Authors: Dan Simmons
Finally Adler said, “Do we talk about us first, Sherlock? Or about this game we find ourselves in?”
“This is no game,” said Holmes in a voice harder and sterner than he’d meant to use.
“Of course not,” said Irene Adler and looked down at her hands folded on the small bag on her lap.
“Let us speak of personal things first,” Holmes said in an infinitely softer tone.
“Very well. Which of us should start?”
“You should, Irene,” said Holmes.
She turned a mock-stern face to him in the dim light. “Why did it take you almost two years to come to America to try to find me?” she demanded.
Holmes felt his face grow flushed. He looked down at her hands. “No one told me that you’d gone back to America. No one told me that you were pregnant. I worked for almost a full year in British theater troupes, looking for you.”
“Idiot,” said Irene Adler.
Holmes could only nod.
“And you practicing and preparing during your entire childhood to become the World’s First and Foremost Consulting Detective,” she said, but this time her tone was lighter, almost bantering.
Holmes nodded again but looked at her now. “I never found you in my time in America, either,” he said, his voice sounding hollow even to his own ear.
She reached with her right hand and laid it on both of his. “That is because as soon as I heard—through the players’ secret telegraph wires—that you had come to New York and Boston, I took the next ship to France.”
“With the baby,” said Holmes in something not quite a whisper.
“Yes.” Her answer had been even quieter.
“When did Colonel Moran take him from you?” asked Holmes.
“When Lucan was four years old,” said Irene Adler. “The day after his fourth birthday.”
“How could you let that . . . that . . . brigand . . .” began Holmes and then fell silent.
“Because of the hold Colonel Moran had over me,” said Adler. “The same hold that Lucan now uses.”
Holmes, forgetting himself, took her by her upper arms, his strong hands then moving to her shoulders, as if he was about to draw her to him . . . or strangle her.
“Irene, you’re the strongest, bravest woman I’ve ever met. How could a cad like Sebastian Moran have such a hold over you that you would surrender your child to him . . .
our
child?” The last two words had emerged as a sort of moan.
“Colonel Moran threatened to assassinate you if I did not do as he wished,” she said tonelessly. “Just as Lucan does now.”
Speechless, Holmes could communicate only by squeezing her arms more tightly. The pressure must have pained her, but she made no effort to pull away.
She turned to him, setting her own hands on his upper arms, until they must have looked to some stranger most like two people consoling one another. “You live a careless life, Sherlock Holmes,” she said fiercely, no hint of apology in her voice. “You always have. That idiot doctor friend of yours—or Conan Doyle, I have no idea which—celebrates and publicizes your little front-parlor detection victories as if you were Achilles. But you sit at your window in plain view. You walk the streets lost in thought, oblivious to almost everything around you. You let the world know your street address and your daily habits. Colonel Moran—or others like him—have not long since murdered you because I’ve done what they want.”
Holmes dropped his hands and sat brooding for a long moment. Finally, “But the child . . .”
“The child is evil,” snapped Irene Adler. “The child was evil at birth.”
Holmes’s head snapped backward as if he’d been slapped. “No child can be evil from birth, for God’s sake. It must take . . . years . . . parenting . . . evil influences . . .”
“You didn’t hold this baby to your breast and watch its first actions,” said Adler in a totally cold voice. “One of his first acts was to pluck the wings off a butterfly I was showing him. And he
enjoyed
it. It was as if I’d given birth to another Coriolanus.”
“But even Coriolanus was shaped by . . .” he stopped.
“His mother,”
cried Irene Adler as if in physical pain. “Volumnia bragged to her hag friends about how her little boy Coriolanus loved to torture animals, give pain to any living thing. But never in the four years that I was with Lucan did I ever give him anything but love and training to love and respect others.” She turned her face away and moved away from him on the bench.
He closed the distance again. “I was going to say that Coriolanus was shaped by warped Roman values,” whispered Sherlock. “That’s always been my understanding of what Shakespeare was trying to say.”
Irene Adler laughed and it was a bitter, sad sound. “Don’t you remember, Sherlock? We met in London during Henry Irving’s troupe’s presentation of
Coriolanus
. I a veteran of theater playing the old hag Volumnia at the advanced age of twenty-two and you an eighteen-year-old understudy, fleeing your first months of schooling in Cambridge, wet behind the ears and everywhere else.”
