Adams knew. Dr. Elias Granger was older than most of them, in his mid-sixties now, and had been in deep mourning ever since he’d lost his wife four years ago. With just men, Granger could relax and exercise the happiness which had been his hallmark right up to his wife’s death. In mixed company, he rarely spoke when the ladies were present any longer, as if doing so might hurt his dead wife’s feelings. Adams, seven years a widower now, thought he understood. If it hadn’t been for Lizzie Cameron and, to a lesser extent, Nannie Cabot Lodge, he probably wouldn’t be accepting dinner invitations either—at least those with the fairer sex present. As it was, he not only attended such mixed dinners now but had resumed hosting his famous “breakfasts”—held closer to the noon hour than morning—which included Lizzie, Nannie, and other local delights.
“Sounds very nice and I like old Granger,” said Adams, “but . . .”
“Before you get beyond ‘but’,” interrupted John Hay, “I forgot to tell you that Clarence King will be there. With his proverbial bells on, he said, and, knowing Clarence, possibly with real ones.”
“King!” cried Adams. “I thought he had headed off for Mexico or Chile or Patagonia or one of those swarthy-lady places he prefers.”
“I thought so too, Henry, but he’s back in town . . . briefly, as I understand it . . . and would love to dine with us.”
“Who else will be there tonight?” asked Adams.
“Teddy and James, of course, King, Rudyard Kipling taking time out from his Cosmos Club . . .”
“I’d come just to hear Kipling tell a tale,” said Adams, “but every time Teddy’s there and tale-telling, Rudyard just curls his legs up under him like a teenaged girl and listens all night, mesmerized.”
“A great story-teller recognizes a great story-teller,” said Hay. “Cameron can’t make it but Cabot Lodge will be there again . . .”
“While his wife pours coffee and cuts cake under the Great Dome,” said Adams.
“Exactly. And about Harry . . . did I tell you that he’s staying with us again? As long as he’ll be in Washington, I believe.”
“No,” Adams said, his voice low. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, he is,” said Hay. “And tonight should be a rather more unbuttoned social evening than our last dinner turned out to be.”
“Harry James unbuttoned,” muttered Adams. “Now there’s an image that refuses to coalesce in the focal lens of my inner eye.” Adams waited a few seconds and had to clear his throat before speaking again. “Will . . . Mr. Holmes be there again?”
Either not picking up on Adams’s tone or ignoring it, Hay said, “Oh, no. Holmes has disappeared. Definitely left town was the last I heard, possibly gone back to England. Either way, he shan’t be at our table tonight and I’m glad of it.”
“Why?” asked Adams.
“Because my daughter Helen has become besotted by the man,” barked Hay. “She asked me the other day how much a detective earns and if such an income might support a married couple in the comfort to which she’s accustomed. She also wondered if great detectives were regularly knighted by Queen Victoria.”
“Good Lord,” said Adams. “She certainly didn’t phrase it all that way.”
“She might as well have,” said Hay. “Oh, Saint-Gaudens will be there tonight, but he says he must leave early, before brandy and cigars—some senator’s wife he’s chiseling in granite.”
“She poses at night?”
“Whenever the senator is out of town,” said Hay.
“Kipling, our dear Clarence King, Saint-Gaudens, Cabot Lodge without Nannie—he rarely speaks at the table when Nannie’s there but can be rather witty when it’s just other men—and then, of course, a chance at a front row seat for the second round between the Boy and Harry,” said Adams. “I can’t pass this up. I’ll be there tonight.”
“With bells on?”
“I do have a jester cap I can bring and possibly convince myself to wear after we open the fourth bottle,” said Adams.
“Save that jester’s cap for young Theodore . . . just in case,” said Hay.
The two were still chuckling when they hung up their telephones.
* * *
The roar of the shotgun blast, though fifty feet below him, was deafening to James. Chicken feathers flew into the air on both sides below him where the canvas covered the thinner rafters. His own higher, thicker beam shook as some sort of shot rattled against its bottom and sides. Cringing into the narrowest straight line the portly James could manage, he still felt a shot—almost certainly bird shot—rip at his left sleeve and stipple his left forearm with pinpricks. He clamped his jaws tight so that he would not cry out.
“You missed him!” shouted one of the gangsters below. “Look out . . . let me . . .” Two shots in rapid succession, each with the sharper, clearer report of a rifle rather than a shotgun blast. James felt at least one of the bullets slam into his beam some six or eight feet in front of him. The entire beam shuddered as if it were a tree taking the first, hard swing of an ax.
“Got it!” shouted the man who’d yelled immediately before the rifle shots. The mob roared.
James dared a peek down the left side of his beam.
Most of the men, save for the anarchists, were out of their chairs now, milling in a circle, slapping each other on the back and laughing, the rigid separation of neighborhood gangs forgotten. A man with a rifle was holding up a large gray rat—quite dead—by the tail and turning in a circle to receive the plaudits of his criminal cohorts.
“SILENCE!” Moriarty’s voice was so loud and commanding that Henry James almost lost his balance and rolled off his beam. The mobs fell silent at once.
