“Which structures will that include, Colonel?” asked Holmes.
The Commandant of the Columbian Guards—out of uniform in shirt and suspenders as the clouds parted and the April day grew warmer—used the blunt cigar to point to their extreme right.
“The eastern parts of the big Machinery Building there.”
The cigar shifted left, further east. “The Agriculture Building next to it.”
Rice pointed straight ahead with his cigar. “The entrance Peristyle has its own promenade which we’ll shut down during the ceremony.”
The cigar moved left again. “The huge monstrosity of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. Long, long promenade, almost as long as the Great Basin that runs down the middle here.”
He pointed left to one of the Great Buildings they could see only part of. “The eastern part of the big Electricity Building there has a straight line to the speaker’s stand. Most of the building doesn’t.”
“And then there are the avenues themselves,” said Drummond.
“Yep,” said Col. Rice. “Look out there now and enjoy the sight of the hundred or so workers you see, because on Opening Day there’ll be at least a hundred thousand people crammed into these open spaces.”
“No place for a sniper in a crowd,” said Drummond. “Our last two presidential assassinations have been with a handgun and at very short range.”
“That’s very true,” said Holmes. “Lincoln, with a small pistol shot from a distance of less than three feet, and President Garfield, shot in the back, point-blank range, by Guiteau.”
“Who used a British-made Bull Dog revolver,” said Drummond.
“Very true,” said Holmes. “An excellent weapon. My particular friend Dr. John Watson owns a Bull Dog revolver.”
“Assuming your theoretical assassin on May first . . .” began Col. Rice.
“There’s nothing theoretical about Lucan Adler, Colonel,” Holmes said briskly.
“All right, we’ll assume that your would-be assassin will want to be somewhere high enough and stable enough and lonely enough that he can use a rifle. That could be from a window or from one of the promenades. Why don’t we look at the four Great Buildings and Peristyle going counterclockwise, starting with the Machinery Building there to the right.”
“Excellent idea, Colonel,” said Holmes.
* * *
The roof of the Machinery Hall was all cupolas, arches, and Spanish-Renaissance-ornamented gewgaws to James’s way of seeing things. In his opinion—neither asked for nor stated—any self-respecting sniper would die from the bad taste of all that ornamentation before being able to fire a shot. But Colonel Rice, Drummond, and Holmes focused on the high second-story loggia—an inset veranda that ran the entire eastern length of the building from the parade ground to the east of the Administration Building, where the president and his party would be all too visible, back west to the larger open ground in front of the Terminal Station.
“You could get a thousand people on this veranda,” said Drummond as if speaking to himself.
“More than that,” said Colonel Rice. “Pack ’em ten or fifteen deep between these Corinthian columns and this grand loggia’ll hold five thousand people, easy.”
“Perhaps a bit crowded and joggly for rifle work,” said Holmes.
“ ‘Joggly’?” said James.
Holmes flashed one of those thin, fast, tight-lipped smiles.
* * *
Moving toward Lake Michigan, Colonel Rice led them to the Agriculture Building, a domed Roman-style structure encompassing half a million square feet of display space. Before they got too close, Col. Rice pointed out Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s gold Statue of Diana, poised on one leg with her bow at full pull, that graced the top of the dome. “It was supposed to go on top of the new Madison Square Garden Building,” grunted Rice, “but it was too damned big. It serves as a good weather vane here.”
Before they entered the building, James gawked at the presence of dozens, perhaps scores, of whirling full-sized windmills, of all shapes and sizes and materials—wood, iron, steel—that filled an area near the Lagoon outside the Agriculture Building.
“That army would prove too much even for Don Quixote,” said James.
The other three men looked at him and said nothing.
“If you’re hungry, gentlemen,” said Col. Rice as they climbed steps to the upper regions, “Canada sent a twenty-two-thousand-pound hunk of cheese to be exhibited down there. It’s encased in iron and, the Canadians say, took sixteen hundred milkmaids to milk ten thousand cows to produce the twenty-seven thousand gallons of milk used to make the cheese.”
“A fascinating bit of information,” said Holmes who, unlike James, was not in the least winded by the endless flights of steps. “And now that I’ve learned it, I will eliminate it from my memory.”
James thought it just a figure of speech, but Col. Rice stopped and faced Holmes. “You can do that, sir? Remove things from your memory?”
“I have to do that,” Holmes said in a serious tone.
“Why?” said the Colonel.
“I was born with what some experts are now calling a ‘photographic memory’,” said Holmes. “It is my misfortune to remember everything. Give me a page of a magazine and, after glancing over it, I can recall every word, comma, and full stop on the page. But the mind is a little attic, as I once tried to explain to my associate Dr. Watson, and someone with a profession as defined as mine must be careful what to store there. If I know for certain that the information cannot help me in my detection—say the fact that the sun does not go around the Earth or the details of this great mass of Canadian cheese—I simply delete it from memory.”
“Delete it?” said James with wonder and doubt in his voice.
“I imagine a red delete button, mentally push it, and the memory is gone,” said Holmes. “Otherwise my brain would be a grab bag of odds and ends rather than a finely tuned engine for ratiocination.”
