I nodded with increasing excitement.
“Can ye fathom my meaning, Doc?”
“That I can, Budger! Let me mull this over, and I’ll bring you a story every editor in London will want to publish!”
True to my word, I returned in a fortnight with a new tale for Budger to look at. We altered some few lines together on my foolscap draft, then pronounced it finished. We drank a pint of mild to celebrate. “Doc, I think yer on the way to bein’ a spellbinder.” Better praise I never earned.
The story was accepted by Beeton’s Christmas Annual, and it opened a new chapter in my life. It began with a brief description of the narrator, then picked up a character Budger and I had put together. He had polish and education and a different physical appearance, but he had Budger’s gift of reading a person from slight clues. A show-off, but in an agreeable way with enough quirks of personality to be interesting. We created him without interest in money or women so as to be incorruptible. The narrator, who somewhat resembled myself, was self-effacing in the extreme and nearly colourless, but the protagonist achieved some popularity.
His first words were similar to the first I heard from Budger: “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
“How on earth did you know that?” asks the narrator in astonishment, ever the naive but willing foil for the genius with whom fate had cast him.
It was all really elementary.
SONS OF MORIARTY
A SHERLOCK HOLMES NOVELLA
BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
Loren D. Estleman published his first Sherlock Holmes novel, Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, or The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count, in 1978, and it has rarely been out of print; 1979’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Holmes pops up nearly as frequently. “Sons of Moriarty,” a full-length novella pitting Holmes against the Mafia, appears here for the first time.
CHAPTER I.
THE ASSASSIN’S DAUGHTER
To commence this narrative, I shall tell you, dear reader, that even now, nearly twenty years after the events I intend to relate, I keep the windows shut in my second-storey bedroom on the sultriest of summer evenings. I take no comfort from a sheer drop of some sixty feet, with no purchase offered to a nocturnal visitor. I would rather swelter the night through than be discovered in the morning with my throat cut from ear to ear.
It all began early in 1903. I was in semi-retirement from my London practice, attending only those long-time patients who would not countenance the idea of treatment by anyone else, and half-heartedly corresponding with a publisher about the prospect of writing my memoirs; a project I viewed with suspicion, as a way of obtaining that which had been withheld by another: the life and intimate remembrances of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
At the desk in my consulting-room, I recalled Holmes’s own ideas on the subject.
“As out-of-favor as he has unfortunately become,” said he, “I stand with Oscar Wilde on the subject of the posthumous biography: It brings a new terror to death.”
“But writing about oneself is not posthumous.”
“It would be, in my case. In that, I stand with Mark Twain, who has directed that his memoirs be suppressed until he has been dead one hundred years. You know very well, Watson, there is dynamite in that little tin box of yours.”
He was referring to the dispatch-case I keep under lock and key at Cox & Co., bankers, containing my notes on such cases as the unconvincing conviction and the strange business of the American snapping turtle.
Smiling at the memory of this conversation, I drew out the ledger-book in which I record various reminders to myself and began to write.
“I quite agree,” barked a familiar voice at my back. “That turtle alone could overturn civilization. Better her story is left to the next century, when, no doubt, the species will be bred for racing as well as soup.”
I started, spoiling the page with my pen, and spun round to face my old friend lounging in the doorway, wearing the shapeless canvas hat and bulky ulster he put on when he wished to wander about the city incognito. This attire quite changed his famous profile; I might not have recognized him straightaway had I not known the clothing.
“Holmes!” I sprang to my feet and wrung his hand, upsetting the delicate operation of rolling a cigarette in the American fashion, a habit he’d acquired after reading the reminiscences of Frank Harris. We hadn’t seen each other in months.
Then I backed away. “Really, this is sorcery! How could you know I was thinking of adding that codicil to my will? I only now just thought of it.”
He brushed the spilled tobacco from his coat, chuckling in his dry fashion, and proceeded to build another smoke. “I envy you, dear fellow. How refreshing it must be to wake up in a new world each morning. I know you will never grasp my methods, but I shan’t give up expecting you someday to understand them.”
