Holmes Entangled

by Gordon McAlpine

  “But when will we get to Poe?” Mrs. Watson asked.

  I scanned the next few pages, wherein Dupin is engaged on behalf of the United States government to travel to Washington, DC, to investigate a suspected plot to assassinate the recently elected American president, Zachary Taylor, thereby placing the narrative firmly in 1849, despite Baudelaire’s proclivity to refer to all such dates as 18—. After enduring a difficult Atlantic crossing, the two Frenchmen arrive in the American capital. In a private meeting at the White House, the interior of which Baudelaire compares unflatteringly to numerous palaces he has visited east of Suez, President Taylor explains to his French guests why he believes someone is attempting to poison him. At this point, however, Baudelaire interrupts the story of political assassination on the grounds that he has chronicled the case elsewhere, presumably in another volume now filed in Le Rossignol, and turns his attention to an unexpected knock that came later that night on their hotel room door in Washington, DC. The visitor is the distinguished American essayist, critic, and short story writer Edgar Allan Poe, who has not made the forty-mile journey from Baltimore in hopes of conducting an interview for publication with the famous Dupin, as Baudelaire initially surmises, but, rather, because he is desperate to secure the brilliant Dupin’s investigative assistance for himself. Poe too, it seems, is being stalked by an assassin. Because Dupin, an avid reader in many languages, is an admirer of Poe’s horror stories and poems, particularly “The Raven,” he agrees to hear out the frantic gentleman.

  “We come to Poe at last,” Mrs. Watson said, sipping from her Dubonnet cocktail.

  However, we were just then interrupted at our corner table by a handsome American with a moustache and a boxer’s musculature. I recognized him from the author photograph on the back of his celebrated novel Fiesta, which was still a subject of conversation among the undergraduates at Cambridge. The book had been published to even greater success in the United States, with the more ecclesiastical title The Sun Also Rises. The young man’s name was Ernest Hemingway, and, unfortunately, it seemed he had recognized me too.

  “Mr. Holmes,” he said, thankfully taking care that no one overheard.

  There was no point in denying my identity, as I hadn’t taken the precaution of a disguise. “Mr. Hemingway,” I answered.

  He looked surprised and then gratified that I’d recognized him. He turned to Mrs. Watson and extended his hand. Clearly, he’d been drinking; nonetheless, his manner was respectful. “Please call me Ernest,” he said to her.

  “This is Mrs. Watson,” I said, before she could offer him the informality of her first name.

  They shook.

  “That Watson?” he asked her.

  “Yes, John was my husband.”

  “My condolences,” he said. Then he pulled a third chair to our small table and turned to me. “May I sit?”

  I looked around the room. Many heads already had turned our way. “Well, as you’re hovering above us seems to draw more attention than would your sitting, I suppose it’s the better alternative, for the moment at least,” I said, closing Baudelaire’s manuscript, as the last thing I wanted was to share its contents with, of all things, an ambitious young author.

  “I didn’t mean to draw any attention to you, Mr. Holmes,” Hemingway said. “My apologies. I understand that you wouldn’t want the entire café hounding you for autographs.”

  “That’s kind of you to acknowledge, but I believe in this neighborhood yours is now the more famous face.”

  “Only because your face has gained the ‘transmogrifying grace of age.’” He spoke the phrase as if complimenting me.

  “I don’t know the source of that quote,” I said.

  “Ovid,” he answered.

  He was making it up. I knew Ovid backward and forward and The Metamorphosis contained no such phrase, even taking into account an unconventional translation. This Hemingway was a formidable one.

  “When I saw you across the room, I knew I’d never forgive myself if I did not take a moment to express my admiration for your work,” he offered.

  I nodded.

