The Six Messiahs

"Are you a diamond merchant, Mr. Stern, or perhaps a dealer in furs or exotic metals?" asked Rymer, falling back on his exhaustive inventory of cultural stereotypes.

  "I'm a rabbi."

  "I should have known it; a man of the cloth, come to shepherd his flock. You have that look about you; that self-forgetful devotion to the life of the spirit. Splendid. I wasn't even aware that there was an Israelite temple in Phoenix."

  "Neither was I," said Stern.

  "Imagine that, Eileen; one of the Twelve Lost Tribes returning to the desert," said Rymer. "History is being written all around us, if only our eyes were not too poor to see."

  Eileen cringed; she was already formulating an excuse for abandoning Rymer in order to sit next to Stern on the train.

  If my dreams are any indication, Mr. Bendigo Rymer, you have blundered a lot closer to the truth than you could imagine, thought Jacob. He shifted his weight, trying to find comfort for his bony hips on the bare wooden bench. His back pulsed with pain, his knees ached as if they'd been hammered by a blacksmith, his lungs burned, his ears rang, he was hungry, thirsty, and he needed to empty his bladder.

  I'm a wreck. Thanks to God: What an invaluable reminder that we are spiritual beings and if we dwell on the physical, our only reward will be pain. On the other hand, if a hot bath and a bowl of soup were to materialize before me now, I wouldn't complain.

  Maybe he could sleep on the train. The same dream had come into his mind with greater intensity the farther south he traveled, additional details of its peculiar landscape coming clearer with each immersion. Throughout the trip from Chicago, Jacob had physically willed himself to stay asleep—not just for the rest, although he felt no less exhausted for it—but so that more of the dream might be revealed.

  Consistently now, he experienced while sleeping the unsettling sensation of full waking consciousness, completely aware that he was moving through a dream. Although unable to control the dream's flow of events, he had learned to shift the focus of his attention and see more of what was happening around him. The explicit content of the dream itself was not on the face of it so frightening, but there crept in around its borders an aura of menace and a potency of light and sound and color so overwhelming that each night he had woken out of it in a pool of sweat, heart thundering, eyes raw and stinging from involuntary tears.

  The Lost Tribe.

  In the dream, he came upon a tribe of people—in the logic of the dream that seemed to be their essence—gathering in an open plaza, all in white, worshiping something mounted on an elevated platform that gave off a tremendous amount of light... but each time the object of their veneration remained frustratingly just out of his sight.

  Other now familiar images:

  An immense black tower casting shadows over waves of white sand. An underground chamber, a crypt or temple carved out of rock. Five other people, faces and forms obscured. An ancient leather-bound book lying in a silver casket. The book in Hebrew. Reaching toward its pristine pages, a hand: talons, scales.

  The phrase in his head.

  We are Six.

  For now that was all he had to go on.

  Jacob had no plan. His body felt frail, his skin hardly durable enough to hold every ailing part of him together, but his mind remained clear and his strength of purpose had grown more resolute with every passing mile. Why Phoenix? What was guiding him in that direction? Pure instinct: The dream took place in a desert so he kept moving toward the biggest one anyone seemed to know about—western Arizona, they told him—and he would continue on until he came across something that conformed to his vision. Then... who knew? Undoubtedly something else would happen. Or perhaps not. Maybe he would have a nice vacation and the desert air would do wonders for his lungs.

  "... we played an entire week in Minneapolis, in front of packed houses, every night; they appreciate fine theater in that town, a hearty Scandinavian people, used to sitting for long periods of time—it's the winters, you see, the long winters pacify 'em—that has been my experience many times over, a most patient and receptive audience...."

