Back to his life.
“What name did you just call me by?” asked the man, still tightly gripping James’s coat front. The Scandinavian accent was gone now. The voice was distinctly upper-class British and nothing else.
“I am sorry,” stammered James. “I must have been mistaken. I apologize for intruding upon your solitude here.” At that second, Henry James not only knew the identity of the tall man—despite blacker hair than when he’d met him four years earlier, fuller hair somehow, now raised to odd spikes rather than slicked back, and a thick mustache that had been lacking four years ago, combined with a nose slightly altered with actor’s putty or somesuch—but also knew that the man had been on the verge of throwing himself into the Seine when James had interrupted him with his arrival in the darkness announced by the tap-tap-tap of his ferule.
Henry James felt the fool at that moment, but he was a man on whom nothing was ever lost. Once he’d seen a face and learned its name, he never forgot.
He tried to move away, but the powerful fingers still gripped the front of his coat.
“What name did you call me by?” demanded the man again. His tone was as chill as iron in winter.
“I thought you were a man I’d met named Sherlock Holmes,” gasped James, wanting only to get away, wanting only to be back in his bed in the comfortable hotel on the Rue de la Paix.
“Where did we meet?” demanded the man. “Who are you?”
James answered only the second part. “My name is Henry James.” In his sudden panic, he’d almost added the long-abandoned “Jr.”
“James,” said Mr. Sherlock Holmes. “The younger brother of the great psychologist William James. You are the American scribbler who lives in London much of the time.”
Even in his intense discomfort of being held and touched by another man, James felt an even stronger resentment at being identified as being the younger brother of the “great” William James. His older brother had not even been known, outside of small, tight Harvard circles, until he’d published his The Principles of Psychology three years earlier in 1890. The book, for reasons somewhat lost on Henry, had catapulted William to international fame among intellectuals and other students of the human mind.
“Please be so kind as to release me at once,” said James in as stern a tone as he could muster. His outrage at being handled made him forget that Holmes—he was certain it was Sherlock Holmes—had just saved his life. Or perhaps that salvation was another mark against this hawk-nosed Englishman.
“Tell me when we met and I shall,” said Holmes, still gripping the front of James’s overcoat. “My name is Jan Sigerson. I am a Norwegian explorer of some renown.”
“A thousand apologies then, sir,” said James, feeling absolutely no apology in his heart. “I am obviously mistaken. For a second here, in the darkness, I thought you to be a gentleman I met four years ago at a tea-party benefit in Chelsea. The party was given by an American lady of my acquaintance, Mrs. T. P. O’Connor. I arrived with Lady Wolseley, you see, along with some other writers and artists of the stage—Mr. Aubrey Beardsley, Mr. Walter Besant . . . Pearl Craigie, Marie Corelli, Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle, Bernard Shaw, Genevieve Ward. During the tea, I was introduced to Mrs. O’Connor’s house guest for the weekend, a certain Sherlock Holmes. I see now that there is . . . no real resemblance.”
Holmes released him. “Yes, I remember now. I was there at Mrs. O’Connor’s estate briefly while solving a series of country home jewel thefts. It was the servants, of course. It always is.”
James straightened the front of his overcoat, arranged his cravat, firmly planted the tip of his umbrella, and resolved to leave Holmes’s presence without another word.
Ascending the dark steps, he realized with a shock that Holmes was walking beside him.
“It’s amazing, really,” said the tall Englishman in the slight Yorkshire accent James had heard at Mrs. O’Connor’s tea party in 1889. “I’ve used this Sigerson disguise for the past two years and passed close by—in daylight!—personages I’ve known for years, without their recognizing me. In New Delhi, in broad daylight in a sparsely populated square and for more than ten minutes, I stood next to Chief Inspector Singh, a man with whom I’d spent two months solving a delicate murder in Lahore, and the trained professional never glanced at me twice. Right here in Paris, I have passed by old English acquaintances and asked directions of my old friend Henri-August Lozé, the recently retired Prefect of Police for Paris with whom I’d worked on a dozen cases. With Lozé was the new Prefect de la Somme, Louis Lépine, with whom I have also had a close working relationship. Yet neither man recognized me. And yet you did. In the dark. In the rain. When you had nothing but self-murder on your mind.”
