Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years

by Michael Kurland

  Quincannon subsided. She was right. The Cobweb Palace, Abe Warner’s eccentric eatery on Meiggs Wharf in North Beach, was a noisily convivial place at the dinner hour, and to draw attention there required a considerable amount of bombast. The ramshackle building was packed to its creaking rafters on that evening—with customers partaking of the finest seafood fare in the city, and with the usual complement of monkeys, roaming cats and dogs, and such exotic birds as the parrot that was capable of hurling curses in four languages. Warner had a benevolent passion for all creatures large and small, including spiders; his collection of rare and sundry souvenirs, from Eskimo artifacts to a complete set of dentures that had once belonged to a sperm whale to rude paintings of nude women, were draped floor to ceiling in an undisturbed mosaic of cobwebs.

  At length Sabina ventured to say, “I don’t know why you carry on so about Mr. Holmes. He may be a bit full of himself, but there’s no gainsaying the fact that he has a brilliant mind. Frankly, I find him charming.”

  “Charming! You haven’t spent nearly as much time with him as I have. Today’s trek through the Barbary Coast and Chinatown was interminable. He insisted on seeing every squalid nook and cranny. Opium dens, gambling hells, wine dumps, half the pestholes from Dupont Street to the waterfront … yes, and the Hotel Nymphomania and Belle Cora’s, among other parlor houses. He even stopped half a dozen street prostitutes to ask the prices for their services, not only for comparison here but with streetwalkers in London’s Limehouse. Faugh! I had half a mind to bribe Ezra Bluefield to feed him a mickey and turn him over to the shanghaiers—”

  “Hush, now! That’s enough.”

  Quincannon subsided again. He gave his attention to his abalone supper, attacking the succulent shellfish with a vengeance. Neither the attack nor his silence lasted for long, however. He laid his fork down after half a dozen bites. Gall had diminished his appetite; his stomach burned with dyspepsia. And now gloom was creeping in to dull the edge of his indignation.

  He said, “That doctor friend of Holmes’s in England, what’s-his-name, the one who sensationalizes all of his adventures …”

  “Watson. And I wouldn’t be too sure that he’s a sensationalist.”

  “Bah. I suppose he’ll write up this bughouse caper, too. And give Holmes all the credit for solving it. Omit my name entirely.”

  “I rather doubt it,” Sabina said. “Holmes won’t want it widely known that he was sleuthing in San Francisco or anywhere else during the past three years. Dr. Watson and the world at large have been led to believe he is dead, remember.”

  “A pity they’re not right,” Quincannon muttered.

  “Really, John. I don’t see why you’re so jealous of the man.”

  “Jealous? Because he managed to solve part of the Costain case? I solved most of it myself, and found and arrested Dodger Brown and recovered the swag from his burglaries unto the bargain. I am every bit Holmes’s equal, if not his better.”

  “Just as you say.” Sabina sipped from her glass of French wine. “It’s not inconceivable, you know, that you’ll have a biographer yourself someday.”

  Quincannon considered that statement. “I should have one now,” he said. “By Godfrey, I should! I wonder if the gent who writes that pungent column for the Examiner would be interested.”

  “You mean Ambrose Bierce?”

  “That’s the lad. Maybe I’ll approach him about it.”

  “Well, his column is called ‘Prattle.’”

  Quincannon ignored that. His gloom had begun to lift. “You’re quite right, my lady, that I have no good cause to let that English pretender bother me. Sherlock Holmes—hah! He may have achieved a small measure of fame, but fame is fickle and fleeting. In a few years his exploits will be forgotten. But the name and the detections of John Quincannon … ah, they’re bound to be writ large and indelible in the annals of crime!”

  Sabina rolled her eyes and remained eloquently silent.

