Holmes Entangled

by Gordon McAlpine

  ALSO BY GORDON McALPINE

  Woman with a Blue Pencil

  Hammett Unwritten (as Owen Fitzstephen)

  Published 2018 by Seventh Street Books®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

  Holmes Entangled. Copyright © 2018 by Gordon McAlpine. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

  Cover design © Prometheus Books

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, products, locales, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Inquiries should be addressed to

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McAlpine, Gordon, author.

  Title: Holmes entangled / Gordon McAlpine.

  Description: Amherst, NY : Seventh Street Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017044811 (print) | LCCN 2017048882 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633882089 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633882072 (softcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Holmes, Sherlock—Fiction. | Private investigators—England—Fiction. | Doyle, Arthur Conan, 1859-1930—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3563.C274 (ebook) | LCC PS3563.C274 H65 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044811

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my Mother, for her many worlds

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  ALSO BY GORDON McALPINE

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE: BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 1943

  CHAPTER ONE: ENGLAND, 1928

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EPILOGUE: BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 1943

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA, 1943

  Sr. J. L. Borges, 44, has completed his shift at the ill-organized Miguel Cané Municipal Library near the city center, where he works as first assistant. Now, as the final hour of daylight glows across the capital, he disembarks from the bus a few kilometers north of the library. With a battered briefcase in hand, he watches the bus pull away and then glances around to assure himself that no one else has disembarked and that no car or motorcycle has pulled suspiciously to the side of the road. He is no gumshoe, as in the American pulps, but he believes he’ll know if he is being followed. For now, he feels all right. Besides, he suspects the next attempt on his life will come in the dead of night, as it did the first time.

  He turns and starts up the street, which leads past his family’s former apartment. He didn’t plan this route with the old residence in mind. When he walks past, he doesn’t glance at the window on the second floor, through which, as a younger man, he’d lean out in search of a breeze on blistering days. It is no absence of nostalgia that prevents his turning back; rather it is his myopia, which would produce little more than a blur from such a glance. Instead, he focuses on the sidewalk before him and continues toward the office of a private investigator in the nearby Palermo district. He’s had no previous contact with the PI, nor has he come by the man’s name and address through reputation, recommendation, or advertisement. Nonetheless, he knows who he is and where to find him.

  This is because he dreamed of the PI a few weeks before. No ordinary dream.

  Naturally, Borges has many times experienced dreams that seemed real—dreams of a type that come to everyone. But this dream was different. This time, he knew with certainty upon awakening that the man in his dream was to be found in Buenos Aires exactly as he’d dreamed him. Back issues of the newspaper and a quick reference to the telephone directory confirmed it was so. Could this merely be a subconscious memory dredged up in sleep and disguised as an anomaly? No. Otherwise, how could Borges awaken knowing things about the PI that no one else knew—that no one else could know ? Even more to the point, how could he know things about the PI that the detective did not even know about himself ?

  Initially, Borges took no action.

  What was he to say to such a man, for whom graft and violence were of far greater interest than an obscure librarian’s dream?

  He might never have made contact, despite the strangeness.

  But then, while alone and attempting to organize and catalogue the disarray in the library basement, he discovered among the stacks a handwritten manuscript in a small cardboard portfolio. Intrigued, particularly by the presumed author, he smuggled the manuscript out of the library and read it as soon as he got home. After finishing, he believed he understood how his strange dream of the PI might have occurred. In possession of such a manuscript and seized by the attendant information therein, as well as the attendant threat, he needed the PI’s help.

  Was it all of a piece?

  Now, Borges takes a careful step over a blooming jacaranda tree’s thick root, which has spread beneath the sidewalk, cracking and raising the cement by half a meter. He could have eased his journey to Palermo by transferring to a second bus or by riding the underground or, in such an important instance as this, by paying for a taxi to deliver him to the PI’s building ; however, he chose instead to navigate the cracked sidewalks that lead from the Recoleta district to Palermo because he still has much to consider before arriving. Indeed, he even makes a detour through the vast Cementerio de la Recoleta, with its ornate, above-ground crypts, to plan how best to explain it all to the PI.

  The manuscript is surely worth a king’s ransom.

  Since placing it in his worn briefcase, he has not allowed the attaché out of his sight (even while at work in the very basement from which he snatched the hidden treasure). Had he the proper hardware, he’d have handcuffed himself to the case, as they do in films and novels of espionage. When sleeping, he has slipped the manuscript under his pillow. What to do with such a thing ? What to make of the manuscript’s startling assertions?

  Then, less than twenty-four hours ago, someone shot at him, barely missing.

  He does not linger in the cemetery, as being there suddenly seems an unsettling omen.

  Besides, the daylight is fading.

