The Six Messiahs

chapter 6

They gathered under the heroic arch in the great hall of the Metropolitan Museum, Fifth Avenue's northernmost outpost of downtown civilization, a glittering multitude of bosomy dowagers and their consorts, society's finest—they called themselves the Four Hundred, someone explained to Doyle, the exact number of people who could fit into Mrs. Vanderbilt's ballroom—paying homage to their distinguished visitor from England. Doyle felt overmatched at first sight of the prestigious throng, but he had watched the Queen handle a few receiving lines over the years; the moves were as ritualized as dance steps and he had learned from a master.

Repeat the person's name when it's spoken to you, shake their hand—unless you're the Queen; one notable perquisite of royalty—accept their obligatory compliment with modesty and a poised facial expression suggesting an abstract fascination with the person, offer brief thanks and a neutral see-you-later: Next please. He'd been through the drill many times at home, although as with everything else he'd encountered during his first day in New York, never on such a colossal scale. By the time Doyle had dutifully worked his way to the end of this wave of wellwishers, his palm throbbed like a beaten timpani; what strange custom led these American tycoons to believe that crushing the bones of a stranger's hand would be interpreted as a sign of friendship?

After the first hour, the crowd merged into one bejeweled and black-tied thousand-headed beast, which put him at a distinct disadvantage as he circulated the floor; it seemed that once you'd been introduced to a person in this country, he could just walk right up and start talking to you. How ghastly! Flanks unprotected, vulnerable to attack from every direction, he felt like a partridge flushed into an open meadow.

And why weren't they sitting down to eat a proper dinner? Another American innovation, Innes explained, as they ducked behind a pillar: no big meal. Only enough champagne to float a gunship and an open field of raw mollusks. More circulation of the guests, less outlay of cash, and this way multiple affairs could be scheduled on the same night and the same four hundred socialites could attend them all without offending anyone by taking an early leave. What did it matter? thought Doyle. They'll all see each other an hour later at the next party, anyway. What an exhausting schedule to maintain; half their time spent dressing up to go out, the rest in transit hurtling through the night perpetually troubled by the nagging possibility that somebody somewhere else might be having a better time.

"Sorry about Pinkus, by the way," said Innes. "The way I behaved on board. Afraid I was quite taken in by him at first. My fault entirely."

"Quite all right," said Doyle, secretly delighted. "Happen to anyone."

"Visions of show girls dancing in my head; quite the silly ass—look lively, Arthur, trouble off the starboard bow."

Innes drew his attention to an approaching flock of matrons who had him locked directly in their sights, ravenous admiration firing their eyes; Doyle pretended not to notice their advance and took flight while Innes waded into their midst to stage a rearguard delay.

But in his haste to escape, Doyle strayed into a boxed thicket under a flight of stairs and found himself penned in by a wedge of sweaty faces, glowing with sun and unnatural health. Where was Pepperman? The Major had kept pace with Doyle as they made the rounds, repeating the name of each assailant as they closed in on him—why couldn't they wear little buttons printed with their names instead of these silly boutonnieres?—but he had been swept aside by the rush of some mad Italian tenor. Doyle could see the Major's shaggy head poking out of the fray nearby beyond his reach and he realized he would have to fend off the pugnacious, buck-toothed predator at the head of this pack alone. What was the man's name again?

Roosevelt? That was it. "Theodore: call me Teddy." Ruling-class family—although there weren't supposed to be any in this land of the free, it would take an idiot only one glance at this room to know differently. Roughly Doyle's age. Blunt and stubby as that fat cigar in his mouth, packing enough fearless will in his eyes to stare down a rhinoceros; fanatical eyes, magnified by thick lenses, jutting out of a perfectly square head.

Roosevelt had been introduced as the Commissioner of Something or Other, Parks or Commerce or the Interior of the Exterior. Americans made a national pastime of bestowing on each other titles that strung together like railroad cars, ripe with redundancy and a dearth of imagination. Vice Superintendent of the Assistant Commissioner's Office for Health and Safety Regulations. Administrative Supervisor of the Public Transit Authority, Horse and Buggy Department, Bootstraps and Stirrups Division. Nothing like the poetic lyricism of English offices: the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Home Secretary. Viceroy of the Sub-Continent, The Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod.

"Been on a lecture tour," said Roosevelt, chomping maniacally on his cigar. "Boston, Philadelphia, Atlantic seaboard. Can't stray too far from home now; my younger brother died two months ago. Alcohol. Dissolute living. Epilepsy. Hallucinations. Confinement in sanitariums. Tried to throw himself out a window. Family's in turmoil. Dreadful. You can't imagine, Arthur."

Why is he telling me this? wondered Doyle. And why is he calling me Arthur?

"Terribly sorry," said Doyle. What else could he say?

"Appreciate it. What can you do when someone you love so fiercely wants no part of living? Nothing. Not a thing. You have to let them go." With no other sign of emotion, and without shame, Roosevelt wiped away a tear that dropped beneath his glasses. "Life goes forward. It's for the living. Wrestle with it, contend. Don't give in, to your dying breath. Time will have us all in the ground soon enough."

The man's muscular fortitude struck a sympathetic note. This was what he admired most in Americans, wasn't it?

Forthrightness, candor. Expressing strong emotion freely. None of the stiff formality and ritualized chatter that his repressed countrymen hid behind like field mice in a Sussex hedgerow.

Roosevelt took the cigar from his mouth and leaned closer to Doyle.

"My view on such excesses as killed my brother are these: Look around this room and all you see is wealth, refinement, sophistication. Let me tell you that elsewhere there is open warfare on the streets of this city; gangs of toughs and hooligans on the Lower East Side control entire neighborhoods, unmolested. The city's helpless to respond. Here, starkly illustrated, are the two lines along which the human race is evolving: One through the self-improvement and philanthropy of the morally strong, striving to increase their knowledge and broaden their minds; they carry society forward.

"The second is accomplished unknowingly by the morally bankrupt, through drink and immorality; two invisible hands plucking weeds from the garden of life. I predict that by three generations from now the strains of the drunkard, the hedonist, and the criminal, interbreeding as they tend to do, will be extinct or on their way out. Why? Because they weaken the blood line, their bodies give out under their excesses or their crimes kill them before they have a chance to breed. Thus the rotten branch is pruned and over time the average of the race is elevated to a higher standard. Nature has its own devices." He stepped back to assess the impact of his theory.

