“Just get out of here, old man.”
“Come down here and make me go,” I said.
He sighed and came down the stairs, stopping in the garden an arm’s length from me, his feet planted firmly. “Last warning, old man. I have an appointment. And I’m not going to let you spoil my plans.”
He could have knocked me cold with one punch.
But I didn’t allow it. Instead, I confused him for a moment. “Is your appointment with Siddhartha Singh?” I asked in my perfect Rajasthani accent. “Well, I am here, at your service.”
His expression was comical. But I knew it would change soon enough.
I shot him.
The discharge was barely louder than a clap of hands as I employed a silencer of my own design on the muzzle of pistol, which I’d fired through the pocket of my coat (ruined now).
He fell backward onto the walkway.
I looked around. The street remained deserted.
I knelt over him where he lay. “Don’t worry, you’ll live,” I said. I had taken care to shoot him through the right lung. I am a good shot. “The bullet has passed clean through you, and any surgeon of above average skill should be able to patch you up,” I reassured him. “The lung has likely collapsed and your breathing is doubtless difficult, but you’ll live. Unless, of course, I leave you here to bleed out.”
He didn’t look at all happy.
I removed from his jacket pocket the handgun that I felt confident had been used to shoot Conan Doyle.
“At the end of this street is a telephone box from which I will call for an ambulance, dear boy, if you tell me what I want to know,” I said. “The ambulance will race to this scene and you will be saved. Or not. Do you understand me?”
His eyes began rolling back in his head.
I slapped him hard a few times to bring him back. “Don’t pass out!”
He took heed.
“Who hired you?” I asked.
“You bloody old bastard,” he muttered, attempting to spit at me. Quite impressive for one recently shot through a lung.
I stood as if to go. “No phone call.”
“Eureka,” he said.
“What? Who?”
“The Eureka Society,” he managed, gasping between syllables. “That’s all I know. Make the call for an ambulance.”
I’d never heard of any such group. But I believed him.
So I knelt once more at his side, removed my cotton muffler from my neck, and wound it tightly around his chest to staunch the bleeding. He passed out. I made the call from the red telephone box.
You may be wondering why I did not simply let the assassin die.
The fact is that when one shuffles a professional killer off this mortal coil, one discovers that there is always another to take his place, that there is no end to them. We train young men to be soldiers, teaching them to kill; quite naturally, a small percentage excel at the activity, and a percentage of those will later choose to use their gifts, not for country but for personal gain, absent ethical considerations. Trained killers can always be hired. Permanently removing one from the world is useless. Besides, the point of the night’s endeavor was neither revenge nor righteousness but investigation, as I believed that the only way to make Conan Doyle safe was to expose and eliminate the man or organization who had hired the shooter. Just as capturing the king is the goal of chess, the object of an investigation is solving the mystery. I did not let the assassin die simply because to do so in no way served my ultimate purpose (and my simple disguise insured he could hold no personal grudge).
Or . . . perhaps that is not what you’re wondering.
Perhaps you’re wondering about me.
After all, until you picked up these pages, you can’t have read a fully authentic account of my work.
Of course, I told you at the start that I am not who you think I am. Still, misconceptions are no fault of yours. It is reasonable that you may have been surprised by my shooting first and asking questions later in the garden of the Society for Psychic Research.
I have read the American writer Zane Grey, and I have seen moving pictures featuring Tom Mix and William S. Hart, so I understand the popular ethic of the Wild West hero, which has swept Britain just as it has swept much of the world. Firing a weapon at a man is acceptable only provided the other has drawn first. But the same has also long been true of the romantic historical novels of Sir Walter Scott or, for that matter, Conan Doyle (swords, guns, what’s the difference?). But all that is fiction. Nonetheless, more than forty years ago Dr. Watson adopted much the same ethic in his depictions of our actual cases. This is what I meant when I referred to his use of dramatic license in the published accounts of our adventures. Inevitably, readers grew attached to the conventionally heroic depiction of . . . well, me. I say again that I believe Watson did this with no intention to deceive or even to profit directly from softening his accounts; rather, he simply found it “ungentlemanly” to tell a story any other way. However, the actual business of investigating crime is most ungentlemanly. For example, had I waited for the assassin to draw his pistol before drawing mine, he’d simply have shot me dead and there would be nothing more to tell.
That is how it works in real life.
Does it mitigate matters that I consider it a near certainty that the blond assassin survived the shooting, at worst losing the use of one lung, and that his prognosis is for a complete recovery, excepting occasional shortness of breath? My aim was true. Does that alleviate my having shot him without first having manfully called for him to “Draw!” or “Put your hands up!”? I apologize if I seem disagreeable or even sarcastic on this issue.
But nothing is simple, nothing straightforward.