“I’ve forgotten everything about the play,” said Holmes. “But remembered every other second of our time together.”
She touched his cheek with the backs of her fingers. “You were
so
young, my dear.”
Holmes took her in his arms. She seemed to resist for a second or two and then melted into him. Then she set her hand on his chest and firmly pushed him away.
“Now,” she said, “shall we discuss this not-a-game game we find ourselves in?”
Holmes couldn’t speak for a moment and, when he did, his voice was ragged. “All right.”
“What horrible thing first?” She’d obviously meant her tone to be light, but it came out as choked with emotion as Holmes’s voice.
“The annual typed cards on December six,” he said.
He could tell immediately that she had no idea what he was talking about. She was a consummate actress but Holmes now had decades of experience studying liars’ faces and eyes when they lied. She was not faking her lack of understanding.
“What cards? I put flowers on Clover’s grave every December six—white violets, she loved them—and I’ve sent a few flowers to Henry Adams on that date, but I’ve never included a card.”
“Ned Hooper, Clover’s brother, came to see me in London two years ago—he’s dead now, by the way,” said Holmes. “He offered me two thousand dollars and said he wanted me to solve the mystery of a card that each of the four surviving members of the Five of Hearts receives each December six—and has since December ’eighty-six. It’s typed and always says the same thing . . . ‘She was murdered’.”
Irene Adler stared at him. “That’s barbarous. I would never do that. There’d be no reason for Lucan to do that. No, he never would.”
Holmes nodded. “I didn’t think it was either of you but I owe it to Ned’s memory—and the one-dollar retainer he paid me in eighteen ninety-one—to ask.”
“That was the year that the papers said you died,” Irene Adler said quietly. “In Switzerland, while fighting with some Professor Moriarty whom no one had ever heard of.”
Holmes nodded again.
“I didn’t believe it then,” said Adler. “And I didn’t believe it the next year when Lucan bragged that he’d killed you in Tibet.”
Holmes smiled. “He nearly did. He put three rifle bullets through my back at a distance of almost a mile.”
She seemed startled. “I’d always assumed he was lying. How could you survive three strikes like that from the kind of rifles Lucan uses?”
“I don’t know,” said Holmes. “But let’s talk about Rebecca Lorne.” The words clicked into place like the clack-clock of a bolt-action rifle bringing a live round into the chamber. “Was it for blackmail?”
“Of course,” said Adler.
“Why Clover and Henry Adams?”
“They were rich. She was weak. At the time, in eighteen eighty-five, Lucan needed money for what he had to do in Europe. Blackmailing the Adamses was an obvious way. Clover was so lonely and lost that I became her best friend in two days.”
“But you continued the pretense for seven months,” snapped Holmes.
“After the first days, it was no pretense,” Irene Adler said softly. “I did like Clover. I admired her talent—as a person, as a photographer—far more than her arrogant, self-centered husband ever had. He used every possible chance to make her feel . . .
less
. Less important. Less capable. Less than an equal human being. Have you read his novel
Esther
that came out not long before she died?”
“Yes,” said Holmes.
“It’s obviously a portrait of her . . . of poor Clover . . . and she’s shown to be foolish and inept in her art, foolish in her life, and always dependent upon some merciful
man
for anything she might ever need or reach for in her life. If I’d had a husband who wrote a novel like that about
me
, I would have shot him twice . . . the second bullet to the head to put him out of the misery of where I’d put the first round.”
“Yes,” said Holmes. And smiled this time.
“So you’d asked why I made her a victim,” continued Irene.
Holmes nodded.
“I thought it was the fastest way to get Lucan out of her life,” she said bitterly. “My dear Cousin Clifton. A mere boy.” Her white hands became white fists in the dim light. “A mere boy who was a cancer . . . a cancer which needed thousands of dollars to go back to Europe to murder someone alongside his hero, the great tiger-hunting Colonel Sebastian Moran.”
“How did he . . . Lucan . . . find out about the romantic letter Henry Adams had sent Lizzie Cameron?” asked Holmes. “I presume that was the direction your blackmail took.”