  The PI’s office is located on the third floor of a four-story building across the street from the Jardines de Palermo, an urban park where respectable gentlemen stroll with their women until darkness descends and the place transforms into a haven for trolling, beleaguered homosexuals and their nemeses, the malevos, hopped-up, knife-wielding young criminals (craven antitheses of the cuchilleros, the romanticized knife fighters of Argentina’s storied past). The malevos prey on the poor sodomites, beating them, taking their money, sometimes stabbing them.

  Since it is after working hours when Borges enters the office building, the elevator operators are gone. So he walks up the stairs. The building is designed in the arcade style, which allows for a vast space at the center, open all the way to an ornate glass ceiling. Art deco hand-rails line the walkways
of the four floors. The frosted glass of office doors, bearing gold-leafed names and credentials of lawyers, accountants, and psychoanalysts are all dark, save one. This comes as no surprise to Borges; he knew the PI would still be in his office.

  How did Borges know he would still be here? This too he dreamed.

  He opens the door and enters.

  The anteroom is empty, but the door to the PI’s private office opens before Borges takes three steps in.

  The PI, mid-thirties, is tall and narrow. No bull of a man. But Borges suspects that beneath his wrinkled suit the man’s body is hardened, like the smooth trunk beneath the soft, furrowed bark of an olive tree.

  The men make introductions.

  “So, Señor Borges, why have you come to see me?” the PI asks, inviting him into his office. He doesn’t wait for Borges to respond. “I apologize that my secretary was not here to greet you properly with tea or maté. But seeing as she goes home at six . . .”

  “It’s better that we’re alone,” Borges interjects.

  The PI looks at him. He grins. “Sounds serious. Maybe even dangerous. No problem. Serious affairs are my business.” He moves around his large oak desk, which is littered with files, legal forms, cigarette rolling papers, a calabash gourd for maté, framed snapshots of race horses, a small chess board sans pieces, and pencils in many colors, which lay like random slashes of paint among the scattered objects. A telephone balances precariously at one edge of the desk and a green-shaded banker’s lamp at another.

  These items too Borges has dreamed.

  The PI indicates that Borges should sit. “It’s quite fortunate I’m available this evening. Usually, I operate by appointment only.”

  Borges removes his hat and sits in the wooden chair across the desk from the PI, setting the briefcase on the floor at his side but keeping a grip on the handle. “I knew you’d be here, available to me.”

  The PI looks confused. “How did you know that?” “Because I dreamed you, sir.”

  The PI takes his own seat behind his desk. “Did you say ‘dreamed’?” “Yes.”

  The PI smiles. He slides open a drawer.

  Borges wonders if he is removing a gun. But it is only a bottle of fernet and two water tumblers. The librarian smiles, reminding himself that not all PI’s are like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, which he saw just a few weeks before at the El Ataneo movie house. Borges liked Sam Spade, who seemed made for his work—amoral, but still possessed of a personal set of values. Not all PIs are so well adapted. Some, like this one, are closeted intellectuals, less suited to the work than they believe.

  “Drink?” the PI proposes.

  Borges nods, though he prefers wine.

  The PI pours, and they each down the strong, bitter spirit.

  After allowing a moment for the drink to settle, the PI offers another.

  Borges shakes his head, and the PI puts the bottle back in his desk drawer, leaving the two glasses as further detritus on the desk.

  “So, you dreamed me, Señor Borges?” he asks, incredulously. Borges takes a long, deep breath but remains silent.

  This is not going to be easy to explain.

  The PI swivels around in his desk chair to the back wall of the office, where a small bookshelf holds a confusion of books as ill organized as the desktop. He takes from the shelf a narrow volume and turns back toward Borges, holding up the book. “You wouldn’t, by chance, be the author of this collection of essays?”

  Borges can’t make out the title. “My eyesight is quite poor.”

  “A History of Eternity,” the PI reads aloud. “By Jorge Luis Borges.” Borges is surprised. The book was published almost eight years before and sold fewer than one hundred copies. In response to the indifference of the reading public, Borges swore off writing. To date, he has not broken his oath. Nor has he any intention ever to do so. He has resolved to be a librarian to the end of his days, as obscurity at least spares one from public humiliation. “How did you come by that?”

  “I enjoy philosophically speculative works.”

  Yes, the character Borges dreamed would appreciate such things, even if few others do.

  “So, are your claims that you ‘dreamed’ me one of your philosophical experiments, Señor Borges?” The PI tosses the book on the littered desk top.

  “No.”

  “Research for a new book. A story?”

  Borges shakes his head. “I gave up writing years ago.” “Then what is this all about?”

  Borges looks around the office. With a wave of his hand, he indicates the framed pictures of clipper ships on the paneled walls. “This room is just as I dreamed it,” he says. Next, he indicates the disheveled desk. “Also, just as I dreamed it.” He looks directly at the PI. “And your impatient, scowling face is also the same as in my dream.”