  Reichenbach

  A Professor Moriarty Story

  Michael Kurland

  You remember, I assume, the newspaper accounts of the accidental deaths of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and the eminent mathematician Professor James Moriarty at Kessel Falls at the River Reichenbach in Switzerland. Or perhaps you’ve read Dr. Watson’s account of the confrontation at, as he called it, “Reichenbach Falls” between Holmes and the “master criminal” Moriarty. It seems that everyone in the English-speaking world has read, or at least heard, of the incident. And then, you will recall, some three years later Holmes reappeared to Watson and explained his absence and supposed death in some detail. Well, I am here to tell you that almost every word of these accounts, including Holmes’s recantation, is false, and I should know. I am Professor James Moriarty.

  It is not the fault of the newspapers, who published with no more than their usual disregard for the facts, nor of Dr. Watson, who believed everything told to him by his friend and companion Sherlock Holmes. There can be no greater friend than one who believes whatever he is told no matter how strongly it is belied by the evidence to the contrary. Is that not, after all, the basis of most religion?

  This, then, is an account of the events that led up to the disappearance, and what transpired for a short time afterward. I was going to say a “true account,” but I refrained, because memory is faulty, and there were some facts that I was not privy to that might make a difference in the truth of what happened. It is, then, an account of the events as they appeared to me at the time.

  It was on the evening of Wednesday, the twenty-second of April, 1891, that Mr. Maws, my butler, ushered a man named Tippins into my study. A tall, thin, angular man wearing a black frock coat with red cuffs and pockets, and large brass buttons, he stood, top hat in hand, before my desk and peered at me through oversized gold spectacles. His nose, while not large enough to be truly grotesque, was the most prominent object on his face, possibly because of the web of red veins beneath the roseate skin. A brush mustache directly beneath the nose added character to the face, but it was not a character whose acquaintance I would have gone out of my way to make. “I have come to you from Mr. Holmes,” he began. “He requires your assistance, and has asked me to direct you to the secret location where he awaits you.”

  I am not easily surprised. Indeed, I spend a good bit of time and effort making sure that I am not surprised. But I confess that, for a second, I was astounded. “Holmes wants to see me? Is this some sort of trick?” I demanded.

  He considered. “Naw, I wouldn’t think so,” he said finally. “He’s much too stout to indulge in that sort of tomfoolery, I should think.”

  “Ah!” I said. “Stout, is he? So it’s Mr. Mycroft Holmes who desires my assistance.”

  “Indeed,” Tippins agreed. “Isn’t that what I said?”

  “I thought perhaps his brother …”

  Tippins snorted. “The consulting detective chap? What has he to do with foreign policy?”

  “Foreign policy?” I inquired.

  “Perhaps you’d best just go and find out for yourself,” Tippins suggested.

  “To the Foreign Office?”

  “Naw. Mr. Holmes don’t want it known that he’s meeting with you, so he has arranged for my services to get you to his, so-to-speak secret location.”

  “Services?” I asked. “What sort of services?”

  He tapped himself on the chest. “I’m a conniver,” he said.

  “Interesting,” I allowed. “You scheme and plot for Her Majesty’s government?”

  “I enable people to do necessary things in unusual ways, when the more usual ways are not available.” He smiled. “I occasionally perform services for Mr. Holmes, but few others in Her Majesty’s government have availed themselves of my services.”

  “And what necessary service would you perform for me in your unorthodox fashion?” I asked him.

  “Your house is being watched,” Tippins said.

  I nodded. I had been aware of a steady watch bein
g kept on my house for the past few weeks. “No doubt by that very consulting detective chap you were mentioning,” I said.

  “Mr. Holmes did not want it known that he was to speak with you,” Tippins explained, “so he sent me.”

  “I see,” I said. “How are you going to get me there unseen?”

  “I have a carriage waiting outside,” Tippins said, unbuttoning his frock coat. “The driver knows where to go. You will leave here as me. I will await your return here, if you don’t mind. I have brought a book.” He took off the frock coat and handed it to me. “Put this on.”

  “It is distinctive,” I said, examining the red pockets. “But I’m not sure we look alike enough, ah, facially, for the masquerade to work.”

  “Ah! There we have the crux of the matter,” he told me. He reached for the gold frame of his glasses and carefully removed them from his face. With them came the red nose and the brush mustache. The face beneath was quite ordinary, and the nose was, if anything, rather small.

