The Empress of India

by Michael Kurland

  “I’ll ask the questions for the next little bit,” Moriarty told him. “However; no, I have no plans to acquire the gold. As to what I’m doing here, that will have to wait.”

  “Why should you think that Professor Moriarty is after the gold?” Margaret asked.

  “Because he is Professor Moriarty,” Holmes explained.

  “Let us not wander off into bright byways of speculation,” Moriarty said. “What do you mean, you thought you were Pin Dok Low? Is it not just one of your less puerile disguises?”

  Holmes blew a thin whistle of air between his pursed lips. “Let me try to clarify my thoughts,” he said. “I was asked by the director of the Board of Governors of the Bank of England to help safeguard a shipment of gold.” He paused and looked around. “Presumably this shipment of gold.”

  Moriarty arched an eyebrow. “Yes?” he said. “And then you went down a manhole into the London sewers.”

  “How did you know that?” asked Holmes.

  “Your amanuensis Watson told me,” said Moriarty.

  “Really?” Holmes shook his head. “I must hear your end of these events after I narrate my own,” he said.

  “You shall,” Moriarty promised.

  “I descended into the depths of the London drains to ascertain whether it was possible to violate the vaults of the Bank of England from below,” Holmes said.

  “So,” said Moriarty. “And is it?”

  “I never had the chance to find out,” Holmes said. “And,” he added thoughtfully, “had I, I would keep it to myself.”

  “What happened?” Margaret asked.

  “There was a great onrush of water which I was unable to avoid,” Holmes said. “It swept me up and carried me along. For some time I fought it, trying to get my footing or cling on to some projection, but I was unable to do so. Then the back of my head collided with some hard object, and the next thing I remember is lying on a concrete shelf about two feet above the water, which must have deposited me there and then receded.”

  “Why, you might have been killed!” Margaret said. “That’s miraculous!”

  “I would have forgone the miracle if I could have avoided the wetting,” Holmes told her.

  He paused in the telling of his tale and they all strained to listen to the sounds from above. Once again there was the deep explosive crack of a coordinated volley of rifle shots, and then another, and then silence.

  “I would judge those are parting shots,” said Moran from the doorway. “I believe the Thuggee ship has been beaten off.”

  The ragged sound of cheering came through the porthole.

  “It does sound as if you’re right, Colonel,” said Moriarty.

  “I’ll stack the carbines,” Moran said, and headed off down the corridor.

  “So,” Moriarty continued, turning his attention back to Holmes, “how did you get from a London sewer to The Empress of India?”

  “I awoke with no idea of who I was,” Holmes told him. “Indeed, I had no idea of who I really was until just a few minutes ago when I found myself on the floor out there with you bending over me. Truly a shock—until I began to remember.”

  “Remember?”

  “What had happened in between the sewer in London and the corridor floor outside this door,” Holmes said.

  “After I had recovered sufficiently to rise from the shelf I looked for the nearest exit from the sewer. I crawled through a large overflow pipe that let out above the Thames and found myself at the foot of Watting Road. I recognized the location, and some bits of memory came back to me. Unfortunately, the small memory I recovered set me on the wrong path. I had a room above a grog shop on Watting Road which I used on occasion to don the appearance and assume the personality of Dr. Pin Dok Low, a nefarious Chinese criminal. Of my own invention, let me add. I am the only Pin Dok Low that ever there was. In this guise I had been able to penetrate the London underworld in search of information. What I remembered, on finding myself on Watting Road, was that I was a criminal called Dr. Pin Dok Low. Far from realizing that I was actually Sherlock Holmes, I believed him to be my deadliest enemy.”

  “You poor man,” said Margaret.

  “I went up to my room and shed my clothes, which were soaking wet and smelled of—various unpleasant odors. I bathed myself as best I could in the large basin I kept for that purpose and transformed myself into Pin. I then went for a long walk to clear my head, disposing of the clothes I had been wearing in a dustbin somewhere along the way.”

