“Alva’s shining moment,” he said.
“These jewels—”
“The pearls were my latest gift at the time. They’d belonged to Catherine the Great of Russia, and later the Empress Eugénie of France.”
“Jewels worth a queen’s ransom indeed. Are they stored securely?”
“Of course, in our own vault—Oh, I take your meaning, Mr. Holmes. Given the recent . . . incident, it might be best to remove them to a bank vault.”
“Jewels were mentioned in the threats. The difficulty, though, is whether it’s safer to move them or to leave them be, even perhaps to leave them as bait.”
“Which do you recommend?”
I turned, more than ready to leave this oppressive pile, but I had one more task to finish this day.
“I will smoke some pipes of shag over that question, Mr. Vanderbilt, over the complete problem, in fact. This is a pretty, if particularly grisly, conundrum. I assume die Commodore would have been pleased to have presented me with such a challenge. Like many self-made men, he must have thrived on goading others to their utmost. A side mystery here is why these ruffians play so coy as to their demands, but first I must request sequestered time in your billiard room until I’m satisfied that I’ve wrung every clue from the premises.”
“Mr. Holmes, you’ve gone over the place with more energy and thoroughness than my army of cleaning staff. Given Alva’s habit of going through every room in a long white kid glove and immediately firing any maid who allows one visible particle of dust to linger, that’s saying something.”
“As with your wife, it takes a great deal to satisfy me. I must have the chamber completely to myself until I leave.”
“I’ll notify Wilson to await your departure, whether it is three this afternoon, or three in the morning. And I look forward to hearing your suggestions, sir, but more to hearing your solution.”
By then Wilson had entered and shut the door behind him. “They are here to remove the, uh, atrocity, sir.”
We doused our respective smokes. Vanderbilt stood and took one last swallow of brandy. “We shall go along to supervise. Fetch Mr. Holmes an envelope first.”
Wilson, surprised, opened the top drawer of a smaller desk and produced a large envelope. He watched while I deposited the papers within via my tweezers. It must have looked as if I were handling dead insects instead of a lively batch of threatening communications.
Vanderbilt and I shook hands, and then I left the library to return to the mysteries of the billiard room.
I had a great deal to think about, and no one waiting at my hotel room to pester me for the estimated time of my return, or for premature conclusions.
This case was beginning to show some intriguing features.
Chief among them was the poor soul about to be bundled away to a secret autopsy and then a pauper’s grave, no doubt.
I quite deplored this shabby and secretive course of action. Only in America would a wealthy man like Vanderbilt have the power or nerve to attempt such a violation of police routines. Yet his willingness to do so, and his need to call on a visiting foreign investigator, told me that he was not a total innocent in some business practices.
Or perhaps he was merely terrified of his wife, should she learn of the irregularities in her fabled household. From what I had glimpsed of the lady, she was a far more immediate threat to him than any unknown villain. As I have often warned Watson, women are not to be trusted, not even the best of them. And when it comes to the worst of them . . . I shudder, Watson. I shudder.
9
CLEARING THE TABLE
As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it
proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes
which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face
is the most difficult to identify.
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, “THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE”
FROM THE CASE NOTES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
Once the body had been spirited away, I returned to the room that had so far defeated me. Vanderbilt was correct; he had watched me scour the premises inch by inch and fiber by fiber.
Wilson had shut the doors behind me and secured the entry from the serving halls beyond by stationing a footman there. I stood just inside the doors and studied everything in the room as I would a stage set.
It was not only that a man had been murdered. I doubted that had occurred here. It was that the murderer, and more likely murderers, had stage-managed the discovery of his death for some still-hidden purpose of their own.
The billiard table had been kept pristine of all mortal signs. I recalled the superstitious maid’s emotion, her curled fingers beating at her forehead and breast over and over in the sign of the cross.
By now I was circling the room, drawing closer to the imposing table on every circuit, my mind mimicking the relentless spiral of my memories and thoughts.
I would never have thought of a crucifixion, though the flung-out arms of the corpse caught my attention at once. As Watson often takes me to task, I am not a religious man in any standard sense. One will not find me before an altar when a chemist’s table calls me.
This is perhaps a failing; certainly it was so in this instance, for I’m convinced the girl in her ignorant instincts was right.
Yet what religion sacrifices the old and frail and the time-burdened instead of the young and the whole and the innocent? (One reason I don’t hold much with religious sects, which seem to eat their young.)
And what sort of criminal needs to confound as well as confront?
The surface of the table lies before me, a great lawn of felt soiled by a patch of dried blood.
If the carpeting that surrounds the table bore no marks of passage . . .
I spring up, a hand on the elaborate wooden border and perch there like a monkey.
Such feats convince the conventional onlooker that I’m half-mad, but there is no witness here, not even Watson.
I stand on Mr. Vanderbilt’s billiard table’s rim and picture again the dead man stretched before me.
If no mark on the carpet testifies to his murderers’ passage . . .
I bend to peer up into the truly massive fixture that lights, the entire tabletop, now so close to my head.
