“Does the landau have a top?” asked Drummond.
“A foldable top,” said Inspector Bonfield. “It’ll be folded back so that everyone, even those in the higher buildings, can see the president. Unless it’s raining, of course.”
“Pray for rain,” Drummond said softly, speaking to himself.
“Oh, Mr. Mayor,” said Bonfield. “Mr. Holmes informed me that he knows the whereabouts of Rudolph Schnaubelt . . . the Haymarket Square bomb-thrower.”
“You don’t have to tell me who Rudolph Schnaubelt is, goddamnit,” snarled Harrison. “I’ve had enough nightmares about the sonofabitch. Where do you think he is, Mr. Holmes?”
“I know exactly where he is,” said Holmes and gave the mayor Schnaubelt’s farm business and personal addresses in Buenos Aires.
“Well I’ll be dipped in shit,” said Harrison. “Bonnie, can’t you send some of your boys down there to Buenos Aires to get that murdering reptile?”
“We have no extradition arrangements with Argentina, Mr. Mayor.”
“God damn it, I know that,” said Harrison. “I mean get him. A black bag job. Haul that goddamn anarchist back here to Chicago for a fair trial and very public hanging.”
“If the Argentinian authorities were to discover a plot like that, it would mean war,” Bonfield said softly.
“It’ll be a sad day when the United States of America can’t whip some pissant country like Argentina,” said Harrison. “Okay, Bonnie, maybe we could just send someone down to shoot the sonofabitch. Bang! Take a picture of the corpse for the Chicago papers. No muss, no fuss.”
“We should talk about this later,” said Bonfield.
“You’re right!” laughed Harrison. “I have my favorite literary hero of all time right here in my carriage to ask questions of. Tell me, Mr. Holmes, in ‘The Sign of the Four’, you were injecting a seven-percent solution of cocaine into your arm or wrist when you were bored. Was that accurate?”
“A habit I abandoned after my friend Dr. Watson convinced me that—how did the good doctor put it?—that the game was not worth the candle.” Holmes saw no reason to mention his morning injection of this more powerful heroic drug or the fact that he planned to inject it twice more before this day was over.
“Ah, good,” cried Harrison. “So tell me, if you are free to do so, in that same adventure, do you think the lovely Miss Mary Morstan had romantic designs on you? Did she just settle, as we say, by marrying Dr. Watson?”
Holmes looked up at the clear sky and sighed. This was going to be a long carriage ride.
SIX
Wednesday, April 12, 3:20 p.m.
Can I get you something to help you feel better?” asked James.
“A .40-caliber six-shooter so that I can blow my brains out,” said Sam Clemens. “Or, since I am a devout coward, perhaps some painless poison that tastes like lemonade.”
“Anything other than that?” asked James. He was sitting on a chair by the window a few feet from where Clemens, in his nightshirt, lay in bed. There were medicines and half-filled glasses on the bedside table and a pile of newspapers tossed on the only other chair.
“One doctor says this is just a bad case of the common grippe and he’s predicted every day in the last eleven days that I’d be up and out of this bed on the next day,” said Clemens between coughs. “The other doctor who’s looked in on me says that it’s pneumonia and that at my advanced age . . . fifty-eight . . . I should get my will in order and start getting measured for my coffin. I have the strongest urge to put these two medicos in a pit and see which one comes out alive.”
James smiled at that.
“What brought you and Mr. Sherlock Holmes to the Great Northern Hotel anyway?” asked Clemens, setting down his awful-smelling cigar long enough to drink from a tall glass of colored fluid, grimace at its taste, and pick up the smoking cigar again.
“Holmes chose it,” said James. Clemens had one of the corner rooms which included three tall windows in the curving bay, and James had all three open to the relatively fresh air of downtown Chicago. This hotel was at the corner of Jackson and Dearborn and this was about all that James knew of Chicago geography.