  “Didn’t the act of becoming this Chinaman—the necessity of performing a transformation to assume the identity—tell you that you weren’t really him?” asked Moriarty.

  “I suppose it did,” Holmes agreed. “I knew I was someone playing the part of Pin Dok Low, as it were, but you see, I had no idea of who that other someone might be. So I stayed with the identity I was sure of.”

  “An Oriental villain.”

  “And one with the knowledge that someone was trying to steal a fortune in gold—it was the one thing I remembered. And I assumed—being a villain—that the potential thief was I. All else followed from that one mistaken assumption.”

  “So you came on board to steal the gold?” Moriarty asked.

  “No. That was to happen later. I came on board to prevent you from stealing it first.”

  “Mr. Holmes!” said Margaret. “How can you say such things about the professor?”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” said Holmes.

  Margaret rose. “What time is it?” she asked.

  Moriarty pulled his pocket watch out and opened it. “A little past two in the morning, Bombay time,” he said. “Which I assume is still the right time, unless we’ve already passed the seventieth meridian east, in which case it is an hour earlier.”

  “I’d better go find my father,” she said. “I insist upon hearing the rest of this fascinating story later. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Holmes.”

  “Thank you. I feel the same way myself,” Holmes told her.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MISSING

  The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.

  —William Shakespeare

  A large black dhow, which had been motorized with some sort of ancient and infernally noisy engine, was nosed along the starboard side of the Empress, held in place by a brace of lines that had been thrown over the side by the faux stewards in preparation for the assault. Thirty or so Thuggees in puffy white pantaloons and long jackets, with red sashes around their waists and red scarves around their heads, looking for all the world like particularly villainous extras in a road production of Pirates of Penzance, came boiling up the ropes and onto the deck. They waved scimitars and blunderbusses and one or two Martini-Henry rifles and a brace of percussion-cap pistols, and screamed of the greatness of Kali.

  The troops of the Duke’s Own assembled on the port side of the deck and tramped in good order over to the starboard to meet the threat. They formed a skirmish line and advanced with the stolid fatalism that is drilled into every British soldier for four hours every day. The deck was not wide enough to admit much of a skirmish line, and the men would have been happier on horseback. But it is a certainty that the horses wouldn’t have enjoyed themselves at all, and besides, the few horses that were stabled belowdecks were not very adept at climbing stairs.

  The British formed two ranks, kneeling and standing, and fired a volley at the Thuggees, who were no more than twenty feet away. The Thuggees advanced quickly, barely giving the soldiers time for one more volley before they closed with the British line. But those two massed volleys had ripped into them, and there were less of them now.

  It was now mainly scimitar against bayonet, and there were a few minutes when the fighting could have gone either way. The forces of good and evil swayed back and forth, exchanging gunfire and grappling in hand-to-hand expressions of ill will. The troops had appeared too quickly a
nd the Phansigar were not prepared to face them. The band of killers, although brave enough, were unused to standing up to an armed and trained opposition. Slowly they were beaten back.

  When the battle had clearly turned against them, the Phansigar made for the rail and jumped, dived, or merely threw themselves overboard to a man. Some landed directly on the dhow below, but the dhow cut its lines and put on the steam and, with a great thumping and clattering, pulled out of the range of the Martini-Henry carbines popping away at whoever appeared on deck. The attackers still aboard the Empress dove over the side and swam, those who could swim, rapidly after the dhow. Some of them made it, but most perished in the water, refusing to grab hold of the lines lowered by the crew of the Empress. Two electrical carbon-arc searchlights mounted toward the bow of the Empress were quickly manned, but by the time the carbon rods were trimmed and adjusted and fired up, the dhow was just about out of range. And, black against the black sky and the blacker sea, it quickly disappeared into the darkness.