Its stained-glassed canopy has an eighteen-inch rim, and inside it’s a maze of electrified brass lights, a modern candelabra big and bright enough to illuminate a cathedral, were it set on high instead of low over a billiard table.
Even these hidden arms have been dusted, but not as recently as the room below.
My magnifying glass spies places of bright brass amid lengths of metal lightly fogged by the merest bream of dust.
It is enough, O my foes, it is enough.
Vanderbilt and Wilson would truly wonder now, for I leap from table lip to table lip, until I have discovered four disturbed points. Then I bound back to the carpet and hie along the paneled walls. I am forced at length to wrestle one of the uselessly heavy Gothic chairs along the wall to a position by the far door where the inquisitive maid had entered.
With it for a ladder I can at last inspect the paneling and discover a small hole, into which a stout hook was screwed recently, onto which a strong rope was wound.
I glanced back at the lighting fixture over the billiard table. Within its decorative boundaries, I see a fatal web of metal and glass, and one poor victim trussed and waiting, not for Death, who has already bitten him to dust but for revelation.
The villains! They waited for the room to be cleaned before they revealed their perfidy, as a stage manager directs the opening of a curtain on a play. Once traces of their presence were wiped away, they loosed the rope that held the body suspended in the arms of the lighting fixture. Who would look up from a billiard table that everyone looks down on?
Had the table been used the night before? Had bowed heads concentrated on the intricate clicks of ivory ball against ivory ball and never suspected the atrocity looming over them?
Suspended by ropes at wrists and ankles, wrapped over the trouser legs and arms, I think, but how were they retrieved? For the ropes would have to be retrieved, from above, to produce the puzzle of an undisturbed surface below.
I pictured the scene again. A trained monkey, perhaps, or an acrobatic child. Someone primitive. I seemed to be dealing here with conjurors and circus tricks.
And blasphemers.
A truly interesting consortium.
I must inspect the body and clothing again. The scent of conspiracy and revenge overlies the reek of greed.
The past is prologue.
10
SPEAKING VOLUMES
. . . an amiable and simple-minded nonconformist clergyman.
—SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”
Irene was pensive the rest of that day and into the next. I couldn’t determine if it had to do with Quentin’s unexpected call (about which she was most annoyingly incurious), or with some matter involving the details we had recently learned of her bizarre childhood.
After lunch in the hotel dining room, we returned to our rooms. She brought out the forbidding volume she had literally unearthed following a ghastly night of death and danger at a house only a mile or so up Fifth Avenue.
We had left a purported “suicide” behind in that house, and were very lucky to leave it at all, at least upright under our own power.
Irene had also borne away with her a book that Nellie Bly, authoress of the sensational Ten Days in a Mad-House, would have spent twenty days in a madhouse to get her hands upon.
The paper was lined, as in a ledger or an account book. Faded ink in an old-fashioned hand had strung numbers and letters together into page after page of gibberish.
Irene now brought me the book. “Madame Restell’s real surname was Lohman, née Trow. She was English-born, Nell.”
“Don’t remind me! It’s so galling to think that a person with such a positive start in life could immigrate to America and shortly after become known as ‘the wickedest woman in New York.’”
“Perhaps you will be better able to crack this cipher.”
“I have nothing in common with the woman, except country of origin.”
“But you are so clever at puzzles.”
“—and she’s more than ten years dead. I am? Clever at puzzles?”
“Much more so than I am. Perhaps it’s because you have such a keen eye and hand for fancywork, which is all patterns, after all.”
“But—”
“An eye that can follow a cross-stitch schematic can surely untangle a few pages of letters and numbers.”
True, my humble sketches had been of some use in our previous investigation . . . no! Now I was thinking of this cursed, coded book as part of an investigation.
“Don’t worry, Nell. This is but one end of our investigation. I only meant you to have this book so that you could apply yourself to studying it in the odd free hour.”
“And when do I have an ‘odd free hour,’ pray?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps not if Mr. Stanhope is to make himself a fixture around here.”
“One visit does not make a fixture.”
“I see signs, Nell. I see signs.” Irene rose airily to collect her summer gloves and the single straw hat she had allowed herself for our supposedly brief visit to American shores.
“You are going somewhere?”
“Indeed. And you may go with me, if you like.”
Although my remaining alone at the hotel yesterday had produced the pleasant surprise of a tête-á-tea with Quentin, I can’t say that I liked sitting at “home” and getting reports of Irene’s whereabouts and doings secondhand.
“Indeed I will and do,” I said, standing to prove my intentions. Was it possible that Irene wanted me to let her roam the streets of New York unescorted? If so, that happy liberty would not occur.
I joined Irene at the mirror in pinning my own hat into the stubborn “rats” that underlay my hairdressing. (I had quickly learned Irene’s stage tricks, and indeed, these new wide-brimmed hats, besides functioning as “sails” in a windstorm, required a fuller hairstyle as a foundation.)
Irene showed no dismay at my resolve to accompany her. Instead, her tortoiseshell eyes, half-brown, half-golden, shone as if polished.
