Authors: Dan Simmons
James came to a full stop. After a moment he managed, “You . . . can . . . not . . . know . . . such a . . . thing.”
“But I do,” said Holmes, still working with his pipe. “And if you join me for a late snack and some good wine, I shall tell you how I know and why I know you will never complete the grim task you assigned yourself tonight, Mr. James. And I know just the clean, well-lighted café where we can talk.”
Holmes grasped James’s left elbow and the two began walking arm-in-arm up the Avenue de l’Opéra. Henry James was too shocked and astonished—and curious—to resist.
D
espite Holmes’s promise to lead them to a “well-lighted place,” James expected a dimly lighted out-of-the-way café opening onto some back alley. Instead, Holmes had brought him to the Café de la Paix, very near James’s hotel and at the intersection of Boulevard des Capucines and Place de l’Opéra in the 9th arrondissement.
The Café de la Paix was one of the largest, brightest, and most vividly decorated establishments in all of Paris, rivaled in its elaborate décor and number of mirrors only by Charles Garnier’s Opéra directly across the plaza. The place had been built, James knew, in 1862 to serve guests at the nearby Grand-Hôtel de la Paix and had come into its full fame during the Expo Exhibition of ’67. It had been one of the first of Paris’s public buildings to be lighted by electricity, but as if the hundreds or thousands of electric bulbs were not enough, bright lanterns with focal prisms still threw beams of light onto the grand mirrors. Henry James had avoided the place over the decades, if for no other reason than it was a common saying in Paris that to dine in the Café de la Paix meant one would eventually run into friends and acquaintances. The place was that popular. And Henry James preferred to choose the times and places that he would “run into” old acquaintances or friends.
Holmes seemed undisturbed by the crowds, the roar of conversation, and scores of eager faces looking up as they entered. James listened as the faux-Norwegian explorer requested his “usual table” from the maître d’—in fluent and properly accented French—and they were led to a small, round table somewhat away from the primary hustle and bustle of the buzzing establishment.
“You come here often enough to have a ‘usual table’?” asked James when they were alone. Or as alone as they could be amidst such bustle and noise.
“I have dined here at least three times a week in the two months I’ve been in Paris,” said Holmes. “I’ve seen dozens of acquaintances, former police partners in my detection business, and clients. None have looked twice at or through my Jan Sigerson disguise.”
Before James could respond, the waiter appeared and Holmes had the effrontery to order quickly for the both of them. After designating a rather good champagne, and perhaps due to the late hour, he ordered a huge after-Opera assortment for two:
le lièvreen civet, pâtes crémeuses d’épeautre
accompanied by a
plateau de fromage affinés
and a concurrent platter of
la figue, l’abricot, le pruneau, en marmelade des fruits secs au thé Ceylan
and
biscuit spéculos
, concluding with
mousse légère chocolat
.
James had no appetite. His delicate stomach was upset by the shocks of the past hour. More than that, he did not care for hare—especially jugged hare with the heavy and grainy French wheat-sauce ladled on it—and this night he had no taste whatsoever for the fruit. And after indulging in it far too much when he was a small boy in France, he detested chocolate mousse.
He said nothing.
James was dying to know how Holmes—this cut-rate street-corner magus—“knew” that sister-Alice’s ashes were in the snuffbox, but he would die rather than bring up the subject here in this public place. It was true, however, that between the din of chatting, laughing diners and the placement of their table, it would have been terribly hard for anyone to eavesdrop on them. But that was not the issue.
As they sipped the rather good champagne, Holmes said, “Did you read my obituary in
The Times
almost two years ago?”
“Friends brought it to my attention,” said James.
“I read it. The paper was three weeks old—I was in Istanbul at the time—but I did get to read it. That and the later interview with poor Watson describing my death at Reichenbach Falls while struggling with the ‘Napoleon of Crime’, Professor James Moriarty.”
Henry James would have preferred to stay silent, but he knew he was expected to fulfill his role as interlocutor.
“How
did
you survive that terrible fall, Mr. Holmes?”