Doyle stared at him. "Are you running for office, Mr. Roosevelt?"

"I have been a candidate in the past for the office of mayor of this great city, and we do not rule it out in the future," said Roosevelt. The supporters behind Roosevelt came to life and stood a little taller at the mere suggestion. "Do you plan to get out to the West while you're here, Arthur?"

"I'm not certain all the stops on the tour have been arranged," said Doyle, still reeling from the man's quicksilver transformation from grieving brother to Malthusian geneticist.

"My advice to you, tour be damned: See the West. A hard and dangerous place, the wild parts of it. And a more proper setting for the contemplation of man's puny insignificance you could never hope to find."

"Do that often, do you?" said Doyle.

"But you'll find that man has gone west for a larger purpose; it's the particular fate of the American to conquer this frontier and the doing of it will shape his character for hundreds of years to come."

"Really? How so?"

Roosevelt slowly rotated his cigar and stared into Doyle's eyes; clearly he was not used to having his pronouncements questioned, but Doyle did not flinch.

"The American will come to believe in his own God-given ability to master nature. Eventually, he will be handed the responsibility of running the civilized world. But he must manage it with respect; indeed, with reverence. And only through exposure to nature will we cultivate the proper attitude for the shouldering of this enormous task. If you visit the West, Arthur, at every turn you will see vistas of such stunning magnificence it will transform the way you think of the world forever. I urge you not to miss it."

"I have always wanted to see some Indians," said Doyle.

Roosevelt's eyes narrowed, focusing his magnetism down to a concentrated beam. "Listen; there's been a lot of warped, sentimental, backward talk in this country about holding up the expansion of our empire to preserve the lives of a few scattered tribes of the plains whose lives are but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than the wild beasts with whom they held ownership before we came along."

"I have read that, in their own savage way, of course— scalpings and so forth—they're really quite impressive."

"Pay no attention to it. The red man is a relic of the Stone Age and his so-called innate nobility is no match for the march of progress. History never stops turning its wheels out of pity; those unable to move from its path are crushed. This is the fate God has in store for the Indian, and their refusal to adapt to the changing world around them makes them complicit in its execution."

Unexpectedly, Roosevelt reached out and applied another crushing squeeze on Doyle's tender hand.

"Greatly enjoyed your stories," he said. "Holmes. Watson. Splendid stuff. Too bad you had to kill him off. Think of the money you could have made. Bully for you, Arthur. Enjoy your stay in America."

With a compact, commanding gesture to his waiting courtiers, Roosevelt strode off, and the entire group fell into lock-step behind him. Innes stepped into the void left by their wake.

"What was that all about?" asked Innes.

"A shocking example of the species Homo Americanus. They could stuff and mount him in the museum."

"Quite a right bunch of toffs, isn't it? Real balmy gaffer over here," said Innes, nodding toward a willowy man in a top hat, swallowtail coat, black cape, and flowing white silk scarf, engaged in conversation but regularly glancing then-way. His face was dusky, fine-featured, an East Indian cast to the eyes and an almost feminine delicacy to his lips and nose. A mane of long black hair flowed into a leonine ponytail. He appeared to be in his early thirties and carried himself with the flamboyant confidence of a lionized maestro.

"Started telling me about this concert he plans to give where every instrument in the orchestra's represented by a different smell that he pumps into the auditorium with a machine whenever they start to play...."

"Different smells?"

"You heard me correctly; rose for the strings, sandalwood for the brass, jasmine for the flute, and so on. Each scent pouring out of a different nozzle hooked up to and activated by that particular instrument."

"Good Christ."

"Says he already owns a patent. Smell-A-Rama: Symphony of Scents."

"You could knock me over with a feather."

"Only in America."

Innes moved off.

A tall, blond, good-looking man in a dinner jacket emerged from the crowd and walked steadily toward Doyle's back, a hand slipping inside his jacket. Seeing him approach, the elegant, swarthy man in the silk scarf turned and made a direct line to Doyle, took him firmly by the arm, and led him deeper into the crowd.

"Mr. Conan Doyle, the honor is entirely mine, sir," said the swarthy man, in rounded tones of upper-class Oxfordian English. "I have just enjoyed the delightful pleasure of your brother's company and thought perhaps I would seize the liberty of introducing myself to you."

And so you have, thought Doyle. Mr. Smell-A-Rama.

Behind them, the tall, blond gentleman stopped and hung back at the edge of the room.

"My name is Preston Peregrine Raipur but everyone calls me Presto. We are fellow countrymen. I am an Oxford man; Trinity, class of '84," said the dandy; then in a quiet, deadly serious tone with no corresponding change of expression: "Please continue to glance towards the gathering from time to time, if you would, sir, and smile politely as if I had said something of mild amusement to you."

"What?"

"We are being observed. It would be best if our conversation remained brief and appeared to be of an entirely superficial nature," said Presto, the frivolousness entirely gone from his voice, replaced by an earnest, intelligent sincerity.

"What is this about, sir?" said Doyle, smiling, complying with the man's request to mask the discussion's true intent.

"Another time and place is more appropriate for an elaboration. You are in danger. You must leave this place at once," said Presto, grinning and nodding to a passing couple.

Doyle hesitated; a casual glance around revealed no danger.

"And would it be convenient if I were to call at your hotel tomorrow morning, say, at nine o'clock?" asked Presto.

"Not without my first hearing some idea of what this is about."

Raipur waved to someone over Doyle's shoulder and laughed like a nincompoop; then, under his breath: "Someone is stealing the great holy books of the world, Mr. Conan Doyle; I believe you are already aware of this. Surely such a subject warrants an hour of your time, if only to satisfy your native inquisitiveness."

Doyle took the man's measure; he stood up to the test "Nine o'clock tomorrow morning at the Waldorf Hotel."

The man bowed slightly. "I shall now create a diversion; take your brother and go immediately," said Presto, producing a calling card for Doyle with a deft sleight of hand. "We shall meet again tomorrow."

Doyle glanced at the card; under the name Preston Peregrine Raipur was printed a title: "Maharaja of Berar." Maharaja?

"Ever so grateful," said Presto, then raising his voice back into the social butterfly register he had earlier employed. "And I can't wait to read more of your fantastic stories, Mr. Conan Doyle: Bravo! Bra-vo! The greatest pleasure to meet you, sir. Best wishes always!"