“I beg your pardon,” said James. He stopped out of sheer shock at Holmes’s effrontery. They were on the street level now and the rain had subsided a bit. But the numerous street lamps there still held their halos.
“Your secret is safe with me, Mr. James,” said Holmes. He was trying to light his pipe despite the damp. When the match finally flared, James could see even more easily that this was the “consulting detective” whom he’d met at Mrs. O’Connor’s tea party four years earlier. “You see,” continued Holmes, speaking now between puffs on the pipe, “I was there for the same purpose, sir.”
James could think of no reply to that. He turned on his heel and headed west along the sidewalk. Holmes caught up to him with two strides of his longer legs.
“We need to go somewhere for a late meal and wine, Mr. James.”
“I prefer to be alone, Mr. Holmes. Mr. Sigerson. Whomever you are pretending to be this night.”
“Yes, yes, but we need to talk,” insisted Holmes. He did not seem angered or perturbed by being found out. Or frustrated that his own suicide-by-Seine had been interrupted by the writer’s arrival. Only fascinated that James had seen through his disguise.
“We have absolutely nothing to discuss,” snapped James, trying to walk more quickly but only making himself look foolish in a portly way as the tall Englishman easily kept pace.
“We could discuss why you were ending your life with your sister Alice’s ashes in a snuffbox clenched so tightly in your right hand,” said Holmes.
James came to a full stop. After a moment he managed, “You . . . can . . . not . . . know . . . such a . . . thing.”
“But I do,” said Holmes, still working with his pipe. “And if you join me for a late snack and some good wine, I shall tell you how I know and why I know you will never complete the grim task you assigned yourself tonight, Mr. James. And I know just the clean, well-lighted café where we can talk.”
Holmes grasped James’s left elbow and the two began walking arm-in-arm up the Avenue de l’Opéra. Henry James was too shocked and astonished—and curious—to resist.
CHAPTER 3
Despite Holmes’s promise to lead them to a “well-lighted place,” James expected a dimly lighted out-of-the-way café opening onto some back alley. Instead, Holmes had brought him to the Café de la Paix, very near James’s hotel and at the intersection of Boulevard des Capucines and Place de l’Opéra in the 9th arrondissement.
The Café de la Paix was one of the largest, brightest, and most vividly decorated establishments in all of Paris, rivaled in its elaborate décor and number of mirrors only by Charles Garnier’s Opéra directly across the plaza. The place had been built, James knew, in 1862 to serve guests at the nearby Grand-Hôtel de la Paix and had come into its full fame during the Expo Exhibition of ’67. It had been one of the first of Paris’s public buildings to be lighted by electricity, but as if the hundreds or thousands of electric bulbs were not enough, bright lanterns with focal prisms still threw beams of light onto the grand mirrors. Henry James had avoided the place over the decades, if for no other reason than it was a common saying in Paris that to dine in the Café de la Paix meant one would eventually run into friends and acquaintances. The place was that popular. And Henry James preferred to choose the times
and places that he would “run into” old acquaintances or friends.
Holmes seemed undisturbed by the crowds, the roar of conversation, and scores of eager faces looking up as they entered. James listened as the faux-Norwegian explorer requested his “usual table” from the maître d’—in fluent and properly accented French—and they were led to a small, round table somewhat away from the primary hustle and bustle of the buzzing establishment.
“You come here often enough to have a ‘usual table’?” asked James when they were alone. Or as alone as they could be amidst such bustle and noise.
“I have dined here at least three times a week in the two months I’ve been in Paris,” said Holmes. “I’ve seen dozens of acquaintances, former police partners in my detection business, and clients. None have looked twice at or through my Jan Sigerson disguise.”