“Nor I, the opportunity to bring you amusement.”
“You must indulge me. I have none to needle since Lestrade was promoted beyond my ken. You were lost in thought, and did not notice that I have been standing here some minutes. I am never idle. There upon the drawleaf of your desk is the letterhead of a publisher—not your own, but the same one who stopped hounding me at last about spraying my wisdom like a delouser throughout the stalls. It was clear the persistent rascals had taken their case to you. I watched you place it there after reading it, doubtless not for the first time, then send your gaze about your immediate vicinity. It lit, first, upon the square patch on the wallpaper where hung until recently your framed inscribed copy of the playbill featuring poor Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, then shifted abruptly to your Mark Twain set in the glazed book-press, easily eight feet away. Surely the thought of one led immediately to the thought of the other.
“Whereupon,” said he, striking a match off the seat of his trousers and setting fire to the finished cigarette, “I recalled our discussion of last Easter and the references I’d made to those two authors. Certainly I can think of no circumstance in which two such disparate artists would be paired otherwise. When, resolute, you opened your ledger-book and began to write, I took a leap—of supreme self-confidence, if not of faith—and made my pronouncement.”
“You might let a fellow know you’re in town. The last wire I received was from Leicester.”
“I had a courier send it. I was digging in Bosworth Field to learn who killed the Princes in the Tower.”
“Richard the Third, of course. Every British schoolboy knows that.”
“Every British schoolboy has grown up on the Bard, who we mustn’t forget introduced modern-day clocks to Caesar’s Rome. I rather think the former Duke of Gloucester has been wrongly used in this instance.”
He pulled a wry face. “This is what I’m reduced to, Watson; the greatest criminal expert in Europe, burrowing in the rubbish bins of history in despair of uncovering sinister genius in his own time. Our brave new century is an arid desert of common footpads, pickpockets, cardsharps, mugger-snatchers, and spivs. If I cannot have a Burke, give me a Hare, at least, and a Richard if not a—”
“Don’t say the name,” I broke in. “You made a resolution.”
“So I did.”
I bade him sit, but he shook his head and put out his cigarette in the human marrow-bone I used for an ashtray. “Another time. I’m off to the Tower.”
“They won’t let you in there with a spade.”
“How well you know me, if not my modus operandi. I wish merely to pace the grounds. If there are two feet of wall space unaccounted for, that may be where my investigation ends, with two frail skeletons and Richard damned in my books as well as in Lamb’s Shakespeare. Failing that, I shall scrutinize a pair of mysterious noble cousins who founded the first legal firm in Glasgow. It was established in 1485, not long after the princes vanished.” He became suddenly keen. “It’s nearly eight; are you expecting a visitor?”
“All but one of my friends is dead, or else residing abroad, and I’ve seen my last patient for this week. I didn’t hear the tre
ad on the stair.”
“You did not hear mine. In this case it’s forgivable, if it’s as light as the scent she is wearing.”
He snatched open the door. Ever since the adventure I have made public as “The Final Problem,” he kept the habit of surprising unannounced callers before they could surprise him.
Here he succeeded beyond measure. The young lady poised to tap on the panel with the handle of her parasol was so startled she nearly fell through the opening.
Holmes, reflexes sharp as always, caught her by the elbow. “I beg your pardon, miss. I hope I haven’t contributed to the effects of your crossing. Gibraltar’s tortuous in all events, but this time of year it’s torturous as well.”
The expression on the woman’s face was perplexed, though I could not tell whether it was because of his precise knowledge of the niceties of English vocabulary or his assumption of the route she’d taken to my door. Certainly there was a foreignness about her that suggested a tenuous association with the King’s tongue; her plain coat, cloth hat, and boots were not of local manufacture, and her handsome oval face was olive-hued. I judged her to be younger than twenty.
She confirmed my assessment regarding her origins when she spoke, in a husky voice with a heavy accent. “However did you know, sir, from where I have travelled? I know I could never pose as English, but I’m told many of my countrymen reside here.”