With that, Preston Peregrine Raipur, the Maharaja of Berar, bowed low and glided off. As Innes made his way back to Doyle, Presto lifted his black gleaming walking stick high in the air:

"Voila!" said Presto.

The stick erupted into a cloud of billowing white smoke and a flashing column of fire. People around him and throughout the room scattered in every direction.

"What the devil..." said Innes.

"Follow me," said Doyle, taking Innes by the arm. "Quickly."

The brothers moved through the agitated crowd, losing themselves in a cluster of others heading out the doors. Behind them the smoke cleared, revealing that Presto had disappeared from sight.

The tall, blond man spotted Doyle and Innes just as they left the museum and hurried to follow them.

Outside, Doyle hustled Innes to their waiting coach at the Fifth Avenue curb, glancing behind in time to see the tall, blond man appear at the doors.

"What's going on?" asked Innes.

"I'll explain in a moment," said Doyle.

They hopped into the cab.

"Where to?" asked the driver.

It was Jack.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

She climbed off the train at the station, standing on the same platform that had held Jacob Stern a few nights before. Wearing a blue gingham dress that concealed the hard lines of her body and a bonnet over her jet hair, she looked more like a visiting country cousin or a rural school teacher than an Indian woman who had skipped the reservation. She kept her face behind the bonnet and her eyes low, submissive, attracting no attention to herself.

The dream had come again that night on the reserve, as the owl medicine had said it would: She found herself wandering alone through a city of tall buildings and wide, empty streets. Waiting for someone in front of a pale castle with thin, fingery towers. She had seen this place in the medicine dream many times, but it had appeared black before, more threatening, and it always stood surrounded by desert, not in the middle of a modern city. That was as much as this new dream could reveal before the Black Crow Man—she never saw his face, only a twisted humpback and long, scraggly hair—swooped down and washed everything away with fire.

She recognized the city as Chicago; it was the only big city she had ever seen. She did not remember seeing this pale tower during her only previous visit; a school outing twelve years ago, one of a group of reservation high school graduates trotted out to impress white politicians. The city had felt like a place of great anger, confusion, and wild energy that she'd hoped she would never experience again. But now she would stay and search its streets until she found that tower and wait for whoever was coming to her.

As Walks Alone left the station, she caught the eye of a man loitering by the carriage stand. Dante Scruggs shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth and narrowed his one good eye; as the dark-haired woman passed by, the evil thoughts that ran through his head more regularly than the nearby trains picked up their frantic roaming. A month had gone by since his last work; it was coming around to the time when the Voices returned, and that same phrase skipped along the surface of his mind like a stone, over and over again.

We got an empty belly and an itch we can't scratch.

He watched her with fanatical concentration; Dante liked the way her haunches rolled when she walked, the way her strong brown hand gripped the handle of the suitcase. He might be half-blind, but he could still spot an Indian a mile away.

When would these women learn they just shouldn't travel alone? Chicago was a rough town; a lady's luck could turn bad any moment, thought Dante, and here she was tempting fate, walking around near the station after dark. As if she ain't asking for trouble, strutting her stuff so shameless, trying to pass for white. Immoral is what it was.

What this squaw needed was to be taught a lesson, and

Dante Scruggs was her man. The thought of their future intimacy made him shiver: He would make himself known to every inch of that brown body before they were through. Then he would take her down to the Green River.

But first he waited for a sign; there, the horse by the hitching post. Its tail twitched to the left, then again: twice in a row.

Yes. The Voices wanted this one____

The woman turned a corner and he followed her.

Against the concrete, brick, and cast iron of the new Chicago that had sprung up since the fire in '71, Dante Scruggs's native coloring provided remarkable camouflage. He wasn't handsome, but you wouldn't call him ugly. Average height, blond and boyish, features plump and mild, like his middle-class shopkeeper folks back in Madison, Wisconsin. He looked ten years younger than his thirty-nine and there was no way to pick him out of a crowd. He wasn't big; most of his remarkable strength was in his outsize farmer's hands: He could crack walnuts with 'em. Smart enough to stay one step ahead of the police and two away from jail, Dante showed the world a bland, kindly face. A person would never notice his glass eye unless they were up close and looking right at it; the iris, as blue as a robin's egg, had no pupil painted on it.

Dante was a breed of man the mechanized world had only just begun to produce. He moved through life casting no shadow while inside he was all hooks, darkness, and ripping pain. He had long ago given up resisting the Voices he heard in his head, and he believed with a servant's humility that once he read their signs it was simply his job to obey.

He pictured the city as a jungle and himself a predator at the top of its food chain; that gave a dignity to what he perceived as his life's work. The U.S. Army had thought enough of his appetite for handing out discipline to make him a platoon sergeant. He put fifteen years in before the massacre at Wounded Knee revealed to his superiors the extent of Dante's enthusiasm for expressing his true nature.

Soldiers in his unit who had been near him dining the engagement testified that Dante had lost all human restraint after that Dakota arrow took out his eye. But then again, they argued, with his sight so badly damaged, how could he be expected to distinguish women and children? The Army had grudgingly bought that argument, buried his excesses in the cover-up. A quiet discharge with honors soon followed, fully pensioned.

Dante interpreted his misfortune differently; the wound opened up a whole new world. He imagined that his lost eye had simply been turned around to look inside and clarified the Voices. And ever since he'd been so grievously wounded, the Voices granted him permission to exact the sort of retribution he'd only been able to dream about: nine murders in three years that nobody would ever connect him to.

With his pension coming in, he didn't need money so Dante devoted himself to what he had heard gentlemen shooters on the range call "the thrill of the hunt": He'd hired out as a buffalo scout before enlisting in the Army and had nothing but contempt for these rich, idle easterners taking their shots at stationary bulls a hundred yards away. They had it all wrong; the thrill was in the close work, hands on, that's what he discovered. Careful, thorough, calculating. He liked to show his ladies the Green River and then take 'em there, slow and easy, devouring their fear along the way.

And this one was an Indian. That was just gravy on his meat.

