Authors: Dan Simmons
“Well, keep a good guard on her,” said Holmes. “She’s a dangerous woman.”
* * *
Henry James had decided that he was sailing on the
United States
from New York to Europe, probably to England but possibly all the way to Genoa from whence he could travel to Florence and then north to join his brother William’s family in Lucerne. Over James’s loud and sincere objections, the Lodges and the Camerons decided that they would go home by way of New York, dropping Harry off—perhaps actually seeing him off at the pier—and staying a week or so to allow the wives and Helen to do some serious shopping while the men had some serious conversations with their Wall Street friends and brokers.
In Buffalo, New York, they had a three-hour layover as a new engine was attached to their private train, and that gave everyone time for luncheon at a decent restaurant there and to stretch their legs.
James returned early and alone to the personal carriage, and one of the valets who helped him said, “There is a gentleman waiting in your compartment to see you, Mr. James.”
“What the devil is he doing
in
my compartment?” snapped James.
“He specifically asked to wait there, sir,” said the valet, his face crimson with shame. “He said that he knew you, sir. He said that it was vitally important for him to talk to you as soon as you returned, sir. I apologize if I did wrong by allowing him in your private compartment.”
James whisked that away with a movement of his hand, but he was not pleased. Not pleased at all.
James had stepped into his small but luxurious compartment and closed the door behind him before he realized that it was almost as dark as night in the room. Someone had pulled down both the lighter and darker shades over his compartment’s windows. It took James a second to see the man sitting in the easy chair—the chair in the corner near the lamp sconce, the chair James used for reading—and another second to register just who the man was.
Professor James Moriarty. The dim light showed the overhang of that luminous, deathly brow, the thin white lips, the cadaverous cheeks and white sticks of hair sticking out over his vulpine ears. The tongue kept darting in its reptilian manner over the dried lips. The nails on the long, white fingers were inches long, curved, and yellowed with age and evil.
“We meet at lassst, Mr. Henry Jamesss,” hissed Moriarty and stood up.
Lacking even his walking stick with which to fight, James flung open his compartment door when a too-familiar voice behind him said, “You’re not leaving so quickly, are you James?”
James spun around.
Moriarty flung up the shades until the compartment was flooded with light. Then he carefully plucked off his long, yellow fingernails, one by one. Then he removed all his teeth, changing the shape of his face. Next the tall man clawed at his own face, pulling off pieces of forehead, cheekbone, nose and chin and dropping the fragments on a towel set out for the purpose. The rest of the forehead and bald pate came off in one piece, but with unpleasant ripping sounds.
Henry James stood there and watched silently while Holmes used some sort of cream and tweezers to remove the rest of “Professor Moriarty’s” ears, face, chin, and neck. All the detritus piled up on the large towel atop James’s dresser.
“You don’t have anything to say about my greatest performance?” asked Holmes. He used James’s mirror to brush his hair back into place and then he put his broken right wrist back into the black sling.
“Why?” asked James.
Holmes grinned and rubbed his hands together while ignoring the sling. “My brother Mycroft and I have been building this evil genius, Professor Moriarty, for almost five years now, James. First it was just the rumor of him in Dr. Watson’s little fictions. Then actual appearances.”
“What about
The Dynamics of an Asteroid
?” asked James. “It’s real. I’ve seen the book.”
“Very real,” said Holmes. “And mathematically accurate . . . or so they tell me. My brother Mycroft and his old tutor at Christ Church, the don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, did the maths for ‘Professor Moriarty’s’ mathematical masterpiece.”
“And Moriarty’s presence at actual astrophysical conferences, as in Leipzig?” asked James.
“All unappreciated performances by yours truly,” laughed Holmes. “But years ago I discovered something very interesting—if one takes extra efforts to look repulsive, to smell repulsive, and to behave in a repulsive manner, other people take far less close notice of you.”
“Why?” asked James, his voice even more tired than before. “Why this elaborate play-acting?”
“As I said, more than five years of elaborate play-acting,” Holmes said softly, sitting on the arm of James’s reading chair. James crossed the compartment and sat on the bed. His face was expressionless. Outside, others were returning from their dining and excursions in Buffalo.