“Delete button,” said Colonel Rice and shook his head. “Now I’ve heard everything.”
NINE
Friday, April 14, 2:45 p.m.
Mr. Drummond, Holmes, James, and the colonel had toured the upper regions of the Agriculture Building, the east-entrance Peristyle, the gigantic Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, and the south side promenade of the Electricity Building, sharing a quick and late lunch with Colonel Rice in the canvas-covered temporary cantina set up for the workers.
It was at the northeast corner of the Agriculture Building that Holmes pointed to a post set at the end of the narrow promenade. A cable ran from the post down for several hundred feet to a 7- or 8-foot tall, lighted channel marker thirty feet or more from the seawall.
“Does this have a purpose?” asked Holmes. “Perhaps holding down the Agriculture Building in high winds?”
Colonel Rice clamped down on his cigar stub and grinned. “There’s another one just like it at the southeast corner of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building across the way. Someone had the idea of dangling the flags of all the nations along the cables so that folks on the ships docking at the end of the pier would feel sort of welcomed with open arms.”
“Is it still to come then?” asked Holmes.
Rice shook his head. “The halyards just wouldn’t rig right, the wind was tearing the test flags all to hell, so the idea was abandoned. They just haven’t got around to removing the cables yet.”
“That cable is rather low to the beacons, light posts, whatever they are,” said Drummond. “Isn’t that a navigation hazard for small boats?”
Rice shook his head again. “Those beacons are there to warn away even the smallest crafts. All the area under water out to the beacons’ tiny little concrete islands is filled with chunks of rock and concrete dumped when we built the sea wall. They’d rip the bottom out of a skiff.”
James was deeply impressed by the Peristyle with its long row of Corinthian columns and great triumphal arch through which passengers arrivi
ng from the water would enter the Fair and see the grand view.
“The Peristyle connects the little casino building at the end of the main Casino Pier there to the south to the Music Hall there on the north end,” said Col. Rice. “Forty-seven giant columns . . . one for each of the states and territories. This has a promenade up there, but just accessible by a stairway at the south end.”
“By all means, let us enjoy the view,” said Holmes.
Above the Columbian Arch at the center of the Peristyle Promenade—which did offer an amazing view both into the White City and out onto Lake Michigan—they were perfectly lined up with the front of the Administration Building where the president would be giving his talk.
“What is the distance, do you estimate, Colonel?” asked Holmes.
Rice squinted. “Five hundred thirty yards. No more than five-fifty.”
“Certainly that is too far for someone with a mere rifle to aim and shoot with any certainty,” said Henry James.
Rice, Drummond, and Holmes exchanged glances.
Rice spoke first. “The best of modern military rifles can give you five-inch groups at up to a thousand yards,” he said softly, removing the cigar as if out of respect for such an achievement. Rice turned to Holmes. “Do you know what kind of weapon this Lucan Adler intends to use?”
“Yes,” said Holmes, “we believe we do. He’s assassinated four powerful figures in Europe since last autumn and in each case he’s used a Model Eighteen Ninety-three Mauser rifle, most probably with a twenty-power telescopic sight attached. He doesn’t leave casings behind, but each dead man seems to have been killed by seven-millimeter rimless bullets. The ’ninety-three Mauser—which was released early last autumn in major sales to Spain and the Spanish troops in Cuba—is a bolt-action with a five-round clip.”
Colonel Rice seemed to grimace. “I don’t know the Mausers—much less this new one. Do you know the muzzle velocity?”
“Twenty-three hundred feet per second,” said Holmes.
“And actual operational range?”
“A little over two thousand yards. I believe twenty-one hundred and sixty is the precise number.”
This meant nothing to James, but it seemed to affect Colonel Rice almost viscerally. For the first time, the stocky gentleman not only took the soggy stogie out of his mouth but removed his worn derby and rubbed his balding head. “My God,” he whispered. “If we’d had that rifle at Gettysburg.”
Holmes nodded. “You could have used aimed fire—individual targets—almost as soon as the Confederates came out of the trees a mile away across that wide, deadly space. With five rounds without reloading.”
Rice let out a deep breath. “Well, it doesn’t matter much. Your Lucan Adler fellow will want to get in as close as he can.”
“Why is that?” asked James. “Especially if he can shoot a target a little more than a mile away?”
Rice smiled. “A man ain’t a paper target,” he said and James sensed that the failure in grammar was deliberate with this man who’d ended the war as a Brigadier General. “Walking at an average rate—two miles per hour—a man walks about two feet in the time it would take a bullet to reach him.” He pointed at the Administration Building due west of them down the long Lagoon. “That would be a miss. Of course, President Cleveland will be standing still and facing this way, but the shooter has probably sighted in his rifle he’d have to hold over eighteen inches.”
“I don’t understand,” said James.
Agent Drummond held out his hands as if framing the target area in front of the distant Administration Building. “That means, Mr. James,” he said softly, “that to shoot accurately enough to hit the president in the chest—and we admit that it is a broad target—Lucan Adler would have to use his telescopic sight to aim about eighteen inches high—say at the top of the president’s forehead.”
