“Do you know when he’ll kill the president?”
“He hasn’t told me, but I know Lucan,” said Irene Adler. “He’ll shoot Cleveland during his short speech. When everyone is quiet and attentive. It will be the brightest spotlight on Lucan Adler’s genius. He even described it in those terms.”
“Do you know how he plans to escape?” asked Holmes.
“Not from wherever his sniper’s roost might be,” said Adler. “But I know the . . . vested interests who are paying him . . . have bought the swift-sailing ship the Zephyr and it will be waiting for Lucan in the lake just offshore. According to Lucan, the Zephyr with its sails, its German-trained racing crew, and new steam engine–driven propellers can outrun any police boat or yacht on the Great Lakes.”
“Thank you for that,” said Holmes. “Thank you for everything.”
Irene Adler touched her locket, opened it, and held it up in the failing light, and for a second Holmes thought she might have a daguerreotype of him or some lock of his hair in there, but it was only a miniature watch.
She said softly, “Our hour is up, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”
“ ‘Ill met by moonlight’?” he asked.
She smiled without effort, the way he remembered her smiling freely when he was not quite nineteen years old. “That’s not the inconstant moon over the hedge tops, my lovelorn Romeo,” she said. “It’s one of the gaslights along the paved road in the cemetery.”
He stood when she did. He made no move and neither did she. Then she turned toward the lighter opening in the monument’s hedged-in space and he walked half a step behind her.
“I’ll see you to your carriage,” he said, taking her arm. They walked that way across the dew-wet grass where headstones were becoming vague and vaguely threatening inconstant outlines in the last of the twilight.
There were sidelights burning on her elegant enclosed coach. Holmes had an instant’s perfect image of Lucan Adler thrusting his arm out the door of the coach and shooting him in the chest with a Colt .45 pistol.
He shook his head once, waving the eager driver/doorman aside, and helped Irene Adler step up into her empty coach.
“When shall we meet again?” asked Holmes, still holding the door as she settled into the cushioned bench.
“Oh, at your funeral or my hanging is most likely,” said Irene Adler.
“NO!” said Sherlock Holmes in a voice so loud and so commanding that the horse twitched its tail in alarm and the driver turned around on his box.
She leaned forward and kissed him passionately on the lips. With her hands still on his cheeks she said softly,
Now to scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long:
Give me your hands, if we be friends . . .
Holmes immediately took both her hands in his and squeezed them.
And luck or Prov’dence shall restore amends.
She pulled the door shut and cried, “Drive on, driver.”
Holmes stood there for a while in the dark. Then he walked back to Clover Adams’s grave, stopped at the granite back of the monument, and pounded on it with his fist.
The stone door hinged open. Chief of the Treasury Department Andrew L. Drummond stepped out and pushed the granite shut behind him.
“Did you hear it all?” asked Holmes in a strained monotone.
“Yes, everything,” said Drummond. “It shall be very helpful.” He gripped Holmes’s forearm in a man’s more aggressive way than Irene had done just a few minutes earlier. “Holmes, the personal things . . . I swear to you upon my word of honor, upon my children’s lives . . . that no one shall ever hear a word of them from me.”
Holmes shrugged as if to say he’d known how naked and vulnerable he would be after this session.
“We’ll find and start following the Zephyr immediately,” said Drummond.
Holmes nodded tiredly. “But let it anchor there near the World’s Fair,” he said in the same monotone as before. “Nothing must let Lucan Adler know that we’re on to his plan.”
“We’ll have to put Miss Adler under arrest,” said Drummond.
“Not now, for Christ’s sake!” exploded Holmes. “We’d just as well send Lucan Adler a telegram saying that we were on to him. Follow her if you can do so subtly—and I mean so totally subtly that a snake like Lucan Adler wouldn’t spot the tail—but, better yet, leave her alone, unfollowed, and free until . . .” His voice trailed off.
“Until when?” asked Drummond.
“Until I tell you otherwise,” said Holmes and turned to walk away.