“You had no appetite at breakfast,” I noted suspiciously.
“I have regained my girlish zest since we lunched quickly in the hotel dining room.”
“These Americans eat so fast,” I complained, taking up my parasol, for my complexion was fairer than Irene’s and tended to the occasional freckle. For some reason the occasional freckle now seemed a fate worse than death.
“They have places to go and people to see there. And so do we.” Irene swept open the door.
“And we are going—where?”
“Where indeed,” said a shadowy figure in the hall.
I gasped. Even Irene drew back as if confronted with . . . well, that truly bestial fellow from our last heedless adventure.
It was, however, only Sherlock Holmes, I realized with some relief (given the alternative, i.e., Jack the Ripper). Irene, however, looked as displeased to see him as I usually did.
“Why are you lingering in our hall, sir?” she asked.
“Precisely the question I came to ask you in regard to another location. I see you are going out. May I come in first?”
It was not a question, of course, and Irene visibly teetered on the brink of a rude reply.
It was odd to see her so testy with London’s only consulting detective. Usually that was my role. So . . . I took up her usual stance.
“Yes, do come in, Mr. Holmes. It’s so frightfully common to stand gabbling in public hotel passages.”
He favored me with a slight smile. “And no one present is in the least bit common, Miss Huxleigh.”
Irene shot daggers of resentment my way. How nice it was to be the one to take the lead, for a change. I could afford to be magnanimous to ”the man” after spending a blissful private hour yesterday with Quentin, which was quite improper but most . . . emboldening.
We returned to our parlor, which Mr. Holmes inspected with one sweeping glance.
“Well, now, Mr. Holmes.” Irene wheeled on him the moment the hall door was safely shut. “You can see we were about to leave. You do see that?”
“And a great deal more.”
She ignored his comment. “I can’t imagine why you’d need to detain us.”
He said nothing.
“Will we be needing to actually sit down to discuss this? Shall we have to remove our hats?”
When she wanted to, Irene could be as imperious as a czarina, but I stared at her. Beneath the bravado of her performance, a longtime and intimate audience like myself scented an unlikely odor of . . . unease.
Why would this tall, aloof observing machine make Irene Adler Norton, prima donna and veteran of myriad opening nights on the world’s most intimidating operatic stages, nervous in her own hotel room?
“I came to warn you, madam,” he said. “On the first occasion we met, I admit I was attired in mind and body to deceive you to your disadvantage.”
I was transported two years back to the charming St. John’s Wood villa Irene and I had occupied then in London, from which she and her new husband, Godfrey, had fled to Europe to evade the King of Bohemia and his paid agent, Sherlock Holmes.
I had stayed behind, disguised by Irene as an elderly servant. In that case I had been the observant one, for I saw how the King regretted the escape of the woman he loved but would not marry. I also saw that Sherlock Holmes held King Willie in as little respect as I did. It was the one thing about the man I could commend.
So his confession now was very gratifying. What a sneak and liar! He had disguised himself as a feeble old clergyman, not unlike my own deceased Church of England father. In this falsely benign guise Holmes had feigned a fainting episode on the street before our door. Irene, with the empathetic heart of
an actress, had succored the poor old fellow and seen him brought into our front parlor and laid upon a couch . . . from which vantage point he was ready when his henchman, the physician named Watson, heaved a smoke bomb into our innocent parlor.
This entire charade had been enacted to stir Irene into revealing the secret wall niche where lay the photo of the King of Bohemia in her company . . . and with Irene wearing the crown jewels at his behest. Grounds for an international scandal if such an indiscreet photograph should show the world the King had pretended to offer queenship to a mere American commoner like Irene, while betrothed from birth to a princess royal.
I remembered these events with a revived resentment as I pictured the elderly innocent Irene had invited into our parlor: fine, snowy hair, a stooped, hesitating posture, spectacles perched precariously on a long, hooked nose.
I eyed the upright, hale man of thirty-five years before me. Had he no shame? Aping a defenseless old man in order to deceive two much-tried women, themselves fleeing for their reputations and even their lives?
Now his face grew accusing, and Irene was looking decidedly nervous even holding her own ground.
Why was Sherlock Holmes recalling this incident so far distant in all our pasts?
Irene had twined her fingers in her pale kid gloves, reminding me of Miss Bo-Peep fretting over her lost sheep.
“You have overstepped yourself,” he said.
Irene’s hands became stone-still.
“Not in St. John’s Wood,” he added, “later that night in London. ‘Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes’ indeed. Passing my very doorstep in men’s dress, playing the baritone, verifying my identity and risking all for a gesture of pure cheek.”
Irene lowered her hands and lifted her head. “What of it? You were too late to catch me the next morning, in any event, and that is all that mattered.”
He shrugged. “I was never enamored of the chase, or the case. I am under a certain noblesse oblige to honor royal requests, since my own queen has called upon me from time to time. Given the delicate political brink that Europe ever teeters upon, it’s never amiss to extend my reach beyond Mother England.”
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