“Moriarty brought regular criminals into a true network of crime,” said Holmes. “As Moriarty, I guided them into masterpieces of criminal endeavor—half a million pounds in scrip from the Second Reserve Bank in London,
over
a million pounds in pure gold bullion from the Berne Gold Depository, hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Farmers’ Trust Bank in Kansas City, five hundred million lire from Rome’s Central . . .”
“All right, all right,” interrupted James. “So I’m sitting and talking to a felon. Someone who’s created successful criminal networks and robberies in America, England, and on the Continent for five years now. Why are you still free?”
“All the brilliant Moriarty triumphs were orchestrated through Mycroft and Whitehall, the local constabularies, and the local banks, depositories, whatever,” said Holmes. “The stolen scrip turned out to be the highest quality Her Majesty’s Government could counterfeit, and by tracking it we traced a diagram of more than a dozen criminal mobs in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, even Cambridge . . .”
“What about the gold?” said James.
“The criminals had their gold verified by experts,” said Holmes. “But Mycroft and his friends took no chances.
We
provided the experts.”
“What about the anarchists?” asked James. “Remember, I was at your Washington meeting of thugs and socialists.”
Holmes shook his head in what seemed to be admiration. “And I shall forever admire your courage and initiative in doing so,” said the detective. “I simply could not tell you about our plans when you shared this . . . vital information . . . with me.”
“Plans?”
“On May first, in twenty-three cities in nine nations, the police and authorities have rounded up criminals and anarchists pledged to destroy their societies.”
“And what will they be charged with?” asked James, putting only a fraction of the contempt he felt into the sarcasm in his tone. “Loitering as a group? Unseemly appearance in public?”
“Ninety-five percent of the criminals we’ve enlisted and who gathered for the Big Riots and Big Hauls on May first had warrants out for them already,” said Sherlock Holmes. “Many in more than one country. For the anarchists, those who showed up at the designated places with bombs and guns will be charged immediately, the rest put on a watch list.”
“So you . . . and your brilliant brother Mycroft . . . invented Professor James Moriarty, went to great pains to give him a believable mathematical background, turned him into the Napoleon of Crime, and then had the fictional villain kill you at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, to free you up, I presume, to spend three years running around in your little Moriarty disguise enlisting burglars and anarchists.”
“Yes,” said Holmes. “That is about it. I did ask for six months of my own time after my death at Reichenbach Falls so I could visit Tibet and ask some questions of the Dalai Lama. But that became a rather longer stay due to young Lucan’s skill with a rifle.”
“Three bullets through you,” Henry James said softly. “I saw the size of those rounds . . . cartridges . . . bullets . . . whatever you call them, when I worked the bolt-action of that Mauser and one ejected. It was huge. How could you not have died?”
“Perhaps I did,” said Holmes.
“To hell with this metaphysical tommyrot you’ve been shoveling onto me since we met,” snapped James, standing suddenly. “You can go spend the rest of your life . . . if it is a life . . . asking yourself and everyone you meet if you’re real. Sooner or later some drunk in some pub smelling of urine and sweat will give you a definitive answer.”
“I’ve already received a good answer,” Holmes said softly. “Just a few days ago.”
James said nothing.
“Have you ever heard of singing yourself into existence?” asked Holmes. “Or others singing someone—perhaps you—into existence by telling stories about them? Passing the stories along? Is that what you’re doing with your writing, Henry James . . . singing yourself into greater existence every day you work at your craft?”
James ignored all that twaddle. “Why,” he said sharply, “were you and a bunch of thugs at the central Chicago railway station that Saturday morning when I was trying to get to New York?”
“Looking for you, James. And the ‘thugs’ were some of Colonel Rice’s men he loaned me . . . there were too many carriages for me to check in the short time before your scheduled train left.”
“Why were you, as Professor Moriarty, looking for me when I was trying to get out of all this . . . leave this fever dream . . . and go home to England?”
Holmes stood. “I was going to show you my Moriarty disguise that morning and ask you not to leave yet. To see our shared mystery through.”