Before James could respond, the waiter appeared and Holmes had the effrontery to order quickly for the both of them. After designating a rather good champagne, and perhaps due to the late hour, he ordered a huge after-Opera assortment for two: le lièvreen civet, pâtes crémeuses d’épeautre accompanied by a plateau de fromage affinés and a concurrent platter of la figue, l’abricot, le pruneau, en marmelade des fruits secs au thé Ceylan and biscuit spéculos, concluding with mousse légère chocolat.
James had no appetite. His delicate stomach was upset by the shocks of the past hour. More than that, he did not care for hare—especially jugged hare with the heavy and grainy French wheat-sauce ladled on it—and this night he had no taste whatsoever for the fruit. And after indulging in it far too much when he was a small boy in France, he detested chocolate mousse.
He said nothing.
James was dying to know how Holmes—this cut-rate street-corner magus—“knew” that sister-Alice’s ashes were in the snuffbox, but he would die rather than bring up the subject here in this public place. It was true, however, that between the din of chatting, laughing diners and the placement of their table, it would have been terribly hard for anyone to eavesdrop on them. But that was not the issue.
As they sipped the rather good champagne, Holmes said, “Did you read my obituary in The Times almost two years ago?”
“Friends brought it to my attention,” said James.
“I read it. The paper was three weeks old—I was in Istanbul at the time—but I did get to read it. That and the later interview with poor Watson describing my death at Reichenbach Falls while struggling with the ‘Napoleon of Crime’, Professor James Moriarty.”
Henry James would have preferred to stay silent, but he knew he was expected to fulfill his role as interlocutor.
“How did you survive that terrible fall, Mr. Holmes?”
Holmes laughed and brushed crumbs from his bristling black mustache. “There was no fall. There was no struggle. There was no ‘Napoleon of Crime’.”
“No Professor James Moriarty?” said James.
Holmes chuckled and dabbed at his lips and mustache with the white linen serviette. “None whatsoever, I am afraid. Invented from whole cloth for my own purposes . . . purposes of disappearance, in this event.”
“But Watson has told The Times of London that this Professor Moriarty had authored a book—The Dynamics of an Asteroid,” persisted James.
“Also invented by me,” said Holmes with a smug smile under the Sigerson mustache. “No such book exists. I cited it to Watson only so that he could later give the press—and his own inevitable publication of the events preceding Reichenbach Falls in his only recently released tale ‘The Final Problem’—some . . . what do you authors call it? . . . verisimilitude. Yes, that’s the word. Verisimilitude.”
“But might not,” said James, “after this detail has been mentioned in the various newspaper accounts of Moriarty and your demise, might not people attempt to find this Dynamics of an Asteroid book, even if just out of simple curiosity? If it does not exist, your entire Reichenbach Falls story must collapse.”
Holmes laughed this away with a flick of his hand. “Oh, I stressed to Watson, who has in turn stressed to the press, that Moriarty’s book was of the most unreadable and difficult advanced mathematics—I believe my exact words to Watson were ‘it was a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it’. That should give pause to the merely curious. I also remember telling Watson that so few copies of Moriarty’s famous book—famous within mathematical circles only—were published that copies were extremely rare, perhaps not even findable today.”
“So you deliberately lied to your friend about this . . . this ‘Napoleon of Crime’ . . . only so that Dr. Watson would repeat these total fabrications to the press?” said James, hoping that the chill in his tone would get through to Holmes.
“Oh, yes,” said Holmes with a slight smile. “Absolutely.”
James sat in silence for a while. Finally he said, “But what if Dr. Watson were called to give sworn testimony . . . perhaps in an inquest into your demise?”
“Oh, any such inquest would have been completed long before this,” said Holmes. “It’s been almost two years since Reichenbach Falls, after all.”
“But still . . .” began James.