Irene Adler made a noise like a small dog choking. “Of course. That circle of friends was so small and so inbred that even young Lucan knew that there would be scandal just beneath the surface. After I’d become dear friends with Clover, and thus allowed into that tiny little circle of highest-society ladies, Lizzie Cameron herself bragged to me of Henry Adams’s love letter to her. Lucan had said that there must be something, and in the end we didn’t even have to dig. One of Clover’s closest friends—quotation marks all around that phrase—gave us, gave
me
, the deadly dagger with a laugh.”
“Why did you go with Clover to see Lizzie Cameron on her sickbed thirty-six hours before Clover’s death?” asked Holmes.
“I wanted Lizzie to deny that any such letter existed,” said Adler. “I’d asked her, Lizzie, just hours before, to deny it. She finally said she would.”
“And did she?”
“She wouldn’t. She was ill with the flu and all of her darker humours were in full control of her. She teased poor, silly Clover about the existence of the letter, playing dumb about it one minute, obviously acknowledging its existence the next. I almost strangled the woman in her four-posted silken-canopied bed. Clover went home that night certain that she’d so failed her husband Henry—at being his
real wife
as she always put it, she was terrified of sexual intercourse, you see, it was always strange and painful to her—that she decided that everything, including her husband’s cheating attentions to Lizzie Cameron, was
her
fault.”
“I can’t see how driving Clover Adams to suicide could help Lucan or you in any way,” said Holmes. “That’s always been the sticking point of this conundrum.”
“Not a very complicated one,” said Adler. “Lucan had found other funding for his list of assassinations. Steady funding. Funding he has even today. He no longer had to wait for a neurotic woman to help us blackmail her husband.”
“Did Lucan poison Clover Adams?” asked Holmes.
The long silence seemed to make the gathering darkness deeper.
“I don’t know,” said Irene Adler at last. “I know he brought the poison to her bedroom that Sunday morning . . . and the glass from downstairs. Suspecting that he would try something to get rid of her—she knew ‘Cousin Clifton’ too well to be on her guard—I rushed to her house that morning. But she was already dead on the floor. I heard footsteps on the servants’ stairs—Lucan leaving, I believe—but somehow I don’t think he forced the poison down her throat. Or even allowed her to see him, for that matter. It was just the bottle of potassium cyanide that had strangely moved from her photographic laboratory and the mysterious appearance of that single drinking glass that sent her off the edge. Perhaps she took it as a message from her husband . . . or God.” After another silence, “But I was still as complicit in Clover Adams’s death as Lucan was, whatever he did or didn’t do. I even took the glass away in my handbag before I went down to meet Henry Adams returning from his walk.”
“When you say he has steady funding, whom are you speaking of?” said Holmes. “The anarchists?”
Irene Adler laughed. It sounded almost authentic this time. Holmes remembered that she’d always had a beautiful laugh.
“The anarchists have no money to speak of, my darling,” said Irene Adler. “They’re
anarchists
, for God’s sake. Most of them can’t even find work in the factories where their fathers worked they’re so drunk or crazy or lazy.”
“Then who . . .” said Sherlock.
“I saw Lucan on Saturday,” said Irene Adler. “He bragged about following you and that writer you’ve been dragging around with you all through the Chicago World’s Fairgrounds. You were within fifty yards of an entire building at the Fair dedicated to one of the primary companies funding Colonel Moran and Lucan Adler—they provide the list of targets to be assassinated—and you didn’t even peek into the building!”
“Krupp,” Holmes said at last.
“Of
course
.”
Colonel Rice had gone on about how one of the great highlights of the World’s Fair—at least for men and boys—was to be “Krupp’s Baby”, a 250,000-pound cannon so large that it needed its own building, tucked in between the Agriculture Building and the lake. The cannon, built by Fritz Krupp’s Essen Works, was said to be capable of firing a one-ton shell twenty miles and still penetrate three feet of wrought-iron armor plating. Since the building hadn’t been in a sniper’s line of sight with the Administration Building, Holmes had had no interest in it.
“What do they want to come from these random assassinations?” asked Holmes and heard the one-syllable answer in his own mind a split second before Irene Adler spoke it aloud.