Authors: Dan Simmons
The blast of the revolver deafened James.
Instead of hitting Lucan Adler in the chest, where she’d been aiming, the deflected shot struck the young man’s right foot. Lucan lost his balance and fell to the deck, but rolled like some jungle cat and came to one knee with the Mauser shouldered, swinging it their way.
Holmes had begun sprinting toward Lucan before the pistol fired, but James saw in an instant that he wouldn’t be able to cover the distance in time.
Cursing in pain as he knelt there, but still holding the rifle with absolute confidence, Lucan Adler aimed and fired.
James felt the bullet buzz past his right ear and Irene Adler cried out and fell face forward. He had the presence of mind to look for the pistol, but she must have been lying on it.
The wounded, cursing Lucan started to swing the rifle barrel at Holmes but Holmes had closed the gap and kicked it aside. The heavy rifle went rattling across the paved promenade.
Lucan had time to crouch and suddenly there was a flat, deadly blade protruding from between the knuckles of his right hand. His right sleeve was torn and James could see the elegant mechanism that had thrust the blade forward. He swung at Holmes’s bare belly and, although the detective arched his back like a bow, James could see blood fly.
Lucan Adler turned, leaped over the fence, grabbed the bicycle grips, cut the restraining string with one swing of his bladed hand, and began plummeting out of sight down the long guy wire.
Sherlock Holmes had not paused a second. With his blood still misting the air, he ran at the fence, jumped to its top, and leaped out into two hundred feet of open space.
T
he unseen crowd of a hundred thousand people roared as if applauding Sherlock Holmes’s suicide. Running toward the south fence beside the searchlight, Henry James saw, in his peripheral vision, huge flags unfurling from the Agriculture and other giant buildings, the huge Statue of the Republic in the Lagoon directly south of him finally dropping its veil, fountains leaping into life. Part of him realized that President Cleveland had lived long enough to depress the gold telegraph key on its velvet pillow.
Later, James had the thought that any true gentleman would have first checked the condition of Mrs. Irene Adler Lorne Baxter, and helped her if he could. But at that moment Henry James didn’t give the least goddamn about the condition of Lucan Adler’s mother.
He reached the fence at the southeast corner of the building and gasped.
* * *
Holmes hadn’t been able to leap far enough to get his hands on the rubber-tipped bicycle handlebar. Instead, one hand caught Lucan Adler’s belt, the other hand gripped his shirt collar.
The collar came off and the shirt ripped down the seam, even as Lucan began to twist his body toward Holmes. With Lucan’s sleeve torn open, James now saw the knife mechanism strapped on his forearm work again—slipping a wide, flat blade between the assassin’s knuckles.
Holmes swung himself around the already turning killer and began clambering up Lucan’s front like a monkey on a man-shaped climbing bar. His right hand now had a grip around Lucan’s neck, pulling the younger man’s head down like a lover enforcing a kiss, even while his left shifted quickly from Lucan’s belt to grab his right wrist, arresting the blade. But not quickly enough to avoid another wound. James saw blood mist the air again . . . Holmes’s blood.
Henry James looked around wildly. Part of his mind had recorded the sound of the elevator going down and now it was arriving at this level again, but that meant nothing to James. Irene Adler was still lying face-down, possibly dead.
James saw the Mauser rifle. He quickly picked it up—dear Christ it was heavy—and laid it across the top of the metal fence to steady himself while he tried to look through the telescopic sight.
Holding the wood under the barrel tightly, he worked the well-oiled and expertly assembled bolt. A complete bullet—James could see the lead points with little X’s gouged into them—ejected and landed under the German searchlight.
For all James knew, that was the last live round in the rifle. He didn’t have time to check. Nor did he wonder, as anyone who knew firearms would have, just how far off true the telescopic sight had been knocked in all its being thrown here and there.
For a moment nothing made sense and then, fuzzy but solid in the circle, there were Holmes and Lucan spinning as the single-wheeled mechanism flew down the cable. Lucan’s white shirt was torn to tatters and covered with blood—Holmes’s blood, James realized. Holmes’s bare skin was as white, torn, and blood-spattered as his opponent’s shirt.
