Urged by Holmes’ questioning, Merridew explained that Stuart appeared to have grown unsettled in recent weeks. Stuart had arranged a set of signals by which he and Merridew could communicate, without ever coming face to face unless necessary. There was a north-facing window on the top floor of the building in which they met, visible from the street, at which hung two drapes, one red and one black. If the window was curtained in black, Merridew was to mount the stairs and enter, where he would find Stuart waiting for him. If the red curtain was instead drawn, Merridew was to stay away, and not to approach under any circumstances.
“Red curtain,” Merridew said as we stepped down from the growler to the street. “Stay away.”
“Come along, Merridew,” Holmes said, taking the American by the elbow and steering him towards the door. “The signal suggests that your Mr. Stuart is in, and he is a man that my friends and I would very much like to meet.”
When we reached to the top of the stairs, in the deeply shadowed gloom of the ill-lit interior, I caught a strong smell of bleach and lye, overlying something stronger, ranker, more unsettling. Through the flimsy wooden door at the landing, I could hear faint moaning, somewhere between the cry of a child and the mewling of a drowning cat.
“Red curtain, stay away,” Merridew repeated, looking visibly shaken.
“You’ve been here before,” I said, feeling the irresistible urge to cheer him, if possible. “What is there to be afraid of?”
Merridew shook his head, and fixed me with a pathetic gaze. “When I came before, it had always been cleaned. Now, I think, it is still dirty.”
“Enough of this nonsense.” Lestrade pushed ahead of us, and pounded on the door. “Open up in the name of her Majesty!” He pounded again, louder. “It’ll only go harder on you if you resist.”
The moaning on the door’s far side took on a different quality, and I could hear the sound of scuttling, feet pounding against wooden boards, as if someone were trying to flee. But the room occupied the entire floor of the narrow building, and the only out would be through the window.
“He’s trying to scarper,” Lestrade said.
“Not today, I think,” Holmes said. Stepping back, he carefully studied the door in the dim light. “There, I think.” He pointed to a spot midway up, near the jamb. Then, after taking a deep breath, he lashed out with his foot, kicking the door at the point he evidently felt the weakest. He’d been right, as it happened, for the thin door flew inwards, shattering into three pieces.
The stairway and landing had been darkened, a gloaming scarcely lighter than a moonless night, but in the room beyond candles burned in their dozens, in their hundreds. Their flickering light cast shadows that vied across the walls and floor, shifting archipelagoes of light and darkness. The room itself might once have been suitable for a human dwelling, but had been transformed into an abattoir. Bits of viscera hung like garlands from the rafters; blood and offal painted the walls and floor. A pair of severed limbs had been transformed into grotesque marionettes, strung up on bits of intestine tied with ligaments, a kind of macabre Punch and Judy awaiting some inhuman audience.
It took an instant for me to recognize the figure that lay stretched on the floor as being that of a human being at all, so little was left of him, the rest having been spun out and excised to decorate the room. And a further instant to recognize as human the figure crouched by the now-open window, his arms and face covered with blood as red as the curtain he’d torn out of his way. In one hand, the man held a knife, in the other what appeared to be some severed piece of human anatomy. The blood-covered man regarded us with crazed eyes, lips curled in a snarl baring red-stained teeth, his cheeks sunken.
“Don’t do it, Phipps,” Holmes shouted, taking a single step forward, and only then did I recognize the steward of the Tomlinson household.
There must have been some confusion when Merridew and the man first met, and the American’s strange recall had fixed on a term he’d misunderstood. Phipps had simply never corrected him when Merridew assumed his name was Stuart, not his profession that of steward.
Phipps snarled like an animal. “Money is power, blood is power, both are mine.” He threw one leg over the window’s sash. “You cannot stop me, nothing can.”
I don’t know whether Phipps truly believed in that moment that he could not be hurt, or even that he might be able to fly. When he struck the cobblestones below a heartbeat later, though, he quickly learned that neither notion was true.
While Lestrade rushed to the window, already too late to do anything about Phipps, Holmes and I turned our attention to the man on the floor. He was alive, but only barely, and would doubtless perish before any help could arrive, or before he could be transported anywhere else.
“Dupry’s under-butler,” Holmes said, his hand over his nose and mouth to block the worst of the smell.
“Poor fellow.” I held a handkerchief over my own nose, but still the fetid stench of the place threatened to overwhelm me.
Lestrade stepped over from the window, his expression screwed up in distaste. “The man ‘removed’ so that Merridew could take his place, I take it.”
“The most recent of five,” Holmes corrected. “Most recent and final victim of the so-called Dismemberer.”
It was only then that I thought to see where Merridew had got to. I turned, and saw him standing there in the doorway, just as he had been when Holmes had kicked the door down. The American idiot savant had not moved, but had stood stock still with his eyes wide open and fixed on the scene before him, his mouth hanging slightly open, slack-jawed.
“Merridew?” I said, stepping towards him.
