tens or hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers continued to use it after their Civil War thirty years ago. And now this heroic heroin, while not yet released to the general marketplace, is becoming equally abundant there.”

James was goggling at the tall man. “We’re going to America? We? ”

“We’re leaving for Marseilles and a steamship bound for America early in the morning,” said Holmes. “There is a seven-year-old murder there in their capital city that I am duty bound to solve, and it is in your very deep interest— compelling interest, my dear James—for you to accompany me. I could not, in good conscience, leave you behind in Paris while you are in this melancholic and possibly still self-destructive state of mind. Besides . . . you will enjoy this! The game’s afoot and we’re called to it as certainly and inescapably as your next story or book calls to your creator’s soul and writer’s pen.”

Holmes beckoned for the waiter to bring the bill and paid it while James sat there with his eyes still wide and his mouth hanging unbecomingly open.

In the ten days that followed, while crossing the Atlantic from France to New York and then taking a train to Washington, D.C., Henry James felt as if he were in a dream. No, not so much in a dream—his dreams tended to be specific and colorful and powerful—but, rather, in a fog. A delicious and dangerous and decision-free fog.

They sailed from Marseilles on the older French liner the Paris . James thought he remembered being aboard her twelve years before, the last time he’d visited America, when he’d hurried home to Cambridge during the period when first his mother and then his father had been dying. Sherlock Holmes refused to take a more modern English steamship since it would mean a stop somewhere in England on the way—the Paris paused only briefly in Dublin—and Holmes would not set foot in England, he said, until he was “fully satisfied”. Satisfied as to what, was not further defined at that time, but James had to guess that it related to the subject of the consulting detective’s real versus fictional existence.

There had been five amazing conversations—revelations, in truth—during the past ten days before landfall in New York, and James had to sort them out not only by content but by the context of where they had been announced.

The first had been outside his hotel on the Rue de la Paix after their late-evening dining on the night they had met.

“It is, of course, absurd to think that I can—or should wish to—go to America now,” James had said, holding his umbrella in both hands like a weapon.

“But you must,” said Holmes in calm terms. “My case depends upon it.”

“ ‘Case’?” repeated Henry James. “I thought you had left being a consulting detective behind when you faked your own death almost two years ago.”

“Not a bit of it,” said Holmes. “Even as Jan Sigerson, I did my bit of detecting in Turkey, India, and elsewhere. But that was for my brother Mycroft, for Whitehall, and for England. Now I find I must take up a private case again. Solve what is almost certainly an apolitical mystery.”

James continued to hold his folded umbrella at port arms. The rain had stopped. “Let me guess,” he said. “In Dr. Watson’s absence, you need me to chronicle your adventures. To be your Boswell.”

Sherlock Holmes laughed loudly enough that the sound echoed back from the nearby stone buildings. “No, no, not at all, Mr. James. Nor do I think such a role as Boswell would suit you in any event, but certainly not in writing up the details of a mystery.”

James’s spine stiffened a bit at that. He considered himself capable of writing any sort of story—as long as neither its topic nor style was beneath his dignity. And he had done a few of those stories for money in his youth.

“What I mean,” continued Holmes, “is that while I have not had the pleasure of reading your novels and shorter fiction, Mr. James, many of my more literary acquaintances—including Watson himself—have. And from what they tell me, your rendering of the most exciting adventures you and I might have in America would end up with a beautiful young lady from America as the protagonist, various lords and ladies wandering through, verbal opaqueness followed by descriptive obtuseness, and nothing more exciting being allowed to occur in the tale than a verbal faux pas or tea service being late.”

James wondered whether he should be—and act—offended, but decided that he was not. All in all, he was amused.

“Then you could have no conceivable need for my presence in this quixotic jaunt to America you seem about to undertake, sir.”

“Ah, but I truly do, Mr. James,” said Holmes. “I need you for introductions, for information, for American context, for—what did you call it earlier?—for cover, and for companionship. I shall be a stranger in a strange land and to solve this mystery I shall need your help. Do you wish to hear more of the reasons for this?”