  The PI sighs deeply. “Anyone could make such claims, Señor Borges. They prove nothing about your ‘mystical’ dream. Look, it’s after hours. I am a busy man. Are you merely wasting my time?”

  Borges leans forward, placing the palms of his hands on the only two open spots on the desktop. “Perhaps, then, I should share something of a more private nature regarding your life.” He waits for the PI to respond, but there is nothing. So Borges continues. “You’re working, quite secretly, on a murder case involving a renowned criminal,” he states, flatly.

  “Any confidence man could surmise that by my job and reputation.”

  “Specifically, you’re investigating a series of murders that you believe follow a geometrical and Kabbalistic pattern involving the unspeakable four-letter name of God,” Borges continues. “Quite esoteric.”

  The PI stands from his chair.

  Borges remains seated. “I must warn you that if you follow through with your theory . . . well, it ends poorly for you.”

  “Is that a threat, Borges?”

  The librarian shakes his head. “It is intended only as evidence that my dream of you was quite comprehensive, allowing me to know even what you’ve been thinking.” He pauses. “As if I had invented you.”

  The PI says nothing.

  “You still doubt me,” Borges observes. “But isn’t it true that you’ve shared your theory with no one?”

  “No one is to be trusted,” the PI snaps. “My enemy has spies everywhere.”

  “I am not among them.”

  The PI’s eyes narrow even as he forces a smile. “There is a more common explanation for your knowledge of my private suspicions regarding the murder case, Señor Borges. Occam’s razor suggests we favor it.” He stops.

  “Go on.”

  “It is this,” he continues, gesturing buoyantly with his hands. “Suppose I am correct in my theory about this Kabbalistic pattern in the crime I’m investigating. And you, being a conspirator, are merely parroting back to me what you suspect I’ve come to know. Or, perhaps, you are testing my progress in the case.”

  Borges nods, acknowledging the possibility, inaccurate as it is. “Frankly, I am quite flattered you could consider me a master criminal. But it is not so. Your current case has nothing to do with why I’m here. So allow me a different, simpler sort of demonstration. Does it suffice to say that you now have three hundred and seventeen pesos in your billfold?”

  “A parlor trick,” the PI says dismissively. “Please be good enough to count, sir.”

  Begrudgingly, the PI removes his billfold from his inside jacket pocket. He counts the bills.

  “Well?” Borges presses.

  The PI returns the billfold to his jacket. “A parlor trick,” he repeats. Borges says nothing, confident in the man’s native curiosity, which he knows is even greater than his own.

  The silence works.

  “Fine, I will admit to being intrigued,” the PI says at last. “But I still do not know what you want from me.”

  Borges reaches down to the side of his chair, flipping the lock on the weathered briefcase and removing the manuscript, which he sets in his lap. Next, with his forearm, he sw
eeps a quarter of the detritus from the desktop, heedlessly sending it crashing to the floor. On the open spot, he gently places the manuscript, which is a hundred or more pages long, handwritten in small, precise strokes. “I believe contained in this manuscript is the curious solution to the nature of my strange dream. And the manuscript addresses much else as well. Perhaps everything.”

  “You mean everything about the murder case?”

  Borges shakes his head. “Nothing so trivial as that. When I say everything, I mean everything.” To assuage the PI’s discomfiture, Borges continues: “You see, I was, quite naturally, confused by my dream, which afterward seemed to have revealed an actual character . . .”

  The PI interrupts, objecting. “You’re calling me a ‘character’?”

  Borges waves away the question as insignificant. “But then I came upon this manuscript, misfiled among the stacks of the library where I work. I don’t know how long it’s been there. Perhaps all or most of the fifteen years since it was written. Nor do I know how it got there in the first place. But, believe me, it is an illuminating document.”

  The PI sits and looks at the sheets of paper.

  “It is a heretofore unknown manuscript written in the hand of the world-famous British consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, the paragon of your profession,” Borges declares.

  “Holmes?”

  “Written after Watson died. The late nineteen-twenties, which is also the period during which the narrative is set.”

  “The period during which Holmes himself died by his own hand.” “Yes, shortly after completing this work. The two events may not be unrelated.”

  The PI looks at Borges. “And the handwriting ?”

  “I compared the handwritten pages to published photographs of Holmes’s letters. I can confirm that the handwriting matches.”

  The PI reaches for the manuscript. But he stops. “Well, congratulations on your discovery. Doubtless, it fulfills a librarian’s ambitions. But, since you’ve already found such illumination, why do you need me? And what has any of it got to do with your ‘dreaming’?”

  Borges announces, almost casually, “Since I found the text someone has been following me, intending my death.”