But it was clear that Merridew would not be answering, not then, not ever. He could not look away from the horrible carnage that his erstwhile partner in crime had wrought, and for which he in some sense at least had been responsible. Eyes that could recall entire books in a single glance, that could find untold levels of detail in the patterns of shadows’ falling or the curve of a cloud, took in every detail of the grisly scene. And having seen it, Merridew would never see anything, ever again. He would live, but his mind would be so occupied by that macabre sight in all its untold detail that his mind would refuse to allow any other sensations or impressions to enter. He would live forever in that moment, in the horrible realization of the horrors he had, however inadvertently, helped to accomplish.
I remember that day as if it were yesterday, and yet I know that I can not recall even a scintilla of the detail that Merridew retained. But even that tiniest amount, even that small iota of recollection, is enough to haunt me to the end of my days.
Doctor Rhys regarded John Watson, his eyes wide with sympathetic horror.
“I can’t help but think of all those young men,” John continued, waving towards the door and indicating the whole of Holloway Sanatorium beyond, “those tending the garden, or around the snooker table, or else just lounging in the corridors. So young, with so much life ahead of them, and yet their minds are fixed on the horrors of the trenches, their attentions forever fixed on the Great War.”
John leaned forward, meeting the doctor’s gaze.
“If it were up to me, doctor,” John went on, “you would spend less time studying how it is that we remember, and marveling over the prodigious memories of the past, and instead devote your attentions to discovering how it is that we forget.”
John closed his eyes, and eased back in his chair.
“Memory is no wonder, Dr. Rhys, nor is it a blessing.”
John pressed his lips together tightly, trying to forget that awful day, and the smells that lingered beneath the scent of bleach and lye.
“Memory is a curse.”
Red Sunset
Red Sunset
by Bob Madison
The sky was red when a hot wind blew in from the south. Sunset in Los Angeles can be a funny thing. It can make a man feel beaten and maybe a little lonely. Whichever, it didn’t make me feel good.
I had ne
ver met the old man before. They moved him over the big drink for safe keeping when Hitler started bombing London. They said that morale would crumble if the Nazis took him out, so he was smuggled into New York by submarine and wheeled over like a pasha to the coast. Then, we pretty much forgot about him, warehousing him with the other fossils once we got into the war ourselves. I heard that the old guy was screwy, but I thought screwy was just what I needed about now.
They set him up in an old folk’s home near Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a gray old dump, crumbling and shaky, just like the people who lived there. The nurse at the front desk made a big show getting me ‘approved’ to see the old man, even though I flashed my badge and explained that it was business. When she thought I had waited long enough, she led me down a dimly lit hall and knocked on the door.
A reedy voice said, “Yes?”
“Visitor for you,” she said.
“Send him away.”
She smiled at the door. A cruel smile, I thought. “He always says that. Just go in.”
I watched her walk away before I took hold of the doorknob and entered.
It was rank in the old man’s room. It smelled of stale clothes and medicine and something vaguely sick in the air. There were two windows facing south and the room was flooded with the red sunset. Books, some opened, some not, were scattered about, and the floor was littered with copies of The Times. The drapes were a little ragged and the carpet frayed. On the desk was an old photograph of a good looking man with a thick moustache.
The old man sat huddled in a wheelchair, small and brittle in his clothes. He wore an over-sized dressing gown and the collar of his shirt needed ironing. He had a beaky face that was a battlefield of wrinkles, and his gray hair was pulled far back from his temples. His lips were thin and blue with age, his teeth brown with nicotine. I heard he was over one hundred, and it was a miracle that the old man was still alive.
His brows came together and he squinted at me. “You smoke cigarettes, I perceive.”
I nodded.
“Give me one.”
I fished a pack of Luckies from my jacket pocket and handed it to him. His clawed fingertips touched mine and they were cold. “They think that smoking is bad for me and have taken away my pipe,” he wheezed. “Colossal stupidity.”
The old man wheeled over to his desk and took down a large box of wooden matches. He lit a Lucky and inhaled gratefully. Then he coughed, his bones rattling. When he started breathing again, he looked at me.
“Oh,” he croaked. “Thank you. That will be all.” He put the cigarettes in his dressing gown pocket.
“Wait a minute. I need to talk to you.”
He sighed heavily and blew smoke at the ceiling. “You want me to do the trick? Young man, I was quite elderly before you were born. I am not a performing flea and will not entertain you in return for a cigarette.”
“You kept the whole pack,” I said.
He took another drag and gave me a dirty look. It was a thin smile that could curdle milk. He clawed at his chest for a satin ribbon and pulled an old fashioned pince-nez from the folds of his robe. He held these up to his eyes, which magnified like big, gray headlights.
“Very well. You,” he said, “are a dick.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That is, I believe, the American vernacular for a consulting detective. You’re an operative for one of the larger firms, Chandler or Continental, perhaps. You have smoked cigarettes for some thirty years. You are from the American mid-West, Nebraska or some other wild territory. You are unmarried and not engaged or in any other permanent arrangement with a woman. You never eat at home and your diet is appalling. It is quite some time since you’ve bought a new suit of clothes. You write your reports with a typewriter on which the ‘A’ key is loose. You own a motor car, a rather gaudy one, I should think. You carry a revolver and have recently been in an altercation that has occasioned the use of fisticuffs.”
I looked at him.