“Shared mystery,” repeated James, pouring scorn into every syllable. “You never even solved poor dead Ned Hooper’s question of who sends those typed cards every December six. ‘She was murdered’, remember?”
“The game’s not over yet,” said Holmes. His bandaged right hand and broken wrist obviously were hurting him and he shifted his arm in its black sling.
“Do you want to know what I think about your precious game?” asked Henry James.
“I do, very much, yes,” said Holmes.
Henry James had never done this in his life, not even as a boy wrestling with William or Wilkie, not even at his angriest, but now he turned his right hand into the most solid fist he could and hit the Great Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes on his pointed chin as hard as he could.
Holmes flew backward onto the bed, totally surprised. When he could sit up, he used his good left hand to rub his jaw. “I deserved that, I guess,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, James. Especially since I’ve come to think of you as a friend and I really have no friends.”
James turned and left his own compartment and walked forward through carriages until he reached the ladies’ common area where he sat and listened to them for a while, pretending to be the tame cat that he often longed to be.
* * *
Holmes waited until a stop in Albany where John Hay and most of the others got out to stretch their legs before he approached Clara Hay, who had stayed behind with one of her headaches.
“May I speak to you privately, Mrs. Hay?”
She smiled wanly and touched her temple. “I have a bursting headache right now, Mr. Holmes. Perhaps later?”
“Now is a better time, Mrs. Hay,” said Holmes and walked into her compartment and sat on a straight-backed chair.
“Well, I’ll call for some tea,” said Clara Hay. When the serving girl hurried in with a tray of hot tea and plates of scones and biscuits, Holmes said, “You may step out now and close the door behind you, Sally.”
Shocked at the man in Mrs. Hay’s compartment giving her orders, Sally looked to Clara Hay to see what to do. Mrs. Hay also looked shocked, or at least nonplussed, but she nodded for Sally to leave. Then she sat in her overcushioned embroidering chair, about as far away from Holmes as she could get in a train compartment. Even a luxury train compartment.
“What is it, Mr. Holmes?” she asked in a tiny voice. “Shouldn’t John be here to be part of this discussion?”
“No,” said Holmes. He picked up his cup of tea and saucer, added a bit of cream, and drank the steaming liquid. Clara Hay remained very, very still and watched him as if she had found herself in a room with a rattlesnake.
“I know that you typed and delivered all the ‘She was murdered’ cards, Clara,” said Holmes. “You should probably stop doing that now.”
“That is the most offensive and ridiculous thing that I have ever . . .” began Clara Hay, raising both hands to her cheeks.
“You and Mr. Hay stayed three days at Mr. Clemens’s Hartford home in the year after Clover Adams died,” said Holmes. “You were often alone and Clemens even remembered you asking how to operate his new typing gadget.”
“Ridiculous . . .” managed Clara Hay, but could say no more than that.
“I tracked down two of Mr. Clemens’s servants who remembered the sound of typing coming down from the billiards room when Clemens and Hay had gone out for a walk and you were alone in the house all afternoon, Clara,” said Holmes. “But in the end it was the money, Mrs. Hay, that tipped me off to your involvement.”
“Money?”
“In the spring of eighteen ninety-one, shortly before I had to leave for the Reichenbach Falls charade, Clover’s brother Ned asked me to come to America to investigate the ‘mystery cards’ that appeared each year on the anniversary of Clover’s death. I’ve told people the truth, that I took one dollar from him so that I would be on retainer and get to the puzzle when I could . . . too late for poor Ned, I’m sorry to say . . .
but he offered me three thousand dollars
to come to America right then and to solve this disturbing card case before I went on to anything else.”
“Ned never had three thousand dollars in his life,” whispered Clara Hay.
“Precisely what your husband and Henry Adams said when I mentioned the sum,” said Holmes. “They insisted that Ned had fantasized that amount of money, Mrs. Hay.
But Ned showed me the three thousand dollars in my room at two-twenty-one-B Baker Street
. He begged me to take it and to follow him back to America immediately where, he said, there would be more money if I did my job correctly. I sensed even then that Ned Hooper had never even had the funds to travel to England alone. It was someone else’s money. Someone else’s need for a detective.”