The Six Messiahs

commerce, ever turning.'

'My name's Eileen; what's yours?'

'Jacob. Jacob Stern.'

'Are you a diamond merchant, Mr. Stern, or perhaps a dealer in furs or exotic metals?' asked Rymer, falling back on his exhaustive inventory of cultural stereotypes.

'I'm a rabbi.'

'I should have known it; a man of the cloth, come to shepherd his flock. You have that look about you; that self-forgetful devotion to the life of the spirit. Splendid. I wasn't even aware that there was an Israelite temple in Phoenix.'

'Neither was I,' said Stern.

'Imagine that, Eileen; one of the Twelve Lost Tribes returning to the desert,' said Rymer. 'History is being written all around us, if only our eyes were not too poor to see.'

Eileen cringed; she was already formulating an excuse for abandoning Rymer in order to sit next to Stern on the train.

If my dreams are any indication, Mr. Bendigo Rymer, you have blundered a lot closer to the truth than you could imagine, thought Jacob. He shifted his weight, trying to find comfort for his bony hips on the bare wooden bench. His back pulsed with pain, his knees ached as if they'd been hammered by a blacksmith, his lungs burned, his ears rang, he was hungry, thirsty, and he needed to empty his bladder.

I'm a wreck. Thanks to God: What an invaluable reminder that we are spiritual beings and if we dwell on the physical, our only reward will be pain. On the other hand, if a hot bath and a bowl of soup were to materialize before me now, I wouldn't complain.

Maybe he could sleep on the train. The same dream had come into his mind with greater intensity the farther south he traveled, additional details of its peculiar landscape coming clearer with each immersion. Throughout the trip from Chicago, Jacob had physically willed himself to stay asleep—not just for the rest, although he felt no less exhausted for it—but so that more of the dream might be revealed.

Consistently now, he experienced while sleeping the unsettling sensation of full waking consciousness, completely aware that he was moving through a dream. Although unable to control the dream's flow of events, he had learned to shift the focus of his attention and see more of what was happening around him. The explicit content of the dream itself was not on the face of it so frightening, but there crept in around its borders an aura of menace and a potency of light and sound and color so overwhelming that each night he had woken out of it in a pool of sweat, heart thundering, eyes raw and stinging from involuntary tears.

The Lost Tribe.

In the dream, he came upon a tribe of people—in the logic of the dream that seemed to be their essence— gathering in an open plaza, all in white, worshiping something mounted on an elevated platform that gave off a tremendous amount of light... but each time the object of their veneration remained frustratingly just out of his sight.

Other now familiar images:

An immense black tower casting shadows over waves of white sand. An underground chamber, a crypt or temple carved out of rock. Five other people, faces and forms obscured. An ancient leather-bound book lying in a silver casket. The book in Hebrew. Reaching toward its pristine pages, a hand: talons, scales.

The phrase in his head.

We are Six.

For now that was all he had to go on.

Jacob had no plan. His body felt frail, his skin hardly durable enough to hold every ailing part of him together, but his mind remained clear and his strength of purpose had grown more resolute with every passing mile. Why Phoenix? What was guiding him in that direction? Pure instinct: The dream took place in a desert so he kept moving toward the biggest one anyone seemed to know about—western Arizona, they told him—and he would continue on until he came across something that conformed to his vision. Then... who knew? Undoubtedly something else would happen. Or perhaps not. Maybe he would have a nice vacation and the desert air would do wonders for his lungs.

'... we played an entire week in Minneapolis, in front of packed houses, every night; they appreciate fine theater in that town, a hearty Scandinavian people, used to sitting for long periods of time—it's the winters, you see, the long winters pacify 'em—that has been my experience many times over, a most patient and receptive audience....'

With Rymer lost in his self-absorbed monologue, Jacob was able to rest and feel his heart settle into rhythm again. He was forced to admit that, for a man in such miserable condition, he felt surprisingly good. After fifty years cooped up with his books, to travel around in such a spontaneous, unrestricted way felt like a revelation; eating sandwiches, watching the spectacular American countryside roll by outside the windows of the train. How exhilarating! Fields and rivers, evergreen forests, the sunset-red Rocky Mountains in the high distance; he'd never been near such exquisite natural beauty before. The world seemed so huge, expansive, and made all his attempts to philosophically encompass it seem laughingly inadequate. A sense of humiliating foolishness about his journey came over him, but he had regularly suffered the same feelings while standing on a street corner or walking to the butcher. Generalized shame is an inescapable part of the human condition, he reminded himself. May as well keep moving forward.

And if the whole mishmash turned out to be born from some crazy defect in his mind, with no horrific calamity awaiting him at the end of the trail, why then, that qualified as good news, didn't it? This spur of the moment train trip to the Wild West would simply pass into the mythology of his circle of friends as the most celebrated example of Jacob Stern's already well-certified eccentricity.

He was certain of only this: Within the hour, the conductor would whistle them onto the train to Phoenix. The actor would continue to talk about himself, unprovoked, until their train arrived or the world ended, whichever came first. And to pass the time until then in the company of such a beautiful woman as this one across from him was not such a terrible fate.

Maybe she would sit next to him. He could think of worse things.

'Deerstalker hats have become all the rage.'

'You don't say.'

'I'm told there's even been a run on magnifying glasses and meerschaum pipes.'

'Honestly? Well, I never.'

'I attended a costume party at the Vanderbilt mansion some few weeks ago and I would hazard to say that no less than every third man there came dressed as Mr. Sherlock Holmes,'' said Major Pepperman, sipping the hotel's complimentary champagne and idly tinkling on the grand piano that sat before the picture window looking down on Fifth Avenue, its lights twinkling to life as night settled slowly over the city.

'How extraordinary,' said Doyle.

How mind-numbingly terrifying, he thought.

Seated snugly in the sitting room of his suite at the Waldorf Hotel—a room considerably larger than every entire flat he had ever lived in until recently—Doyle picked grapes from a courtesy fruit sculpture the size of Rodin's Balzac while paging through a stack of the daily tabloids; in all but one of the rags his arrival had rated front-page news. But no stories in the Herald under the byline of Ira Pinkus, or in any of the other papers under his various noms de plume, and nothing within the existing write-ups referred remotely to any nefarious events on board the Elbe. Whatever pressures Jack had applied to Pinkus had silenced his bark, realized Doyle, allowing himself a private sigh of relief.

'Perhaps that strange fellow we met in the lobby had been at your party as well,' said Doyle.

A frumpy pear-shaped man in full Holmes regalia and two equally suspect accomplices had staked out the Waldorf entrance, jumping into Doyle's path as they arrived: 'Conan Doyle, we presume?' Then, with stone-faced ceremony, they handed him an engraved plaque—commemorating mr. Arthur conan doyle's first american visit, courtesy of the official new york chapter of the baker street irregulars—an organization Doyle had never heard of, which according to Pepperman had spontaneously sprouted out of Sherlock mania like a wild toadstool.

This Holmes impersonator then insisted on delivering a rambling, poorly memorized soliloquy in the most wretched simulation of an English accent Doyle could remember hearing, presumably, although it was difficult to