“I decided first to disregard your clothing, which may be purchased many places in our cosmopolitan city, in order to concentrate upon the scent you’re wearing: an Egyptian blend with a touch of turmeric, which has just become available here, but the tariff compels our shopkeepers to charge a price too dear for one who cannot afford furs this time of year. It’s imported through Italy, where it can be obtained for a few lira. That you made the voyage fairly recently is evident by the stitching on your coatsleeve where the price marker was freshly removed. It’s just the thing for the North Atlantic and England this season, but would be an unnecessary expenditure in the Mediterranean climate.”
“Meraviglioso!” She clapped her tiny hands in woolen gloves. “But how can you, a man, know of such things as profumo? You are, perhaps a merchant, and not—?” Her lively face registered disappointment.
“Negazione, signorina. Merely considering a monograph on women’s chemical enhancements, can Piccadilly but slow down their proliferation long enough for me to write it.”
“Then I have not been misdirected, and you are the Sherlock Holmes. I am so—so—”
“Watson!”
When it comes to medicine, my own reflexes are not so far inferior to the detective’s. Scarcely had she swooned into his arms than I poured a glass of medicinal brandy. He carried her to my old leather couch and picked up her parasol for examination as I lifted her head and placed the glass between her lips.
When at present she came round, a deep flush spread beneath the dark pigment of her skin. She stirred, as if to rise, but I entreated her to lie still.
She obeyed. “Your pardon, signors. You were right, Mr. Holmes, about my recent crossing. I arrived in London only this afternoon, and made haste to your rooms, where the signora told me I might find you here. I’ve come all the way from Palermo just to see you.” She cast a doubtful glance at me; but Holmes put her mind at ease, and the parasol aside. The time for parlour tricks had passed.
“You’ve come to the home and workplace of Dr. Watson, my friend and confidant, who has given you this restorative. His discretion is as good as his cellar. Now that you know us, perhaps you will return the favor, and we shall all have been properly introduced. I know the quaint customs of your island and the regard in which a woman’s honour is held. We shan’t want any vendettas waged on our behalf.”
This witticism had the opposite effect of the one intended. Her face paled and her teeth chattered. Fearing a seizure, I came forward once again with the brandy. But she waved it away and sat up, peering anxiously at Holmes.
“My name is Magdalena Venucci, and I have come to beg for your help, as I have no one else to whom I can turn. My father, Signor Holmes, was Pietro Venucci. Perhaps you remember the name.”
He shook his head. “I fear you’ve been reading the doctor’s panegyrics with an unjaundiced eye. Most of my memory is stored not in my cranium, but in my commonplace books. I have concluded some seven hundred seventy-three cases in England, a score or more on the continent, and one in America. I can recite the details of but a hundred. As for those I failed to conclude—”
“There is no need to explain. The man was dead when first you heard his name, and he was but slightly involved with the—what is your word?—case you were working upon at the time. It was the affair of Il Seis Napoleoni, and for a time Scotland Yard believed he was central to the solution. One cannot fault them for arriving at that conclusion. You see, my father was—was—oh, come si chiama in inglese?”—Two tiny fists pounded the leather upholstery in her frustration—“uccisore, assassino—”
“Killer,” Holmes said grimly. “Assassin. You remember the business, Watson? The ritual destruction of the six plaster busts of Napoleon the First.” He was watching our guest from beneath lowered lids; a certain sign that she’d aroused his attention. “Your father was a mercenary, paid to commit murder for the Mafia.”
CHAPTER II.
THE GRAVEDIGGER’S STORY
As yet, the adventure I have called “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” had yet to appear in print, although some of the particulars had been reported in the press, and evidently contained sufficient interest to have been appropriated by foreign papers, or our comely visitor would have known nothing of the case.
