The Empress of India

by Michael Kurland

  “I’ve asked that everything be kept as it is until we determine what happened to the gold,” Holmes explained.

  Bergarot nodded. “Quite right,” he said calmly, his hands wrapped over the golden lion that formed the handle of his ebon walking stick. “What did happen to the gold?”

  Inspector Lestrade stepped forward. “If I might be permitted,” he said.

  “Certainly.”

  “Whoever did you out of your gold,” Lestrade began, “and however it was accomplished—”

  “I must correct you on one thing, young man,” Bergarot interrupted. “Strictly speaking, it isn’t my gold. I couldn’t let that pass without commenting, so there would be no doubt.”

  “I meant, of course, the Bank of England’s gold,” Lestrade said.

  “So did I, young man. Strictly speaking, it isn’t the bank’s gold that’s missing. That is, the gold has never been turned over to an official of the bank, so the loss, if any, will have to be covered by the insurers of Anglo-Asian Star lines. Lloyd’s of London, I assume, carries the policy.”

  “Lloyd’s has the ship,” affirmed Captain Iskansen, “but I believe the special cargo is self-insured.”

  Bergarot raised an eyebrow. “The board is carrying the whole indemnity? If so, this will put the company into receivership. No small group of private individuals can withstand such a loss.”

  Iskansen shrugged. “So I believe,” he said. “Perhaps some of the individual members carry personal policies. At any rate, they’re selling the firm to Green Star, from what I understand. For all I know, they already have.”

  Well,” said Bergarot, “even though the bank suffers no loss if the gold is not recovered, we would, of course, prefer to have it safely in our hands. Word of this will get out, and I’m afraid the public might not make so fine a distinction as to who lost the gold. We cannot have public confidence in the bank shaken. We cannot.” He turned to Holmes. “So I implore you, Mr. Holmes: Find my gold!”

  “We have searched the ship,” Holmes told him. “I’m beginning to think the gold was dropped overboard during the night, perhaps with a floating buoy to mark the spot. Steam launches are being sent back along the Empress’s path to see if they can spot such a thing.”

  “How did they—whoever they might be—get the gold out of the vault?” Bergarot asked.

  “That is still to be determined,” Holmes admitted. “It seems impossible, two tons of gold disappearing overnight, but there must be something I am not seeing.”

  “Perhaps,” Moriarty suggested softly, “you’re seeing more than is there.”

  Holmes wheeled. “Are you trying to hint as to how you did it?” he asked. “Or are you trying to further misdirect me?”

  “Are you saying that this gentleman is the, ah, culprit?” Bergarot asked, with a wide-eyed glance over the top of his spectacles.

  “Were I to do so directly,” Holmes replied, “he could sue me for slander. I haven’t a shred of proof. And yet those two large Scotland Yard men are standing behind him at my request, to assure that he doesn’t disappear as the gold did, until this crime is solved. Even the professor will admit that this smacks of the sort of crime that he would delight in.”

  “I take no delight in crime, Mr. Holmes,” Moriarty said. “You do me an injustice. More than that, it shows how little you understand me.”

  Holmes wheeled to face Moriarty. “Pray enlighten me,” he said.

  “What we are faced with here is a seemingly impossible crime,” Moriarty said. “Something over two tons of gold disappearing from a closed vault overnight, with guards in the corridor the whole night. Is that a fair statement?”

  “I admit how you accomplished it has me puzzled at the moment—” Holmes began.

  “That’s how it looks to us, Professor,” Lestrade cut in.

  “Then you must ask yourselves why the crime is impossible,” Moriarty said. “It is foolish to make a crime appear impossible if it adds one scintilla of complexity, or one second of additional time, to the act—unless the criminal has a damn good reason.”

  “And had you?” asked Holmes.

  Moriarty sighed a long-suffering sigh. “If I had wanted the gold,” he said, “I would have let the Thuggees take it and then sunk their ship.”

  “Thuggees?” asked the Honorable Bergarot.

  He was ignored. “You could have done that?” asked Captain Iskansen.