Behind him, Agent Drummond blew a police whistle, and more than a dozen men—shadows among shadows—came from behind distant trees, boulders, headstones, and monuments to join their chief. Wagons were arriving at the park entrance. By their lamps, Holmes could see that most of the men were armed with pistols, as Drummond had been, but several carried long guns. None of them could have stopped Lucan Adler from shooting Sherlock Holmes—the sniper would have been too concealed for that—but the plan had been to capture Lucan after the fatal shot had revealed his position.
Holmes was waved into a comfortable open carriage that would carry just him and Drummond back into town.
Remembering the timbre of Irene Adler’s voice, Holmes surprised Drummond by crying, “Drive on, driver!”
3
Early on the morning of Friday, the twenty-ninth of April, Henry Adams and Henry James rode together to the main railway station to meet the “special train” that Henry Cabot Lodge had laid on for them.
It was a short ride, but Adams used it for what he obviously thought was an important conversation. “Harry,” he said, leaning forward toward the portly writer, “I need to tell you—before we meet up with all the others—how very important your visit has been to me the last two weeks.”
James’s gray eyes came alert. “And to me as well, Henry. I shall always treasure the hospitality and our nightly conversations.”
“And you did get some work done on your play?”
James smiled ruefully. “Some. Then rewrote it. Then rewrote it again. Then I tossed it all out. But I did start to expand a short story I’d written—a slight thing about an impoverished tutor who loves the young child in his care more than do the child’s careless parents.”
“It sounds all too real,” said Adams.
James made a slight gesture with his hand. “I shall see.”
“Thank you for allowing me to speak freely about Clover—her life as well as her death—after my years of silence,” said Adams. “I shall always be grateful to you for that.”
James’s eyes seemed to fill. “The honor and gratitude was all mine, my friend. I assure you.”
Suddenly Adams grinned. “Do you remember what you said to Clover in eighteen eighty-two in what you said was your last letter, from the ship before it sailed? Why you had chosen her to receive what you called ‘my last American letter’?”
“I said that I considered Clover the incarnation of her native land,” said James.
“And do you remember her response to me when she read that? I shared it in a letter to you so many years ago.”
Henry James said, “Clover told you that mine was, I believe her exact words were, ‘a most equivocal compliment’, and that it left her wondering, and I do remember her wording exactly—‘Am I then vulgar, dreary, and impossible to live with?’ ”
Both men laughed heartily.
Adams held out his closed hand. Presuming his friend wanted to shake hands, James held out his hand, but Adams turned it over and dropped something cold and solid into it. James realized that it was his watch, the watch given to him by his father, the watch he’d lost that mad night he and Sherlock Holmes had been hiding in the Saint-Gaudens monument, Henry Adams’s most cherished secret.
James blushed but, when he looked up, Adams was smiling.
“Clover and I will always love you, Harry.”
James quickly lowered his face but could not hide th
e tears that dripped from his cheeks and chin onto his open hand holding the beloved watch.
4
Holmes appeared at the Washington railway station at the appointed time and was amazed at what Henry Cabot Lodge’s casually offered “lay on some special private cars” amounted to. It was an entire private train unto itself. After the engine there was a car for servants’ quarters. Then a lavish car just for dining. Then a comfortable car for smoking, conversation, and taking in the passing view. Then no fewer than four even-more-lavish private cars for Lodge and his guests.
Henry Cabot and his wife Nannie had the end suite, half a car at the end of the train. Senator Don Cameron and his beautiful wife Lizzie had an equally spacious suite—an entire suite, complete with water closet, on a railway carriage!—and the Hays had an elaborate compartment which adjoined a smaller one where their daughter Helen slept. Clarence King had chosen not to make the trip, claiming necessary meetings in the West concerning mining interests, but Augustus Saint-Gaudens had accepted Lodge’s invitation. So the three bachelors—Saint-Gaudens, James, and Holmes—had smaller compartments, but each lavishly appointed and equipped with its own private toilet and sink. When told that the three gentlemen would have the constant services of only two valets—the servants’ car was overcrowded as it was—James had sighed and said, “Well, we shall just have to rough it then all the way to Chicago.”
