The Fifth Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

shortly after we met in January of eighteen eighty-one.”
    “Is there a paradox in that?” asked James.
    “When these doubts of mine began and multiplied in the winter and spring of eighteen ninety and eighteen ninety-one,” Holmes said very softly, “I went to the office of the City Surveyor and looked at the most recent maps of our neighborhood. As of eighteen ninety-one, a full ten years after we took up residence at two-twenty-one-B, the residences and structures on Baker Street ended at Number Eighty-five.”
    “Incredible,” muttered James.
    “But mostly . . .” continued Holmes as if he’d not heard Henry James speak, “it is the . . . cloudiness, lack of daily detail,
emptiness
. . . for me of the periods between my actual cases that most makes me doubt my existence separate from some fictional page. It’s as if I’m alive . . . real . . . only when investigating a case.”
    “Could not your . . . ah . . . disposition toward indulging in certain drugs account for that?” asked James.
    Holmes laughed and set his coffee cup down with a clatter. “You
do
read my adventures in
The Strand
after all!”
    “Not at all,” said James. “But as I mentioned, some younger friends of mine do. I remember their commenting on your frequent injections of . . . cocaine, was it not?” James well remembered Edmund Gosse’s fascination with Holmes’s dependence upon the drug. It had made Henry James suspect that Gosse himself had experimented with injecting it upon occasion.
    “Only a seven-per-cent solution,” laughed Holmes. “Quite tame by any opium-eater’s scale. But since my death on twenty-four April eighteen ninety-one, I have successfully cured myself of that self-indulgence.”
    “Very good,” said James. “How did you manage that?”
    “By the replacement use of a much less harmful injected substance called morphine,” said Sherlock Holmes. “And in the past weeks, I have discovered an even more miraculous and innocuous replacement—distilled by our German friend who created aspirin, Mr. Bayer himself—a drug so habit- and side-effect-free that both Bayer and those who use it have named it after its heroic qualities.”
    “Yes?” said James.
    “It is called heroin,” said Sherlock Holmes, “and I look forward to finding greater . . . and less expensive . . . quantities of it in America when you and I go there next week. Morphine has been sold in abundance on the streets of the United States—much more so than in England—since so many tens or hundreds of thousands of wounded soldiers continued to use it after their Civil War thirty years ago. And now this heroic heroin, while not yet released to the general marketplace, is becoming equally abundant there.”
    James was goggling at the tall man. “We’re going to America?
We?
”
    “We’re leaving for Marseilles and a steamship bound for America early in the morning,” said Holmes. “There is a seven-year-old murder there in their capital city that I am duty bound to solve, and it is in your very deep interest—
compelling
interest, my dear James—for you to accompany me. I could not, in good conscience, leave you behind in Paris while you are in this melancholic and possibly still self-destructive state of mind. Besides . . . you will enjoy this! The game’s afoot and we’re called to it as certainly and inescapably as your next story or book calls to your creator’s soul and writer’s pen.”
    Holmes beckoned for the waiter to bring the bill and paid it while James sat there with his eyes still wide and his mouth hanging unbecomingly open.

CHAPTER 5
     
    I n the ten days that followed, while crossing the Atlantic from France to New York and then taking a train to Washington, D.C., Henry James felt as if he were in a dream. No, not so much in a dream—his dreams tended to be specific and colorful and powerful—but, rather, in a fog. A delicious and dangerous and decision-free fog.
    They sailed from Marseilles on the older