This squaw didn't know where she was going, that much was clear, and she didn't know Chicago: looking for street signs, wandering without direction. He didn't care what she was doing here alone; thoughts like that turned them into people and made the magic go away. Her family would be back on the reservation where they belonged; this one was a skipper so Dante felt no impulse to hurry. With prime meat, he liked biding his time. He had followed a woman halfway to Springfield once, hanging back, waiting for the right moment to make his move. That was what made courtship so suspenseful; it might take days or weeks before an opportunity presented itself. But once he'd locked on to one, he never let go until the work was finished.

She took the stairs to a boarding house he knew on Division Street—ladies only, lodging by the week; good, she was planning to stay awhile. Dante had seen this pattern so many times; woman comes into town, finds a low-end job, waitressing, maybe seamstress in a sweatshop. Time passes and the work grinds her down to one of those nameless, faceless bodies no one notices passing by them on the street. Trudging back to her room alone every night. Bone weary, looks wearing out fast. Taking meals with the other thin-faced women in the boarding house; he could see 'em sitting prim and proper through the Irish lace on the dining room windows. Maybe she finds a friend among them and they talk without much hope about meeting a man some day, a fellow who won't treat them too bad, provide some kind of a life. Smoking cigarettes on the back porch, breath steaming in the cool evening air. Washing up in the shared bathroom down the hall, never all her clothes off at the same time. Sleeping with her meager dreams.

Women like empty cups. Drifting through life waiting for something to happen. Now he was here and the waiting was over. Her Me would have meaning.

She would see the Green River.

There she was in a window. Second floor, near the back. That's fine; settling in. The Voices told him it was safe to leave now. He knew where to find her.

But for all his focus on the Indian, Dante Scruggs remained unaware that someone was following and watching him. A dark, quiet man, with a distinctive round tattoo—a circle pierced by lightning—on the inside crook of his left arm. He waited for Dante to pass, then walked slowly after him, blending into the crowd.

YUMA, ARIZONA TERRITORY

Nobody in the hobo camp could remember seeing a Chinaman on the bum before, and in the philosophizing way common to these kings of the road, they viewed it as a true signifier of hard times. Their aversion to capitalism's twin addictions— work and money—did not erase from their minds an abiding curiosity in the larger workings of the world: Their indolence actually gave them more time for sizing up the human condition. Bums kept their ears to the rails of social change; at every stop on their circuit, there were men who made a point of studying discarded newspapers and discussing the evident faults of man like disapproving archaeologists. These hobos were more aware than most good citizens that six hundred banks had failed in the last year, that two hundred railroads had gone bankrupt and over two and a half million people were out of work in America; those kinds of numbers put respectable folk out on the road, crowding up their camps, and made life thornier for the professional vagabonds. Sad-faced men pissing and jabbering about their marital problems or how much they missed their jobs. That line of self-pitying blather turned a real bum's stomach.

The tramps knew, too, that Chinese were family people who took in their own and kept to themselves when things went sour, so when a Chinaman showed up riding the lines, that qualified as news. Slocum Haney said he'd hopped a freight in Sacramento and this chink was already in the boxcar. Never said a word between there and Yuma, not even when spoken to. Never saw him sleep or eat; he just sat in the corner watchful as a cat. Haney didn't even know if he understood English or not. Something crawly about the man, even now, sitting out there alone on the edge of the circle round the bonfire.

"You talk to him, Denver," said Slocum Haney. "You worked with Chinamen before."

Denver Bob Hobbes commanded universal respect from his peers based on his longevity on the bum and a habit of straight talk; in the egalitarian world of the hobos, he held an unofficial post of elder statesman emeritus. He'd been a working stiff once, came west from Ohio pounding rails on the transcontinental back in the sixties, when one day picking potatoes in Pocatello, Idaho, twenty years ago he saw the light and vowed never again to lift his hand in the service of another man's profiteering.

Denver Bob had kept that promise and studied himself into an authority on the economic exploitation of the working man. He'd marched on Washington with Kelly's Industrial Army in '93 to protest the industrial workers' plight—and besides there was nothing like political demonstrations for free food and good company. Bob claimed to have met Walt Whitman once, always carried with him a dog-eared edition of Leaves of Grass, and he could talk about the nobility of poverty and life on the open road to a complete stranger until all the oxygen in the neighborhood was depleted. If the presence of this Chinaman was upsetting the harmony of the camp, then Denver Bob saw it as his responsibility to set things right.

"You get cold snaps like this in October here in the desert," said Denver Bob, setting his plump butt down on an empty copper wire spool beside the Chinaman. "Most men start moving toward California around this time of year but it seems to me you've just come from there."

He offered the man a swallow of the homemade raisin jack they'd brewed the night before. The man shook his head and kept his eyes straight ahead. Denver Bob wasn't used to people turning down his generosity—he was big and round and with his thick, white beard and apple cheeks he looked like Father Christmas—but it didn't set him back. Not much did.

"This camp's been here ten years now, ever since they opened the line from Los Angeles. Hundreds of men pass through these yards every season." The shanty camp occupied the outskirts of the switching yards at Yuma, the major interchange between Los Angeles and the Arizona Territory, on the banks of the Colorado River. "Do you speak English, my friend?"

The man looked directly at him for the first time; Denver Bob felt a chill scamper over his scalp. Not that there was any overt threat in those dull black eyes. There was just... nothing. No personality, submission, false good humor. No Chinaman he'd ever known looked or acted anything like this.

"I am looking for work," the man said.

"Work? Well, that feeling comes over a man from time to time," said Denver Bob, bringing his well-oiled geniality to bear. "He don't know whether to shit or wind his watch; it's like a fever, see; best thing is to lie down, have a drink, and wait for it to pass."

"I work with explosives," said the man, immune to Denver's merry creed of sloth.

"Is that a fact?"

"Demolition."

"Yes, I follow you. So you're a working man." Whatever else he might be, this fella was no tramp. Didn't seem much like a railroad hand neither for that matter; too self-possessed, independent. Maybe a miner who just lost his stake. No matter: Everything about the man gave Denver Bob the willies; if there was anything he could say or do to get him out of camp and on his way, it couldn't happen fast enough.

"Where do I find this work?"

"As a matter of fact, brother, I can tell you exactly. They're still putting in the spur line between Phoenix and Prescott through the Pea Vine; I hear tell there's tunnels to dig and canyons to trestle aplenty, enough to keep a double shift crew working round the clock for another year."

"Where?"

"North-northwest. You can hop a night freight to Phoenix over yonder near the swing bridge, leaves around midnight, have you there by morning."