“Watson would not have been perjuring himself in such testimony,” interrupted Holmes, showing the slightest hint of irritation now, “because he sincerely believed that Moriarty was, as I explained to him in such detail, the Napoleon of Crime. And Watson believes with equal sincerity that I died with Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.”
James blinked several times despite his best effort to show no reaction to this. “You have no remorse about lying to your best friend? The press has reported that Dr. Watson’s wife has died in the interval since your . . . disappearance. So presumably the poor man is now mourning the loss of both his wife and his best friend.”
Holmes helped himself to more fruit. “I did more than lie, Mr. James. I led Watson on a merry chase—pursuing the mythical Moriarty, you understand—across England and Europe, ending at the fabled waterfall from whose waters neither my body, nor Professor Moriarty’s, shall ever be recovered.”
“That was beastly,” said James.
“That was necessary,” Holmes said with no anger or emphasis. “I had to disappear completely, you see. Disappear without a trace and in a manner that convinced the multitudes—or at least that small share of the multitudes that has shown interest in my modest adventures—that I was dead. Was there much mourning in London upon news of my demise?”
James blinked at this and was sure it was levity. Sure, that is, until he saw the serious expression on Sherlock Holmes’s disguised face.
“Yes,” he said at last. “Or so I hear.”
Holmes waited. Finally he said, “Watson’s telling of the Reichenbach tale, his story called ‘The Final Problem’, appeared in The Strand only three months ago—December of ’ninety-two. But I’m curious about the reaction when the news stories appeared two years ago.”
James resisted a sigh. “I don’t read The Strand,” he said. “But I’m told that young men in London, both when the news of your death was first published and then again this winter when Dr. Watson’s story appeared, started wearing black armbands.”
It was true that James would never read the kind of cheap-romance fiction and casual science-fact and household gossip that appeared in The Strand. But his younger friends Edmund Gosse and Jonathan Sturges both did. And both had worn black mourning armbands for months in solemn memory of Holmes’s presumed death. James had thought it all ridiculous.
Sherlock Holmes was smiling as he finished the last of his mousse.
Henry James, still terrified that the conversation would turn back to the contents of his snuffbox if Holmes were allowed to guide it, said, “But why carry out such a hoax, sir? Why betray your good friend Dr. Watson and thousands of your loyal readers with such a ruse if there were no grand criminal conspiracy—no Napoleon of Crim
e—pursuing you? What could be your motive? Sheer perversity?”
Holmes set his spoon down and stared directly at the writer. “I wish it had been something so simple, Mr. James. No, I decided that I had to fake my own death and disappear completely because of discovering through my own ratiocination . . . through the inductive and deductive processes by which I’ve become the most famous consulting detective in the world . . . a fact so shocking that it not only irrevocably changed my life but led me, as you found me tonight by le Pont Neuf, ready to end it.”
“What single fact could possibly . . .” began Henry James and then closed his mouth. It would be the worst of manners and presumptuousness to ask.
Holmes smiled tightly. “I discovered, Mr. James,” he said as he leaned closer, “that I was not a real person. I am . . . how would a literary person such as yourself put it? I am, the evidence has proven to me most conclusively, a literary construct. Some ink-stained scribbler’s creation. A mere fictional character.”
CHAPTER 4
Henry James now knew beyond a doubt that he was dealing with a crazy person. Something had driven this Sherlock Holmes person—if this was the Sherlock Holmes he had met four years earlier at Mrs. O’Connor’s garden party—to and beyond the raveled edge of rationality.
But the perverted truth was simple and shocking: James was fascinated with Holmes’s delusion that he was a fictional character and he wanted to hear more about it. It struck him as a wonderful conceit for a short story someday—perhaps one involving a famous writer who also had descended into believing that he was one of his own characters.
Holmes had ordered cognac—a poor choice, James thought, after the champagne and late evening meal—but both men sipped it now as the writer worked to pose his questions. Suddenly a noisy commotion erupted in the terrace-covered area of the café across the wide dance floor from where they were seated. Dozens of people had gotten to their feet; men were bowing; a few applauded.