  He continued, seeming, like many drinkers, to speak his words as he thought them. “I believe that the profession of detective on the darkened paths of crime may be the nearest thing to that of the soldier in war. Except . . .” He stopped, rethinking his words. “Well, maybe there’s nothing that actually comes close to soldiering.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, young man,” I acknowledged. I had never been to war. I suspected Hemingway knew that. Was he taunting me? I didn’t care. I’d allow him that, seeing as his book jacket biography identified him as a wounded veteran. And I knew what war did to men. I’d seen what it had done to John, who often woke up at night screaming. When I’d race into his room, I’d find him sitting up, drenched in sweat, but remembering nothing of the nightmare. And I suspect that Hemingway’s mechanized war of trenches, the Somme, Verdun, the Marne, Gallipoli, sixteen million dead, was of a darker nature than even what John had endured in Afghanistan.

  “Perhaps it’s more accurate to suggest that the work of the detective is the nearest to that of the writer and vice versa,” he continued. “I refer to the continual pushing forward, clue by clue or page by page, with no guarantee of success and the genuine possibility, at any moment, of self-destruction.”

  “I wouldn’t know about writing,” I said. “My friend John Watson pursued the page for my benefit. But I’ll take your word for the comparison, Mr. Hemingway. You seem quite fit to make it.”

  “Ah, you think me foolish, Mr. Holmes,” the younger man said, looking genuinely admonished.

  I did not think him altogether foolish. “I suspect you are most formidable.”

  An uncomfortable silence was broken only when Mrs. Watson asked, “Do you enjoy living in Paris, Mr. Hemingway?”

  “Yes, but my wife and I are leaving soon,” he said. “Back to the States.”

  “You’ve grown tired of your apartment on Rue Férou?” I asked.

  Hemingway looked at me with an expression I’d seen often before. Wonder and vague discomfort. “How did you know where I lived, Mr. Holmes?”

  I shrugged. “A guess. But not uninformed.”

  “Please, go on.”

  I always made them ask for the explanation. Unwelcome pedantry was a quality I sought to avoid. “When you stood at our table I observed three pamphlets in your jacket pocket, informally fanned like playing cards. Being both a fastidious and somewhat vain man, you’d surely not leave such handouts in your clothing any longer than necessary, suggesting you have collected them in just the past hours, presumably since leaving your residence. I took particular note of their order. Taken in reverse, they trace your movements these past few hours. I observed on top a schedule for upcoming productions at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, located just a few streets from here. Are you planning to attend the Comédie-Francaise before you and your wife leave Paris?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “And beneath that schedule is the printed bulletin from Saint-Sulpice, where a mass is held every Saturday evening at six o’clock.” I looked at my watch. “Yes, just a few hours ago. Now, you may not be Catholic yourself, Mr. Hemingway, but perhaps your wife?” Again, I allowed no time for an answer. “The church, then, was your second stop after leaving your residence. And, finally, beneath the two documents in your pocket, thereby collected first on your leisurely walk here, is a brochure of upcoming books from the publisher, Editions Athos, located on the corner of the residential Rue Férou and the commercial Rue de Vaugirard, directly across from the Luxembourg Gardens. Editions Athos is named for the character from The Three Musketeers, who, in the novel, lived on Rue Férou. Now, might that detail appeal to a literary man seeking an apartment?” Once more, I continued without allowing even a breath for him to answer my question. “Of course you might have come to that street corner from some place in Montparnasse, but if you had, considering the light rain this afternoon, your shoes would show signs of mud from cro
ssing the Luxembourg Gardens. Bearing no such mud leads me to presume you merely walked down your own street to the corner, collected the catalogue, and then doubled back in this direction, stopping at the church, the theater, and, finally, this table. Of course, I could be wrong.”

  “How do you know I didn’t walk around the Luxembourg Gardens to reach that street corner?” he inquired.

  “Because you’re not the kind of man to walk ‘around’ anything.”

  He looked pleased with the characterization. “And how do you know I didn’t approach that corner from the east or the west, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Because Rue de Vaugirard is closed on the north side of the street for sewer repairs. Mrs. Watson and I happened by there earlier today on our cab ride from the train station to our hotel. Of course, you could have stepped your way through the construction, but that would have left a different tell-tale coating of mud on your shoes.”