“You’ve been in a fight.”
“Yeah.”
That curdled smile again, then another drag. “Hauntingly concise. Thank you and good-bye.” He wheeled around, his back to me.
“I’ve come here for help.”
“I’m not interested. I’m retired. I’m too old. I don’t care. Go away.”
“I shot a man yesterday.”
“I understand from the cinema that your type often does.”
“I shot him three times.”
“Once I could shoot my Sovereign’s initials in my parlor wall. Do better.”
“I shot him twice in the chest and once in the head. Then he got up and walked away.”
Silence. Then he slowly wheeled around again to face me. His eyes had caught the red light outside. He pursed his lips, thinking of what to say next. “You have another package of cigarettes in your left breast pocket, I perceive. Give them to me.”
I handed them over and he squirreled that pack away with the other. “Pray take a seat.”
I pulled up the only other chair in the room — a wooden straight-back that was once part of a kitchen set. I took the violin off of it and placed it gently on the desk before sitting. “Do you have a smoke?” I asked.
He smiled thinly, giving one of my cigarettes back to me. He kept the pack. I struck a light on my shoe and puffed. “About five days ago a dame comes into my office. She’s just what you want, you know? Long and slinky, blonde, but probably not natural, her eyes were puffy and she had that haunted look, but not enough that it would put her on the shelf. I sit her in the chair across from my desk and offer her a drink. The light played on her rings when she moved her hands, and—”
He cut me off. “Do you talk like this all the time? Could you please dispense with the poetry? I’m over one hundred years old and I don’t have much time.”
I made it short. “She says that her husband’s vanished. He’s an importer. His business was mostly through Europe, but with the war business has dried up. They were doing OK — better than most, I’d say. But times have been tough for the past few years.”
“Does this dame have a name? Or her husband, for that matter?”
“Landau. Monica Landau. Husband is Miles Landau. He started the business, Landau Consignments, in the early ‘30s. Business did well and he made enough for a big spread in Marina Del Rey. He and his wife moved there in ’38. Aside from the problems with business because of the war, she thought they were happy.”
“What were the circumstances of his disappearance?”
“There were no circumstances. He just never came home.”
“You searched his office, naturally.”
“Yeah. Landau Consignments is down by the Vivica Docks. It’s the swankiest building there — he didn’t do things on the cheap. He’s got only one full-time employee, an old dame named Theresa Vincenzo. Everyone else he uses is freelance or part of the importation crew. Vincenzo has to be a hundred. No offense, of course.” I stubbed my cigarette into the clean ashtray on the desk. “Went through his phone book. No dames. No tell-tale signs of hanky panky, either.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He was the age, you know? Don’t get me wrong, Monica Landau is a doll, but Miles was pushing fifty, and that’s when a man is looking for a little excitement.”
“I believe I understand. Pray continue.”
“Well, when a guy pushing fifty disappears, it’s usually one of three things. Either he’s got a broad on the side or he’s gambling or drinking — something that gets him into trouble. Or, sometimes, he’s had some kind of accident and no one knows it yet.”
“Astonishing,” he said, blandly, lighting another of my cigarettes. “I could, with a modicum of imagination, create hundreds of reasons for a man to disappear, but no matter. I assume you followed your usual lines of investigation.”
“Yeah. Nothing large missing from the bank account. No booze hidden in the office. Vincenzo says no unexplained phone calls. I even went to the cat hous
e four blocks down, you know, on Lindstrom?”
He blew smoke. “I can’t say I do, but I shall take your word for it.”
“Never heard of him. So, I get a picture from the Landau dame and go to each and every hospital and morgue in town. Nothing. Check with the police on the car. Nothing.”
“Come back to the motor car, please. What do you mean, nothing?”
“It could still be on the road, but it hasn’t turned up wrecked or abandoned. A black sedan.”
“I see. So Landau drove to work in a motor car?”
“Yeah. Why?” He just brushed the question aside, so I went on. “So, then I’m thinking that maybe it’s the dame, you know? Maybe she’s getting me in on it, so, after her husband’s body turns up, no one would know she killed him. You know?”
The old man crushed his butt in the ash tray. “It is a considerable deductive leap to suddenly believe this young lady would commit murder simply because you cannot find her husband.”
“Yeah, but you know dames.” He gave me that smile again, really venomous this time. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. When I’m around you it’s just a pleasure to be alive. Now tell me. I assume that Monica Landau had also gone to the police and reported her husband missing. I also assume that you found nothing to incriminate her in his disappearance. And, I conclude that you returned to the case with that indefatigable energy that you have thus far demonstrated. Would that be an accurate summation?”
“Yeah. So, then I figured, hell, maybe it was something to do with his business.”
“Ah ha, a colleague after all. Pray continue.”
“As I said, business for Landau had not been so good since the war. I went over his import/export records for the last few years. He shipped all around the world, but there was nothing consistent that got me suspicious. He worked the Orient, but not enough for him to be big into dope, you know? And he did enough with Germany, but that all dried up in the late 30s, so I didn’t think he was a Fifth Columnist, either. And he did just as much with the French and Brits as he did with the Germans.
Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes Page 26