  “Bless me!” I said, or perhaps it was a slightly stronger expression.

  He smiled. “Simple but effective,” he said. “The watchers will see what they expect to see.”

  I put on the glasses, with the accompanying nose and mustache, and shrugged into the coat.

  “Here,” Tippins said, handing me his top hat. “It will complete the illusion.”

  And indeed it did. Wrapped in Tippins’s frock coat and wearing much of what had been his face, I thrust the journal I had been reading into the coat pocket and left my house. I clambered into the waiting carriage, a sturdy but undistinguished hack, and the jarvey spoke to the horse, and we were on our way. I waited about ten minutes before removing the facial part of the disguise. Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken it off so soon, but I felt foolish enough in the coat of several colors without wearing that nose one moment longer than I had to. I kept a careful eye out the rear window, but as far as I could tell no one was following us or taking an undue interest in our passage.

  After several turns designed to force anyone following us to come into view, the jarvey took a fairly straight course to Regent’s Park Road, turned off on a side street, and pulled to a stop in the middle of a block of flats. He hopped down from his perch and opened the carriage door for me. “That door there,” he said, indicating a brown door much like all the other brown doors along the street. “You’re expected.”

  It crossed my mind that this might be a trap. There are people in London who would rather see me dead than steal a million pounds, and one of them might have been inside that door instead of the rotund Mr. Holmes. But I have an instinct for such things, and this was both too elaborate and too commonplace to be anything other than what it seemed. So I pulled up the collar of my borrowed coat against the chill wind, crossed the walk, and pulled the bellpull at the indicated doorway.

  No more than three seconds later the door opened, and a short woman of immense girth dressed as a maid gestured me in. Whether she was actually a maid, or some employee of the Foreign Service in masquerade, I cannot say. “This way, Professor Moriarty, sir,” she said. “You’re expected.”

  She showed me into a room that might have been the waiting room in some doctor’s surgery, or for that matter the outer office of the booking agent for a music hall. There was a wide, well-worn black leather couch, several large and sturdy chairs, a heavy table of some dark wood, ill lit by three wall sconces with the gas turned low and a window with heavy, light green muslin curtains, which were drawn. A deep throbbing sound came faintly into the room; I could discern neither the location nor the function of its agent. Some sort of machinery? On the right-hand wall, leading to the back of the house, a pair of double doors were drawn closed. “Please wait,” she said. “He will be with you shortly.” The timbre of her voice changed when she said “He,” the added resonance giving the word importance, as though I were awaiting Aristotle or Charles Darwin himself. “Please don’t open the shades,” she added as she left the room.

  I turned the gaslight up in one of the wall sconces and settled into a chair beneath it, taking from my pocket the journal I had brought with me, Das Astrophysische Journal der Universität Erlangen, and immersing myself in its pages. The Austrians Joffe and Shostak have advanced the theory that the nebulosities observed through the larger telescopes are not some sort of interstellar gas, but actually vast clouds of stars much like our own Milky Way galaxy, seen at tremendous distances. If so—but I digress.

  After a while I heard the door open and close, and I looked up to find Sherlock Holmes standing in the doorway. “So!” he growled, looking down his thin, crooked nose at me. “It was one of your tricks after all!” He thrust his walking stick in front of him like a child playing at dueling. “I warn you that I am prepared for any eventuality.”

  “How nice for you,” I said, folding my journal and putting it back into my pocket.

  “Mr. Holmes,” said the broad maid from behind him. “Please be seated. Your brother will be down directly.”

  Holmes stalked over to a chair on the far side of the room and dropped lightly into it. “We’ll see,” he said, never taking his eyes off me. He flexed his walking stick, describing a series of shapes in the air before him, then laid it across his knees.

  The door opened again, and the large shape of Mycroft Holmes loomed into the room. “Sherlock,” he said, “Professor Moriarty. Good of you to come. Join me in the next room, where we can talk.”

  “You invited him?” asked Sherlock, pointing a wavering walking stick in my direction. “What were you thinking?”

