The Seventh Bullet (Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) by Victor Daniel D

Author:Victor, Daniel D [Victor, Daniel D]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2011-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

Eight

THE SENATE

“The real ‘unruly classes’ are those ‘respectabilities’ with ‘pulls,’ and these governmental officers who are ‘pulled; they violate the laws; they purchase or enact or enforce unjust legislation; they abuse the confidence and the tolerant good nature of the people; they misuse the machinery of justice.”

–David Graham Phillips, The Reign of Gilt

“W ell, Watson,” Sherlock Holmes asked me as we emerged from the long concourse, “what do you make of Union Station? It is but five years old.”

We had just disembarked from our railway carriage in Washington, D.C.; and despite the natural excitement engendered by our locale, I must admit to having felt tired. The journey by train that had begun late Sunday night in New York and that had terminated early Monday morning at the virtual seat of the American government had fatigued me.

Grasping the back of one of the numerous wooden benches, I gazed upwards at the cavernous Main Hall in which we now found ourselves.

“It is remarkably large,” I responded unimaginatively, feeling dwarfed below lofty arches of coffered ceiling and airy skylighting. Encircling the vast room on a sort of abbreviated mezzanine a few yards above our heads stood some fifty centurions of stone, each at stoic attention behind a massive shield.

“It rather reminds one of Ancient Rome,” I added, hoping to give a better account of my powers of observation.

“Capital, Watson! In spite of your exposure to the New World, your sense of history has remained intact. Constantinian arches. Pompeian traceries. Indomitable legionnaires. Indeed, the whole structure is said to be modelled after the Roman Baths of Caracalla.”

He allowed me no time to relish my architectural acumen, however. “Onward, old fellow,” he prodded. “We have an appointment with Beveridge to keep.”

Holmes and I emerged into a grey, damp morning. Beneath the mammoth statuary depicting Prometheus and Thales, Ceres and Archimedes, and Freedom and Imagination that peered over the three curving portals of the railway station, we edged through the crowd to Massachusetts Avenue, the street immediately before us, taking care not to slip on the wet pavement. “The District of Columbia, Watson,” Holmes said, waving his ebony stick as if it were a brush and he a landscape artist painting the broadest of canvases. “The capital of America designed by a Frenchman. A city of ironies—like the country itself.”

Holmes’s energy seemed boundless. A restless night in a train would tire most men his age as it certainly had wearied me, but not Sherlock Holmes! Ever the enthusiastic cicerone, he pointed out in the distance to the right the obelisk that is the Washington Monument and, closer to us, the massive columnar white buildings that put me in mind of the imposing and stolid edifices of Whitehall. So zealous was he that my own drowsiness began to fade, and I soon experienced the rush of excitement that being in a world centre generates. To be sure, the youthful capital that surrounded us lacked the grandeur and the majesty of London, the hub of empire, but this

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