  With Rymer lost in his self-absorbed monologue, Jacob was able to rest and feel his heart settle into rhythm again. He was forced to admit that, for a man in such miserable condition, he felt surprisingly good. After fifty years cooped up with his books, to travel around in such a spontaneous, unrestricted way felt like a revelation; eating sandwiches, watching the spectacular American countryside roll by outside the windows of the train. How exhilarating! Fields and rivers, evergreen forests, the sunset-red Rocky Mountains in the high distance; he'd never been near such exquisite natural beauty before. The world seemed so huge, expansive, and made all his attempts to philosophically encompass it seem laughingly inadequate. A sense of humiliating foolishness about his journey came over him, but he had regularly suffered the same feelings while standing on a street corner or walking to the butcher. Generalized shame is an inescapable part of the human condition, he reminded himself. May as well keep moving forward.

  And if the whole mishmash turned out to be born from some crazy defect in his mind, with no horrific calamity awaiting him at the end of the trail, why then, that qualified as good news, didn't it? This spur of the moment train trip to the Wild West would simply pass into the mythology of his circle of friends as the most celebrated example of Jacob Stern's already well-certified eccentricity.

  He was certain of only this: Within the hour, the conductor would whistle them onto the train to Phoenix. The actor would continue to talk about himself, unprovoked, until their train arrived or the world ended, whichever came first. And to pass the time until then in the company of such a beautiful woman as this one across from him was not such a terrible fate.

  Maybe she would sit next to him. He could think of worse things.

  "Deerstalker hats have become all the rage."

  "You don't say."

  "I'm told there's even been a run on magnifying glasses and meerschaum pipes."

  "Honestly? Well, I never."

  "I attended a costume party at the Vanderbilt mansion some few weeks ago and I would hazard to say that no less than every third man there came dressed as Mr. Sherlock Holmes,'' said Major Pepperman, sipping the hotel's complimentary champagne and idly tinkling on the grand piano that sat before the picture window looking down on Fifth Avenue, its lights twinkling to life as night settled slowly over the city.

  "How extraordinary," said Doyle.

  How mind-numbingly terrifying, he thought.

  Seated snugly in the sitting room of his suite at the Waldorf Hotel—a room considerably larger than every entire flat he had ever lived in until recently—Doyle picked grapes from a courtesy fruit sculpture the size of Rodin's Balzac while paging through a stack of the daily tabloids; in all but one of the rags his arrival had rated front-page news. But no stories in the Herald under the byline of Ira Pinkus, or in any of the other papers under his various noms de plume, and nothing within the existing write-ups referred remotely to any nefarious events on board the Elbe. Whatever pressures Jack had applied to Pinkus had silenced his bark, realized Doyle, allowing himself a private sigh of relief.

  "Perhaps that strange fellow we met in the lobby had been at your party as well," said Doyle.

  A frumpy pear-shaped man in full Holmes regalia and two equally suspect accomplices had staked out the Waldorf entrance, jumping into Doyle's path as they arrived: "Conan Doyle, we presume?" Then, with stone-faced ceremony, they handed him an engraved plaque—commemorating mr. Arthur conan doyle's first american visit, courtesy of the official new york chapter of the baker street irregulars—an organization Doyle had never heard of, which according to Pepperman had spontaneously sprouted out of Sherlock mania like a wild toadstool.

  This Holmes impersonator then insisted on delivering a rambling, poorly memorized soliloquy in the most wretched simulation of an English accent Doyle could remember hearing, presumably, although it was difficult to tell, as the character of Holmes paying tribute to his creator. This p
aralyzing assault went on for nearly five minutes, during which time the smile pasted on Doyle's face began to cramp painfully. In the awkward aftermath, it took all Doyle and Pepperman could do to dissuade the sorry trio from following them into the elevator.

  An awful thought struck Doyle: What if Jack were to materialize in the middle of such a scene?

  "So ... tell me, is he really dead?"

  "Who?"

  "Why, Mr. Sherlock Holmes."

  "Oh, good God, man, he fell a thousand feet into a waterfall."

  "There's one school of thought thinks he might have found some way to survive."

  "I can't believe people are honestly walking around thinking about such things."

  "As I tried to communicate to you in my cables, Mr. Doyle, you have no idea the powerful impression your stories have made on readers over here," said Pepperman. "A continuing series of mysteries featuring the same characters is just so plumb bob audacious, it's a plain wonder no one ever dreamt it up before. Honestly, sir, I've never seen the like; I used to promote a traveling circus so I've got a sense of the way things catch on, the common touch, how folks want to spend their hard-earned buck. I don't believe you can as yet fully appreciate what Sherlock means to these people."