  “Easily,” Moriarty affirmed.

  General St. Yves drew himself out of his soft chair and glowered at Moriarty. “They intended to kill everyone aboard The Empress of India,” he said intently, his ears turning red at the thought. “You would have permitted—encouraged—that?”

  “Of course not,” Moriarty responded, angry in his turn. “What do all of you take me for? The Thuggees were much too occupied to attempt to sink the Empress or kill the passengers. Their only thought was to escape. If it could have been arranged for them to escape with the gold, they would have done so. But they wouldn’t have lingered for any lesser reason. And before you berate me for having been willing to blow up their ship, are you not planning to hang the few prisoners you have?”

  “How would you have retrieved the gold from the sunken ship?” Holmes asked. “The ocean must be half a mile deep out there.”

  “The latest diving bells are quite capable of such a depth,” Moriarty told him. “And I have a few ideas for improvements in the design that I’d like to have an excuse to try out.”

  “But you didn’t do it,” said St. Yves.

  “I never intended to,” Moriarty told him. “I have trained my mind to explore all possibilities in any situation. I do it now without conscious thought or intent.”

  “I knew it, Professor,” cried Margaret St. Yves. “You could never deliberately sink a ship, not with living people aboard. No truly ethical person could.”

  “I thank you for that,” said Professor Moriarty.

  “So,” Holmes said, “the ideas for crimes come to you unbidden.”

  Moriarty considered. “Crimes, yes,” he admitted. “But also ways of improving scientific instruments, philosophical theories of varying worth, snippets of doggerel verse—I make no claim to being a poet—dubious insights into historical facts, and sudden observations regarding the follies of the human race.”

  “Hmmph!” said Holmes.

  “You do the same,” Moriarty told him. “For all of your vaunted powers of ratiocination, your startling leaps of deduction are largely a result of the workings of what Dr. Freud calls the unconscious mind.”

  “Perhaps,” said Holmes, “but my unconscious does not plot criminal activities.”

  “Really?” Moriarty asked. “What would your friend Dr. Pin Dok Low say about that?”

  Holmes looked stricken. “I confess,” he said, sitting down. “It must be that in some dark recess of my mind—”

  Moriarty waved a negligent hand. “Try not to let it bother you, Holmes,” he said. “In the nooks and crannies of the mind of each of us dispiriting thoughts gather. Or so Dr. Freud would have us believe.”

  The Honorable Bergarot looked from one to the other of them. “Perhaps,” he suggested, lifting the cut-crystal glass, part of a set reserved for the use of the directors, and sipping the ’17 San Tomás de las Aguas port, also reserved for the directors, with which it was filled, “we could return to the subject at hand.”

  “The missing gold,” said Lestrade.

  “Prescient of you, Inspector,” agreed Bergarot.

  “Holmes could tell you where it is,” Moriarty said, leaning back in his chair and sipping at his own dram of fine port. “If he’d clear his mind of the presumption that I was involved in the crime, which, as is so often the case, is clouding his otherwise laudatory thought processes.”

  Bergarot looked over his spectacles at the professor. “You claim that you were not involved in the theft?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  “But you know how it was done.”

 
“I believe so,” Moriarty said.

  “Because you did it yourself?” Holmes suggested.

  Moriarty shook his head. “Consider that if I had, I would not be standing here exchanging gibbets of wit with you. I would be long gone.”

  Holmes eyed him suspiciously.

  A young lieutenant of the Lancers, in the full dress uniform that the British climate made comfortable once again, stepped into the room and saluted his general. “Sorry, sir,” he said, “Major Sandiman requests that you return to the briefing room as soon as possible. There are questions about the debarking orders and, well, sir, everything seems to be turning into a muddle.”

  “Ah,” said General St. Yves, pushing to his feet. “Good to be needed, I suppose. I’d better . . . if you gentlemen will excuse me . . .” He eyed the remaining port in his glass, and then downed it in one swallow and followed the lieutenant out of the room, pausing at the door to say, “Margaret, my love, if I’m not back shortly, our rooms at the Northumberland Arms should be awaiting us. I imagine you can make your way there without my assistance.”

