The Empty Birdcage

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  To say nothing of the fact that women did not ordinarily commit multiple murders, though nearly every country in Europe had been caught flatfooted by those who did: Hélène Jegado of France and Gesche Gottfried of Germany had both favored arsenic; Darya Saltykova of Russia had tortured and killed some hundred forty serfs, mostly women and children; and Englishwoman Mary Ann Cotton had poisoned as many as twenty-one people, including three of her four husbands and eleven of her thirteen children. Though all these women were competent and remorseless killers, they were also anomalies. It was men who seemed to fancy murder in multiples.

  Sherlock’s conclusions at this juncture were few and hard-won. The killer was unique in that thus far he had struck only in the daylight hours, rather than under the more typical cloak of darkness. He was a right-handed Englishman with a primary school education and a great deal of free time, which one would need in order to travel and to visit multiple locations more than once. He also had an uncanny ability to justify what he had done.

  This last, Sherlock deduced from the repetition of the message: as if each time, the killer were raising a flag of victory, emphasized by the exclamation point at the end. And, given that the penmanship was neither labored nor shaky, Sherlock assumed the killer to be between thirty and fifty-five years of age.

  In other words, nothing to hang one’s hat upon. A male right-handed disciple of the roundhand script of between thirty and fifty-five might not be as common as dirt, but he was surely as common as clerks, of which England had a passel. And although few clerks had the economic wherewithal to travel so bountifully, this particular man had a well-honed gift for plotting and waiting, possibly fueled by a heightened sense of self-righteous revenge. He may’ve scrimped and saved for years to execute his plan: such a thing could not be discounted.

  But against whom had he plotted so assiduously? For no seven-year-old had ever destroyed a man’s life or livelihood!

  What Sherlock would not give to travel hither and yon, to examine the original notes, to spy out whatever useful tidbit the law had ignored or, worse yet, mangled, to follow the various and sundry trails like a hound on the scent.

  But that was nigh on impossible. He had a month left of his degree, and no resources to speak of. Might he ask Mycroft for an advance? Money seemed to attach to his brother like leeches to tender skin. But how in the world would he justify it?

  He could not.

  Simply put, the Fire Four Eleven Murders, as the papers had been quick to label them, were giving him sleepless nights and even a bit of indigestion—and there was little he could do about it.

  Sherlock strode across the college green, past his former friends, identical twins Eli and Asa Quince. They were sparring with short staffs upon the lawn, their sand-colored hair wet with the effort, their shoe-button eyes void of anything but each other. Exertion notwithstanding, their skin remained the color of bleached flour, as if nothing could coax blood through those staid Norman veins.

  Their movements, as always, were fluid and assured, but something had altered. Eli was no longer a hair’s breadth quicker than his brother. In execution, as in everything else, they were now evenly matched.

  Nothing quite so dull as a rivalry between equal opponents, thought Sherlock.

  He said not a word as he passed but hunched forward, as if fighting a particularly vexing headwind. Every day of the previous term, he had beaten both boys handily at the short staff. And though he had filled many happy afternoons (and a journal and a half) gauging reaction times between Asa, whom he had labeled ‘the Addict’ and Eli, whom he’d dubbed ‘the Teetotaler,’ his long experiment had at last come to naught, for Asa had finally forsaken his substantial morphine addiction in favor of mens sana in corpore sano. Once this ‘healthy mind in a healthy body’ had been permitted to take root, all had been lost. Sherlock found he had nothing more to learn from either of them.

  The twins, for their part, had likely sensed his disillusionment with their association, for they did not pursue him—the convenient consequence of befriending people with no discernible personality.

  Sherlock continued on towards The Eagle, a watering hole that he favored. For his perennially gray England seemed to him to be growing more colorful with each passing year; pubs lining their floors with tiles and their walls with looking-glasses, so that the discord of human noise was free to ricochet unabated from table to table. Everywhere was the disconcerting image of oneself staring back from out some enameled mirror.

  Conversely, at The Eagle he would find both quiet and blessed darkness, along with the disinterest of habitual drinkers towards a lanky nineteen-year-old mucking about with newspaper columns.