  Doyle smiled absently, feeling it would be impolite to ask but hoping Pepperman would leave soon so he could unpack. He reached for and opened another package off the Matterhorn of ornately wrapped gifts that they'd found piled inside the suite.

  A lurid red satin pillow needlepointed with the inscription though he might be more humble, there is no police like holmes.

  "I'm beginning to get a grasp of it," said Doyle, heart sinking as he realized he was now obliged to favor each gift-giver with a reply as etiquette required.

  With his obsessive devotion to order, he could already visualize the assembling of the cards and addresses, the infinite tedium of personalizing each and every thank-you—good Christ, it could take weeks. This trip was supposed to be a break from all that, a lark, an excursion. If Larry was along, they might have managed it, but Innes would only make royal hash of a job this logistically complex. And now that he had caught the scent of that herd of dancing girls, the boy would be absolutely unfit for duty. Where had he gotten himself off to now, for example? Doyle hadn't seen him since they checked into the—

  "I don't recall if I mentioned it to you, but Grover Cleveland has on more than one occasion stayed in this very same suite," said Pepperman.

  "Grover who?"

  "Grover Cleveland. The President."

  "Of? Oh, the president of your country."

  "Yes, sir. Right here in the Presidential Suite. On more than one occasion."

  All three-hundred-plus pounds of him—oh dear, thought Doyle, perhaps I'd better check to see if the bed's broken. He caught a glimpse of the eager-beaver expression on Pepper-man's face and chided himself: Here I am prattling on about my petty ordeals, wondering why the man won't leave, and the poor fellow's only waiting to hear how terribly pleased I am at all the fuss he's made.

  "You know, Major, I am so truly grateful beyond my ability to express to you for all the effort you've made on my behalf," said Doyle.

  "Really?" Pepperman's face lit up like a full moon.

  "I can't tell you how much I appreciate everything you've done; I couldn't be more certain that our tour will be the greatest success for us both, financially, artistically, and in every other way imaginable."

  "Why I'm most pleased to hear you say so, sir," said Pepperman, rising and shaking his hand, flashing his blinding teeth again. "Most pleased. Now I should leave you to get yourself more settled in. ..."

  "Oh no, it's quite all right—"

  "No, now I'm sure you could use an hour or two of peace and quiet; we'll be setting quite a pace while you're here, it may be the last chance you have for quite some time."

  "Perhaps you're right...."

  "So if it's convenient, sir, I will call for you at eight with the carriage and we'll go straightaway to your publisher's reception."

  With that, the good-natured giant took his leave and Doyle embarked on an exploratory tour of the three-bedroom Presidential Suite, calculating the staggering cost of the place; Italian marble floors and mantels, Persian rags the size of a cricket pitch, immense Egyptian urns, and paintings of Dutch landscapes with enough spread of canvas to sail an easterly wind halfway back to Britain. The force of water pressure exerted by the overhead shower in the bathroom he found astonishing, if not physically dangerous. He had just finished verifying that the bed had survived the challenge of President Cleveland's amplitude when a knock summoned him to the front door, which in the immensity of the place took an anxious minute to find.

  No one there. He walked back into the sitting room.

  "Sorry," someone said, as Doyle jumped half a foot.

  Jack Sparks stood by the piano near the window. Father Devine's priest's garb had been abandoned, along with the thinning red hair, whiskers, and paunch. Doyle had nearly forgotten the man's genius for disguise and with a jolt remembered he had given that same chameleon talent to his detective; here he was, face-to-face with Sherlock's inspiration.