Inspector Lestrade had enlisted Holmes’s aid in getting to the bottom of a series of bizarre crimes in which a number of inexpensive plaster busts of the French Emperor had been stolen and smashed to pieces. It developed that the infamous black pearl of the Borgias, missing for some time, had been secreted in one of the objets d’art before the plaster had set in order to avoid arrest, and the thief responsible had been forced to track them down to their purchasers and eliminate them one at a time. The last of the six had turned out to contain the item, which Holmes, with his passion for theatrics, had been privileged to extract himself before an appreciative audience.
One Beppo, a known associate of the Italian secret society known as the Mafia, was the culprit. He had slain the assassin Venucci in a struggle to obtain it, and for a time Lestrade had suggested closing the case as an example of an Old World vendetta.
Such had been our one-and-only brush with that sinister organisation. We’d thought it to be our last.
Holmes, needless to say, was elated. Here at last, it seemed, was a reprieve from the ennui that plagued him whenever his gifts were in idle, and to see him rub his hands, eyes bright, like an artist seized with sudden inspiration, quite heartened me.
Would that I had not been so naive; but to attempt to dissuade him in medias res would have been as futile as trying to stop a charging train by standing on the tracks with arms upraised.
“Watson, I think your patient has recovered to the point where we may treat her as a guest.”
“I agree.”
Presently, we had repaired to my sitting-room, contentedly arranged in my worn but comfortable old upholstered chairs, Holmes and I with whiskies-and-sodas. Miss Venucci, her colour restored by another draught of brandy, declined further refreshment.
“And now, young lady,” said Holmes, curled up like a cat with his legs crossed beneath him and his long fingers tented, “kindly proceed with your predicament.”
Her account was brevity itself. She had a better command of our language than she proclaimed, a mystery she herself explained almost at the start.
She had never known her father. Her mother, the daughter of the owner of a tiny vineyard outside Palermo, Sicily, had died giving her life, and in his grief and ignorance of child-rearing, her father had remanded her to the care of the local sisters of charity, who had include
d lessons in English, Spanish, and Greek in addition to her native tongue. Although they would tell her nothing of her father, some of the other girls in the orphanage were better versed in the ways of the world, and through them she learnt that Pietro, a local gravedigger, had fallen in with the Mafia when the local don had paid him handsomely to dig an extra few feet and bury some inconvenient corpses beneath the legitimate residents interred above.
Venucci, it developed, possessed the gift of discretion: “Omerta,” his daughter injected at this point. “You know this word?”
Holmes nodded. “The oath of silence. A sacred thing, in that culture—enforced, of course, by the threat of death to the transgressors. In its way, it’s the key to criminal success, as valuable as confession is to the Catholic, albeit it less conscionable. Do I interpret it correctly?”
“Sí,” said she, clearly impressed. (This was personal approbation; despite his disparagement, I had not exaggerated the detective’s phenomenal resources of memory in regard to the demimonde in which he was as comfortable as in our own respectable class. I forbore to point it out, in keeping with my pledge never to distract him in the course of interviewing a potential client.)
In time, this ability—and Venucci’s greed—led to his trial by fire: murder for hire. His first victim was a tailor who’d refused to share his profits with “the order” (for such it was euphemistically called; also la cosa—“this thing”—and various other terms of refinement designed to confuse the authorities). The details were unknown, but from the results, the gravedigger’s prowess with a stiletto matched his skills with a spade. He was thereupon promoted to that elite society comprised of thugees, hashashim, and Destroying Angels that has plagued mankind since Cain slew Abel.
Just how Venucci came to emigrate to England, she could not supply. Possibly one of his assignments had led to complications with the authorities, and it was deemed wise that he set sail for cooler climes.
“I can tell you nothing more of him,” his daughter concluded, “as I heard nothing until the circumstances of Il Seis Napoleoni appeared in the local journals. I was eighteen years old at the time, and the nuns encouraged me to take the vows. ‘It’s your calling,’ Sister Maria Immaculata insisted. I was cheeky—this is a word, sí?”
Sons of Moriarty and More Stories of Sherlock Holmes Page 13