"The Santa Fe Prescott and Phoenix Railroad."

"That's the outfit; you'll find their offices right there at the Phoenix rail station. Sure they can set you up nicely—work's scarce most places these days, but a fella with a handy skill like yours is always in demand. Here's wishing you and your ancestors good fortune." Denver Bob raised his tin can of hooch and drank a toast, thinking: You got your marching orders, friend, now remove your spooky ass from my yard.

The man offered no acknowledgment or gratitude and directed his look back to the bonfire. Then something speared the man's attention; he sat up stiff as a bird dog on a scent.

Before Denver Bob could react, the night air around them split with a chorus of piercing whistles; that could only mean one thing, and the cry went up throughout the shantytown.

"Bulls!"

Railroad cops and Pinkerton men had been running rousts through the hobo camps since the Pullman railroad strike in Chicago that previous May; violent, head-busting rampages, setting fire to the shanties and scattering whatever bums they didn't toss in prison to the winds. Through the summer, the bulls had worked their way down through St. Louis and along the tracks out toward the western camps, preceded by survivors' eye-popping accounts of the indiscriminate and malicious mayhem directed at their brothers. No more free rides, that was the new company policy. Seemed the railroad barons wanted their rails and stations sanitized so as not to offend the refined sensibilities of the middle-classers migrating westward and upon whose traveling dollar the Trust had decided the future fortunes of their railroad depended.

Fifty tramps basking in the numb glow of an alcoholic haze and the bulls burst in from behind a line of boxcars before a single one of them could reach his feet. Twenty head-busters, sneaking in like thieves; an ambush, nightsticks and sawed-off baseball bats in their hands, and they go right to work— most of these bums had endured a brick yard beating or two in their day but this was a whole new game. These boys meant business.

Two cops with torches set fire to the tinderbox shacks; the bulls had made their rush from both flanks, stampeding the hobos into the center of the yard, falling, colliding over each other, trapped as minnows in a net. Most knew enough to go to the ground, shelter their heads and absorb as much trouble as they could with the meat of their backs. Any man who tried to run was cut down around the knees and pummeled viciously. Scalps split open, collarbones cracked, blood flowed into pools.

Denver Bob fell at the first whistle, wrapped himself around the spool he'd been sitting on and waited for the blows to rain down on him. He looked back at the Chinaman, ready to yell and tell him to grab some dirt but the man was gone.

A big yard-bull raised his bat to swing at the tramp standing by the handcar, holding on to his long bundle. The bum gestured as the bat arced down at him and the blow never connected. The bull looked down in surprise; he clutched only the handle of the bat in his hands, sheared off, a clean cut just above his knuckles. As he looked up, the bum swung his arms around again—a chink, fer Christ's sake—and the bull felt something go haywire with his left leg; he tried to take a step and the leg split in two above the knee; his whole leg from foot to mid-thigh tipped away from him and flopped onto the ground; an instant later, the man's balance gave out and he toppled like a felled pine.

This makes no sense, thought the bull. The chink has a sword in his hand. No pain yet but he couldn't breathe. He looked up and saw the sole of the chink's boot screaming toward his face.

Kanazuchi had no time to offer a prayer for the dead guard as another one charged up quickly behind him, weapon raised high. He dipped, back-kicked, and the out-of-control guard flipped over him and fell heavily; Kanazuchi grabbed the man's wrist and with a single twist removed his shoulder from its socket. A single blow across the bridge of the nose from the stick the guard had wielded drove a splinter of bone into his brain and silenced the man's screams.

Kanazuchi looked around, instantly analyzing the scene: Although they possessed far greater numbers, the men in the camp offered no resistance. None of the other attackers yet taking notice of him or the damage he'd done, preoccupied with the beatings. More of them darting in between the rail cars to his right. Fires flaring dangerously in the burning shacks in front of him. A cold, treacherous river at his back.

Cornered. Capture, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of these men, carried a high probability.

Kanazuchi settled his breathing, remaining alert, wishing for nothing, escorting the fear from his body with every measured exhale.

There it was—an opening. A narrow gap in the attackers' formation under a water tower led to the rail bridge heading east. He would need to depend on the darkness and the chaos in the camp and keep the Grass Cutter out of sight in order to traverse the fifty yards.

Another guard took a run at him. Kanazuchi flowed to the ground, rose up underneath him and used the man's own momentum to toss him onto the roof of a burning lean-to. Moments later the man emerged screaming, flapping his arms like a bird, wrapped in flame. Distracted guards focused toward the burning figure and now he had his opportunity: Holding Grass Cutter in its sheath along the line of his pant leg, Kanazuchi began to walk across the yard.

Huddled beneath his spool, the guards hadn't found Denver Bob by the time it happened so he was the only man in the camp who saw the entire rush of the Chinaman clearly from start to finish. In the days to come, even with the leeway his eminence among his peers allowed him, it proved a tough tale for anyone to swallow. If the bodies of the seven bulls and the heads of the two Pinkerton men hadn't been left behind for all to see in the morning light, they would have called Denver Bob crazy to his face.

"The Chinaman moved like he was made out of liquid instead of solid flesh," Denver Bob grew fond of saying, but those were just words that did pale justice to a memory; as it was happening before him, he could hardly make sense out of what his eyes reported.

He walked calmly, with a lilting grace, like a man taking a stroll in the park. Every other body in sight making angular, frantic moves; men on either end of a vicious assault. Only by contrast did you even notice the figure moving placidly between them. Guards would catch sight of the man passing a foot away, reach out to swing a stick at him and before they'd taken the club completely back they were already on the ground, limbs snapped like kindling, faces broken. The Chinaman's arms and legs seemed to whirl out away from him in effortless patterns and then circle back; at one point he appeared to hang in the air. By the time he reached the edge of the yard and the two Pinkertons faced him down with their revolvers pulled, news had reached the rest of the bulls that something disastrous was happening in their midst.

That's when in a single smooth gliding motion the Chinaman pulled the sword out of its sheath along his pant leg, swung it around twice in a loop—you could see reflections from the fire glinting off its edges—and the heads of those Pinkerton men dropped like ripe melons.

The Chinaman ran. He was a blur. He was gone.