“He overheard a clerk telling a bellboy to take up a fresh pitcher of water with lemons to your room,” added James. “That’s how I knew you were here. I was surprised. When I was told you were ill, I thought I should check in on you.”
“That’s right neighborly,” said Clemens and stopped to cough. It was a deep, phlegmy cough and James leaned back a little more into the fresh air. “I plan to leave for New York tomorrow, Mr. James, if I have to do so in a coffin with a chunk of aged Limburger cheese on my chest for verisimilitude. I may have to ask you to be my pallbearer.”
Clemens coughed and drank from the glass again. He poured more colored liquid from a quart-size bottle into the glass.
“Is that cough syrup of some sort?” asked James.
“Of some sort,” said Clemens and took another long drink. “It’s laudanum. Liquid opium. A gift from the gods. My second doctor isn’t shy about prescribing it by the hogshead barrel. So far it’s the only thing that’s smoothed this cough.”
Wonderful, thought James. Holmes is injecting himself with that new heroin drug every day and Clemens—Mark Twain!—is busy turning himself into a laudanum addict.
“Did you get your business done here in Chicago?” asked James. “You told us in Hartford that you had people to see.”
Clemens snorted. “I made the rounds of interested investors in Paige’s typesetting machine, but they are small-minded, James. Small-minded. They insist on seeing a working example of the typesetter. They are prejudiced in favor of earning their money back with interest.”
“And Paige doesn’t have a working model?”
“He tells me almost every other week that he has a perfect working model,” said Clemens. “But when I rush to see it and get within fifty miles of him, the machine either quits working or Paige decides to dismantle it and improve it in some arcane mechanical way. He’s in Chicago to set up a second factory to produce the things while the first factory has yet to spit out a model that works for more than two minutes at a time.”
“Did you see Mr. Paige while you were here?”
Clemens drank deeply from his glass of laudanum and refilled the glass from the bottle. “He’s been wonderfully attentive, visited my sickroom at least six times, staying hours each time.”
“And?” said James after a silence that had Clemens staring at nothing.
“And do you remember,” said Clemens, glaring at James from under his bushy white eyebrows, “how I said that Paige could convince a fish to come out of the water and take a walk with him?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this time he convinced this particular fish to come out, take a walk with him, climb a tree, and make noises like a parakeet.”
James didn’t know what to say to that so he remained silent, trying to breathe the fresh air from the open windows rather than the odious air from Clemens’s cheap cigar.
“I came to demand—not request, not ask nicely for, but to demand,” continued Clemens, “that Paige immediately refund me the last thirty thousand dollars I’d put into this project. I need it. I’d borrowed from my little publishing venture to pay for the investment in the typesetter and now circumstances demand that I borrow from the typesetter investment to keep my publishing house afloat. So I came to demand, in no uncertain terms, thirty thousand dollars of the hundred and ninety thousand dollars that I’ve poured into Paige’s bottomless pit.”
“And did he pay up?” asked Henry James.
“It ended with me writing him a check for fifty thousand more dollars,” grumbled Clemens. “So that he can make those ‘last few little improvements’ before the automatic typesetting machine sets the publishing world on its ear and I become a millionaire.” Clemens coughed fiercely and, when he’d caught his breath and drunk some laudanum, said, “I finned myself far up and out of the crick
this time. Livy will kill me.”
“I hope it works out,” said James who had never invested in anything save for his own talent.
“Say, where’s your friend Sherlock Holmes these days?” asked Clemens.
“Today he went to meet various people at the White City,” said James.
“Have you seen the Exposition yet, James?”
“Not yet.”
“The White City is yet another thing in this life that I shall never see,” sighed Clemens. Then, without any preamble, Clemens said, “Does Holmes still believe that he might be a fictional person rather than real?”
Taken back a bit, James finally said, “I believe he does.”
“He may be right,” said Clemens.
“Why do you say that, sir?”