  Sherlock turned down Trumpington Street past the Fitzwilliam Museum. As he waited on the corner for the traffic to pass by, a weathered mendicant sidled up to him, her face obscured by rags, her filthy hand outstretched. Sherlock dug into his pocket and pressed a coin into her hand, heedless of denomination and more to be done with her than from any sense of charity.

  “Yer see, don’ ye?” the crone announced through broken teeth, her eye winking conspiratorially. “Yer sees wut uvvers cannot!”

  She did not wait for reply but hobbled on, clutching the coin in her spider-like fist.

  Sherlock was perturbed. Though not given to pondering the prognostications of some old beggar, it left him wanting. He did see what others could not. He cast off the butt of his cigarette and felt about for his shag and papers. Pity that he could not yet bring himself to return to smoking a briar pipe—much more convenient. But it reminded him of failure, and of the worst kind. If he wished to succeed at his endeavors, he would have to guard against the sway of emotion, and to do so mercilessly, rather than simply assume that he was immune. As he rolled the tobacco between thumb and forefingers, he thought of his current predicament. He was very nearly done with the term. He could take books on his journeys, could he not? He would need little in the way of funds: a minimal amount for victuals, a pittance for train fare, naught but spare coins for shag. Even Mycroft could not begrudge him such a paltry sum, whatever it was! For a moment, he felt the burgeoning excitement of possibility. Then he remembered that his brother was not in London at the moment, that he had gone somewhere, for something or other.

  Bother, where was it again?

  Ah yes, Vienna. But why? For the life of him, Sherlock could recall no further detail of the journey, save one.

  He would be residing at the Hotel Imperial. That name had stood out solely because it had sounded like rich fare for his parsimonious brother. Mycroft despised paying dearly for anything he could not thoroughly enjoy: “Hotels should deduct for the time one sleeps!” he would proclaim less than half in jest.

  Sherlock knew perfectly well that the superior lodgings held, for his brother, an ulterior motive. But any stratagem of Mycroft’s doubtless had to do with the political or the economic field, or some other deadly dull pursuit. He was not in the least curious.

  Still, the name of the hotel came in handy, for he could send a telegram to communicate but one message: “send money.”

  He licked his well-packed rolling paper, lit his cigarette, and glanced about. Cambridge was not London, with telegraphs in every post office. But he did recall telegraph boys with their dispatch boxes exiting a building not so far from The Eagle.

  He would plead his case to Mycroft on the chance, however slight, that he would see the merit in the thing.

  After all, what did he have to lose? For all the darkened pubs in the world could not provide him the one thing he needed to solve this particular crime:

  Proximity.

  He turned to go, only to be confronted with the old mumblecrust again. He could see from her milky eyes and dimwitted smile that she remembered him not at all but thought him a brand-new mark.

  “Yer see, don’ ye?” she began before he cut her off.

  “Yes, yes, I see what others cannot,” he told her. “By the sheer luck of the draw, it so happens that you are
correct. And I aim to get started this very moment. What do you think of that?” he added, pressing another coin into her ancient hand before hastening off.

  “Áhd mór!” she called out behind him. “May good luck rise to ye, laddy!”

  3

  Vienna, Austria

  Thursday, 8 May 1873, 11 a.m.

  MYCROFT DREW A BREATH, GRATEFUL THAT HE COULD do so without wincing. He savored the myriad scents of the balmy spring morning, the alpine swifts like two-toned arrows winging across the azure sky, the rock doves cooing and pecking at scraps of bread in the cracks of the cobblestones.

  Odd that something so ordinary could bring such a catch to his throat.

  More than five weeks had passed since his surgery. So as to ensure the strictest confidence, he had first resigned his post at the War Office, causing untold trauma to his former employer, Edward Cardwell. He had sent Huan, his bodyguard and driver, off to Trinidad for an extended visit with his family, for Huan was a good and faithful soul who would worry about him excessively, and blather unconscionably. And although the operation had not occurred in a hovel under cover of night, it may as well have, for all the skullduggery required so that three intelligent, inquisitive people—Queen Victoria, Douglas, and of course his brother Sherlock—would remain blissfully unaware of the goings-on. Sewing up the pericardium could not extend his life: the heart was still broken, after all, and would give out whenever it chose. But there was no denying that he could breathe more easily, and was no longer as pale as chalk.