  “You keep a map of Paris in your head?”

  “I find it useful to keep ‘maps’ of numerous capitals in my head.”

  He looked down at the table, tapping it with his knuckles. “Well, damn. I do live on Rue Férou.”

  “Yes, but what does it really matter?” I asked.

  “True, considering that we’re leaving Paris.”

  “Actually, I meant it in consideration of your leaving our table, Mr. Hemingway. Most respectfully . . . But Mrs. Watson and I are occupied.”

  “Oh, my apologies,” he said, standing. Only then did he glance at the manuscript we’d taken from Le Rossignol, which bore its title on its spine.

  I glanced at the document. “A mere trifle.”

  “Poe was no trifle,” Hemingway said.

  “Agreed.”

  He leaned over us, setting his hands on our table, and addressed us with a certainty that went beyond the professorial. I suspected such confidence would make him even more famous in the years to come. And doomed. “Of course,” he said, “for all Poe’s influence, he is not an essential part of authentic American literature. He remained too fixated, stylistically, with England and the Continent. Real American writing didn’t begin until Twain.”

  I looked up at him. “I think you’re being insincere, Mr. Hemingway. Falsely modest. It will never suit you. The truth is you don’t actually consider your country’s literature as having begun until now, with you. Isn’t that so?”

  He smiled as he straightened.

  “Good luck with that, Mr. Hemingway,” I said.

  He nodded a gracious farewell to Mrs. Watson and passed back into the crowded café.

  “Quite the preening peacock,” Mrs. Watson observed.

  I tossed some franc notes onto the table and stood. “Now that my cover is blown, whatever Hemingway’s intentions to keep it to himself, I think it best that you and I finish reading Mr. Poe’s misadventure back at our hotel.”

  “But there’s no lobby or lounge there.”

  I grinned. “This is Paris, Mrs. Watson. No one will turn his head if you come to my room.”

  She blushed, but assented.

  It was there that we’d finish Baudelaire’s account.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Monsieur Poe was distraught, his ordinarily pale complexion seeming to further whiten before our eyes as he related details of the recent attack upon his residence in Baltimore. Ill at ease in our hotel room, his anxiety remained undampened despite Dupin’s fortifying him with a glass of good Armagnac, which we’d transported across the Atlantic in a rosewood box. Poe drank the Armagnac in a single draught, without seeming to savor or even to take note of its exceptional quality. We might as well have given him a shot of the local Virginia concoction, referred to as “White Lightning,” which, while quite strong, is better used, I suspect, as liniment for rubbing down horses than for human consumption. Accordingly, Dupin did not offer him a second glass of the Armagnac, but chose instead to attempt to calm the nearly hysterical man with well-chosen words.

  “Start at the beginning, Monsieur Poe,” Dupin requested, a paragon of reassuring calm.

  Poe nodded, signifying not only his assent but also, perhaps, attempting to clear his brain. “My apartment was in wild disorder,” he said. “The furniture was broken and thrown in all directions. On my desk lay my own razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were three strands of grey fur, also dabbled in blood, seeming to have been pulled out by the roots. I recognized the shade of the fur. It had come from my own cat, which had not greeted me as she usually did upon my arrival and was nowhere to be seen. The innocent beast deserved no such violence. Moments later, I discovered its corpse tossed atop the armoire. At this, my horror, trepidation, and grief trebled.”

  Poe stopped to compose himself.

  “Were any articles removed from the room?” Dupin asked.

  Poe shook his head. “The armoire, like the chest of drawers, had been opened and rifled, although many articles still remained inside and, when my terrible accounting was complete, it was only my poor pet that had been taken from me, ruling out robbery and suggestive of something far, far worse!”

  I lay on my back, stretched out on the hotel bed, the manuscript held before me like any ordinary nighttime reading. Meanwhile, Mrs. Watson sat in the near corner of my room, upright on a hard chair that allowed for no other posture. She looked quite uncomfortable, though she’d insisted on the arrangement. I’d offered to take the chair. But she considered it unseemly to sit on a man’s bed, even when the man in question did not also occupy it, even under platonic circumstances such as ours.