Holmes laughed and brushed crumbs from his bristling black mustache. “There was no fall. There was no struggle. There was no ‘Napoleon of Crime’.”
“No Professor James Moriarty?” said James.
Holmes chuckled and dabbed at his lips and mustache with the white linen serviette. “None whatsoever, I am afraid. Invented from whole cloth for my own purposes . . . purposes of disappearance, in this event.”
“But Watson has told
The Times
of London that this Professor Moriarty had authored a book—
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
,” persisted James.
“Also invented by me,” said Holmes with a smug smile under the Sigerson mustache. “No such book exists. I cited it to Watson only so that he could later give the press—and his own inevitable publication of the events preceding Reichenbach Falls in his only recently released tale ‘The Final Problem’—some . . . what do you authors call it? . . . verisimilitude. Yes, that’s the word. Verisimilitude.”
“But might not,” said James, “after this detail has been mentioned in the various newspaper accounts of Moriarty and your demise, might not people attempt to find this
Dynamics of an Asteroid
book, even if just out of simple curiosity? If it does not exist, your entire Reichenbach Falls story must collapse.”
Holmes laughed this away with a flick of his hand. “Oh, I stressed to Watson, who has in turn stressed to the press, that Moriarty’s book was of the most unreadable and difficult advanced mathematics—I believe my exact words to Watson were ‘it was a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it’.
That
should give pause to the merely curious. I also remember telling Watson that so few copies of Moriarty’s famous book—famous within mathematical circles only—were published that copies were extremely rare, perhaps not even findable today.”
“So you deliberately lied to your friend about this . . . this ‘Napoleon of Crime’ . . . only so that Dr. Watson would repeat these total fabrications to the press?” said James, hoping that the chill in his tone would get through to Holmes.
“Oh, yes,” said Holmes with a slight smile. “Absolutely.”
James sat in silence for a while. Finally he said, “But what if Dr. Watson were called to give sworn testimony . . . perhaps in an inquest into your demise?”
“Oh, any such inquest would have been completed long before this,” said Holmes. “It’s been almost two years since Reichenbach Falls, after all.”
“But still . . .” began James.
“Watson would not have been perjuring himself in such testimony,” interrupted Holmes, showing the slightest hint of irritation now, “because he sincerely believed that Moriarty was, as I explained to him in such detail, the Napoleon of Crime. And Watson believes with equal sincerity that I died with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.”
James blinked several times despite his best effort to show no reaction to this. “You have no remorse about lying to your best friend? The press has reported that Dr. Watson’s wife has died in the interval since your . . . disappearance. So presumably the poor man is now mourning the loss of both his wife and his best friend.”
Holmes helped himself to more fruit. “I did more than lie, Mr. James. I led Watson on a merry chase—pursuing the mythical Moriarty, you understand—across England and Europe, ending at the fabled waterfall from whose waters neither my body, nor Professor Moriarty’s, shall ever be recovered.”
“That was beastly,” said James.
“That was necessary,” Holmes said with no anger or emphasis. “I had to disappear completely, you see. Disappear without a trace and in a manner that convinced the multitudes—or at least that small share of the multitudes that has shown interest in my modest adventures—that I was dead. Was there much mourning in London upon news of my demise?”
James blinked at this and was sure it was levity. Sure, that is, until he saw the serious expression on Sherlock Holmes’s disguised face.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Or so I hear.”
Holmes waited. Finally he said, “Watson’s telling of the Reichenbach tale, his story called ‘The Final Problem’, appeared in
The Strand
only three months ago—December of ’ninety-two. But I’m curious about the reaction when the news stories appeared two years ago.”
James resisted a sigh. “I don’t read
The Strand
,” he said. “But I’m told that young men in London, both when the news of your death was first published and then again this winter when Dr. Watson’s story appeared, started wearing black armbands.”
It was true that James would never read the kind of cheap-romance fiction and casual science-fact and household gossip that appeared in
The Strand
. But his younger friends Edmund Gosse and Jonathan Sturges both did. And both had worn black mourning armbands for months in solemn memory of Holmes’s presumed death. James had thought it all ridiculous.
