Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“I need to think and I often find that a long hansom ride is conducive to serious thinking,” said Holmes. “Haven’t you also found this to be true, Mr. James?”

James made a noncommittal sound. In truth, he couldn’t remember ever having done any deep creative thinking while in a cab. In a railway carriage when traveling alone, yes, and—first and foremost—when in the bath or when taking a morning walk, but not in a cab. James made little note of which direction they were heading as Holmes called up directions—“Right here, driver”, “Left, driver”, “Straight along here until I tell you, driver.”

“Do you have some compelling reason to think about something?” asked James. “Or something new that we should both be thinking about?”

He knew that he was taking a risk asking the question so directly—a risk of rebuff or active embarrassment—but James was very curious and had been since he’d returned to the Saint-Gaudens memorial and found Adams and Holmes sitting there in such distracted silence.

“Yes,” said Holmes, “but it could be very personal . . . to Adams, to your other friends here . . . so are you certain you want to hear about it?”

James did not have to think about this for long. “I’m certain.”

Holmes succinctly described his graveyard conversation and agreement with Henry Adams.

“But you don’t even know what the mystery is? ” asked James, feeling both shocked at Holmes’s decision and relieved that the detective soon would be leaving his friends alone.

“No idea,” said Holmes.

“Did you interrogate Adams about it . . . receive even a clue?”

“No,” said Holmes. “You know Henry Adams, Mr. James—and I do not, other than what Ned and you have said about him and impressions he made upon me last night at dinner and today—do you think he is being honest about there being a mystery?”

James thought about that for a while as the hansom clopped along, the cabbie receiving another “Turn right here, driver” order from Holmes. The passing scenery looked like so much of Washington—glimpses of fine homes, then rare commercial blocks, then empty fields, then more trees and homes.

“Yes,” James said at last. “Adams can be . . . playful is the word that comes to mind . . . especially when he is with Hay and Clarence King or Sam Clemens . . . and he guards his privacy as zealously as a dragon guards his gold, but if there were no mystery whatsoever, he would never have come up with this absurd . . . game. He would have just insisted you leave him and his friends alone.”

Holmes, who had been passing his black gloves through his other hand over and over, nodded distractedly. “You don’t have a clue as to what the mystery might be, do you, James?”

“Beyond the one you came here for—the death of his wife seven years ago—I do not,” said James. “But, then, for the past decade, my contact with Adams has been either epistolary or when he is visiting London or when we see each other somewhere on the Continent.”

“I’m convinced that this mystery he speaks of lies here, now,” said Holmes. “Not some conundrum he brushed up against in London or elsewhere.”

“Do you have a guess as to what the mystery might be?” said James.

Holmes slapped his gloves against his open palm, frowned, and said sharply, “I never guess, James. Never.”

“Then, have you ever had a case like this before?” asked James.

“How do you mean, sir?”

“I mean a case where to solve a mystery you must first figure out if and where there is a mystery.”

“In roundabout ways,” said Holmes. “Often I’m asked to consult on something little more than a curiosity—why a father might ask his grown daughter to change bedrooms after she’s heard something in the night, that sort of thing—and only then discover that the curiosity is wrapped in a true mystery. But I’ve never been given the task of searching out a mystery, pulling it from the background of the entire world, as it were, before having only twenty-four hours . . .” He glanced out at the long shadows and fading sunlight. “Less now . . . in which to solve it. Stop here, driver.” Holmes thumped the box above them with his cane.

Outside in the last of the evening light, James looked around but did not recognize the place.

“Here’s an incentive to wait for us for as long as it takes us to return,” Holmes was saying to the driver, giving the man what James thought was an absurd number of gold coins. The driver grinned and touched his beaver top hat.

“Come, James,” said Holmes and began walking briskly down the tree-lined side street running off the main avenue they’d come up.

It was only when he saw the arched entrance twenty yards or so ahead to the left of the street that he realized they had returned to Rock Creek Cemetery.

“Do you expect to find your mystery to solve here?” asked James as they walked along the paved lane that curved through the huge cemetery.

“Not necessarily,” said Holmes. “But if we want to walk while we think about this problem, this is certainly a contemplative place in which to stroll.”

“It will soon be a dark contemplative place,” said James.

It was true. The sun sat on the western horizon, a red orb perfectly balanced on the horizon glimpsed through the trees and various headstones and monuments. The trees in the cemetery had thrown out ever-lengthening shadows until those shadows had touched and coalesced into growing patches of darkness. It would soon be too dark to read the inscriptions on the headstones that were giving off their last warm glows of sunlight for this day.

“I brought a dark lantern should we need it,” said Holmes, jiggling the canvas bag he was carrying. He busied himself with lighting his pipe. Normally, Henry James enjoyed the smell of burning pipe tobacco, but Holmes’s choice of tobaccos was so cheap and so strong that now James changed places as they walked abreast so that he would be upwind of it.

“James, do you remember any mysteries being embedded in Mr. Adams’s conversation at dinner last night?”

“I’m afraid that due to Mr. Roosevelt’s extended and repeated efforts to be boorish, much of the dinner’s conversation was lost on me,” said James.

Holmes stopped walking and gave the writer a sharp glance through the pall of pipe smoke. “ Nothing is ever lost on you, James. You know it and I know it.”

James said nothing and they resumed their walk. The sun had disappeared and much of the three-dimensionality of their surroundings disappeared in the pleasant twilight. Trees, monuments, lower headstones, and grassy knolls all took on a flatter aspect without their glow and shadows to set them off.

“There was the mystery of the canvasback ducks,” said James. “But Clara Hay brought up that subject when she explained we were having teal, and it was her husband who said that the disappearance of canvasbacks in the restaurants and shops was a bit of a mystery.”

“And Henry Adams solved that mystery,” said Holmes. “The Jews were behind the disappearance . . . just as they are behind so many nefarious plots.”

Holmes’s tone was not lost on James and he started to speak to explain his friend, to say that Adams was usually a most liberal person but had this blind spot when it came to the Jews.

Holmes interrupted the apologia with a swing of his cane. “It’s no matter, James. Many Englishmen share this reflexive mistrust and hatred of Jews, but in this country, of course, it is overshadowed by the Americans’ treatment of more than eight million Negroes as something less than citizens or full human beings.”