James had received Holmes quite coolly when they’d met after two weeks of separation and silence, but the detective had seemed too distracted by some thought to notice James’s carefully calculated snub. During the first hours of the voyage, James was irritated that he would be forced to break the mutual silence and talk with Holmes privately.
He found his chance after the elaborate dinner when the women went to the common social area on the first half of the fourth carriage and the men went into the smoking-room carriage with brandy and cigars. James pulled the detective into the dining room and told the servants to step out until he said they could enter again.
“What is it?” asked Holmes. The detective still seemed preoccupied with something and had barely spoken during dinner, even though Hay’s daughter Helen had tried to draw him out with half a dozen questions.
“I saw Moriarty,” whispered James. “I sent a note to that effect to your damned cigar store but they sent it back to me unopened with a scrawl saying that you were no longer picking up your mail there.”
“That’s true,” said Holmes. He was applying his fancy modern lighter to a Meerschaum pipe and puffing offending aromatic fumes into the air that still smelled of beef and wine. “I’ve been traveling and wasn’t checking for mail at that cigar store. Where and when did you see Moriarty?”
“On the day I was prepared to leave Chicago for New York,” said James, his temper short. “On the fifteenth. The same day you left for heaven knows where.”
“Where did you see him, James? And what was he up to?”
The writer thought that Holmes was being damnably offhanded about such a serious topic. “He was at the central Chicago railway station, looking through the carriages. Looking for me, Holmes. He had some thugs helping him search. I barely got away without him seeing me.”
Holmes nodded and puffed. “Why do you think that Professor Moriarty was looking for you, James?”
“Well, you weren’t taking the morning train from Chicago to New York that morning, were you?” demanded James.
Holmes shook his head without removing the stem of the pipe from between his teeth.
“Moriarty and his thugs were there with their eyes full of business,” said James. “And that business was, I am certain, murder. And I was to have been the victim. Somehow . . . from someone you told about my earlier eavesdropping on Moriarty and the anarchists and mobs . . . somehow word got out. He was stalking me, Holmes. I am certain of it.”
“Then it’s a good thing you didn’t get on that particular train,” said Holmes.
James’s jaw dropped. “That’s all you have to say about this? That’s your response to my news? Where have you been the last two weeks?”
“Oh, here and there,” said Holmes, having to re-light his oversized pipe.
“And what have you been doing about the threat that Moriarty and his anarchists and his criminals pose to Washington, and New York, and Philadelphia, and Chicago, and the other cities I heard him say would suffer uprisings after President Cleveland is assassinated? Is the army involved? Have you spoken to all the mayors and chiefs of police of all those cities? I can think of little else that could warrant your two-week absence and your obvious . . . obvious . . . insouciance in the face of this imminent threat of what amounts to national revolution.”
“I wouldn’t worry about Moriarty,” said Holmes, patting James on the shoulder like a tutor reassuring a child. James was not fast enough to bat away Holmes’s hand, but he wished for hours later that he had been.
“Not worry about Moriarty?” cried James. “But certainly he must take priority in your searches. Professor Moriarty is the . . . in your words, I believe . . . the mastermind behind all the murders and violent uprisings to come. Surely you must seek out Moriarty as your primary duty and allow others to take care of this . . . this . . . boy . . . Lucan Adler.”
“No,” Holmes said bluntly. “What we have to concentrate on first is stopping Lucan Adler from killing the president. Then I shall deal with Professor Moriarty. You need to trust me on this, James.”
James could only shake his head in frustration and amazement. “And do you know how to do that? Stop the assassination from happening?” he asked at last. “Do you know where the assassin will be shooting from, how he plans to escape, and . . . most of all . . . what on earth you could do to stop him?”