The only reason they hadn’t reached the bottom of this long guy-wired slide was that Lucan’s wheel mechanism hadn’t been designed for so much weight. It lurched along at high speed for thirty or forty feet, then caught, almost stopped, then lurched down and forward again.
The two men were fighting more like animals than men. When they were still moving quickly, Holmes grabbed Lucan’s right wrist and forced the metal release for the knuckle knife up against the wire. Sparks flew. The blade mechanism bent into itself and was now of little use in the fighting.
Lucan switched his right hand to the handlebar and began to pound on Holmes’s lower head and shoulders with his free hand, even as Holmes locked his legs around Lucan Adler and clambered up his bloody front. The two men butted heads, bit at each other. Lucan used the fingers of his left hand to claw at Holmes’s eyes even as Holmes freed his left hand long enough to swing its wedge into Lucan’s throat.
James realized that sweat had clouded his vision. He wiped at his right eye and found the two men in the circular scope again. Their pulley had slowed and they twisted while they fought, bit, kicked, and gouged, but then the wheel seemed to free itself and began falling again toward the still distant beacon island in Lake Michigan.
James saw whiteness fill the telescopic sight, thought that it was— might be—the back of Lucan Adler. He held his breath and squeezed the trigger. He’d not had the butt of the Mauser pressed solidly to his shoulder and now the recoil knocked him backwards from his half-crouch and firmly onto his rear end.
* * *
A hundred and thirty feet down the two-hundred-forty foot guy wire, Holmes had grasped the handlebar and pulled himself up to Lucan’s level. The two men were now face to face, Lucan grinning wildly, as they fought with elbows, fists, head butts, and knees.
Lucan had been working on the knife mechanism and now he had the blade firmly between his knuckles again, his left hand locked firmly on the bicycle bar. Holmes’s left-handed grip on the bar was more tenuous and left him unable to defend the bare left side of his upper body.
“Die, God damn you!” screamed Lucan Adler, bringing the blade around in a thrust that would reach Holmes’s heart.
Holmes said something Lucan couldn’t make out—it might have been “God forgive me” or “God forgive you”—but whatever the words were, they meant nothing now that the killing blow was already in motion.
Suddenly a bullet ripped through the narrow space between the two men, tore a furrow through Lucan’s upper right arm and shirt, and ripped its way across the back of Holmes’s dropping right hand.
The impact was just enough to turn Lucan’s dagger thrust to Holmes’s heart into a razor-sharp slashing motion that cut through flesh and skidded across a rib.
Holmes pulled the tiny lemon-squeezer cyclist’s pistol from his right trouser pocket, pressed it hard into Lucan’s belly—high, at the diaphragm just below where the assassin’s heavily muscled flesh met bone—squeezed the pistol’s handgrip tightly to release its silly lemon-squeezer safety, and fired twice into Lucan Adler’s body.
* * *
James realized that Drummond and some of his gray-suited men had run up to him while two others were checking on the still unconscious Irene Adler. Drummond heard the two pistol shots, but was sure it was a double-echo of his own rifle shot.
Drummond helped him to his feet just as Lucan Adler, still seventy feet in the air, opened his arms and fell away. Holmes was clinging weakly to the pulley device’s handlebars as it picked up speed toward the buoy post.
Lucan fell gracefully, his arms fully extended in what James could only see as a Christlike pose, his head arched back as if he were looking at the sky. James was sure that he would reach the water, but at the last instant, the back of Lucan Adler’s head hit the concrete sea wall with a sound that could be heard all the way to where James and the other men stood numbly, dumbly.
Then James saw Holmes either let go or lose his grip and he dropped at least forty feet—but to the water just short of the concrete slabs that supported the beacon-light post. James, Drummond, and two of the agents leaned forward and strained to see if Holmes came to the surface. Drummond looked through his binoculars and then handed them to James.
Holmes hadn’t come up. He hadn’t come up. He still hadn’t come up. But suddenly Holmes could be seen weakly pulling himself up and over the gunwales of the power boat that Lucan Adler had anchored there. The bloodied Holmes lay on his back on the bottom of the boat and did not move again.
