Authors: Dan Simmons
James took two deep breaths and walked down the cul-de-sac toward the warehouse, silently hoping with every pace that the heavy sliding doors wouldn’t open as he approached. What if Moriarty and the three ruffians stepped out just as he reached the door? One could hardly claim to be lost when one has deliberately walked the better part of a city block down a dead-end alley.
The sliding door did not open.
James stepped to the right of it and stopped in front of the solid wood door. Setting his hand on the iron knob, he prayed that it would be locked. It should be locked. It seemed more like an office door than a door to the open, noisy space Moriarty and the thugs had stepped into. When he ascertained that it was locked, James could turn about, leave at a brisk but dignified pace, and know that he’d done everything in his power to find out what Moriarty had been up to.
The door was unlocked.
James opened it further, tensed to turn and flee if he made a noise or if he saw anyone.
It was completely dark inside. The slit of gray light showed only a narrow staircase rising steeply straight ahead. There was a thick film of dust on the steps, so the stairway must not have been regularly used.
James stepped in and let his eyes adjust to the darkness as best they could.
The narrow stairway rose with what seemed an alarming steepness between two dark, moldering walls. The upper part of the steep staircase was invisible in the darkness—it could be missing for all James could tell from here—but once his eyes had adapted, he realized that there was the faintest glow from a gas lamp on the wall at the top of these stairs.
He began tip-toeing up, trying not to make even the slightest sound, dreading the inevitable squeak and creak of the old steps, but he soon realized that at this rate, the climb to the top would take him ten minutes or more. Besides, the steps were solid. They did not squeak or creak. Perhaps the dust helped muffle his steps.
James walked normally—mostly normally, he realized, since he was still putting most of the weight on the toes of his shoes—and when the staircase was at its darkest, he put his hands flat on the walls on either side. There was no railing. He felt each step gingerly with the toe of his right foot before putting any weight on it. Then he was moving into the tepid oval of light from the gas lamp above.
Nothing. Just a narrow landing with the flickering light. No doors or windows of any sort. James looked to his left and realized that a second and equally steep flight of stairs rose high to another dim light.
All in all, there were four such long, steep flights of stairs and three dusty, poorly lit landings before he reached the top. Here there was a door to his right. The top half was glass and the glass was glazed. James looked down; his were the only footsteps in the dust here. He tried the cracked-porcelain doorknob.
The door was locked. James used all the strength he could muster, even putting his shoulder to the door, but it remained locked. He knew that he could use his walking stick to break the glass and gain entry that way, but he did not entertain that thought for more than a second. The sound of smashing glass might bring Professor Moriarty’s entire mob down on him.
He’d turned and was about to start his steep descent back into the darkness when he noticed something on the left wall, the wall opposite the door. Or rather, he
heard
something from there.
It was the indistinct murmuring as from a loud crowd—perhaps an audience before the beginning of a play. But even the murmurs and half-heard words were coarse. If it was an audience, the play would be a bawdy cockney melodrama.
There was a rectangle in the wooden wall. James crouched low and saw the large wooden flanges near the top corners. He swiveled them to a horizontal position and the rectangular aperture fell back into his hands. The noise was quite audible now and there was light coming up through what seemed to be a floor. James pressed the trap door shut, secured it with a single flange, walked to the gas lamp, and turned the gas off.
Just enough light came through the frosted glass of the doorway across the landing to allow James to find the trap door and its flanges again. Loosening it with exaggerated care, he lowered it to the floor and thrust his head and shoulders into the aperture.
There was no floor, he soon saw, only large, broad beams—the one in front of him at least twenty inches wide—extending out over a great drop. The broad beams were stationed about fifteen feet apart and five or six feet below these major support beams were smaller rafters, mere two-by-four pieces of lumber set narrow-side up. Some sort of cage wire, the kind James associated with chicken coops, was attached to these smaller rafters. Attached to that wire near the walls here was a false floor of some sort of flimsy cardboard or canvas. There was something white, like snow, covering most of this canvas in small heaps and dunes. He was, he realized, in the high attic space of the huge warehouse that Moriarty and the other men had entered.
But about ten feet out, directly ahead of him, the false floor ended and light and noise rose up from below. James heard a deep voice trying to shout the crowd into some sort of attention.
If he were to see anything, James would have to crawl further out on the beam. He set his walking stick in the corner of the landing and began crawling on his hands and knees.
His plan had been to stop before he was over the open drop, but he realized he couldn’t see well from that position, so he lowered himself to the broad beam and kept crawling until only his knees remained in the darkness behind him.
Far below him was a huge space with sawdust on the wooden floor. He must be at least sixty feet above the mobs of men down there, perhaps seventy feet. For a second he clung to the beam with knees and his fingernails, letting a surge of vertigo pass, but there was little chance of his being seen by anyone down there. The space below was brightly illuminated by electric arc lamps in metal shades, but the lamps hung down from the lower rafters on long steel rods. Anything above them would be just a dark blur to the men in the light.
James lay flat, tried to control his breathing, and attempted to make sense of what he was seeing.
There were more than a hundred men sitting on barrels and crates in several distinct groups. To James, they all looked like purse-snatchers and highway thieves, but they clustered in definite groups—tribes—and one group of about thirty men looked more like simple working men. He realized that this group was speaking mostly in German. The other ruffians were bellowing in gutter American English.
All of the groups were facing a raised platform. James saw an abandoned metal scale at the back of this platform, realized that the “snow” he’d seen in the canvas below the rafters further back had been chicken feathers, and decided that the warehouse had once been the final stopping place for thousands of chickens to be processed. That also explained some of the stench that he’d ascribed to the unwashed mobs of men below.