  “‘Designed by architect Karl von Hasenauer in a herringbone pattern and completed in record time by fifteen thousand workmen…’” Cyrus Douglas’s voice read aloud.

  He and Douglas had spent the past week traveling throughout Germany: Mycroft to investigate the Teutonic banking system and Douglas its tobaccos. Now here they were in Austria, purportedly to explore the Fifth International World Exhibition, exquisitely laid out in Vienna’s six-hundred-acre park, the Prater—which made it larger than all of the previous World Exhibition areas combined. It boasted several hundred pavilions featuring exhibitors from thirty-one countries, each a dizzying paean to cultural and technical milestones. There were Japanese gardens and walkways, and outdoor cafés featuring the finest cuisines that the world had to offer.

  So why did the whole endeavor feel so desultory?

  Mycroft craned his neck to take in the Rotunda before them, the exhibition’s crowning glory, as Douglas continued to quote from the map that he held in his hands.

  “‘The Rotunda is, at eighty-five meters high, the world’s largest domed structure, the dome three times the size of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in Rome.’”

  “Does remind one of a greengrocer’s list,” Mycroft offered. “Onions, check; cabbage, check; world’s largest domed behemoth, check…”

  “Come, it is not as halfhearted as all that,” Douglas protested.

  “Mark my word, Douglas. If this folderol recoups even half of the nineteen million gulden Austria spent for its completion, the Emperor Franz Josef should consider himself lucky.”

  “If you are enjoying this so little, perhaps we should go elsewhere…”

  “No, no, we are here. We may as well make a day of it,” Mycroft said. “For, surely, there is no censuring Vienna’s desire to be transformed into a modern metropolis like Paris or London. At any other time, it might have succeeded, but not now. Not when a cloud of melancholy hangs over all this striving, majestic beauty… Smirk if you will,” he added, “but all of your good-natured optimism cannot escape it.”

  “I have never smirked in my life,” Douglas protested.

  “It is in the wind,” Mycroft prophesied. “People may not know that we are plunging headlong towards a crisis, but they feel it in their bones. This! This is what I wished for us to experience,” he added, gesticulating about him. “The visceral impact, the crest of the wave, as it were, of what is about to burst onto our British shores as well…”

  “Ah. And I was under the impression that we were here to see electric lighting powered by a steam-driven dynamo,” Douglas muttered.

  “This shallow turnout confirms my worst fears,” Mycroft replied. “An economic collapse is now imminent.”

  “You have been predicting it for some time,” Douglas reminded him. “Perhaps it is your understanding of the word ‘imminent’ that is at fault.”

  “Would you not call tomorrow morning ‘imminent’?” Mycroft asked.

  “Tomorrow morning?” Douglas raised the collar of his coat against a sudden onslaught of wind and looked at Mycroft dismayed.

  “I am merely stating facts. You need not gape as if I have caused the catastrophe.”

  “What of Nickolus House?” Douglas asked apprehensively, referring to the boys’ school that he owned and ran.

  “Well, as you will not allow me to bankroll it outright—”

  “No, for that would severely tax our friendship—”

  “I cannot fathom why—”

  “Because you do not take kindly to enterprises that do not turn a profit, and Nickolus House does not and never shall turn a profit,” Douglas said.

  “As I was saying, since you will not allow my bankrolling it,” Mycroft replied, “I did the next best thing: in the past six months I have made sound investments for us both. Raw wool, cotton, wheat, tea, meat, beer, and tobacco should continue to see us through the decade. No harm shall come to Nickolus House!”

  “Thank heaven for that!” Douglas exclaimed.

  “Thank me, you mean,” Mycroft corrected with a smile.