Drummond took back the binoculars and stared. “I think he’s breathing. Here come the boats.”
From behind the mass of the S.S.
Michigan
warship came roaring eight police boats—three belonging to the Chicago Police Force and five belonging to the Columbian Guard. They all slowed and centered on the boat where Holmes lay bleeding. James saw a man with a doctor’s bag step into the blood-washed boat.
Then James had to sit down. On the pavement. Sit and try to breathe.
Drummond crouched next to him and lifted the Mauser with his left hand while patting James on the back with his right.
James shoved the rifle away from him. He knew he would never touch one again as long as he lived. Once again he thought of his brothers Wilkie and Bob, who had carried such death with them into the War and, even after their terrible wounds and pain and in the presence of real Death, eventually rose to carry and use their rifles again. He thought of his cousin Gus, so beautiful that day in the drawing class, whose pale and freckled body was now rotted in mold somewhere under Virginia dirt after a Confederate sniper had expertly done exactly what James had just tried to do. He shook his head.
The joy of
dramatic engagement
that had affected him like too much strong American whiskey at the Chicago stockyards had drained completely out of him now. It was not worth being a fictional character—or a real person, he realized—if ending someone’s life through violence was part of the role. It was not civilized. It was not right. It was not Henry James. Nor was it honest to the hard-earned truth of his art.
“Lucan Adler’s body hasn’t come up yet,” said one of the agents still standing at the railing.
Drummond crouched next to the seated writer and repeated that to James as if James had become hard of hearing.
“I . . . don’t . . .
care
,” said James and lowered his head to his raised knees.
W
ho knew that the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 had its own infirmary? Actually, it was a well-stocked little hospital with squadrons of nurses and five full-time doctors on duty, one of them a woman.
Sherlock Holmes was the seventh person ever brought to the sparkling new infirmary—four women and two men had fainted during the crush and heat of the Opening Ceremony—and the two doctors checking him over (neither one a woman) decided to ask a surgeon more skilled in dealing with thoracic wounds to come down from Chicago General and give his opinion. He came—in a police wagon with a siren wailing and horses nearly out of control—and pronounced the wounds simple enough to deal with. No major organs had been punctured or slashed.
Holmes received stitches over his lower abdomen, his upper belly, his right ribs, his right wrist—which had a strange but shallow bullet-furrow in it—and on his scalp and back. He had a concussion, serious contusions around the head and shoulders, and it turned out that he’d also broken two fingers on his right hand and his right wrist in the “scuffling”, as doctors who didn’t know the details of the Opening Day’s incident called it.
Few people ever did hear about this “incident”. Neither Daniel Burnham, Director Davis, Mayor Harrison, nor President Cleveland wanted word of an assassin’s presence or violent death on Opening Day known. Almost none of the crowd had seen the incident and most of those few who had thought that it had been a madcap part of the Opening Ceremony. The press was not told about it.
Henry Cabot Lodge’s guests didn’t mind staying two more days at the Fair until Mr. Holmes would be released; it turned out that the concussion was what kept him in bed the longest. On the third day he left with his torso tightly bound with bandages and his right arm in what he thought was an unnecessary sling, but movement without it hurt his wrist enough that he decided to keep it on for the time being.
Both Andrew L. Drummond and Henry James had visited Holmes in the infirmary, and James was there when Drummond told the detective that Irene Adler was in a room on the floor above him. A room guarded 24-hours a day by two armed Columbian Guardsmen.
“How is she?” asked James. He had been sure she’d been lying dead up there on the promenade deck.
“The slug passed through her shoulder without breaking her collarbone or hitting any major artery,” said Drummond. “The lady is very lucky. One bone was nicked but she should heal quickly enough.”
“Is she going to face charges?” asked Holmes from his hospital bed.
“Absolutely,” said Drummond.
“Charges of what, exactly?” asked Holmes.
“Of . . . of . . . she was . . . of . . . God
damn
it!” said Drummond.