  The wounded and dead men of the attacking party left behind numbered fourteen when they had all been assembled: eight dead and six left to be hanged when they reached port. Of the ship’s crew, three were dead; of the lancers, two; and of the passengers, two: an elderly clergyman who probably died of a heart attack, and a young British bank clerk who was found with an unfired revolver in his hand and a Thuggee scarf tightened around his neck.

  Captain Iskansen had all the passengers remain in their cabins while the ship’s officers searched the entire ship for hiding Phansigar: They thought they had found one squeezed in behind an air shaft, but he proved to be one of the original stewards who had been too frightened to emerge.

  The damage to the ship was minimal and easily repaired, and the only things that were discovered to be missing were some statuettes of dancing girls, most owned by one Albert “Mummer” Tolliver, except for one which had been the property of the Officers’ Mess of the Duke of Moncreith’s Own Highland Lancers. All of which, presumably, had been thrown overboard by the Thuggees in an excess of religious zeal.

  “I still got a couple o’ crates of them little ladies down in the hold,” the mummer told the senior officers after the loss was discovered. “If you’d like, I’ll be glad to replace the one what went missing with one of me own.”

  “We’ve been toasting her every evening since Sergeant Major McQuist found her back in ’58. My father before me, and his father before him,” said Major Sandiman, who took pride in the fact that his was the third generation of Sandimans to serve in the Duke’s Own. “It will seem odd, no longer doing so. Still, with what we know now about her provenance . . .”

  “I concur,” General St. Yves said. “Remember Hiffington and the barmaid. If it ever became known that the regimental officers had been toasting the statue of a tart for thirty-odd years, we should never hear the last of it.”

  “None of us would be able to show his face in the Army-Navy or White’s without a snicker going around the room,” Colonel Morcy agreed. “On consideration,” he continued, “knowing what we know now about the, ah, little Lady, perhaps it would be best were we to forgo the pleasure of her company.”

  “It’s settled, then,” St. Yves said. He turned to the mummer. “Thank you for your offer, sir. We will not replace our missing Lady with another representation of the same, ah, goddess, no matter how close the resemblance. Perhaps if you are ever purveying brass tigers, or elephants, or kettles, we might acquire one to remind us of days gone by.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, General,” the mummer told him. “See if I don’t.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ALTERED PATTERNS

  I may tell them the mysteries that are hidden and concealed, the wonders of the weaving of the web on which depends the perfection and glory of the world . . . the wonders of the path of the celestial ladder, one end of which rests on earth and the other by the right foot of the Throne of Glory.

  —Heikhalot Rabbati

  It took a few days for normality to descend once again upon the ship. Once the bodies were absented, the wounded tended for in the ship’s infirmary, the decks swabbed, the holes, gashes, dents, and abrasions repaired or painted over, and all other outward signs of the ordeal removed, the experience took on the quality of a bad dream for some of the passengers, and of an exciting adventure in which they had an opportunity to display extraordinary coolness, courage, and martial ability to some others. At least, that’s the way they planned to tell it.

  “I will admit, Professor,” said Colonel Moran, relaxing in the upper deck smoking room with his feet up on the chair opposite his own, “that for ways that are dark and for tricks that are vain, nobody I’ve ever known can hold a candle to you. You got that little Lady away from the Duke’s Own with the slickness of Mamarum the Great pulling those gold coins out of the air.”

  “I merely took advantage of the opportunity that presented itself,” avowed Moriarty from the depths of the next chair to the left, but he looked pleased at the praise.

  “Ah, but seeing opportunity where the rest of us saw only danger and confusion is what makes it a stroke of genius in my book.” Moran puffed contentedly on his cigar. “While the rest of us are battling the blasted Thuggees, there is Tolliver going about throwing those statuettes overboard. All but one.” He swiveled in his chair to look at the mummer, who was almost invisible—all but his nose and the tip of his cigar—sunk into the cushions of the chair in his other side. “Say!” he said. “You are sure you saved the right one, aren’t you? I mean, I wouldn’t want to show up at the maharaja’s with a castoff of the real statue.”