“I’ve read the stories in The Strand and the novellas, and the Sherlock Holmes there strikes me as a particularly unrealistic fellow. His adventures sound contrived.”
“You may remember Holmes saying in New York that he wasn’t totally happy with Dr. Watson’s representations of either him or his science of deduction,” said James. “The tales may be true, but written by a mediocre mind.”
“In the past weeks I’ve been thinking,” said Clemens. “I doubt that there is any ‘Dr. Watson’. It’s all that Conan Doyle fellow creating a fictional narrator to relate the fictional tales of a fictional detective.”
“Holmes says that Conan Doyle is his friend Watson’s agent and editor,” said James. “He says that Dr. John Watson shuns the spotlight and that he allows Doyle to represent him.”
“But what if Holmes is a fictional character and this whole assassination plot is part of some melodramatic tale? All make-believe?” said Clemens, coughing more and drinking more of the laudanum mixture. “Where does that leave you and me, Mr. Henry James?”
“How do you mean?” said James, knowing full well what Clemens was leading up to.
“It would mean that we are fictional characters in this instance as well,” said Clemens, staring balefully out from under his shaggy eyebrows. “You chosen as his Sancho Panza . . . or perhaps as his Boswell . . . and me as occasional comedy relief.”
“I’ll never be his Boswell,” James said flatly.
“Have you ever thought, James, of the relationship between you and the characters you’ve created?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” James said, knowing full well what the humorist meant.
“I mean that you’re God to them,” said Clemens, “just as I am God to my small worlds of fictional people. You create them. You put them through their fictional paces. You decide their emotions and you decide when it’s time for them to die. In other words, we’re God to our characters.”
James shook his head. “My characters have a certain life of their own,” he said softly.
“Oh,” said Clemens and surrendered to a spasm of phlegmy coughing. “Does that mean that Isabella Archer is having tea in England or Europe right now?”
“No,” said James, “but it means there are depths to her . . . to Isabel’s . . . character that I haven’t explored.”
“This is writers’ doubletalk,” said Clemens, drinking deeply from his glass. “We love to pretend that our characters have some lives of their own . . . but they don’t, James. You know it and I know it. We move them around like puppets in a Punch and Judy show. Have you read any of my books, sir?”
“I’ve not yet had that pleasure,” said James, surprised by the question. Writers didn’t ask other writers for opinions of their work. It just wasn’t done.
Clemens laughed. “Well, I’ve tried to read yours,” said the white-haired author. “I declare, James, reading your prose is like translating medieval German. You have forty-two freight cars loaded with subordinate clauses being pushed along by a tiny cluster of underpowered engine-verbs tucked in at the end of the sentence. Reading your books is like listening to a man on a soapbox argue with himself, interrupting himself every few seconds.”
James smiled thinly. “My brother William would agree with you.”
“But still . . . with Isabella Archer and a few of your other characters . . .” Clemens’s voice trailed off. He turned to stare fiercely at James again. “Do you know why Isabella Archer made that damned-fool self-destructive decision at the end of the book? Was that your plan all along or did the character take on some autonomy and make her life-ruining decision on her own?”
James lifted his hands, palms up. He was not going to discuss Isabella Archer or any of his other books or characters with this laudanum-addled American.
“You hear your characters’ voices in your head or you don’t,” said Clemens, speaking to himself. “Do you happen to remember that I published a book called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn about five years ago?”
“I remember,” said James.
Clemens looked at him again. “For months—years, really, since I’d set the book aside for a long time—I heard Huck’s voice in my head as clearly as I heard my beloved Livy calling me to dinner. Huck was with me when I went to sleep at night and he was waiting for me when I woke up. And then . . . near what should have been the end of the story when they’re off the raft for the last time and Huck’s slave friend Jim has been captured . . . Huck just left me. He just lit out for the territory without me. I could no longer hear his voice, no longer look through his eyes. I was just a man putting words on paper.”
“What did you do?” asked James, more interested in this topic and in the answer than he could show.
