Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“It’s Hay’s second guest, also James’s traveling companion, that has the servants buzzing,” said Holmes, who brought out his watch from where it was set in his vest pocket next to his Phi Beta Kappa key and checked the time. It was a short ride to the train station from Adams’s home and Henry had noticed that Holmes had his cab waiting.

“Do you want me to guess the second gentleman’s name?” asked Adams with another friendly smile.

“You wouldn’t in a hundred years,” said Associate Justice Holmes with heavy, measured tones. “It is Sherlock Holmes.”

Adams laughed heartily, actually slapping his knees under the desk.

“You laugh,” observed Holmes. Adams’s old acquaintance—they had known each other for more than thirty years—had never been known for his sense of humor, certainly not in the way John Hay and Clarence King might have been, but since he had taken up his black robes of the Massachusetts court, he seemed especially humorless to Adams.

“But isn’t Sherlock Holmes a fictional character,” said Adams, not really making it a question. “A creation of Arthur Conan Doyle? Did Harry bring Mr. Doyle on a visit to Washington?”

“No, he brought Sherlock Holmes,” repeated Holmes. “I almost got John Hay to admit it, although he seemed bound to confidence. Not only have his servants been whispering about the London detective being a guest in the house, but Clara Hay, after making her friends take an absolute oath of secrecy, has told about a hundred of those friends of Sherlock Holmes’s days in the house.”

“Perhaps an English relative of yours?” asked Adams, his mischievous smile back.

“Certainly not that I know of,” said Holmes, who was looking at his watch again. “I must go if I’m to get my luggage sorted out at the station before boarding.”

But before he stood, Adams said, “Was this Sherlock Holmes the second lodger at Mrs. Stevens’s home that you attempted to see along with Harry this morning?”

“Yes,” said Holmes, already moving with much longer strides with Henry toward the foyer, where the head butler, Addison, stood waiting with the justice’s coat, hat, and cane.

“What would you like me to do?” Adams said softly as the two men stood in the open doorway. The late-March morning air was still chill. “Watch out my window and send you a report on whether this Sherlock Holmes looks fictional or not?”

“You still do not dine out all that much, do you, Henry?” Holmes asked bluntly.

“Not really,” said Adams. In the seven years since Clover’s death, he’d come to be known as a recluse and now the invitations—save from Clarence King when he was in town or John Hay next door, old members of the Five of Hearts—no longer came in. “You know how it is in this town,” Adams heard himself saying. “If you accept someone’s dinner invitation, then the favor must be returned. I dine here now usually with the occasional fellow old widower or young bachelor.”

“Well, you’ll be invited by Hay to dine Sunday evening with a young widower whom we both know well and, since this Mr. Sherlock Holmes is reputed to be one of the other guests, I had hoped you’d write me about that .”

“A young widower whom we both know well . . .” began Adams as he walked Holmes outside under the arches and that damned cross. “You don’t mean . . .”

“I do mean,” said Holmes, almost crossly to Adams’s sensitive ear. “The Boy.”

“The Boy . . . oh, dear me,” was all that Adams could muster.

He waved to Holmes’s carriage—knowing full well that Wendell never looked back—until it disappeared around the corner.

“The Boy,” muttered Adams, feeling that he had made a great mistake in coming home several days sooner than he’d originally planned. “Oh dear me.”

Holmes much preferred their new living areas in Mrs. Stevens’s home to being a guest at the home of John and Clara Hay. It was true that even here at this boarding house, Henry James was still residing in the same house as Holmes, but the door to James’s bed-sitting-room was down a long hallway and they no longer had to see each other constantly or to share each meal. But first and foremost in importance was his freedom—the second story had its own outside door and wooden staircase and each tenant received a key to that door. Holmes was free now to come and go whenever he pleased—and in whatever guise he chose—without scrutiny by Henry James or the Hays’ servants.

This morning he was in no disguise; he wore his London-tailored suit, waistcoat, top hat and gloves, long black scarf, and was carrying his cane sheathing a three-sided razor-sharp 30-inch sword.

Across Lafayette Square, Holmes hailed a hansom cab and told the driver to take him to the Metropolitan Police Department Headquarters at the corner of Fifth and Louisiana. Once there he had the driver park across the street from the old rundown precinct house.

Holmes didn’t have to wait more than ten minutes before the Major and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, William C. Moore, came down the steps, glanced irritably at his watch, and hailed a cab. Holmes ordered his driver to follow that cab, even though he knew where it was headed.

Holmes had never met Major and Superintendent Moore but he’d studied photographs of him and there was no mistaking that white, General Robert E. Lee–type beard. And he knew that the irritability he’d glimpsed ran deep this morning since the major and superintendent was not accustomed to being summoned anywhere by anyone , much less to the unimportant Maltby Building by order of someone in the mere State Department.

Holmes’s cab drew to the curb at the corner of New Jersey Street and Constitution Avenue just as Moore had alighted and almost bumped into the former Major and Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police, William G. Brock. Where Moore’s beard looked full, white, and happily plumped, former Major and Superintendent Brock’s beard was a straggly gray that matched his haggard appearance.

“What are you doing here . . .” began Moore.

“I might ask the same of you, sir,” snapped Brock.

The two men disliked one another intensely. More to the point, Holmes did know former Major and Superintendent Brock by sight and vice versa. Brock had reason—or thought he did—to hate Holmes even more than he detested the current Major and Superintendent of Police.

Holmes waited until the two men, still grumbling and demanding answers from one another, went into the building before he stepped out of his cab and paid the driver.

Holmes had asked John Hay about the Maltby Building the previous week, mentioning only that he’d passed by the odd-looking building, and Hay had laughed and explained that the lift inside was treacherous because the Maltby Building, a five-story apartment building purchased twenty years earlier to provide overflow space for Senate offices, had been built on the site of an old stable by its New York developer. Essentially, “as is true of so many things in Washington,” Hay had said, the building had been built on sand. The massive elevator had begun sinking into the sand, dragging the entire building down with it, and now to enter the lift one had to step up or down some seven inches. “What’s more,” added Hay with an additional laugh, “those offices still remaining in the Maltby Building are freezing in the winter, literally intolerable in the summer, and cramped at all times.”

Perfect , Holmes had thought and had cabled his brother Mycroft to have Whitehall “summon” Major and Superintendents Moore and Brock and the others to the Office of Steamboat Inspection on the fourth floor of that building. The Supervising Inspector General of Steamboat Inspection was a certain James A. Dismont, who had been warned by the State Department of this morning’s invasion but had not been told the reason for the gathering. Now when Dismont’s flustered clerk, a certain Andrew McWilliams, according to the sign on his desk, led Holmes into the Inspector General’s crowded office, it was also entry into a din of outraged voices—led by William C. Moore’s.