“I believe so,” said Holmes. “We shall find out in less than three days, shan’t we? Oh, and I shall expect you to help me when that time comes, James.” He had the effrontery to pat Henry James on the shoulder again before Holmes went to the connecting door, waved the waiting servants in, and said, “Shall we join the other gentlemen in the smoking car?”
Henry James had never in his life felt the urge to kill anyone—save for a few brief stabs of that emotion aimed at his older brother William—but now he felt he could take a carving knife to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. He went into the smoking room and found a seat as far from the detective as he could get in the long carriage.
5
Henry Cabot Lodge’s special World’s Fair Express train arrived in Chicago on the morning of April 29 with everyone well-rested and amused. Everyone, it seemed, save for Sherlock Holmes, who seemed further and further lost in his own thoughts.
Lodge had let everyone know that their special cars were going to be parked on a private siding less than fifty yards outside the Columbian Exposition’s western gates where all the trains deposited visitors who went through the gates and onto the Parade Ground, flowing ahead to the Administration Building and the Court of Honor and then into the rest of the White City. All of his guests were free to come and rest or freshen up at any time of the days and nights they’d be there. The servants and cooks were on constant call.
But their first stop that morning was at a downtown-Chicago pier where everyone was ferried out to Don Cameron’s “Great Lakes Yacht”, the stately Albatross, where they were each shown slightly smaller but still luxurious rooms they could use whenever they wanted. The yacht was also heavily stocked with servants who would bring a cold drink or fix a full meal on a minute’s notice. Cameron gathered everyone together before the expeditions to the Fair began and explained that messengers would run any notes from the Albatross to anyone who decided to stay at or visit the luxury train cars and that there would always be at least one, and usually two, steam-powered longboats to rush them to or from Casino Pier at any hour of the day or night.
And with that, the explorations began. John Hay and Cabot Lodge had made sure that everyone—even young Helen—had the all important special visitor badges that all
owed them the run of the White City and the newly vitalized Midway Plaisance at any time. Lodge explained that the director of the entire Columbian Exposition, Daniel Burnham, had said that there would be a lot of last-minute cleaning-up going on—rubble moved, temporary tracks being taken out, last-minute fields of flowers and even trees being planted, some of the huge buildings getting their last spray of white paint—but if they were careful, they shouldn’t be in anyone’s way.
Finally, Lodge warned them to be careful on the mile-long strip called the Midway Plaisance. Burnham had told Henry Cabot that everything and everyone was in place save for the . . . Lodge didn’t use the word Burnham had . . . doggoned Ferris Wheel which should be completed in June. Meanwhile, the Midway offered complete Algerian and Tunisian Villages where they could sample the exotic food or watch even more exotic jugglers and dancing girls; the Barre Sliding Railway—a water-propelled ride that guaranteed screams and squeals of delight the whole length of the Midway; the Bernese Alps Electric Theatre where visitors in a hundred-seat diorama took a frigid (thanks to electrical refrigeration) trip over thirty simulated miles of Alpine peaks.
There was the captive balloon, which Lodge didn’t recommend to the ladies, as well as the Chinese Village, Dahomey Village, Turkish Village, and German Village, all populated with hundreds of appropriately dressed natives. For those seeking out culture along the Midway Plaisance, there was Hagenbeck’s Zoological Arena placed conveniently near the Hungarian Concert Pavilion where Gypsy bands would play and dance in native costume. Also nearby was the Vienna Concert Hall and Café.
There was a perfectly realized Street in Cairo—along with native Egyptians in their robes and with their dogs, snakes, and monkeys—as well as a huge building for the Kilauea Volcano for those who wanted a thrill. If they grew too warm in their weekend visit, there was the Natatorium indoor swimming pool. This Saturday night and Sunday night, the White City would be lighted only by its gaslights and the full moon, but Lodge promised that after President Cleveland turned the magic key on Monday, May first, the White City and its extended Midway Plaisance would become the most brightly and dramatically lighted place on the planet.