  “Shall I go on, Mrs. Watson?”

  She looked at me as if I were mad. “Why wouldn’t you, Sherlock?”

  There was a slight slur to her words. Two Dubonnet cocktails were more alcoholic drink than she usually allowed herself.

  “There are further descriptions of violent acts here,” I explained. “Perhaps it would be better for me to scan through the manuscript myself and then review it for you afterward.”

  She waved away the idea, her speech loosened from its usual tenor. “I was married to John, who, need I remind you, wrote plenty about violence. He wrote about you, for Heaven’s sake. And I lived in the same building as the two of you for all those years, with the comings and goings, up and down my stairs, of the most disreputable ruffians in the city. And in those years they came to know me by name. And I them! So please don’t think of me as a fragile flower, Sherlock.”

  “My apologies,” I said.

  She closed her eyes. “Now, read on.”

  I turned back to the manuscript, glancing down the page, skipping a paragraph that recorded Poe’s description of the particular horrors committed upon his cat, before I began to read aloud again:

  “Do you think the actions of your assailants, in regards to your unfortunate pet, were intended as a reference to your famous short story, ‘The Black Cat’?” Dupin asked Poe.

  “No, their violence far exceeded even that story,” Poe answered. “They intended it as a warning to me.”

  “How can you be sure?” Dupin inquired.

  “The note.”

  “Tell me about this note the assailants left behind,” Dupin requested of the author.

  “Better yet, I’ve brought the note with me,” Poe replied.

  I was interrupted in my reading of Baudelaire’s account by the sound of gentle snoring. Mrs. Watson had fallen asleep, still sitting up in the wooden chair. I don’t know how many hours of slumber she had managed the previous night, her head resting on her arms on a table in the reading room of the British Library. Nor can I say whether or not she had napped on the Channel crossing as had I. For a woman in her late seventies, it had been a taxing day. Nonetheless, I suspected the two drinks at Le Deux Magots, rather than the day’s frenzied pace, had done her in.

  I set the manuscript aside, stood up from the bed, and went to her.

  “Mrs. Watson?” I whispered.

  The only movement was a fluttering behind her eyes, as if she were dreaming.r />
  “Mrs. Watson?” I repeated, this time in full voice and placing my hand softly on her shoulder.

  Nothing. She was out cold.

  I considered my options. Leaving her in the chair for the night would doubtless result in aches and pains that she could ill afford come morning, particularly if she also awoke with a “hangover.” Could I carry her out of my room and down the hall to her own? No. She was quite light, but then so was I, relative to what I had once been. And calling downstairs for assistance getting her to her room was out of the question, as it would mortify her to learn in the morning that not only her drunkenness but also her presence in my room had been revealed to a stranger, even if the stranger was a Parisian hotel night clerk. Fortunately, I was still strong enough to get her to my bed, which I did by placing my hands under her arms and hauling her limp frame up from the chair; no easy task. I then drew her close, as if in embrace, and pivoted in a series of awkward dance steps to the mattress, where, taking a deep and fortifying breath, I laid her as gently as possible, her head upon one of the two pillows. She did not stir during the process. While I had not pulled down the sheets and covers, I nonetheless took a blanket from the end of the bed and placed it over her.

  I could have taken her room key from her handbag and proceeded down the hall to sleep in her bed.

  But I didn’t.

  Why should I leave my own room? Besides, wouldn’t it confuse her to awake alone in the morning here? Such a bewilderment would carry further weight because our investigation included the threat of violence. So, I retrieved the manuscript from the empty side of the bed and went to the wooden chair. Unfortunately, it was as uncomfortable as I’d suspected. However, that same discomfort likely aided me in remaining awake long enough to finish Baudelaire’s manuscript, which included details of the murder of Edgar Allan Poe.

  I would have much to relate to Mrs. Watson come morning.

  Then, sometime in the night, I dropped the manuscript to the floor and fell asleep in the chair.