  “I imagine so, Father,” Margaret affirmed.

  “Sorry to leave,” the general said, eyeing his empty port glass with a sigh of regret. “Do send someone along to tell me how this all comes out—and where the bally gold is!” And he was out the door.

  “Yes,” Bergarot said, recapturing the group’s attention. “The gold. Where is it?”

  Captain Iskansen had jumped to his feet immediately after St. Yves, and now stood indecisively in the middle of the room. “My job,” he said. “I am being horribly remiss. The debarking. The unloading of cargo. The reloading. I really shouldn’t be here. I really mustn’t stay.” He put his hat firmly on his head and headed for the door. Pausing in his turn, he turned and said, “Keep me informed, will you?” and he was gone.

  “If you do know where the gold is,” Holmes told Moriarty, “do share the information with the rest of us, and we can all get on with our duties.”

  “I believe I can deduce its location from the information at hand,” Moriarty said. “You could, too, Holmes, if you’d allow yourself to take cognizance of the obvious.”

  Bergarot stirred. “I believe you,” he said. “It makes perfect sense to me. You know where the gold is because you didn’t take it. Fine. Now share the information with the rest of us.”

  “Let us construct a syllogism,” Moriarty said. “Not one of Lewis Carroll’s sort, but a more complex structure.”

  “Ever the professor of mathematics, eh, Moriarty?” commented Holmes.

  “Perhaps,” replied the professor of mathematics. “First premise: We are faced with a seemingly impossible crime; the gold could not have been removed from the vault while it was locked and under guard, and in any case it could not have all been removed in the space of one night.”

  “That’s true enough,” grumbled Inspector Lestrade.

  “Second premise: The gold was there yesterday.”

  “It was seen to be,” Bergarot affirmed.

  “Third premise: It is now gone; the vault is empty.”

  “Except for a few cinders, essentially so,” Holmes agreed.

  “Now we must reach for the conclusion. In doing so we will keep in mind the axiom that when the impossible is removed, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  Holmes glared at Moriarty. “I believe I have said something of the sort myself upon occasion.”

  “Yes,” Moriarty agreed. “So, conclusion: Since the gold could not have been removed from the vault last night, it was not removed from the vault last night.”

  Moriarty’s declaration had a powerful effect on his listeners. Director Bergarot’s mouth opened mutely. The lines in Holmes’s face hardened; he disliked being made sport of. Lestrade guffawed. “You’re not saying we’ve all been mesmerized, are you, Professor? The gold bars are still there, but we can’t see them? Like one of those fantastical Professor Challenger stories from The Strand Magazine?”

  “You have the horse in view, but you’ve placed him behind the cart, Inspector.” Moriarty made a twisting motion with his hands. “Reverse that thought.”

  Holmes’s face suddenly twisted in a spasm of thought, and then relaxed, and he slapped his hand down on the table in front of him. “Of course! It’s obvious!” he said. But then his eyes narrowed and he thrust a bony crooked first finger up in warning: “But that still doesn’t prove that you had nothing to do with it.”

  “If I did, why would I be telling you about it?” asked Moriarty.

  “A clever ruse,” said Holmes.

  “Enabling you to retrieve the gold,” expanded Moriarty.

  “True,” Holmes said. “True.”

  “What are you two talking about?” demanded Inspector Lestrade. “It isn’t obvious to me. Where is the gold, if you suddenly know, and how did it get there?”

  “It couldn’t have been removed last night,” Holmes said, “so it wasn’t removed last night. It was removed earlier.”

  “Probably much earlier,” Moriarty agreed. “And over a period of time.”

  “But,” objected Margaret, “everyone saw it there. Dozens of people must have walked by that vault room every day, and the gold was there.”

  “Was it?” Moriarty asked. “What did they see?”

  “Gold bars,” Margaret said. “Stacks of them—in wooden boxes. I saw them myself. Didn’t I?”

