My Sherlock Holmes

by Michael Kurland

  When he reached the greensward he righted himself and drew the bird from beneath his cape. “I thank you, my dear Dupin, for the lessons you have given me, equally in observation and in deduction. Our prey is recovered.”

  So saying he held the black bird toward me. Even through its black coating I could make out the shape of its feathers, its claws, its beak and its eyes. It was clearly a magnificent example of the sculptor’s art. My student asked me to hold the figurine while he once more donned his stockings and boots. The weight of the black bird was so great that I felt even greater astonishment at his ability to descend the wall of the château with it strapped beneath his clothing.

  We spent what little remained of the night exploring the interior of the château, utilizing torches which remained from that sad structure’s happier era. The only clues that we uncovered were further evidence of the brutality of the invaders who had slaughter the Duke and Duchess as well as their retainers, all in a futile attempt to learn the whereabouts of the treasure which my pupil and I now possessed.

  With morning our hackman arrived, somewhat the worse for wear and, one inferred, for the consumption of excessive amounts of spirit. I instructed him to take us to the village of Lagny, where we concealed the bird inside the boot of the hack, promising the hackman a generous tip in exchange for his silence. We thereupon made a full report of our gory findings at the château, making no mention of the bird. The reason we gave for our visit to the château was the truthful one that I was an old acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess and had been eager to introduce to them my visitor from England.

  The mayor of the village of Lagny and the chef des gendarmes were duly horrified by our descriptions, but permitted us to depart for Paris upon our pledge to provide what information and assistance we could, should these be called for at a later stage of their investigation.

  In due course the hack pulled up at my lodgings in the Faubourg St Germain. A light snow had fallen in the metropolis, and I picked my way carefully to my door lest I slip and fall to the stones. Exhausted by the activities of the past day and night, I turned my key in the lock of my lodgings and pushed the door open so that my guest and I might enter. When we did so we were confronted by an unanticipated sight. My quarters had been ransacked. Furniture was overturned, drawers were pulled from their places and inverted upon the floor. The carpeting had been torn up and rolled back to permit a search for trapdoors or loosened boards.

  Every picture was pulled from the wall and thrown to the floor, including that of my friend and idol the great Vidocq. Shocked and offended by the invasion of my quarters I proceeded to examine their contents, assessing the damage and grieving for the destruction of precious mementos of a long career. I clutched my head and expostulated my outrage.

  Drawing myself together at length and hoping in some manner to mitigate the harm which had been done I turned to confer with my visitor, only to find that he had disappeared without a trace.

  I flew to the doorway and exited my premises. The hack had of course departed long since, but a row of dark footprints showed in the fresh snow. Following without heed to the risk of falling I dashed the length of the Rue Dunôt. At length I found myself standing upon the doorstep of the establishment of M. Konstantinides. I sounded the bell repeatedly but without response, then pounded upon the door. Neither light nor movement could be seen from within the shop, nor was there response of any sort to my summons.

  At once the meaning of these events burst upon my tortured brain. The Englishman was a dope fiend, the Greek apothecary the supplier of his evil chemicals. How Konstantinides has obtained knowledge of the bird was unfathomable, but it was at his behest rather than that of either the Carlists or the Bourbons that I had been recruited.

  Konstantinides had ransacked my lodgings merely as a distraction, to hold my attention while the Englishman brought the bird to his shop. By now, even though mere minutes had passed, it was a certainty that both the Englishman and the Greek, along with the black bird, were gone from the Faubourg and would not be found within the environs of Paris.

  What would become of the bird, of the English detective, of the Greek chemist, were mysteries for the years to come. And now at last (Dupin completed his narrative) I learn of the further career of my student, and of the scorn with which he repays my guidance.

  As I sat, mortified by my friend and mentor’s humiliation, I saw him clutching the small volume from which he had read the cruel words as if it were a dagger with which he planned to take his own life. All the while he had been telling his tale I had been carried away by the narrative, to another time and place, a time and place when Dupin was young and in his prime. But now I had returned to the present and saw before me a man enfeebled by the passage of the years and the exigencies of a cruel existence.

  “What became of the bird?” I inquired. “Did it disappear entirely?”

  Dupin shook his head. “The apothecary shop of the Greek Konstantinides was reopened by a nephew. Of the elder Konstantinides nothing was ever again heard, or if it was, it was held inviolate in the bosom of the family. I attempted to learn from the nephew the whereabouts of his uncle and of the Englishman, as well as of the bird itself, but the younger Konstantinides pled ignorance of the fate the two men, as well as that the bird. For two generations now the shop has remained in the family, and the secret, if secret there is, remains sealed in their bosom.”

  I nodded my understanding. “And so you never again heard of your pupil, the strange Englishman?”

  Dupin waved the book at me. “You see, old friend? He has become, as it were, the new Dupin. His fame spreads across the seas and around the globe. Did he but make the meanest acknowledgment of his debt to me, I would be satisfied. My material needs are met by the small pension arranged by our old friend G—of the Metropolitan Police Force. My memories are mine, and your own writings have given me my small share of fame.”

