The Fifth Heart (38 page)

“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.”

Holmes looked directly into James’s eyes, the detective’s fathomless gaze meeting James’s frightened but deeply curious and unblinking gray gaze in return.

“Trust me that I have more reasons for finding Lucan Adler than I can share at this time,” said Holmes. “He needs to be put to death. But I hope to speak with him first.”

H
enry Adams awoke in his own bed in his Lafayette Square mansion and for a moment he was disoriented. The air seemed too cool. The bed too familiar. The morning light too soft. And the floor was not moving.

Adams had enjoyed his last two months of lounging in Havana with a friend, then spending a fortnight at Senator Don Cameron’s place at Coffin Point on St. Helena Island, and—most of all—he’d enjoyed “geologizing on the coral reefs” with the zoologist Alexander Agassiz, son of the famous geologist Louis Agassiz, on Agassiz’s comfortable yacht
Wild Duck
.

But now he was home—a place he’d mostly preferred not to be in the seven years since his wife’s suicide—and after his bath he found his clothes laid out for him by his own valet rather than by one of Don Cameron’s people.

Having been so emotionally solitary in the past seven years, Adams had expected to feel some sense of relief when his shay—he’d been met at the station, as requested, only by his driver—had pulled up in front of his home on H Street next to the Hays’ similar mansion fronting on Sixteenth Street, if for no other reason than his constant daily socializing, first with Phillips in Havana, then with the Camerons, then with Agassiz, and finally with the Camerons yet again, would be at an end.

But instead he’d felt a wall of depression wash over him as he approached the familiar arches of his front door.

Clover hadn’t died in this house, of course, or he’d never have returned to it. They’d been planning to move in on New Year’s Day 1886 after the two years of elaborate work inside and out was finished but Clover had drunk her developing-chemicals poison on December six.

But the damned cross she’d insisted on, without his approval, was there above the elaborately scrolled stonework above the arches.

He and Clover had been at Beverly Farms that July when the cross—the damned cross—had been added to the façade of the stonework. Henry had asked his friend from the State Department Library, Ted Dwight, to oversee that important bit of stonework and engraving and he’d written to Dwight—“If you see workmen carving a Christian emblem, remonstrate with them like a father.”

The place between the windows above the main pillars needed something decorative, insisted their architect, H. H. Richardson, so Henry had suggested to Clover that a peacock be carved there since—to his way of thinking—the entire new mansion complete with its beautiful art, furniture, and contents was a way of showing off for a Washington society he and Clover had snubbed at the best of times. Richardson had argued for a lion, roaring and rampant. Perhaps, Henry Adams thought, because the huge architect had been forced to put up with so many of Henry’s roars and complaints over the course of building this impressive mausoleum for the living.

But it turned out that, secretly (from Henry’s point-of-view), Clover had ordered an elaborate stone cross to be carved into the brick space there between the windows. By the time Adams at Beverly Farms had heard the news of the cross, the stonework was a done deed. It had bothered him deeply. Neither he nor Clover were religious in any way. They’d often made light fun of their less-than-pious Washington acquaintances who’d managed to work Christian symbols into the stonework or interior carvings of their expensive new homes.

When Ted Dwight had written to inform him that the cross had been added by artisans under Richardson’s supervision at Mrs. Adams’s insistence, Henry had written what he hoped had been a lighthearted-sounding letter in which he said—“Your account of the cross and the carving fills my heart with sadness and steeps my lips with cocaine.” And he’d added, “Never fear, Ted, we shall plaster over it with cement soon enough.”

But of course, they never had. So he’d also written to Dwight—“It’s a done thing, a
fait accompli
in stone, so I can neither revolt nor complain, though the whole thing seems to me bad art and bad taste. I have protested in vain and must henceforth hold my tongue.” But he’d also asked Ted not to tell anyone else about the cross yet, since “Washingtonians chatter so much that one is forced to deny them food for gossip.”

Goodness knows that Clover had provided them all with years of food for gossip within six months of that cross going up—she a December suicide, lying dead on the carpet of their living room at the Little White House at 1607 H Street.

The cross, rising between two arches, was a backdrop for a carved medallion showing off a slightly indefinable winged beast. Certainly not Pegasus. Not quite a griffon, nor a dragon—though Adams had wished it might have been. Whatever Clover had in mind when she ordered Richardson to add that design remained a mystery to this day, but even in the summer and autumn of that fateful 1885, Henry had written to friends that the “d— —d cross and its winged creature was prophetic of the future” and that they filled him “with terror.”

They still did. He had no idea, save for his peripatetic absence at the mansion being more common than his solitary presence in the past seven years, why he hadn’t gotten rid of the cross and winged monstrosity after Clover’s death.

To Adams, that entire horrible year had been filled with omens. That spring of 1885, when the minister was trying to impress upon Clover—with the utmost care, sympathy, and gentleness—that her father was indeed dying, Adams had heard her say, “No, no, no . . . everything seems unreal. I hardly know what we are saying or why we are here. And if it seems so unreal, it must be. Or at least
I
must be.”