“I would think that shooting for the head would be preferable,” said James, appalled at hearing his own words.
Colonel Rice said, “Our heads move around a lot more than we think—especially when giving a speech. Center of the body’s mass is the surest target.”
They were all silent for a long, sickening moment. Finally Rice said, “Well, shall we tour the Manufactures and Electricity Buildings, have some lunch, and get this over with?”
Holmes, Drummond, and James followed him down from the Peristyle Promenade without speaking.
* * *
The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building was by far the largest and most imposing structure they visited. The interior was chaos this day—a very controlled chaos once carefully observed—as thousands upon thousands of major displays were uncrated, assembled, and made ready. Far across the vast, cluttered floor, James caught a glimpse of an elegant telescope that must have been at least sixty feet tall.
“You should have seen this hall when it was empty,” said Col. Rice as they waited for the Otis-Hale elevator to drop down in clear sight, the car now seeming to be suspended in mid-air among the iron beams some 200 feet above them.
“We had the Dedication Ceremony in late October last year,” continued Rice. “This floor’s thirty-two acres and it was filled that day with more than a hundred and forty-thousand Chicago folk. The carpenters had to build a platform that would hold five thousand grandees in their little yellow chairs. Ex-Mayor Harrison had a seat up on the platform, but he spent most of the time shaking hands with every one of the hundred forty-some thousand citizens standing. And it was a cold day . . . cold as a witch’s tit. Men kept their overcoats and hats on and women tried to hide down in their fur collars and keep their hands in their mink muffs when they weren’t waving white hankies to the music. And it was a bloody long ceremony, too. After an hour or so I heard a sound like a marching army approaching and realized it was all the men standing out there stamping their feet to stay warm. You could see your breath in front of you during the entire overblown ceremony and I swear that after the first half hour, little clouds formed under them iron trusses twenty stories up there, just from our breath.”
“Could anyone hear any of the speeches?” asked James.
“About ten people up on that platform and closest to the podium,” said Colonel Rice. “The place was so damned big and echoey that the organizers had to use ex-military fellows I provided to wave semaphore flags to cue the five-hundred-musician orchestra and five-thousand-voice choir when it was their time to play or sing.”
“Did anything interesting come out of that day?” asked Drummond.
“Well,” said Rice, “some fellow who edits some children’s magazine wrote out a pledge that the Bureau of Education sent to every damned school in the country so that on that October twenty-one Dedication Day last year all the young brats in all the schools of the nation would be contributin’ something to their nation.”
“A pledge?” James said dubiously.
“I don’t remember it but for the beginning,” said Rice. “It goes ‘I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands . . . ’ ”
“Forcing school children to recite a national pledge doesn’t sound very American to me,” said James.
“No,” agreed Holmes. “It sounds German. Very German.”
* * *
The elevator ride up to the promenade level was a surprise for Henry James. It literally took his breath away. The Otis-Hale Company had built a super high-speed elevator that was a simple cage, open on three sides, and it whisked upward so quickly through rings of electric lights and occasional high platforms that one felt both exposed to the height and heavier at the same moment. When it came to a stop at the top, the rear doors opening to the promenade, James thought for a moment that his feet had left the floor of the lift.
“That elevator should be a major attraction all on its own,” said James when he could get his breath back.
“I’m sure it will be,” said Colonel Rice.
“I’m not sure I would care to ride it more than once,” said Drummond.
The promenade on the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building was called the Observation Deck and it went all the way around the thirty-two-acre building. Instead of stone or plaster railings, the barrier was a simple metal chain link fence, which made the sense of height all the more palpable. The views were astonishing. James realized that if Mr. Ferris ever got his giant Wheel built, citizens on this Observation Deck would be looking at it almost at the height of its highest carriages as it revolved.
Naturally, Holmes, Drummond, and Rice were interested only in the parts of the Observation Deck that would allow a madman to murder a president from afar.
“Three corners of the Observation Deck have one of these huge searchlights,” Holmes said as if to himself.
Rice answered anyway. “Yes, sir. They’re German and terribly bright and focused. They will be used to illuminate buildings, fountains, the Wooded Island, and other things during the night. One of these lights could show us a rabbit a mile away.”
Each German searchlight had a six-foot-square black base about two-and-a-half feet high. The steel was painted with black enamel.
They were at the southwest corner of the Observation Deck, the one that gave the best view of the Administration Building and area where President Cleveland would be standing in a little more than two weeks.
Holmes crouched, pointed to a lock along one side of the base of the searchlight, and said, “Would you happen to have a key for this compartment, Colonel Rice?”
Again Rice grinned around his cigar stub. “You’ve heard me clinking and clanking along the last two hours. I’ve got a key on this ring for everything in the fairgrounds.”
In a moment he produced a small key that unlocked the compartment.
Holmes lay on his belly to look inside and Drummond joined him, but James refused to get his suit dirty doing so, and he crouched as best he could to look over the detective’s shoulder. The dark space showed various thick insulated wires going through the floor and some iron support struts, but was mostly empty. The knee-high black steel square was obviously there primarily to be a base for the seven-foot-high heavy searchlight.