So, I did not leave the assassin to bleed to death, unattended. But, of course, this means he is now likely to kill again, someone, somewhere, sometime. So is his survival a good thing, sparing me the appellation of killer? Or is it a bad thing, making me a kind of conspirator in his next, unforeseen murder?
Good, bad . . .
Allow me to repeat: nothing is simple, nothing straightforward.
Having long ago arrived at this understanding, I resolved that I would value only the playing of the game. And I played the game well at the offices of the Society for Psychic Research. I gained a clue: “Eureka,” Greek for I have found it, made famous by the story of Archimedes in the bath tub. That I was unfamiliar with any such organization mattered little to me just then.
What mattered was that the game was truly begun.
And my mysterious opponent seemed worthy indeed.
I climbed into the cab where I had left it.
“Heavens, Sherlock!” Mrs. Watson cried as I settled in beside her. She pointed to my shoulder. “Have you been shot?”
I glanced down. My coat was bloodstained where I had brushed against the blond assassin’s wound. “No, I’m fine.”
“But that’s blood on your coat,” Mrs. Watson whispered.
“It’s not mine.”
From the front seat of the motor cab, the driver turned back and asked, “Where to, governor?”
“Stay here for a moment, if you please,” I answered, curious to see if the ambulance I called would arrive alone or accompanied by some other vehicle.
“What happened?” Mrs. Watson pressed, indicating the blood.
I closed the small window that separated us from the driver.
“Disgraceful behavior,” I answered her.
She set her eyes upon me. “On whose part?”
“Don’t forget, my dear, that we are the heroes. Not the villains.”
“True, but that doesn’t answer my question.”
“A most insightful commentary.”
Being familiar with my methods, Mrs. Watson did not press it further. Instead, she asked, “What did you learn out there?”
“The game’s afoot, my dear,” I said.
She sighed. “That much I already knew,” she said. “In any case, while you were out ‘adven
turing’ I made this list.”
She handed me a sheet of paper upon which she had written in careful penmanship the following, numbered questions:
1) Who saw through your expert disguise as Cambridge tutor and why expose the information to Conan Doyle?
2) Why communicate the information to C. D. in such a bizarre manner?
3) Does it matter that the supposed spirit manifestation was of an “alternate” Stanley Baldwin, our current PM? Political? Or might the manifestation have been anyone?
4) How was the effect of the supernatural visitation achieved, since it seems beyond even the formidable techniques of Madam Du Lac?
5) Why shoot C. D.?
“This is very good, Mrs. Watson,” I said, folding her list. It was good, if incomplete.
“But you’re still not going to share your theories or conclusions?” she asked.
“What I discovered while ‘adventuring’ was a sixth question for your excellent list, Mrs. Watson.”
She sat up straighter. “Which is?”
“What is the ‘Eureka Society’?”
She shook her head. “Never heard of it. What is it, Sherlock?”
“If I knew, then it wouldn’t be a question for your list,” I answered. “And that’s quite strange, as I have more than a passing familiarity with secret societies. Hundreds. Thousands. But one’s knowledge can never be truly comprehensive. Actually, such omniscience would make life rather tedious, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never had to worry about omniscience,” she responded.
“Nor I,” I admitted. “Whatever the cinema or theatricals or even some of John’s accounts may suggest.”
“So how do we find out what this Eureka Society is?”
“Research.” I removed my wig and slipped out of my blood stained jacket, stuffing them (along with the gun) back into my bag.
“As at a library?”
“Exactly. Now.”
“But the hour . . .” Mrs. Watson slid slightly nearer. She lowered her voice as if the driver could hear us. “The library’s closed.”
“I have associates among the night watchmen,” I said.
She smiled. “Of course you do, Sherlock.”
The ambulance raced past us, unaccompanied by other vehicles. Still, I knew other wheels were spinning.
I slid open the driver’s window: “The British Museum; specifically the library wing,” I instructed. “But first we’ll drop Mrs. Watson at her home.”
The driver started away.
Mrs. Watson looked at me. “I’m not tired, Sherlock.”
“I’m afraid the next stop will be less engaging than these last two,” I explained.
“I’m sure I could be of some help, as I know my way quite well around libraries,” she said. “Since John’s death I’ve spent countless days among the stacks at the British Museum. I’m very good now with the Universal Classification System.”
“Some of the research I’ll be doing will entail an entirely different kind of classification system.”
“Dewey Decimal, like the Americans?”
I shook my head. “There is a secret library classification system known only to a few hundred men and women throughout the world, even though the system is employed in many major libraries, always under the very noses of the uninitiated librarians.”
“Why?”
“Because some information is essential but too dangerous to make readily accessible. So it is scattered about the stacks in what would seem to be unintelligibly random placements.”
“What sort of information?”
“Lists and descriptions of secret societies, both from the past and the present.”
“How does the classification system work?”
“It’s rather too complicated to explain at one sitting. Besides, I am not at liberty to share the information.”