  “What do you take me for?” protested the mummer. “The little Lady is cocooned quite nicely in layers of cotton batting, sitting in a crate holding eleven more copies of the same. But I don’t think you’ll have any trouble telling them apart. The real one has a certain fineness of detail which the others lack.”

  “You might want to leave the ship at Port Suez and take your prize right back to India,” Moriarty suggested.

  Moran shook his head. “Little Pook has his agents in London. I’ll turn the Lady over to them, thus completing the deal. I shall accompany them back to India, of course, but if anything happens to the Lady on the return trip it’ll be on their head, not mine.”

  “Ah!” said Moriarty. “You are not without a certain subtleness of character yourself.”

  “When it comes to collecting what’s mine,” Moran said, “I manage.”

  Sherlock Holmes entered the smoking room and came over to their corner when he saw them. Somehow he no longer looked anything like the sinister Dr. Pin Dok Low. The cast of his face was subtly different: the turn of his mouth, the leanness of his cheeks. His gaze, while still intense, was more direct and forthright than previously. “Do you mind?” he asked, gesturing toward an empty chair.

  “Join us, by all means, Mr. Holmes,” Moriarty told him. “How are you feeling?”

  “Rueful,” said Holmes, dropping into the chair and taking a cigarette from a silver case in his inner pocket. “And both relieved and confused. We seem to have been on the same side in the recent contretemps, and those blackguards were clearly not agents of yours.”

  “On the other hand,” Moriarty commented dryly, “there seem to be a number of blackguards among your current acquaintances.”

  “Yes,” Holmes admitted. “I’m not sure what to do about that. The two of them have realized that my scheme for getting the gold will not be realized, and as I never told them enough about it for them to carry it out on their own, they are a bit miffed at me at the moment. I think the Artful Codger suspects that my turning out to be Sherlock Holmes is some clever ruse on my part to make off with all the gold for myself. At any rate, both of them are currently avoiding me, which is probably all to the good.”

  “Are you quite recovered from your, ah, experience as your alter ego?”

  “I shall probably never be completely recovered,” said Holmes, striking a large safety
match against the side of the box and lighting his cigarette. “My memory of the events, and of the thinking of Pin Dok Low, has left a bad taste in my mouth and it will take some time to cleanse my palate. I always thought I’d make a good criminal, but I never realized how close to the surface the impulse was.” He blew out the match. “Perhaps, in future, I shouldn’t be quite so harsh on you, Professor.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that when you’ve quite recovered you will manage to be just the dogged bulldog you were before,” Moriarty said, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

  A wreath of smoke circled Holmes’s face and drifted slowly toward the ceiling. “I still can’t believe that your presence on this ship, in close proximity to a large store of gold, is purely serendipitous, Professor Moriarty. What are you doing here, if you’re not after the gold? Tell me that.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d believe that I have been visiting old Indian astronomical observatories?” Moriarty asked.

  “You don’t suppose correctly,” Holmes told him. “Even while I was immersed in the personality of Dr. Pin Dok Low, I did not lose sight of who you are, or what you might be up to.”

  “And you attempted to have me killed several times, as I recall,” Moriarty reminded him wryly.

  “Incapacitated, merely,” Holmes asserted. “Perhaps some of my agents—Pin Dok Low’s agents—were overly assertive in their interpretation of my orders. If so, I’m sorry.”

  “I stand corrected,” Moriarty said. “Not dead, merely with a number of important bones broken.”

  “Well . . .” Holmes smiled ruefully. “At the time we were both after the gold. Now only one of us is.”

  Moriarty raised his hands in an appeal to absent gods. “I assure you, Holmes, that whatever business I had is complete, that nobody was hurt by it, that it has nothing to do with the gold in the vaults below us, and that I intend to spend the rest of the journey in pleasant contemplation of the vast ocean as we cross it.”