  “The very least I could do, Dupin, I assure you.”

  There followed a melancholy silence during which I contemplated the sad state to which my friend had fallen. At length he heaved a sigh pregnant with despair. “Perhaps,” he began, then lapsed, then again began, “perhaps it would be of interest to the discerning few to learn of a few of my other undertakings.”

  Shaking my head I responded, “Already have I recorded them, Dupin. There was the case of the murders in the Rue Morgue, that of the purloined letter, and even your brilliant solution of the mystery of Marie Roget.”

  “Those are not the cases to which I refer,” Dupin demurred.

  “I know of no others, save, of course that which you have narrated to me this night.”

  Upon hearing my words, Dupin permitted himself one of rare smiles which I have ever seen upon his countenance. “There have been many others, dear friend,” he informed me, “many indeed.”

  Astonished, I begged him to enumerate a few such.

  “There were the puzzle of the Tsaritsa’s false emerald, the adventure of Wade the American gunrunner, the mystery of the Algerian herbs, the incident of the Bahamian fugitive and the runaway hot-air balloon, and of course the tragedy of the pharaoh’s jackal.”

  “I shall be eager to record these, Dupin. Is the list thus complete?”

  “By no means, old friend. That is merely the beginning. Such reports may in some small way assuage the pain of being aged and forgotten, replaced on the stage of detection by a newer generation of sleuths. And, I suspect, the few coins which your reports may add to your purse will not be unwelcome.”

  “They will not,” I was forced to concede.

  “But this—” Dupin waved the book once more. “—this affront strikes to my heart. As bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a two-edged sword, so sayeth the proverb.”

  “Dupin,” I said, “you will not be forgotten. This English prig has clearly copied your methods, even to the degree of enlisting an assistant and amanuensis who bears a certain resemblance to myself. Surely justice forbids that the world for
get the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin!”

  “Not forget?” my friend mumbled. “Not forget? The pupil will live in fame forever while the master becomes but a footnote to the history of detection. Ah, my friend, my dear, dear friend, but the world in which we live is unjust.”

  “It was ever thus, Dupin,” I concurred, “it was ever thus.”

  THE FIRST MRS. WATSON

  “Well, and there is the end of our little drama,” I remarked after we had sat some time smoking in silence. “I fear that it may be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods. Miss Morstan has done me the honor to accept me as a husband in prospective.”

  He gave a most dismal groan.

  “I feared as much,” said he. “I really cannot congratulate you.”

  I was a little hurt.

  “Have you any reason to be dissatisfied with my choice?” I asked.

  “Not at all. I think she is one of the most charming young ladies I ever met and might have been most useful in such work as we have been doing. She had a decided genius in that way … . But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.” …

  “The division seems rather unfair,” I remarked. “You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?”

  “For me,” said Sherlock Holmes, “there still remains the cocaine bottle.” And he stretched his long white hand up for it.

  —The Sign of Four

  by BARBARA HAMBLY

  The Dollmaker of Marigoto Walk

  “I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.”

  “Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a light-house.”

  —“THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP”

  My husband, Dr. John Watson, has written often that his friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes loves the solving of crimes, and the trapping of evildoers, as a huntsman loves the chase, or an artist his brush and oils.

  Yet as much as the solving of crimes—and sometimes I think more so—I have observed that Mr. Holmes loves the puzzles of human behavior for their own sakes, even when they have no bearing on the breaking or keeping of the law. Cold-blooded and logical himself, the eccentricities of human conduct delight him: he takes more pleasute, I believe, in discussing with the local cats-meat-man the mathematical system by which that gentleman picks racehorses to bet on, than by bringing to justice a bank director who embezzled thousands out of mere unimaginative greed.

  Thus when poor old Mrs. Wolff came into the soup kitchen at Wordsworth Settlement House in Whitechapel, weeping that she had been drugged and robbed—and left unhurt—by a well-off gentleman, I am ashamed to say that almost my first thought was to wonder what Mr. Holmes would make of such astonishing behavior.

  This particular Monday night was foggy and chill, for it had rained on and off all day. I very nearly cried off from the little class I teach there, for my health has always been uncertain. But I knew the little shop girls I taught to read looked forward to it. A number of my friends come down to the Settlement House in daylight hours, to help with the washing and folding of clothing donated for the poor, or to teach the girls and boys of those horrible dockside slums—to teach also the innumerable Russians, Roumanians, Hindus, and Chinese who huddle ten and twelve to a tenement room enough English to seek employment—but I am one of very few who will work there at night. At least one night a week, and sometimes two, John spends with his friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, either adventuring on whatever criminal case Mr. Holmes is pursuing, or dining with him and going somewhere to listen to music. On such nights I will frequently come down to the Settlement to teach, or help the regular workers there in any way that I can.

  Thus I was there at ten o’clock—just finishing up that evening’s chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, in fact—when Mrs. Wolff stumbled in from the brick-paved yard, clutching with one hand the basket of oddments she carries to sell, and with the other the dirty remains of a woolen shawl about her, sobbing like a beaten child.