Clemens licked his lips. “I brought in Tom Sawyer from his book, turned Huck into the shallow supporting character he’d been in that Tom-Sawyer book, and essentially let the most important book I’ve ever written turn into another boy’s book,” said Clemens. “All games and coincidences and no-harm-done-to-anyone with Tom, a character whom I knew shouldn’t even be in this novel, making the decisions.”
“That sort of situation is unfortunate,” James said softly. “And I am sure that it happens to all of us in writing one novel or the other.”
Clemens shook his head. “Have you read the novel Robert Elsmere?”
“I’ve heard the title but haven’t had the pleasure of reading it,” said James.
“It created quite a sensation about five years ago and caused the rumpus,” said Clemens. “It was written by Mrs. Humphry Ward. It advocated a Christianity based on social concerns and help for one’s fellow man rather than on Scripture or theology. She made a lot of devout enemies.”
James waited.
“Anyway,” continued Clemens after some coughing and expectorating, “I copied a sentence from that long, sometimes dismal book because it relates to what we’re discussing. Mrs. Ward wrote—and I remember it clearly—‘I cannot conceive of God as the arch-plotter against His own creation’.”
“That doesn’t sound very radical,” said James.
Clemens rounded on him again. “But we’re God to the world and characters we create, James. And we plot against them all the time. We kill them off, maul and scar them, make them lose their hopes and dearest loves. We conspire against our characters daily. But in the Huck Finn book, I lost my nerve, James. I lost Huck’s voice and then I lost my nerve. Or maybe—probably—it was the other way around. I so loved Huckleberry Finn that I failed to plot against him and the rest of my creation as I should have. If Huck’s voice had stayed with me—if I’d had the courage to listen to it—I would have had nigger Jim captured and sold down the river to endless slavery in front of Huck’s eyes and in spite of all of Huck’s efforts—or at the very least had the decency and mercy to kill Jim and Huck—rather than bring Tom Sawyer into the tale to end it as a mere boy’s book.”
Clemens spat out the last two words.
“What has this to do with the question of whether Sherlock Holmes is fictional?” James asked bluntly. He hated writers’ self-pity and detested watching it.
Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. “Don’t you see, Jame
s?” he said at last. “You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be.”
“Do you have any idea who that God-Writer might be?” asked James. “I’ve thought about this. Conan Doyle would never use living contemporaries in his tales . . . certainly not use their real names or make them so recognizable. Holmes said that Watson had to disguise the Prince of Wales as the King of Bohemia in one story.”
“It doesn’t have to be Conan Doyle,” said Clemens, his chin almost on his chest as he poured the last of the laudanum from the bottle into the glass. “It’s almost certainly some lesser mind, lesser talent, than you, perhaps even lesser than me, certainly lesser than Arthur Conan Doyle, which is saying a lot. And it might be written thirty years hence, or fifty, or a hundred.”
“Well,” said James, trying for a light tone despite the heaviness in his heart, “at least that would mean we’re still being read thirty or a hundred years from now.”
There was a long silence broken only by street sounds some fourteen floors below and the raspy, phlegm-filled effort of Samuel Clemens to breathe.
“If we are only fictional constructs, brought in to give the fictional-construct Sherlock Holmes company, what do we do next?” James finally asked.
Clemens laughed. “I’m going east to New York tomorrow, stopping at Elmira if I feel up to it. I’ll probably be too sick to watch the procession of Great Ships scheduled for this weekend in New York Harbor, but I’d give two toes to see that. No sir, if the God-Writer of this tale . . . hack that he probably is—wants to kill this Sam Clemens off, he will have to do it offstage, the way Shakespeare killed Falstaff.”‘
I need to leave, too, thought James. Regain my autonomy. Regain myself.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” asked Clemens.
“Holmes said that he wanted to take me on a boat tour of the White City.”
“Well, enjoy what I’ll never see,” said Clemens.