When they saw the wreckage he'd left behind, the fight gushed out of those bulls like a busted water bag. While they started to tend to their dead, the yard bums who could walk stumbled away into the night, scattering like shrapnel, carrying their bundles and what small fragments of the nightmare they had witnessed. As time went by, Denver Bob did the most talking; thanks primarily to him, in the world of the railroad bums, the story about the man with the sword who had saved the camp at Yuma passed into legend.

By dawn of the following day, a more practical consequence, the manhunt to track down this murdering Chinaman, was already under way.

NEW YORK CITY

Dazzling electric light displays lit up the span of the boulevard and revealed a street carnival of humanity crowding around the theaters and groggeries and dime museums and particularly outside the town's newest sensation, the five-cent Kinetoscope parlors lining either side of Broadway. Roving vendors hawked a warehouse of cheap movable goods—toys, shoes, scissors, suspenders, pots, and pans. Knife grinders threw sparks off their whetstones; ragpickers jangled the bells on their carts. Promenaders dined on baked apples, hot cross buns, steamed clams for sale out on the street. Winsome young girls offered cobs of hot corn—an attraction Innes did not fail to pick out of the mix. Some blew bugles to sound their wares, others wore block-printed sandwich boards, most depended on their voices; sharp, repetitive choruses cutting through the din.

Electric streetcar operators leaned on their horns and carved a path through the dense carriage traffic, edging jittery horses still not accustomed to their presence out of the way. Double-decked omnibuses trundled tourists looking for a thrill around the tangled midtown streets; every few yards of fitful progress brought a fresh sensation into view. Bohemians in berets and garish neckerchiefs. Gamblers and grifters sniffing out their next big play. Local toughs footpadding in striped sweaters and floppy gang hats. Preening swells in plaid suits, pearl-gray derbies, and matching spats taking the air with a dolly on each arm. Streetwalkers between jobs stumbling off their gin or hop. Irish cops patrolling a beat, bouncing their sticks off the sidewalk. A Salvation Army band pounding drums, fishing for recruitable strays. Pimps, rummies, newspaper boys, jugglers, runaways, Chinese cigar sellers.

"Can you imagine, Arthur?" said Innes. "Ten o'clock at night and the streets this full of life? By Jove, have you ever seen the like!"

Doyle watched Innes eyeing the parade, feeling a protective swell of affection for his brother's exuberance and untested innocence. Was there a danger he'd corrupt those qualities by leading him further down this path he'd begun to follow? He'd never mentioned a word to Innes about Jack Sparks or what they'd been through together, not even since Jack reappeared on the ship. Was it right to expose Innes to the sort of danger Jack courted as a matter of routine? Given his responsibilities to wife and family and his professional obligations, Doyle questioned whether he had any business putting himself in harm's way, either.

Sparks sat in the driver's perch above them, anonymous, cold. Doyle studied his face as he picked their way through traffic; he had harbored serious reservations about Jack's state of mind ten years ago: his obsessions, dark mood swings, his closeted appetite for drugs. He could only guess at what horrors the man had lived through since; he might have become perfectly deranged by now. Could he be trusted?

"This can't be the most direct way to the hotel, can it, Arthur?" said Innes, not minding at all.

It was not too late to fling open the door, spirit Innes away from Jack Sparks and everything he represented. Doyle saw the image of his wife's hands, folded peacefully in her lap. Irrationally, another woman's face drifted into his mind: the actress, Eileen Temple. The lights of these Broadway theaters must have summoned her up. He knew she had come to this city, leaving him flat at the end of their brief romance, to follow her career and seek her fortune. Her black Irish beauty; their fleeting time together had haunted him ever since. We want most what we can never have, thought Doyle. Could she be out here tonight, nearby, performing on one of the stages they passed, maybe even at this minute walking in this crowd that surrounded them? He scanned the faces, half hoping to find her. After so many years of intimacy with his wife, the thought of seeing Eileen now felt alien, illicit and thrilling. He could hardly remember who he'd been when he'd known her. Would he even recognize her after all this time?

Yes. He would remember her face until the day he died.

Then a third figure materialized. Queen Victoria. Proud. Frumpy. Enormously endearing. The bond of his word to her echoing back to him: He was hers to command whenever, wherever she required. She had never abused the privilege. And he remembered her unshakable faith in Jack Sparks, her most trusted secret agent, the man who had fought so bravely at his side. The man who had been such a friend to him ...

There, he caught it, the root of his anger: He felt cheated. Jack had come back into his life as Doyle had always hoped he would, but the man that had shown up in his place was a shell, a remnant, depriving Doyle of the satisfaction of a true reunion. Still too early to tell if any trace of the Sparks he had known remained inside the ghostly shade driving their carriage; the evidence so far was anything but encouraging.

But Jack's stepped this far out of the grave against all odds; perhaps I can help him the rest of the way. Don't I owe him that much? Isn't this man responsible for so much of the good fortune that has come into my life? Yes, my Christ: If there is a chance of his recovering, I have to see this through.

Jack glanced down at him from the driver's seat. Was there a flicker of feeling in his eyes, that old affinity between them? As if he had picked up Doyle's thoughts and looked down to reassure him:

I'm still here. Have faith. It will take time, not words, to repair this damage.

Or was that nothing more than wishful thinking?

"Arthur?" asked Innes again. "Aren't we going back to the hotel?"

Doyle studied his brother: Innes had enlisted in the Royal Fusiliers at the earliest legal age, a soldier still in his heart, always itching for a fight and eager to serve the interests of the Crown. Hadn't he proved himself beyond a doubt in the action on board the Elbe?If he had to take someone into his confidence, who better than his own flesh and blood?

"We have some business to attend to first," said Doyle.

"Business? What sort of business?"

Doyle took a deep breath; yes, he would tell him. "A man I used to know. Name of Jack Sparks. He worked as a secret agent to the Queen."

"Never heard of such a thing," said Innes skeptically.

"That's why it was a secret," said Doyle patiently.

"Hmm. What about this Sparks fellow?"

"We met ten years ago. Innes, you must never speak about this to anyone; I need your solemn word."

"You have it," said Innes, his eyes growing rounder.

"Jack had an older brother: Alexander. When they were boys, Alexander murdered their sister. Six months old. Smothered her in the crib."

"He must have been mad."

"Dyed-in-the-wool. But unable to establish his guilt, they sent him off to school. One night years later, while Jack was at school in Europe, Alexander returned. Their home, an estate in Yorkshire, burned to the ground, killing everyone inside. But not before Alexander defiled and slaughtered his own mother before their father's eyes."

