Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“After his release from Millbank, he returned to an ever more successful career as a barrister,” said Holmes. “When the so-called Jack the Ripper murders in the East End captured the press’s attention in ’eighty-eight, I joined Mr. Anderson of the CID in looking at many suspects. There were other murders of women through that period, but I was certain that the Ripper’s victims were only five—the poor ladies Chapman, Stride, Nichols, Eddowes, and a certain Mary Kelly, who had known Miss O’Brian who had been murdered in eighteen eighty-three. The man whom I became convinced was behind all the so-called Jack the Ripper murders was Mr. Montague Druitt.”

“But Jack the Ripper was never caught!” said James.

“No, but the body of Montague Druitt was fished out of the Thames on December thirty-first of eighteen eighty-eight,” said Holmes. “The police ruled it a suicide.”

“Was it . . . a suicide?” asked Henry James.

“No,” said Holmes. His gray eyes now looked so cold to James that he would have described them as inhuman, reptilian. But a reptile that was both satisfied and deeply sad.

Suddenly Henry James felt his body grow cold and a strange and unpleasant prickling flowed down his arms, the back of his neck, and along his spine.

Eventually James said, “I thank you again for your comments about my Princess Casamassima . It pleases me that someone as thorough with detail as yourself approves of its research.”

Holmes smiled. “You remember the location of the Hotel Glenham where we met Mr. Clemens last night for dinner?”

“Of course,” said James. “Nine ninety-five Broadway.”

“Well, Mr. James,” said Holmes. “Within ten blocks of that hotel were more than thirty beer halls, union halls, lecture halls, and even churches where anarchists meet every week. For your American anarchists are primarily socialists, you see, and your American socialists are primarily German . . . moderately recent German immigrants, to be precise.”

“I would never have guessed that, sir,” said Henry James. “Of course, many of the workers in my Princess Casamassima were German, but that was due to the prevailing feeling . . . the stereotype in England, as it were . . .”

“The German neighborhoods in the Lower East Side of New York are the nexus for ninety-eight percent of anarchist sentiment and activity in America,” continued Holmes, as if James had not even spoken. “I found it located primarily in the Tenth, Eleventh, and Seventeenth Wards. Germans refer to this part of New York as Kleindeutschland —‘Little Germany’, as I am sure I don’t have to translate for you. This area is bounded by Fourteenth Street on the north, Third Avenue and the Bowery on the west, Division Street on the south, and the East River on the east. It has been Kleindeutschland since the Civil War.”

“Certainly, sir,” protested James, “you are not saying that all German immigrants in New York are anarchists.”

Holmes was still smiling. “Of course not,” he said softly. “But I am saying that a surprisingly large number of your German immigrants have brought socialism with them from Europe, and at the core of the most fanatical socialism lie the embers and sparks of today’s anarchism and terror.”

“I find this hard to believe,” said James.

“Between eighteen sixty-one and eighteen seventy,” continued Holmes, “some zero-point-three percent of your immigrants were from Austria and Hungary, fewer than eight thousand people. Between eighteen eighty-one and eighteen ninety, more than six-point-seven percent of your immigrants are Germans or Austrians, almost seven percent of your total. Some eighty-two thousand people, most of whom chose to reside in the most crowded sections of New York or Brooklyn and not move west. And the ratio is rising dramatically. Demographers working in my brother Mycroft’s department at Whitehall predict—rather confidently, I feel—that a full sixteen percent of your immigrant population will be German by the year nineteen hundred, almost six hundred thousand German men and women and children, and by nineteen ten, lower-class Germans should be almost twenty-five percent of your total immigration, numbering more than two million.”

“But certainly there are German immigrants who are hard working, God-fearing . . . I mean, you mention only a few German beer halls . . .” stammered James.

“There are more than two hundred German beer halls associated with the anarchist movement in New York City right now, just in eighteen ninety-three,” said Holmes. “Many of these are what they call Lokalfrage —secure places—where they can speak freely or hold socialist meetings where they can openly discuss anarchist plans.”

Holmes leaned forward, his weight on his walking stick.

“And yes, your German immigrants are very hard working, Mr. James—I can tell you that by working alongside them under the most inhuman of conditions in factories in New York. But the majority of them resist learning the English language. And the literate among them—and literacy is high in the German community, as you doubtlessly know—have read and absorbed their European communist-anarchist philosophers such as Bakunin and recently have moved on to the more violent communist-anarchist leaders such as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Élisée Reclus. Your German immigrants have brought with them not only their capacity for hard work six long days a week, but their hatred of the upper classes and their interest in anarchy and . . . for a minority, but still for too many of them . . . a willingness to turn to the bombings, uprisings, and the assassinations of all-out anarchy.”

Holmes patted his cane absently, as if his own recitation upset him.

“Socialists—and anarchists—also use these beer-house Lokalfrage as clubhouses for trade-union locals, singing societies, and German mutual-aid organizations. But the anarchists, including the most virulent kind, Mr. James, also meet there, store weapons there, make their plans for assassinations there. And we could have walked to a dozen of these Lokalfrage from the Glenham Hotel last night.”

James desperately needed to change the subject. Many of his characters in The Princess Casamassima had been German immigrant workers, but Henry James actually knew no such Germans, no industrial workers. The Germans he did know were teachers, professors, artists, and literary men in Germany itself. He said, “But the man you are seeking . . . this Lucan Adler . . . he is not German.”

“No,” said Holmes in a strange tone. “Lucan Adler is not German.”

Knowing he should stay silent and let this disturbing conversation die, he still spoke. “This search for the person behind Clover Adams’s death—the search for Lucan Adler, Mr. Sebastian Moran’s bastard son, is terribly personal to you, is it not, Mr. Holmes?”

Holmes stared at him with those cold gray eyes and nodded ever so slightly.

“It must be because of the wounds,” said James. “Those terrible gunshot wounds inflicted upon you by Lucan Adler.”

Incredibly, inexplicably, Sherlock Holmes smiled. He flung his long black scarf around his neck in the flamboyant manner James had become accustomed to, while cocking his head back, chin jutting strongly beneath that odd, almost lighthearted, smile.

“Not at all,” said Holmes. “The wounds are a price of my profession. But it’s true I seek out Lucan Adler for a deeper reason than an attempt to save untold public figures from the world’s most terrible anarchical assassin. You see, Mr. James, Sebastian Moran took the small child Lucan away from Irene Adler, claiming him and raising him as his bastard even though he never gave the boy his last name. He trained Lucan in every dark art of murder that he knew, and young Lucan, no older than twenty-one years of age, learned even more on his own, surpassing Moran as both a marksman and an assassin.”