  “As for poor, beleaguered Vienna,” Douglas added with a cursory look, “perhaps the lack of visitors has less to do with ‘imminent economic collapse’ and more with the terrible bout of cholera that they have endured. What you and I are sensing in the air might simply be the paranoia of contagion.”

  They had just reached the Machine Hall, where a large knot of people was clustered. It is now or never, Mycroft thought. He halted, as if offended, forcing Douglas to do the same.

  “Do you doubt me, Douglas?”

  “What? No! I am saying that even if the Austrian economy is in crisis, you have wide-ranging influence. Could you not use it to warn their banks, at the least?”

  “Banks? Banks are the problem! What do you think has caused this economic boom, this… this Gründerzeit? Bad speculation. Railroad bonds of undetermined value. Devil-may-care loans for real estate to fill up buildings that should never have been built in the first place!”

  Douglas glanced about nervously, but Mycroft continued.

  “And the banks’ funds to protect investments exist solely on paper! Tomorrow, the stock exchange will plummet, there will be a panicked sale on shares, and no one will come to anyone’s rescue!”

  Predictably, the park’s attendees began to turn their way. Douglas lowered his voice until he was nearly whispering: “But surely their National Bank has reserves?”

  “The reserves do not exist!” Mycroft insisted, as he went on gesticulating and expounding. “They will hand out note payables, as worthless as a pauper’s I.O.U. As for the Great Unwashed, they shall suffer a half-dozen years of the worst toil and drudgery imaginable!”

  “Mycroft, calm yourself…” Douglas urged.

  But it was too late. Two well-dressed Austrian gentlemen of middle years left the large group of visitors and walked towards them. The stouter of the two raised a monocle and peered at Douglas, his fist tightening around the ivory horsehead handle of his cane. His smaller friend, round, colored spectacles perched on the bridge of his upturned nose, stopped beside him.

  Mycroft glanced at the cane.

  “What do you suppose that is?” he whispered to Douglas as they drew ever closer.

  “Pneumatic gun,” Douglas replied, “air tank in the handle and upper portion, ramrod in the barrel, muzzle velocity some thousand feet per second. They are all the thing in Belgium.”

  “I struggle to recall a sillier weapon,” Mycroft mutt
ered.

  “Regardless. We cannot do battle,” Douglas warned. “Not here, not now.”

  “Ist alles in Ordnung?” the stouter fellow asked Mycroft, never taking his monocled eye off Douglas, while the smaller used the thumb and index fingers of his free hand to massage a few errant blond mustaches.

  “Ja, danke,” Mycroft quickly replied. “Mein Butler weiss nichts von der Geschichte. Ich versuche ihn aufzuklären.”

  The two stared at Douglas as if to assess Mycroft’s declaration that he was simply schooling his man on some small point of history. Douglas for his part kept his focus on a patch of ground at the edge of his toes, playing to perfection the abashed servant who’d been put in his place by his younger, wiser employer.

  Mycroft smiled and patted Douglas on the back, eliciting a look of disapproval from the smaller of the two.

  “Das ist Zeitverschwendung. Neger können nicht lernen,” the little man declared.

  With that, the two returned to the huddle of visitors, the smaller one casting a final warning glance over his shoulder to the tall Negro whom he had just declared incapable of learning.

  “No further need to pat me; they are off,” Douglas muttered, eyeing the men warily as they went.

  “What possessed you?” Douglas hissed as he and Mycroft quickly made their way towards an enormous fountain with a pagoda at its center. “It was as if… as if you intended to create a scene.”

  “Really, Douglas, why would I…?”

  “I cannot say. But I do know there was purpose behind it. You disappoint me, Mycroft.”

  They stood beside the fountain, awkwardly watching the white swans gliding by.

  “Your survival depends on my being circumspect. Forgive me,” Mycroft murmured at last.

  Douglas did not respond directly. But as they began walking again he said, in a much lighter tone of voice: “Speaking of survival, you will never guess who asked about you.”

  “When?” Mycroft asked.

  “I believe the more usual response is ‘who.’ A fortnight ago.”