Sherlock Holmes was smiling as he finished the last of his mousse.
Henry James, still terrified that the conversation would turn back to the contents of his snuffbox if Holmes were allowed to guide it, said, “But why carry out such a hoax, sir? Why betray your good friend Dr. Watson and thousands of your loyal readers with such a ruse if there were no grand criminal conspiracy—no Napoleon of Crime—pursuing you? What could be your motive? Sheer perversity?”
Holmes set his spoon down and stared directly at the writer. “I wish it had been something so simple, Mr. James. No, I decided that I had to fake my own death and disappear completely because of discovering through my own ratiocination . . . through the inductive and deductive processes by which I’ve become the most famous consulting detective in the world . . . a fact so shocking that it not only irrevocably changed my life but led me, as you found me tonight by le Pont Neuf, ready to end it.”
“What single fact could possibly . . .” began Henry James and then closed his mouth. It would be the worst of manners and presumptuousness to ask.
Holmes smiled tightly. “I discovered, Mr. James,” he said as he leaned closer, “that I was not a real person. I am . . . how would a literary person such as yourself put it? I am, the evidence has proven to me most conclusively, a literary construct. Some ink-stained scribbler’s creation. A mere fictional character.”
H
enry James now knew beyond a doubt that he was dealing with a crazy person. Something had driven this Sherlock Holmes person—if this
was
the Sherlock Holmes he had met four years earlier at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party—to and beyond the raveled edge of rationality.
But the perverted truth was simple and shocking: James was fascinated with Holmes’s delusion that he was a fictional character and he wanted to hear more about it. It struck him as a wonderful conceit for a short story someday—perhaps one involving a famous writer who also had descended into believing that he was one of his own characters.
Holmes had ordered cognac—a poor choice, James thought, after the champagne and late evening meal—but both men sipped it now as the writer worked to pose his questions. Suddenly a noisy commotion erupted in the terrace-covered area of the café across the wide dance floor from where they were seated. Dozens of people had gotten to their feet; men were bowing; a few applauded.
“It’s the King of Bohemia,” said Holmes.
Henry James wondered if he should humor the madman across from him and then decided not to.
“There is no King of Bohemia, Mr. Holmes,” he said flatly. “That is the Prince of Wales. I’ve heard that he dines here from time to time.”
Holmes, not sparing another glance at the royal party across the crowded room, sipped his cognac. “You really have
not
read any of Watson’s chronicles of me in
The Strand
, have you, Mr. James?”
Before James could reply, Holmes continued, “One of his first published stories of our adventures—if, indeed, John Watson
was
the chronicler or author of these adventures—was titled ‘Scandal in Bohemia’ and dealt with an indelicate case—a former prima donna of the Imperial Opera of Warsaw using a certain photograph to blackmail, for . . . romantic indiscretions . . . a very famous member of a certain royal house. Watson, always discreet, invented the ‘King of Bohemia’ in his clumsy attempt to disguise the royal gentleman’s true identity, which was, of course, our very own Prince of Wales. In truth, the ‘scandal’ was the second time I had helped the Prince out of a jam. The first time was with a potential scandal dealing with a debt incurred in card games.” Holmes smiled above the rim of his cognac glass. “There is, of course, no ‘Imperial Opera of Warsaw’ either. Watson there was doing his earnest best to disguise the Paris Opéra.”
“You are making up for Dr. Watson’s attempts at discretion with amazing indiscretion,” murmured James.
“I am dead,” said Sherlock Holmes. “A dead man has little use for discretion.”
James glanced over to where the Prince of Wales was at the center of a laughing, bowing, fawning circle of dandies.
“Since I have neither read nor heard of the story . . . chronicle . . . of your ‘Scandal in Bohemia’ adventure,” he said softly, “I must presume that you reclaimed the blackmailing adventuress’s incriminating photograph for the Prince.”
“I did . . . and in a most clever manner,” said Holmes and laughed out loud. In the noise of the busy restaurant, no one seemed to notice. “And then the woman stole it back from me, leaving a framed portrait of herself in its place.”