  He looks roughly the same; a decade older, of course—so are we all, thought Doyle, but the mind manufactures an allowance for the erosions of time, keeping pace with the subtle changes one never notices in that face we study in the mirror. He still wore black—neutral, ascetic trousers and shirt—a leather coat, and the same soft leather boots. His hair shorter, clipped closer to the skull, going to gray. The scars Doyle had seen earlier on Father Devine had not been the work of makeup; a stark band of white along the left jaw, an indentation on the forehead running just below the hairline. As if he'd been fractured and reassembled, thought Doyle, dimming his charismatic handsomeness; something harder and more forbidding emerging from his interior.

  His eyes had changed most of all, and yet they were the first thing about him Doyle had recognized; he remembered seeing in them this same haunted, spiritually disrupted look during their most troubled times together: Now it seemed a constant presence, deeper set, withdrawing from life. Impossible not to notice eyes like those and be disturbed by them.

  A cruel irony, thought Doyle; here I am, an honored guest in this palatial suite, celebrated beyond all reasonable proportion for the exploits of a fictional character, and here its principal inspiration stands before me, a sorrowful, reduced shadow of the man I had known. Over the years, Doyle had wondered hundreds of times how it would feel to see his friend again. The one emotion he had never anticipated was the one he felt now.

  Fear.

  Perfectly natural. I thought he was long dead; it's a bit like encountering a ghost, isn't it?

  Jack made no move toward him, offered no hand in greeting. Nothing warm or welcoming in his look or manner, only a dull glare of rectitude and regret.

  "The reason why no approach was made to you on the ship," said Sparks, his voice flat, deflated.

  "You knew I was there from the day we sailed, why didn't you?..."

  "Didn't want to involve you."

  "It wouldn't have troubled me...."

  "Not your affair. Wasn't aware you were going to be there. Taken aback. Stern or his book either, for that matter. Couldn't be helped."

  "I'll take you at your word." Why was he so cold?

  "Suspected those four men were on board. Suspected they were involved in the other business."

  "The theft from Oxford; the Vulgate Bible."

  Sparks kept his hands folded behind his back, offering no nods or shrugs, a complete economy of movement and gesture, with no concession to the comfort of the other.

  "Sorry to see you there," said Sparks.

  "No reason to be . . ."

  "Caused enough trouble in your life."

  "Nonsense, I would have been happy to know you were alive...."

  Jack shook his head once, with emphatic vehemence.

  "I'm not."

  Doyle's heart tripp
ed. Sparks wouldn't meet his eyes.

  "Not in the way you suppose when you say it. Not in the way you assume."

  "Of course I had no way of knowing that, did I?" said Doyle.

  "That woman. On the ship."

  "The medium? Sophie Hills?"

  "You asked her about me."

  "She said that you weren't dead."

  "She was wrong. I did die. I stayed in this body and I died."

  "But Jack; you are alive, the fact remains you're standing here...."

  ' 'Life ... does not mean ... the same thing ... it does to you. There is no way ... this can be described.. . that would make you understand. Not any way ... that would have made you .. . happy."

  Jack spoke like an automaton, face drained of expression; unreachable. Spitting out the last word like a bitter seed. He was right about this much: He didn't seem human. And using the skills Jack had taught him to now analyze the man himself made Doyle feel vaguely treacherous.

  A long silence. Jack turned away, looked out the window. Doyle's skin crawled, palms moist. But he waited for Jack to elaborate. You'll find I'm not the same man either now, old boy; I don't intimidate so easily.

  "Didn't want you to see me like this," Jack said finally.

  Was there a trace of shame in his voice? For the first time, Doyle noticed Jack's hands folded behind his back; they were scored with angry red and white scars, fingers crooked, mangled. The fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand were missing. What had happened to him?

  "Larry told me about it," said Doyle. "Found me in London. Nearly ten years ago now. How the two of you followed your brother's trail to Austria. Finding Alexander at the waterfall. Your fight. How you fell."

  "Yes. I read your story," said Jack dryly, staring down at the city.

  "And I'll make no apologies for writing about a man I thought long dead," said Doyle, his back bristling; then, softening his tone: "I went there, years afterward. With my wife: I'm married now. To Reichenbach Falls. I didn't see how anyone could have survived but someone said it had happened before. It was possible. But I never heard from you. ..."

  Doyle trailed off; no response.