by Dan Simmons
Suddenly the almost emaciated-looking boy took the quiver of brushes from the scarecrow man and crouched low as the skull-man leaned forward over the boy, tumbling in a perfect somersault along the three-inch-wide ridgeline, and then immediately got to his feet and bent over as the boy jumped up onto his back.
The crowd let out a gasp and low moan and some in the front stepped into those behind them, as if seeking to get out of range for when the man and boy fell.
James felt a sense of unreality fall over him like a cloak as he watched the red-and-black-striped man—his long, white fingers looking truly skeletal—remove the covers to the triple-chimney at the end of the ridgeline. Fingers moving in a blur, working together, orange-haired-man and green-haired-boy used a loose bit of rope to tie those coverings tight at the base of the chimney.
Then the skeletal man—his black shoes looked almost like ballet slippers—leaped straight into the air until his legs were far apart, the shoe-slippers on opposite sides of the four-foot-wide triple chimney.
The crowd gasped again, like a single organism, James thought (he had gasped as well, although not out loud), when the boy simply threw himself into the air sixty feet above the ground, his arms ahead of him like a diver leaping from a cliff into the sea. But there was no water below the boy, only a six-story drop to hard soil, grass, and stone walks.
The tall sweep with orange hair caught the boy in mid-air and held him, the boy’s terribly thin arms still stretched straight forward, his legs rigid behind him, until suddenly the scarecrow adult swung the skinny lad until his arms and head were pointing straight down into the narrow chimney aperture. It was only then that James noticed that the adult sweep and boy sweep were attached at the waist with two strangely knotted ropes, rather like two Alpine climbers roped together on the Matterhorn.
The skull-faced tall sweep let the boy’s torso and legs slide between his long, stick-white fingers until all of the boy save for his lower legs and feet had disappeared down the impossibly narrow chimney. The grown sweep let go of the boy’s ankles and the crowd moaned in unison again until they saw that the skull-faced adult sweep now had both ropes in his hands. The man began lowering the rope, first letting it slide through one hand, then through the other, and all the while he was leaning further back from the vertical on the narrow chimney pot ridge, letting the boy’s slight weight balance him as he continued backward until it seemed impossible that he might ever pull himself upright again.
James turned away.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” asked Clara Hay. “Exhilarating!”
“Extraordinary,” managed James, not wanting to hurt his hostess’s feelings. Those few seconds of watching had given him a sense of vertigo followed by nausea. What an insane species we are, was his only coherent thought.
“They call themselves the Flying Vernettis,” continued Clara, obviously not noticing James’s sudden paleness. “Father and son, Lizzie Cameron thinks. They have been doing their chimney-cleaning this week for only a few of the finest houses, for the finest families, and Lizzie has been impatient all week for them to get to her house.”
“Extraordinary,” James said again, not turning his gaze back to the spectacle as the crowd gasped and groaned again at some new impossibility.
“Lizzie says that they’re ever so efficient,” continued Clara, speaking to James but looking back the other way. “They close every room off before clearing and cleaning the chimneys—and heaven knows some of these older houses need such a clean sweep—and she says they lay newspaper across everything in the closed-off rooms before the actual dusting.”
“Extraordinary,” said James. He focused his gaze on the White House across the street to the south. “I believe I shall take a brief walk,” he continued. “I shall see you later this afternoon or evening, Clara.”
Clara did not respond. Her hands clasped tightly together as if in prayer, her mouth open, she was totally absorbed in whatever death-defying absurdities were occurring high above her on Lizzie Cameron’s rooftop.
* * *
Later, even many years later, Henry James could never quite explain, even to himself, exactly why he chose to do all the things he did in the hours that followed. If, he would invariably add to this particular mental query, it was truly I who chose to do those things. It was more the behavior, he felt, of a poorly drawn character in a sensationalist Wilkie Collins or H. Rider Haggard novel.
Luckily he’d brought his silk top hat and walking cane despite Clara’s tugging and urgings when leaving the house, so he did not have to go back to the Hays’ home. James turned east on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked briskly, refusing to turn his head as the crowd on Lafayette Square Park gasped or oohed or aahed.
The Flying Vernettis was precisely the kind of idiotic American showmanship and bread-and-circus nonsense that had kept James in England and Europe all these years. A chimney sweep risking his son’s life, if indeed the boy were his son and not some orphan the sweep had picked up from an orphanage and trained, to perform idiot acrobatics sixty feet in the air for the approval of the likes of the Camerons and Lodges and Hays and the dour Henry Adams. James would not have been surprised if President Grover Cleveland and his wife weren’t on the front lawn of the Executive Mansion and gawking as broadly as the social elite in Lafayette Park.
America was a nation that refused to grow up. It was a perpetual baby, a vast, pink, fleshy toddler, now in possession of some terrible weapons it did not know how to hold properly, much less use properly.
James hailed a hansom cab and told the driver to take him to the closest steamship company.
At the rather lavish steamship headquarters, James ordered the cab to wait while he went inside and paid for reservations from New York to London on the North German Lloyd Line’s new greyhound steamship the Spree, sailing at 7:30 p.m. from New York the following Tuesday, April 11. He would spend his birthday at sea.