Innes narrowed his eyes in shock. "Terrible." Doyle had never told anyone Jack's story before, but his reaction was no surprise.

"Their father survived long enough to dictate Jack a letter describing Alexander's crimes. From that day forward, Jack dedicated his life to tracking down his brother. Along the way, he made himself into the greatest enemy the criminal element of our country has ever known. Eventually he entered the Queen's service, performing the same duties in service to the Crown.

"Then, ten years ago, Alexander finally revealed himself, mastermind of a foul plot against the throne; six other conspirators, they called themselves the Seven. With some small help from me, Jack thwarted their mad plan and pursued Alexander to the Continent. It ended with them both taking a deadly plunge over Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland."

"But that's, good God, Arthur, that's Holmes," gasped Innes.

"No," said Doyle, pointing at Jack. "That is. And he needs our help."

"No one has seen my father for nine days," said Lionel Stern. "He has a young assistant, a rabbinical student who comes in once a week to help organize the library—Father forgets to put books back on the shelves when he's finished with them, as you can see____"

Stern swept his arm around the tables, chairs, and stacks of the low-ceiling basement room; every square inch occupied with books. Doyle, a dedicated bibliophile, had never seen such a varied and enviable selection.

"His filing system is to say the least a little archaic, and when he gets lost in following a line of inquiry, well, once he had books piled up so high he couldn't find the door. He had to tap on the window and alert someone passing by to come let him out." Stern pointed to the casement window that looked up and out at a busy street, shaking his head in fond memory. "When Father's assistant came last week and he wasn't here, it didn't alarm him—Father had missed appointments in the past without explanation. But when he came the second time, yesterday, and the room was exactly as he'd seen it the week before, that was quite a different story."

He loves his father very much, in spite of their disagreements, thought Doyle. He's trying to conceal how much his lather's absence hurts him.

"Has he gone off like this in the past?" asked Doyle.

"For a day or so, never longer. He took a walk once, trying to sort out some biblical discrepancy—he likes to walk while he thinks; keeps blood moving through the brain, he says— and he solved it all right, but by that time it was dark and he was in the middle of the Bronx Botanical Gardens."

"No friends or relatives he might have gone to visit?"

"I'm his only family. Mother died five years ago. There are other rabbis he knows, scholars, colleagues; most of them live in the neighborhood. I've spoken to them; no one's had any word. Aside from one other occasion, he's never been out of New York City before."

Innes stepped forward to lift up a peculiar leather-bound manuscript embossed with an inscription that appealed to his eye.

"Don't touch it," said Sparks sharply.

Innes jumped back as if he'd burned his hand on a stove.

"Don't touch anything. The answer is somewhere in this room." Sparks moved slowly between the bookshelves, eyes traveling methodically from one detail to another, accumulating information. Doyle carefully watched him work; this much about him seemed unchanged.

"When did you last hear from your father?" asked Doyle.

"He wired me before Rupert and I left London, ten days ago; routine communication, asking about our arrival, business having to do with the acquisition and transportation of the Zohar."

"And you replied?"

"Yes."

"Anything in your answer that might have prompted his leaving?"

"I can't imagine what it might have been; I'd already sent him an identical wire the week before answering all the questions he asked me in his. He probably lost it. Keeping mindful of what he calls the 'bookkeeping' of life is not his strength: you know, comings and goings. Paying his bills. All of that falls to me for the most part."

Sparks pulled a pair of long tweezers from his coat and extracted a sheet of yellow paper protruding a quarter inch out from under a stack of books on the table.

"Here's your first telegram," said Sparks. "Unopened. Unread."

"See what I mean?" said Stern. "If he won the sweepstakes, the check could get lost in here for twenty years."

"It is a most impressive theological library," said Doyle, walking between the stacks. "I've never seen such a concentration of rare volumes in any private collection before; quartos, folios, first editions."

"Must be worth a fortune," said Innes, one of the few statements he'd felt confident enough to utter in Sparks's presence.

"Whatever small amounts of money have passed through his hands over the years ended up in a book, that much I'm sure of," said Stern. "Most of them were gifts, donations from friends, various institutions."

"A fine tribute to your father's standing as a scholar," said Doyle.

"There's really no one else quite like him," said Stern, settling onto a stool. "After Mother died, he began spending more and more of his time down here alone. Most nights he'd sleep on that sofa over there." He pointed to a poor-looking daybed in the corner. "To be honest, I never could understand half of what he was talking about. Maybe if I'd made more of an effort, I could have understood and he—" His voice choked; he hung his head, trying to stave off tears.

"Here, here," said Innes, a hand on his back, the closest to him. "We're sure to find him. Without fail. No quit in this bunch."

Stern nodded, grateful. Sparks turned and walked right up to him, offering no acknowledgment of his emotion.

"Your father's methods of study," said Sparks. "He took notes as he read."

"Yes. Volumes."

"A pen in his left hand. Sitting in this chair." Sparks walked to a chair at the desk.

"How did you know?"

"Worn on the rests; scratches along the left arm; he wore a long coat, with buttons on the sleeves."

"Yes, he almost always wore that coat. He was usually cold down here; poor circulation, the doctor said, but to tell the truth Father was always a bit of a hypochondriac."

Hasn't lost his observation skills, thought Doyle. Sparks sat in Rabbi Stern's chair and stared at the books cluttering the desk directly before him. He peered closer, reached in, and lifted one book off the pile, unveiling a pad of white lined paper underneath. He leaned down and studied the pad.

"Have a look at this," he said.

Doyle and Stern joined him; the paper covered with sketches, doodles, scrawled phrases, snatches of academic doggerel; the quality of the drawings surprisingly expert and detailed.

"Yes, Father often did this sort of thing when he worked," said Stern. "Drew odd bits while thinking something through—he was clever that way. I used to sit with him and watch when I was a boy; he'd sketch street scenes, faces, people passing by."

Two central images on the page: a large tree with drooping, denuded branches, holding ten round, white globes arrayed in a geometric pattern and connected by straight lines.

"That's the Tree of Life," said Stern. "An image I've seen in kabbalistic books. I'm afraid I couldn't begin to tell you the significance of it."

The other image: a black castle, stark and forbidding, a single window illuminated in its highest tower. Sparks's eyes narrowed as he stared at it.