  “All in good time,” said Mycroft. “Follow me.” He stomped through the waiting room and pulled open the double doors. The chamber thus revealed had once been the dining room of the house, but was now a conference room, with an oversized highly polished mahogany table in the center, surrounded by heavy chairs of the same dark wood, upholstered in green leather. Around the periphery stood a row of filing cabinets, and a pair of small writing desks. A large chart cabinet stood against the far wall. The other walls were obscured by pinned-up maps, charts, graphs, diagrams, and documents of all sorts and sizes, and one framed oil painting of a fox hunt, which was covered with a dark patina of grime and neglect. The windows had heavy curtains over them, which were drawn closed. The room was brightly lit by three fixtures which depended from the ceiling. I observed them to be electrical lamps with great metallic filaments in evacuated bulbs. This explained the humming noise I had heard: this house had its own electrical generating plant.

  Three men were waiting in the room as we entered: two seated at the table looking stern, and the third pacing about the room with his hands linked behind his back. One of the seated men, a slender, impeccably dressed, greying man with muttonchop whiskers, I recognized instantly as Lord Easthope, who holds the post of foreign minister in Her Majesty’s present Tory government.

  “Come, sit down,” said Mycroft Holmes. “Here they are, gentlemen,” he added, addressing the three men in the room. “My brother, Sherlock, and Professor James Moriarty.”

  The pacing man paused. “Have they agreed?” he asked.

  “No, your lordship. I have not as yet explained the situation to them.”

  The third man peered at us over the top of his tortoiseshell glasses. “So these are the miracle men,” he said.

  “Come now, sir,” Mycroft Holmes protested. “I never claimed that they were miracle men.”

  “They’d better be,” the man said.

  I took a seat on the right-hand side of the table. Holmes crossed over to the left side and sat where he could keep me in sight while speaking with our hosts.

  Mycroft laced his hands behind his back and leaned forward. “Gentlemen,” he said, addressing Holmes and me, “may I present Their Lordships, Lord Easthope and Lord Famm.” (That’s the way the name is pronounced. I later learned that His Lordship was Evan Fotheringham, Earl of Stomshire.) “And His Excellency, Baron van Durm.”

  Lord Fotheringha
m, the gentleman who was pacing the floor, was a tall man with an aristocratic nose and thinning hair. Baron van Durm was a great bear of a man, with heavy, black muttonchop whiskers and glowering dark eyes. He was impeccably dressed in a pearl grey morning suit, with a diamond stickpin the size of a robin’s egg holding down his white silk cravat.

  “I see you have recognized Lord Easthope,” Mycroft said to Holmes and me, reading more from a slight widening of our eyes than most people could from the twenty-eight pages of their evening newspaper. “Lord Fotheringham is chairman of the Royal Committee for the Defense of the Realm, and Baron van Durm is general manager of the Amsterdam branch of the House of van Durm.”

  Although the name is not generally recognized outside of government or financial circles, the House of van Durm is one of the richest, most powerful, and most successful private banking houses in the world. With branches in every place you would imagine, and many that would not occur to you, the van Durms have supported governments in need and brought about the ruin of governments whose policies offended them.

  Van Durm nodded his massive head slightly in our direction. Lord Fotheringham paused in his pacing long enough to glower at Sherlock Holmes, Lord Easthope growled a soft monosyllabic growl.

  “They know who you are,” Mycroft told us, “and we, collectively, have something to, ah, discuss with you of the utmost importance, delicacy, and secrecy. Before we continue, I must have your word that nothing we say here will be repeated outside this room.”

  I raised an eyebrow. Sherlock looked astonished. “You have my word,” I said.

  “You would trust that—” Holmes began, pointing a quavering finger at me. Then he paused as Mycroft glared at him, dropped the finger, and sighed deeply. “Oh, very well,” he said. “You have my word also.”

  Mycroft sat down. Lord Fotheringham stopped pacing and stood facing us, arms behind his back. “Here is the situation, gentlemen,” said his lordship. “The enemies of Britain are hatching a devilish plot, and there is danger for the safety of this realm—perhaps of the entire world—lurking in every corner of Europe. Plainly put, there is a shadow growing over the British Empire.”