It was true, James knew, that this German ship hadn’t quite matched the eastward crossing records of say the City of New York (5 days, 23 hours, and 14 minutes) or the City of Paris (5 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes), but James knew the Spree to be lavishly comfortable. He also knew that the American and British steamship companies measured their eastward crossings between Sandy Hook Lightship and Roche’s Point, the entrance to Queenstown Harbor; the North German Lloyd Line and the Hamburg-American measured the trips between Sandy Hook Lightship and the Needles, near Southampton.
He would not be in a hurry once he was on the open sea, and he looked forward to a majority of the passengers speaking German, so he would not constantly have to be drawn into conversations (although he was fluent in German).
Satisfied that he would be sailing to England in three days, James went out to his waiting cab and told the cabbie his next destination.
At the railway station, James made reservations for (and paid for) a first-class ticket to New York City, leaving Washington tomorrow—Sunday—afternoon. He also purchased continuing tickets to leave for Boston on Monday morning, returning to New York early on Tuesday afternoon, allowing plenty of time before the Spree’s evening departure.
He then had the cab take him to a telegraph office where he wired reservations for Sunday night at the upscale New York hotel where he’d stayed when he’d arrived in New York, then another reservation for one night in a familiar hotel in Boston. He’d made up his mind that he would not be looking up old friends there and William and his entire family were in Europe. With some discipline, James thought, on his way to the cemetery to deposit Alice’s ashes at her grave, he might avoid walking past the old house in Cambridge where the whole family, Aunt Kate and all, had lived. He also did not want to see brother William’s huge home at 95 Irving Street in Cambridge. He would plan his walk to and from the cemetery accordingly.
But thinking about his older brother, James wrote out a telegram to be sent both to Florence and Lucerne—William should be moving his family from Italy to Switzerland about now, according to th
e schedule he’d sent James weeks ago—but James knew that his brother moved his family around while on schedule much as their father had: with no respect for schedules whatsoever.
The telegram may have caused the telegraphist to glance at James with curious eyes but even that made the author smile:
WILLIAM—I AM CURRENTLY IN AMERICA WITH A MAN WHO EITHER BELIEVES HE IS THE DETECTIVE SHERLOCK HOLMES, OR WHO IS SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THEREFORE BELIEVES THAT HE IS A FICTIONAL CHARACTER STOP CAN YOU ADVISE? STOP MESSAGES WILL BE FORWARDED TO ME FROM JOHN HAY’S HOME IN WASHINGTON—HARRY
That should confuse his always superior-behaving older brother.
Finally, on a whim, James asked if he could pay one of the Western Union lads to deliver a handwritten note within the city—they said he could for only fifteen cents, and they would provide paper and the envelope—so James put the address of the cigar store through which Holmes had said he could be contacted at any time on the envelope, took the white sheet of paper, and started writing, got through “I am leaving Washington tomorrow, Sunday” and stopped. He could think of nothing else pertinent to say. Nor was anything beyond this any of Holmes’s business. He quickly signed his name (for some odd reason, almost adding the “Jr.” that he hadn’t used for more than a decade), added “To Mr. S. Holmes—Personal” on the envelope above the cigar store’s address, paid the Western Union people for the use of their lad and tipped the lad himself ten cents.
Having made all these arrangements, James had the hansom drop him on Constitution Avenue a few blocks northeast of Lafayette Square so that, with luck, he could walk back to the Hays’ home without encountering the crowds still admiring the Flying Vernettis’ dangerous aerial gyrations. All that energy wasted and death or injury invited only to clean a chimney or two. Absurd.
He was walking south when he came to an intersection and froze in his tracks. For an instant he stood in shock, not quite certain, and then he was certain.
Professor James Moriarty—tall white forehead, lank hair over the ears, old-fashioned collar, swallow-tail black coat, and spidery white hands—was walking quickly down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the adjoining street, headed southwest, away from the direction James was walking.
It is none of my business, James thought fiercely. He’s only an aging mathematics and astral physics professor, you already knew he was alive from the photo in the science magazines at the Library of Congress, and it is none of my business.
James mentally repeated this three times, like a mantra, but then he turned right and began following Professor Moriarty from a discreet distance, taking care to stay back and remain on his side of the street.
12
A Rat. A Fucking Rat.
Henry James had never “tailed” anyone before, but he soon found that it was a relatively simple affair. All he had to do, he discovered, was to stay a half block or more behind Professor Moriarty and on the opposite side of the street, hurry a bit to keep him in sight when the professor turned left or right onto some new street, and step back into the shadows of a storefront the few times the professor stopped. It helped that Moriarty never looked over his shoulder or—for that matter—paused to look to his left or right as he walked briskly toward whatever destination he obviously had firmly in mind. Whenever James got close enough to hear the regular tap-tap-tap of the tip of the professor’s silver-headed cane on the pavement, he knew he was following too closely and would fall back thirty yards or so.