There were two men on the raised platform. Professor James Moriarty was at the rear of the ad hoc stage, sitting in a high-backed chair. The other man, cigar in mouth and a derby cocked at a ruffian’s angle on his squarish head, was the one shouting for silence and attention.
Finally the mobs of men quieted down and focused their attention on the speaker.
“Well, all the important gangs are here and no one’s killed anyone yet,” shouted the thickset man on the platform. “That’s
something
, at least. We’ve already shown progress.”
No one laughed. Someone in the batch of German-speaking working men was translating for the others.
“Culpepper ain’t here,” shouted someone in the mob.
“Culpepper’s dead!” shouted someone else. “Somebody dropped ’im thirty or forty feet onto that fat head of ’is.”
This did bring laughter. The man on the platform waved them into silence again. “Well, while Culpepper’s people work out who’s going to take his place, we’ll go ahead with our project here and give that gang the word later.”
“
What
project?” shouted a fat man near the front. “All we heard was big talk about lots and lots of boodle and not one fucking specific.”
Before the man on the platform could speak again, a man in the front row of the German-speaking group cried, “Why are we brought here with these . . .
criminals?
”
The other hundred or so men now roared with laughter, some hooting “these . . .
criminals
” back at the German. Several others snicked open their seemingly ubiquitous gravity-blade knives.
The man standing waved them into some sort of order again. “As you’ll hear in a minute, we need the anarchists for . . .”
“Socialists!” cried the German working man who’d just spoken.
“These socialist anarchists,” corrected the man on the platform, “for our plan. They’re necessary. Professor James Moriarty will explain.”
The big man nodded to Moriarty and took his own seat on the platform as the professor slowly stood and took measured steps toward the front of the platform.
“Gentlemen,” began Moriarty, and something about his sunken-eyed skeletal presence brought a deeper silence onto the entire room full of men, “none of you has ever seen me before, but you all know my name. In the last two and a half years, my planning has made more money for each of your . . . organizations . . . than you’ve ever made before.”
There came a low rumble that James realized was one of agreement and approval.
Moriarty held up two fingers. Silence came down like a curtain.
“In the next month,” continued the professor, his voice soft but carrying to every corner of the huge space, “you and I shall make more money . . . more of a true fortune . . . than has ever been realized in the long history of criminal endeavor.”
The silence extended. Finally a shrill, doubting voice shouted, “How?”
“Precisely at noon on the first of May,” said Moriarty, “the President of the United States is going to push a button that shall start every electrical device at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. A hundred thousand people may be watching him. One second after he does that, President Cleveland will be assassinated—shot by a high-velocity rifle wielded by the world’s greatest assassin.”
Somehow the silence deepened.
“In the next fifteen minutes,” continued Moriarty, “the Vice-President of the United States as well as its Secretary of State and Attorney General will also be assassinated. Their demise is expertly planned and guaranteed. Within the next hour, the mayors and chiefs of police of Chicago, Washington, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and more than eight capital cities in Europe will also be assassinated.”
“How does that earn us one single damned penny?” shouted someone at the back of one of the clusters.
Moriarty smiled. Even from his angle so high above, Henry James could see that terrible smile and it made him shake and cling harder to his beam.
“Our anarchist . . . socialist . . . friends across this country and Europe,” continued Moriarty, holding a hand out toward the German-speaking working men, “will, upon a precise signal, descend upon the police forces in Chicago, Washington, Boston, London, Berlin . . . all the cities I have mentioned and more. The police will be ambushed at predetermined places and times. Our anarchist friends will be better armed than ever before—with rifles as well as pistols, large quantities of dynamite as well as grenades—and the timing shall be as precise as I described. This one hour on the first of May, starting with the public execution of the chief executive of the United States of America, will make Haymarket Square look like the tiny, insignificant rehearsal it was.”
Suddenly James had a terrible urge to sneeze. The chicken feathers behind him on the canvas, others littering the beams above and beside him. He squeezed his nose shut and prayed.
“Where do we . . .” asked one man from the crowd below, his voice low, almost disbelieving.
“Where do you come in?” Moriarty finished for him. Again that cadaver’s smile. Above his squeezing hand, James could see men in the front rows seem to flinch away from the professor.
“When the heads of these serpents of oppressive governments are severed,” said Moriarty. “Cut off . . .” he repeated for the least intelligent among his audience. “With mayors and police chiefs and federal officials murdered, there will be nationwide chaos. And amidst that chaos, you do what you do best . . . you loot. You plunder.” He paused and his tongue licked out like a snake’s. “But not randomly. And not with the usual failure of aforethought. No, you will be looting the finest homes in New York and Chicago and Washington and Boston and all the other cities. The fattest banks. The richest federal and state gold depositories. You will be looting according to a plan I have drawn up and will soon share with you . . . a plan that is foolproof.”
Random talking turned into a roar of approval and excitement.
“It’ll be like the fucking New York draft riots only with no fucking army coming in to shut it down,” shouted one man.
James remembered the draft riots in 1863. Not long after Gettysburg. When the army draft was started in New York City—it had been volunteers up to that time—the street gangs and mobs, mostly Irish, had risen up in civil insurrection that had gone on for days. The homes of some of New York’s richest families had been invaded, women raped, money and paintings and furniture stolen. Entire blocks had been burned down. One Irish gang, for the fun of it, had burned down an orphanage for black children, killing several of them.
“It shall be the New York draft riots times one thousand,” said Moriarty over the noise. “And you are correct . . . this time there will be no U.S. Army sent from battlefields to save the beleaguered and outgunned local police and militia. The spoils shall be . . . yours.”
He turned and went back to his seat.
Suddenly, over the roar of excitement, a man with a shotgun leaped out of his seat and pointed with his free hand upwards, directly toward where Henry James lay cringing and trying to make himself smaller on his beam.