“Grogan will visit each of your leaders in the next week with precise instructions on where you’ll muster on May one, what armaments you’ll bring and which will be provided for you, exactly where the killing zones for the police will be, your precise positions for the ambushes, and information on where the anar . . . excuse, me . . . socialists will have already begun their bombing. We’re finished for tonight. But leave in small groups to get back to your own gang areas and beer halls. We don’t want the cops picking any of you up tonight, much less arresting clusters of you. And I’ll have Lucan Adler kill any man who speaks to the police—even if that man is being held in protective custody at police headquarters.”
That seemed to sober the mob into true silence. The man with the rifle tossed away the dead rat. The groups began filing out of the main front and back sliding doors of the old warehouse.
James leaned over to peek again at Moriarty, but the derby-hatted hoodlum named Grogan was the only one still standing on the platform. Moriarty had disappeared.
* * *
James continued lying on his side on the high beam until his muscles and bones were in such pain that he thought he might scream. He lay there as the last of the anarchists and gang members walked boldly out into the darkness beyond the sliding doors; he stayed there until the man they’d called Grogan had shut off the lights and been the last to leave. And still he lay there, his left arm hurting, for another hour or more, listening to the scurrying of rats in the rafters near him.
He was sure he would hear heavy footsteps coming up the stairway at any second. He’d pulled the panel up behind him using the peg set on the inside for that purpose but he was sure that anyone coming up the steps would turn the gas lamp back on, see the unlatched top corners of the trap door, and open it behind him.
Eventually he could stand the pain and darkness no longer. James got to his hands and knees, feeling dizzy and not trusting his balance in the darkness, and backed up along his beam until his heels contacted the trap door. He tapped it open with the least force and sound he could manage.
Then he was out on the death-black upper landing and all but unable to stand. He had to pull himself up with his hands on the wall above the trap door until he stood weakly there, still leaning on the wall, his knees and back hurting far more than the lacerations on his right a
rm under what he could feel as the torn sleeve of his jacket and shirt.
There was no light coming through the frosted glass of the office door on the opposite side of the absurdly narrow landing. Could he possibly have been lying on that beam long enough for it to grow dark outside? He started to raise the strength of the single weak gas lamp on the wall but then thought better of it. If someone was waiting on the dark staircase below, the resumption of light on his landing would make him a perfect target.
He found his hat and walking cane where he’d left them on the floor of the landing.
Remembering how steep and narrow the staircase was, James descended carefully in the darkness, taking each step with care, his arms extended so that he could touch the peeling wall on either side of the staircase, his cane finding each step in the darkness.
At each flickering landing, he expected to encounter someone waiting for him. No one was there. Still, when he reached the bottom of the last flight and was standing at the door through which he’d entered, it took him a minute or two to work up courage to open the door. A terrible thought made him grab the wall again for support: What if they’ve locked this door? Locked me in?
They hadn’t. He stepped out into twilight. The cul-de-sac was empty except for himself, standing there so incongruously, so obviously.
It was about sixty normal paces to the end of the dead-end alley and the beginning of the unpaved street but it felt like half a mile to the aching writer.
He turned right on the unnamed street, trying to remember a general direction back to the civilized parts of town. There were other people on the street—all men as far as he could tell—but most were clustered near the few lighted saloons. James stayed near the dark buildings across the street from these lighted buildings, walking where the sidewalk would be if the muddy lane had been a real street. At least there was less horse manure on the sides.
As he walked, James questioned himself about his reactions during his time clinging to a beam high above thieves, robbers, rapists, arsonists, and Professor James Moriarty in that old chicken warehouse. He had been frightened, to be sure—especially when the man had yelled “Rat!” and the shotgun blast had rattled all around him—but along with the fear had been something unexpected and rather new to Henry James—simple excitement? A sense of thrill? A strange, inexplicable joy at the wild strangeness of it all?
He wondered if his pounding heart and excited sense of everything slowing down during those tensest moments he’d spent above the mob, the moments when he thought he’d been discovered, the rifle shots, if he had been sharing something he thought he would never have the opportunity to experience after having avoided service in the Civil War. Had his brother Wilkie thrilled to such danger in the minutes or hours before receiving his terrible wounds? How else to explain Wilkie’s eagerness to return to his unit months after suffering such undignified, suppurating, and impossibly painful injuries?
And his brother Bob, who had said he’d “enjoyed” life in the army during the war. Could James’s experience that afternoon connect in any way to the simple joy of action that his brothers had written about? James thought of his cousin Gus—that beautiful pale, red-head’s naked body in the afternoon light on the day James had walked in on the life-drawing class—had Gus felt such a thrill of danger and the joy of risk in the months of service before being killed by a sniper, his body never recovered? Had Gus heard the sound of the shot that had taken his young life? The veterans insisted that one never did—never heard the fatal shot since science had shown that the ball or bullet was traveling faster than sound itself—but James remembered hearing the loud rifle shot just before the beam he was lying on reverberated like a struck bell. It had been . . . thrilling.
He walked for what seemed like hours as the last of the light left the skies. His sense of direction all but gone now, James headed for lights reflected from lowering clouds. That way lay street lamps. That way, whichever way it was, must be toward civilization.