  “Vhy vould any do so to a poor voman, Mrs. Vatson?” she asked, when I’d brought her to the big room’s tiny fire and sent one of the girls to get her soup. “Such nice gentleman he look, too, mit his beard all combed so nice, and his spectacles all rim mit gold. He buy me drink, he tell me I look like his sister—and him a goyische gentleman all in varm coat on such cold night! Look how I found my t’ings, vhen I vake up in alley behind Vish und Ring, eh?”

  Certainly the contents of her big wicker basket—beautifully embroidered handkerchiefs, penwipers wrought in curious shapes, dolls of woven wicker with bright ribbons around their necks and cats wrought of folded tin with glass buttons for eyes—had been rudely treated, being now all soaked and muddy from having been dumped from the basket into the gutter and trodden on.

  “I make box out of tin,” she went on, as one of the girls—Rebecca was her name, and a very sweet bright child—brought her up a cup of soup. “Beautiful box, all mit buttons on it; two shilling I askin’ vhor dat box. An’ now it gone, an’ he stole it from a poor voman, an’ him mit nice hat an’ his gloves an’ his coat, an’ bein’ so nice to buy me schnapps, eh? Oy, the headache I got vhen I vake”—and indeed the woman’s haggard face was the hue of ashes in the grimy glow of the gas jet and the fire. “Vhy he do a t’ing so, eh?”

  “Maybe you were merely taken sick in the Fish and Ring,” I suggested, “and stumbled in the alley and fell. The streets around there aren’t terribly safe at this hour”—which was putting the matter mildly to say the least, the Fish and Ring being in one of the least salubrious streets of a neighborhood renowned for coshings, knifings, brawls, and hooliganism of all descriptions. “Perhaps someone happened along and stole your box?”

  “Oy,” she moaned, and pulled her shawl more closely about her. “Vhy vhould goyische gentleman vant poison poor voman like so, eh?”

  “I don’t know, Bubbe Wolff,” piped up Rebecca, settling on the bench beside the woman and holding out her chapped hands to the fire. “But Zoltan Berg, he told me how that same thing happen to some woman his mama knows over Wapping.”

  “What?” I’d been turning over one of the wicker dollies in my hands, fascinated by the delicate workmanship; now I set it back in the basket and regarded the child in startlement. “This happened to someone else?”

  “Zoltan’s mama said,” temporized Rebecca, an accurate witness if ever there was one. “This man came up and talked to her in the street, Mama Berg’s friend, and ask her to the Blue Door Pub for mild and bitters, and next thing she know she wakes up in the alley behind the pub all cold and in the rain. She said he was a real nice gentleman, with a big brown heard and spectacles like Mama Wolff said, and said he was lonely an’ she remind him of someone he knew.”

  The girl shrugged, skinny little shoulders in a hand-me-down pinafore and eyes too wise for a ten-year-old. Unprepossessing, the local police call them, and pert, but the more time I spend in the East End, the more I think that if ever I am granted the miracle of bearing John a living child, I would like her to have that kind of pluck and wit.

  “He didn’t rob her—anyway Mama Berg didn’t say he did—and she got a drink out of it. And you know what sometimes happens, around Wapping and here, it could have been lots worse.”

  I shivered, and put a reassuring hand on the little girl’s shoulder. The other reason I was the only one of my friends who would work the Settlement Hall at night was, of course, that the fiend whom the popular press had called Jack the Ripper had operated within a few streets of where we sat, only last year. Though nothing had been heard of that ghastly assassin for nearly twelve months—and though I’ve always believed that if one takes sensible precautions one can remain reasonably safe wherever one is—I was, when it came time for me to return home, escorte
d through the Settlement’s grim courtyard to my cab by at least six stalwart local gentlemen, and left to meditate, all the long rattling way back to Kensington, on the peculiarities of human conduct.

  In John’s stories about Mr. Holmes’s cases, events follow neatly one upon another, without the intervening persiflage of day to day existence. This, I suppose, is the necessary difference between a painting and a photograph—the simplification of the background, that the foreground may stand in clearer relief. But in fact we live much more in photographs than in paintings, and for the next several days the Adventure of the Friendly Gentleman was crowded from my thoughts by the Adventure of the Imbecilic Maidservant, the Adventure of the Talkative Neighbor, the Adventure of the Blocked Stovepipe, and the Adventure of Mr. Stamford’s Wedding Present. If I did not mention the matter to John it was only because it had become my habit to speak of the more harmless curiosities and occurrences at the Settlement House: and that, I suppose, indicates that however little harm had befallen Mrs. Wolff or Mrs. Berg’s bosom friend at the Friendly Gentleman’s hands, I guessed he was not quite as friendly as he seemed.

  It was when I found myself in Portman Square, nearly a week later, in quest of a patent fountain pen for John’s birthday, that I bethought myself of Mr. Holmes—not that he ever had the slightest idea of when John’s birthday was, nor his own, I’m sure. And the thought occurred mostly because it had been some weeks since I had visited Martha Hudson.