The Fifth Heart Read Free Page B

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