"Looks like something out of, what do you call it, you know," said Innes, snapping his fingers. "The dwarf and the pretty girl..."

"Rumpelstiltskin?" said Stern.

"Rapunzel let down your hair and all that," said Innes.

Doyle didn't take his eyes off Sparks; something was rumbling up from deep inside the man.

"What does this mean?" said Sparks, pointing to a boldly sketched cuneiform figure on the page below the castle.

"Schischah," said Stern. "That's the Hebrew word for six."

"The number six?" asked Sparks.

"Yes," said Stern. "It has other meanings, in the kabbalistic sense, but you'd need a scholar to—"

Sparks stood up abruptly and jumped back from the table; chair legs screeched against the floor. He stared over at the bed in the corner, a wild, uncontained look passing through his eyes, as if he'd seen a ghost.

"Jack? You all right?" asked Doyle.

Sparks didn't answer. Tension coming off him permeated the room. A water pipe dripping rhythmically somewhere sounded as loud as gunshots.

"Where is the Gerona Zohar?'' asked Sparks.

"The safe in my offices," said Stern. "A few blocks north of here."

"I need to see it. Now."

"I'll take you there."

Sparks and Stern started for the door.

"Bring that pad of paper," said Doyle quietly to Innes. He pried the pad out from under the books without knocking over the stack and they followed Jack out of the tenement.

Gaslight threw weak ripples of light into the damp air. Sparks led the way like a bloodhound straining at its leash; footsteps echoing, streets empty as midnight approached.

In the shadows across the way from Stern's building on St. Mark's Place loitered two young toughs, cigarettes hanging off their lips. As the party went inside, and lights flickered on in the fourth-floor window of the office, one of the toughs ran off down the street; the other stayed to watch.

Lionel Stern dialed the safe's combination, removed the wooden crate, set it down on his desk, and lifted the cover. The Gerona Zohar was large, nearly two feet square and three inches deep, bound in dark antiquated leather. Stern slipped on a pair of frayed white gloves and opened the cover; the binding creaked like an arthritic elbow.

"Backwards, isn't it?" asked Innes.

"Hebrew reads from right to left; this is the front of the book," said Stern.

"I see," said Innes, wishing he could swallow his fist.

Sparks stared at the parchment of the first page, yellow and crusted with age, densely covered with fading handwritten words.

"Let me see that pad," said Sparks.

Innes handed it to him. Doyle watched Jack: What was he on to?

"Is this a drawing of the Zohar, here?" asked Sparks, pointing to a sketch on the pad's margin: an open, leather-bound book, strikingly similar to the one before them. Matching script scribbled inside its front page.

"Could be," said Doyle.

Sparks took out a magnifying glass, leaned over and examined Stern's drawing then scrutinized the first page of the Gerona Zohar.

"Your father has never seen the Gerona Zohar?" asked Sparks.

"No."

"Then how has he in this sketch exactly reproduced its first • page?"

Sparks handed the glass to Doyle: The minute writing in Rabbi Stern's sketch was identical to the book. Stern examined the two fragments as well.

"I can't account for it," said Stern.

"What do you make of this?" asked Sparks, pointing to a dark shape on the pad drawn over the corner of the book.

"A shadow," said Doyle, looking closer. "A hand. Reaching for the book."

"Did your father ever talk about his dreams?" asked Sparks.

"Dreams? No, not that I can recall."

"What are you driving at, Jack?" asked Doyle.

Sparks looked at the pad and pointed to the drawing of the castle.

"I have seen this black tower before," he said.

"Seen it? Where?"

Sparks looked up at Doyle, hesitant. "In a dream."

"This same tower?"

"I could have sketched this myself."

"Sure it's not some place you saw once that's drifted up through your subconscious?" said Stern.

"Then how do we explain the drawing?" asked Doyle. "You said your father never left New York City."

"He came here from Russia as a young man," said Stern. "Perhaps something he saw there or along the way."

"Perhaps a picture he came across in a book," said Innes, taking the pad and the glass from Stern.

"What sort of dream, Jack?" asked Doyle, trying to keep him focused.

Sparks stared grimly at the drawing, then spoke softly, as if confessing something to Doyle. "I had the dream first three months ago. Keeps coming back, with greater intensity, always the same. This black tower. A white desert. Something underground. A phrase repeating over and over again in my mind. We are Six."

"Six? You mean—"

"Yes."

"Like the number Stern drew on the pad..."

"Yes."

"Who's Brachman?" asked Innes.

"Brachman? Where did you see that?" asked Stern.

"Written here, very small letters, on the edge of this drawing," said Innes, pointing to the pad with the glass.

"Isaac Brachman is a colleague of my father's, a rabbi at a temple in Chicago____"

"And a scholar of the Zohar?"

"One of the most learned. I may have mentioned him to you on the ship, if not by name. We obtained the Tikkunei Zohar, the addendum to the Zohar, for him to study. Rabbi Brachman was a principal organizer of the Parliament of Religions last year at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago."

"Did your father attend that convention?" asked Doyle.

"He (id; every major religion in the world was represented.... "

"When was the last time you spoke to Rabbi Brachman?"

"I don't recall; weeks ago, certainly before I left for London."

"You must wire him immediately," said Doyle.

"Why?"

"Doyle is suggesting that your father's gone to Chicago to visit Rabbi Brachman," said Sparks, coming out of his fog.

"Yes, of course, that would be possible, wouldn't it?" said Stern, suddenly hopeful.

And preferable to a number of the other alternatives, thought Doyle.

"Do you have the other book I asked for?" asked Sparks.

"Yes, it's right here," said Stern. He lifted a book similar in size and design to the Gerona Zohar from a cabinet and onto the table beside the original. "A copy of the Zohar, nearly indistinguishable, but this is a fairly recent re-creation: Only a scholar could tell them apart."

"You might want to have a look at this," said Innes, who had wandered away from the table to the window.

"What is it, Innes?" said Doyle.

"Not sure, but I'd say there's at least twenty of them."

An instant later they were at the window, looking down at the street.

The two toughs outside had multiplied tenfold, and a dozen more were pouring down the block to join them.

"Street gang," said Sparks.

One of the gang looked up, saw the four men outlined in the window, pointed at them and whistled sharply.

At his signal, the gang rushed across the pavement, toward the doors of the tenement.