  “It looked like gold, certainly. In a sense it was gold. What you saw was a trompe-l’oeil.” Moriarty told her. “A cleverly done painting to fool the eye. The gold you saw was gold leaf.”

  She thought it over. “Well, if so, it certainly fooled my eyes.”

  Holmes got up and, with a slow, measured step, began walking around the table, his gaze toward some unseen distant horizon. “Our view was limited,” he said thoughtfully. “No chance for much perspective.” He continued walking, his forefinger pressed to his nose.

  “And the bright electrical lights helped the illusion,” Moriarty added. “They eliminated shadows. It was a sort of clever stage illusion.”

  “Stage illusion!” Margaret put her hand to her mouth. “The professor!”

  “I agree,” said Moriarty. “The professor.”

  “What professor?” asked Lestrade. “You? Are you admitting—”

  “I actually saw him with paint on his sleeve once,” Margaret said. “He said, if I remember correctly, that he was painting a prop.”

  “Well, he certainly was,” Moriarty said.

  “Professor Demartineu,” Holmes mused, “and his friend Sutrow the magician.”

  The Honorable Bergarot swiveled in his chair to look at Holmes, who was passing behind him. “Magician?”

  “I see it now,” said Holmes. “The disappearing lady—the disappearing gold bars. Nothing but a clever illusion.”

  “An illusion?” Lestrade asked, lacing his hands behind his back and trying to look thoughtful. “Hmmm. An illusion. Go on, Holmes.”

  “The illusion was put in place, a trompe-l’oeil of the cases of gold. And behind this wood-and-canvas flat, the gold was removed. It could have begun the day we left Calcutta, and it was probably finished weeks ago.”

  “How was this done, from a locked and guarded vault room?” Bergarot asked.

  “Why?” asked Margaret. “Why create a mystery—an impossible crime?”

  “Ah,” said Moriarty. “There’s the crux, you see. The how and why are tied together. The illusion of an impossible crime, created because it had to be an impossible crime.”

  “I’m afraid I lost you when the impossible became possible,” said the Honorable Bergarot. “Or was it the other way around?”

  “If it wasn’t an impossible crime, you see, then there would have been no mystery as to how it was done,” Holmes said.

  “And if there was no mystery as to how it was done,” Moriarty continued, “there would have been no mystery as to who did it.”

  “So, in order to concea
l the fact that the gold was being stolen—” Holmes began.

  “He had to make it appear that the gold was still there,” Moriarty said.

  “Who had to—” began Bergarot.

  Holmes stopped pacing and wheeled to face the table. “But it had to be removed early so that it could be concealed. That’s obvious.”

  “Once you realize that, the rest follows,” Moriarty said. “When the thread is picked up at any point, the skein unravels.”

  “The rest of what?” demanded the Honorable Bergarot.

  “If I’m supposed to be arresting somebody,” complained Lestrade, “I wish you’d tell me who. If I’m supposed to be recovering the gold, I wish you’d tell me where it is. I’ll await the explanation as to how it got there for a later time.”

  “It becomes clear once you realize why the crime had to appear impossible,” Holmes said.

  “Elucidate,” said the Honorable Bergarot.

  “Assume that we had not been allowed to look through the gated inner door every day; that the vault door had been closed since we left Calcutta.”

  “Yes?”

  “And the door was opened this morning, and the gold was gone. Who took it?”

  “The captain had the only key,” said Bergarot.

  “Exactly!” said Holmes.

  “But it was sealed in an envelope,” Margaret protested.

  “A heated thin blade under the wax,” said Moriarty. “Opened in an instant, and none the wiser.”

  “Amazing!” said Bergarot. “So the only reason the gold was left on display every day was because it actually wasn’t there.”

  “Sleight of mind, you might call it,” said Moriarty. “If the gold was there until last night, then the captain couldn’t have taken it because nobody could have. Turn it into an impossible crime, and the list of suspects is as large as your imagination will admit.”

  “But how did he get the gold out of the vault?” Lestrade asked. “And what did he do with it? We’ve searched the ship.”