She gave me a hard look.
So I offered to her what I could, as I offer now to you, dear reader: “Suffice to say that the resources are not to be found in any one section but are scattered among books with innocuous titles wholly unrelated to the true subject matter.”
“That subject matter being secret societies,” she proposed.
“Yes.”
“But what if some ordinary patron stumbled upon such a book?” she asked, quite reasonably.
“The information is coded and contextualized so that even in such a case the reader of his or her chosen volume on zoology, astronomy, knitting, or whatever subject, would find the hidden text indistinguishable from the rest.”
“Remarkable,” she said. “How often have you used such resources in your cases?”
“Occasionally.”
“And John knew this ‘coded’ classification system?”
I shook my head. “The numbers entrusted with the use of such a system are, for obvious reasons, quite small.”
“But he knew the resource existed?”
“Actually no,” I said.
“Why not? Surely John was trustworthy.”
“Indeed he was. I suppose I didn’t tell him about the resource because . . .” I stopped.
She waited.
I hadn’t an answer that pleased me, so, rather than complete the aborted sentence, I changed the subject. “So, you see, Mrs. Watson, there would be little for you to do at the library. It’s far better to get you home.”
She shifted in her seat. “What, exactly, do you think awaits me at home?” She didn’t allow time for an answer (such as safety, warmth, sleep, etc.) but provided her own. “Nothing awaits me there, Sherlock. Nothing but silence.”
“A library cultivates silence even during working hours,” I observed. “In the dead of night . . .” I allowed the phrase to speak for itself.
“Surely you know there are different kinds of silence.”
I knew her reference was to her not wanting to be alone, a vulnerability to which I considered myself immune.
“I could simply find a good book and keep watch in the library,” she volunteered. “I’ll ensure that no villain sneaks up on you.”
I wasn’t much worried about my safety in the library.
She touched my hand. “Then, when your research leads you to some amazing conclusion, I’ll be the first to know,” she said.
“It’s late. You’ve no need to sleep?”
“How many septuagenarians do you know who sleep well at night?” she asked, rhetorically.
I leaned toward the driver. “No need to stop at Belgrave Square, my good man,” I instructed. “Just take us both straight on to the British Museum.”
He nodded and started for the great edifice in the city center.
She smiled. “Now, about that blood on your jacket . . .” she started.
I held my hand up to stop her. “Enough questions, Mrs. Watson. We’ll have much to discuss after I’ve completed my research.”
She nodded. “Fair enough.”
However, after hours of my moving alone through the darkened stacks, I had uncovered no information about a “Eureka Society.” I’d scanned accounts and even membership roles of hundreds of fraternal orders, “magical” organizations, Pythagoreans, cabals of politicians, criminals, clergymen . . . But nothing brought me nearer my goal.
Was it possible the blond assassin had lied to me, even as he lay bleeding ?
Not likely.
At last, wearily, I made my way down from the fourth floor to the library’s magnificently domed Reading Room. The vast room was illuminated by the first light of morning streaming through tall windows at the base of the dome. Near the center of the otherwise unoccupied expanse sat Mrs. Watson, her head resting upon her folded arms on a table, an open book face down at her side. Her soft snoring echoed through the space.
I approached and tapped her shoulder. “Mrs. Watson?”
She opened her eyes, taking a moment to gain her bearing. “Oh!” she said as she looked around. “Funny, I was dreaming I was in my bed asleep. But here I am . . . Um, where am
I? Oh, the library! Of course. I must look a mess. How embarrassing, my falling asleep in a public place.”
“No need for embarrassment,” I assured her. “And it’s hardly been ‘public’ these past hours. But now it’s morning.”
She looked up at the windows. “Yes, I see. How quickly the night went. Did you solve the mystery, Sherlock?”
“Not yet. Nonetheless, it’s time we left here.”
“Yes, the morning shift will be on soon. All those librarians! We wouldn’t want to be caught here after hours. Or, rather, before hours. Or . . . whatever.”
“What were you reading ?” I asked, as she closed the book on the table before her.
“Poe,” she said. “I enjoy his tales of the macabre.”
“Poe . . .”
“Yes, Edgar Allan. The American from the last century. Surely, you’ve heard of him.”
Of course, I’d heard of him.
My voice brightened and I felt renewed, as if I had not spent the past hours in fruitless research. “Poe!” I exclaimed. “It might just be . . .” I stopped, turning possibilities over in my head.
“Be what?” she pressed.
I pointed to the book. “It might be that what we’re seeking is right there before us.”
She looked at me as if I had gone slightly mad. “In Poe’s book?”
“Yes. How quickly can you be ready to leave town?”
“Where to?”
“Paris,” I said, glancing at my watch. “If we hurry we can catch the 7:54 to Dover to make the crossing!”
Holmes Entangled Page 9