After twenty or thirty minutes of this clever following, James realized that he no longer had the slightest idea of where in Washington City he might be. He distinctly remembered walking west toward the afternoon sun at one point, and then following the briskly pacing Moriarty left—south—then west and south again more than one time, but he had no clue what neighborhood he was in. It didn’t help that street signs and even street lamps had disappeared blocks and blocks ago and it was with something of a shock that James looked down and realized that there had been no sidewalk under his feet for some time now.
From stately homes and quaint shops, he’d followed Moriarty into an area of crumbling brick warehouses and the occasional sagging hovel. Even the width of the street had narrowed until he was following the professor down filthy lanes that should more properly be called alleys than streets. There was a strange, unpleasant-smelling green fog that hung low over the rooftops. Odd for Washington, D.C., James knew, but nothing compared to London’s thick fogs. He wondered if he’d followed Moriarty into that part of town that John Hay had called “Foggy Bottom”.
But, strangely—and helpful for his anonymity—there were more people and traffic about in these muddy alleys than had been the case in the nicer parts of town. James realized that most of the people walking here walked in groups and that they were almost all men. Once or twice he noticed a slovenly dressed woman, one obviously and loudly intoxicated, rushing to get out of the way of the striding men and rumbling dray wagons filling the center of the street, but most of the pedestrians were men dressed in working-class rags or large, intimidating “swells” wearing mud-tinged suits that were far too boldly striped and waistcoats of appallingly bright colors.
Still Moriarty walked on without looking left or right. The crowds—mobs, really—of rough men parted for him as if the professor were some unholy Moses and the ruffians mere dark waves on the Red Sea.
Realizing that his clothes and cane and very mannerisms “stuck out” in this part of town, Henry James stopped on the dirt path that passed for a sidewalk and seriously considered turning around and getting back to a decent part of town as quickly as he could.
How? Which way? And what if someone stops me?
As these thoughts sent a chill through him, James noticed three men deliberately approach Professor Moriarty. None of them shook hands—nor offered to—but even from almost a block distant, James could tell that the four men recognized each other. Or rather, that the three large ruffians—poorly dressed from greasy homburgs to their expensive but muddy boots with oddly pointed toecaps—knew Professor Moriarty. The men were big—big-shouldered, big-armed, big-bellied—but Moriarty towered over all three of them. With his skull-like face, protuberant forehead, and bald dome covered with only a few combed-over dark strands, the professor stood out like a well-dressed cadaver looking down at would-be body snatchers.
They exchanged a few words and turned left down a street. Feeling the stares of the clusters of rudely dressed men near him, James made up his mind to stay in the chase and hurried to turn the corner.
Dead end. The street was short and empty of anyone save for Moriarty and his new friends and it ended at a massive warehouse with no windows.
James stepped back around the corner and out of sight mere seconds before one of the men looked over his shoulder at the empty cul-de-sac of mud and brick.
When James dared peek again, two of the men had shoved open a heavy wooden sliding door. The rumble of a large group—whether of men or animals, James could not tell—came through the open door, but then Moriarty followed the first two in, the third man glancing back again but not before James once more dodged out of sight, and then the massive door was rolled shut. There was a regular-sized door—man-door, as it were—about a dozen steps to the right of the sliding door, but it was solid wood and James had no idea if it opened into the same area that Moriarty had entered. It was probably locked.
James stood at the corner and . . . dithered. That was the only word for it, he realized, dithered.
What could he do?
He could get out of this dismal neighborhood—or perhaps he could, he’d not noted all the turns and changes of direction that had gotten him in this area of town—and find some trustworthy lad to carry a second message to Holmes via that cigar shop.
But certainly that wouldn’t be in time for Holmes to arrive before whatever business was detaining Professor Moriarty in the warehouse would be concluded. And Henry James didn’t believe he had the nerve to continue. Besides, Holmes h
ad lied to him and stated flatly that Professor James Moriarty, the presumed criminal mastermind, did not exist; that he had been a figment of Sherlock Holmes’s imagination, dreamed up solely to expedite the ruse of Holmes’s falsified death and subsequent disappearance from the world.
Well, that wasn’t true. James had seen him in the 1892 photograph of mathematicians present at the Conference on Advanced Mathematics and Astronomical Physics, University of Leipzig, and now he’d seen him in person.
But what to do?
He could retreat from this neighborhood and find a policeman. But what crime had Moriarty committed? All James had seen was the professor walking down a public street—or alley now, as the case might be—and everything James knew about the man was that he was a legitimate English mathematician and physicist. The police might put him, James, in jail for inciting a false complaint.
The obvious and sane choice was for him to turn away now and walk—briskly—out of this dangerous neighborhood (James had the sense that walking north and east would at least get him out of this Foggy Bottom area) and return to the Hays’ comfortable home and forget all about Professor James Moriarty for the time being. Should he ever bump into Sherlock Holmes again, he’d share this amusing little story of actually having crossed paths with the real Moriarty in Washington City.
Yes, that was the only sane and safe thing for him to do.
James took two deep breaths and walked down the cul-de-sac toward the warehouse, silently hoping with every pace that the heavy sliding doors wouldn’t open as he approached. What if Moriarty and the three ruffians stepped out just as he reached the door? One could hardly claim to be lost when one has deliberately walked the better part of a city block down a dead-end alley.