Several times men broke off from some group and crossed the street toward him and each time James thought—This shall be it—but no one accosted him. No one even addressed him except for a bizarrely madeup lady of the night—what the Americans called a “crib doxie,” he felt certain, whose place of business was one of the canvas-covered stalls in a reeking alley—whose chalk-white and crimson-rouged face opened to show yellow teeth when she called “Looking for a good time, are you, Mr. Gentleman, sir?”
James nodded toward the apparition and quickly crossed the street.
He had finally reached a cobblestone street—trolley tracks in the center!—with gas lamps at each corner and allowed himself a sigh of satisfaction. There would be street signs here. The slums were behind him.
And just at that moment, three men stepped out of an alley and blocked his way.
“Lost, pal?” asked the tallest one, bearded and filthy. The second man was equally as tall but heavier and had short whiskers rather than a beard. James glimpsed a gold tooth when the light from the corner street lamp briefly touched the first man’s face. Both tall men wore wide-rimmed hats that were soiled with sweat and grime and looked to have been gnawed upon by rats. The third man blocking James’s way could hardly be called a man yet: a boy of sixteen or seventeen, almost as tall as his two mates but infinitely thinner. The boy’s face was mostly nose and with his hair hanging greasily over his eyes and his oversized teeth catching the light, James thought of the rat the gang members had shot off the rafters.
“Let me pass, please,” said James and stepped straight toward the bearded man with the gold tooth.
That man stepped aside but the second big man moved to block James’s way. The three stepped closer, encircling him. James looked over their shoulders but could see no police officers, no pedestrians, no decent folk he might call out to.
“Nice spats,” said the ruffians’ leader. And then he hawked and spit, quite deliberately, a gob of brown tobacco onto James’s left foot.
The second man touched James’s torn right sleeve. “You’re bleedin’, pal. Better come with us so we’s can bandage you up right.”
James tried to step to his left, into the street, but the boy and the first man blocked his way again. They stepped forward aggressively and James realized that he was giving way, backing toward the darkness of the alley from whence they’d stepped. He stopped.
The leader stepped so close that James could smell the whiskey and garlic on his breath when the tall man ran his ragged fingers over James’s jacket and waistcoat front. “Fucking spats, fucking top hat, fucking silver-headed walking stick,” the bearded leader said, “but no fucking watch in your vest. Where is it?”
“I . . . I lost it,” said James.
“Careless sod, ain’t you?” said the second man. “But I bet you didn’t lose your fucking billfold, did you, Mr. Spats?”
James drew himself to his full height, his right hand gripping the cane tightly even though he knew they would be on him before he could lift it in his own defense.
He felt something sharp touch his belly and looked down to see that the youngest man had set a knife point there.
“James!” cried a familiar voice from just across the street.
James and the three thieves turned their heads at the same instant. James had to suppress a giggle—possibly a hysterical one—since the two men he least imagined running into were now hurrying across the empty street toward him. It had been Theodore Roosevelt who had called out and with him, in a finer suit than James had last seen him in, was Clarence King.
As the two men trotted up to the sidewalk, the bearded thief—well over six feet in height—looked at the five-foot-eight Roosevelt and King, two inches shorter than Roosevelt, and said, “I bet you a bottle that they got watches.”
“Not for fucking long,” said his equally tall, brawny, and filthy partner.
14
As Good as the Boston Beaneaters
The youngest thug pulled the blade back from
James’s belly and held the knife down at his side as Roosevelt and King stepped up to the group.
“James!” said Roosevelt again, ignoring the three hoodlums and showing his huge, perfect-toothed grin beneath his gold pince-nez. His blue eyes were very bright, as if in joyous anticipation of something. “How fortunate to bump into you! King and I were hoping to find you . . . we’re headed over to Hay’s home for dinner.”
Clarence King’s hazel eyes were much colder than Roosevelt’s blue gaze. While Roosevelt had no walking stick with him, King was carrying the elaborate one that James had first seen at Hay’s home: the top was of some burnished stone naturally curved almost like a bird’s beak.
The two tallest thugs exchanged glances and the bearded leader nodded. James assumed that they’d just silently agreed to rob and beat—and possibly kill—all three of the “swells” they’d just encountered on the edge of Night Town. James didn’t know if these three thugs had been at Moriarty’s meeting or not . . . and realized it didn’t matter. He’d tried to warn his friends away with not-so-subtle shoving motions of his hands when they were across the street, but now it was too late. The six men were clustered in a rather tight circle here at the entrance to the dark alley.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” young Roosevelt said to the thugs, still smiling that impossible white smile. “Thank you for escorting our friend this far. We shall walk with him from here.”
The two tallest men shifted to their right, blocking any easy retreat for King or Roosevelt. The scrawny young man closest to Henry James had his blade raised and visible again.
The leader flicked his grimy fingertips up and then down Roosevelt’s waistcoated thick torso. “There’s a good watch at the end of that chain, ain’t there, four-eyes?” he said, showing his brown teeth.
“Of course there is,” young Roosevelt said coldly.
“And a billfold in your pocket, too, ain’t there?” added the bearded man.