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luck.”
    “Thank you, sir. I enjoyed our little talk, too,” Gustav said. “I hope we’ll be seein’ more of you.”
    Curtis’s smile went so wide I could hardly believe one face could contain it. When he turned to go, I almost expected him to leave it hovering in the air behind him like Mr. Carroll’s Cheshire cat.
    Gustav and I both turned to Smythe, our quizzical stares saying in unison, “Well…?”
    “The man’s a fanatic,” Smythe told us, voice atremble. “I just hope he’s not here to disrupt the contest somehow.”
    “Why would he do that?” I asked.
    “Cuz of how he feels about Mr. Holmes,” my brother said. “That’s what you meant when you called him a fanatic, am I right?”
    Smythe nodded. “He’s turned Sherlock Holmes into a sort of god. In his eyes, every other magazine detective’s a fraud. A false idol for him to tear down. And the little crank doesn’t keep his opinions to himself.”
    “Sounds like someone else I know,” I said.
    Old Red scowled at me.
    “What did Curtis want with you?” Smythe asked him.
    “Just to talk. He asked if I was me, shook my hand, then started in about the Man. Really knew his stuff, too. Quoted Holmes, talked about the Method, compared my brother’s stories to John Watson’s. Every now and then he’d go all forgetful, though. Need me to remind him of this or that. Almost like he was testin’ me.”
    Down at the end of the hallway, Curtis passed another Guardsman and pushed through more ornate glass doors. The blast of a brass band echoed in from somewhere just outside.
    “I’m sure he was testing you,” Smythe said. “He wrote the Nick Carter exposé.”
    “The Nick Carter what, now?” Gustav asked, his face puckering up as it would whenever Carter came up. To him, the man’s always been “Blockhead Numero Uno”—undoubtedly the most famous magazine detective, aside from Holmes, but (according to my brother) the dimmest as well.
    “The article about him,” Smythe said. “In Scribner’s Magazine . The one that caused all the uproar.”
    “We ain’t heard about no uproar.”
    Smythe gaped at my brother, then at me. “You mean you really don’t know? I can’t believe you haven’t read of it. I mean … why do you think I wanted you here today?”
    I peeked down at my new duds. “You have a sick sense of humor?”
    “Nick Carter doesn’t exist!” Smythe said. “Curtis proved it!”
    “Doesn’t exist? So there ain’t really no Nick Carter?”
    “That’s generally what ‘doesn’t exist’ means,” Gustav sniped. Somehow, he seemed utterly unsurprised to learn that Blockhead Numero Uno was, in truth, nada. “Curtis proved it how?” he asked Smythe.
    “Oh, that doesn’t matter now.”
    Smythe pulled out a pocket watch and checked the time. From the look of profound gloom that came over his face, you’d have thought it was the Hour of Judgment. And in a way, I guess it was.
    “The important thing is you’re going to walk outside with me and prove to all the world how real you are.”
    Smythe snapped his watch shut and started for the doors Curtis had just passed through. Gustav and I reluctantly followed.
    “You ready to be famous?”
    “I am ready,” my brother said, “to smack you upside the head for gettin’ us into this.”
    “Just grit your teeth and think of Miss Corvus and you’ll be fine. We get through this, she’ll have us on Colonel Crowe’s payroll for sure.”
    “I’d rather just give you that smack.”
    It was nerves talking, I knew, so I didn’t sass Old Red back. Even if we’d fallen into our usual bickering, though, it couldn’t have lasted long: Once we walked out into the Court of Honor, neither of us had the breath left for anything but gasps.
    Stretching out before us was a long lagoon, so large you might’ve called it a lake if it hadn’t been dwarfed by the infinite blue of Lake Michigan beyond it. Huge statues jutted up out of the water—naked women, flute-playing