The Seventh Bullet

by Daniel D Victor

  On the neighbouring shelf were occult books of an even more specific nature. I saw two copies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Pierre Carmouche’s Le Vampire, Dr. John Polidor’s The Vampyre, Thomas Preskett Prest’s Varney the Vampire, and—rather surprisingly since we had previously assumed that it was the volume we had discovered at Van den Acker’s—Viereck’s The House of the Vampire. If the case against Buchanan depended so greatly on that book at Van den Acker’s being his, perhaps our rush to condemn him was premature. Holmes, however, appeared unruffled by the discovery.

  “May I?” he asked the butler, indicating the books he wanted to examine.

  The older man shrugged his assent, and Holmes began by withdrawing the two copies of Dracula from their positions and opening each in turn to its title page. After riffling their pages, he replaced both of them and, rubbing his chin, proceeded to inspect the books by Polidor and Prest. Only then did he reach for the claret-coloured work by Viereck, which he examined as he had the others.

  As Holmes did so, the butler observed, “That’s strange. I thought the senator had given that very book to his secretary, Mr. Altamont, just before the senator’s departure.”

  So many books, I thought. How could this old fellow account for which ones were given out?

  A few moments later Holmes returned the volume he was inspecting to its place on the shelf and, with a slight nod of his head, indicated to me it was time to retire.

  “The Senator seems to be lacking in Poe,” Holmes observed with mock gravity. Once again, I noted that macabre American author with whom my friend had some passing if not totally appreciative familiarity.

  We thanked the butler, telling him that we would convey our purchasing suggestions to Mrs. Buchanan abroad without ever revealing how we had gained access to the Senator’s library. The butler could thus rest assured that his master would have a most satisfying birthday due in great part to the perspicacity of a loyal but anonymous servant.

  Sherlock Holmes said nothing as we walked back to Rollins and the Packard. In spite of my own anxieties, I could tell by my friend’s smug grin that he had got the information he had been looking for.

  “But Holmes,” I said once we were seated in the security of the closed passenger compartment, “I myself observed the copy of the Viereck book on Buchanan’s shelf. It should have been missing if his was the volume we saw on Van den Acker’s desk.”

  “My dear Watson,” Holmes said, “the man is a collector of rare books. That is why I was checking at the front of each copy. The two Draculas, for example—one was a Constable and Company first edition; the other, an American first from Doubleday. The rest I looked at were also first editions.”

  “Including The House of the Vampire?” I asked.

  “That all depends on which copy you mean, Watson,” he said with a smirk.

  “But surely I saw only a single volume, Holmes.”

  “Back at Buchanan’s—yes, that is so, and it was not a first. But the book on Van den Acker’s desk, old fellow—don’t forget it. Remember, the butler said that Buchanan had given it to Altamont.”

  “Then it was Altamont who was behind these murders?”

  “Not behind them, Watson, although he played prominent roles in both. He certainly must have planted the book at Van den Acker’s, and that book, I am convinced, is the linchpin of this investigation. It was a first edition, you see, and I have no doubt that the ‘Senator’ of the inscription was not Van den Acker, as we were supposed to believe, but rather the culprit who ordered it left at the scene of Van den Acker’s murder—the honourable former senator from New York, Millard Pankhurst Buchanan.”

  “But how can you be so certain that Altamont wasn’t acting on his own—perhaps out of some demented loyalty to his employer?”

  “Because, Watson, Altamont would not have the capability to affect so many men of power and authority. He never could have orchestrated the unanimity we witnessed in Washington among all those senators.”

  “Then you think Buchanan’s our man, Holmes?”

  “Yes, I believe he is, old fellow. That is why we must return to England as soon as we can to confront this deadly betrayer of the public trust.”

  Holmes leaned forward to communicate with the driver. “Rollins!” he fairly shouted. “To the Waldorf! And quickly, man!”

  Ten

  CONFRONTATION

  “The much-talked-of difference between those born to wealth and power and those who rise to it from obscurity resolves itself to little more than the difference between those born mad and those who go insane.”

  —David Graham Phillips, The Price She Paid

  Much of the next twenty-four hours remains an ambiguity. Holmes and I booked passage on the first available ship to England, the White Star Line’s Olympic, leaving the following day. Mrs. Frevert, whom Holmes rang only to tell that the mystery of her brother’s death was taking us back to London, insisted on seeing us off and commandeered not only Rollins and the Packard but also Beveridge himself in her efforts to facilitate our departure. And so it was that the day after our visit to Buchanan’s library, Holmes and I and our luggage, along with Mrs. Frevert and Beveridge, made our way through the crowds as quickly as we could to the vast lengths of Pier 59. Just the previous year, Beveridge explained, the dock had been extended an additional ninety feet out into the Hudson to accommodate the large ships of the White Star Line.

  “What a pity,” I lamented “that we never visited the Statue of Liberty. It’s so typically American, after all.”

  “Oh,” Beveridge replied, “with your trip to Washington and your stay in New York, Doctor, I think you’ve experienced the essence of what this country is made of.”

  “How true, Senator,” Holmes said, as he shook Beveridge’s hand in farewell, “how very true.”

  Not long after I had positioned myself at the rail of the great ship, a veritable fleet of twelve tugboats, like courtiers round a queen, struggled for position in helping the mighty vessel ease away from port. Beneath a bright and, I hoped, prophetic sunny sky, I stood waving my good-byes to Mrs. Frevert, to Beveridge, and to the chauffeur Rollins (whom I could easily make out in the distance thanks to his proximity to the yellow motor car). As I took in for the last time that celebrated skyline of New York, I realised I was also saying farewell to America—not to mention the seductive offer of employment made to me by Hearst. What would Mrs. Watson have done if instead of returning to England, I had telegraphed her to join me in New York?

  For his part, Sherlock Holmes was already fiddling away in our cabin somewhere beneath the four massive funnels of the Olympic.

  The week of travel passed slowly, especially for my companion. Like the trap that falls upon a jungle cat before the animal can spring, the confines of the ocean liner ringed Holmes in. He paced back and forth in our cabin; he played his violin in our cabin; he read more of Phillips in our cabin.

  “Why pretend that I have freedom, Watson?” he said when I suggested that he stroll along the open promenade deck. “A means for ensnaring a villain is my goal, not deluding myself into thinking that, despite the tennis courts and bathing pools, I’m not aboard a ship.”

  His foul temper lasted the entire seven days of the voyage. I could only breathe a sigh of comfort when I contemplated the good fortune that had prevented us from sailing together in the opposite direction. I had foolishly believed that age might temper Holmes’s easily sparked sense of frustration, but his restlessness that week proved me wrong. Indeed, before we reached my house in Queen Anne Street, I was even doubting the wisdom of having invited him to reside with me while my wife was still away.

  Once we arrived in London, however, Holmes’s calmer nature prevailed, and with a week still remaining of Mrs. Watson’s stay with her aunt in the Midlands, I felt more than ready to share my abode with my old friend. Reassured that we could continue our investigation undisturbed for a while longer at our Queen Anne Street headquarters, Holmes wanted no time lost in implementing wha
tever strategy to lure our prey he had conjured during the past week at sea.

  Our first task was locating Senator Buchanan. To that end, Holmes contacted our old friend Wiggins, one of the former young street Arabs whose acquaintance I had made in Holmes’s and my initial case together, which I called “A Study in Scarlet.” The nominal leader of the Baker Street Irregulars, for so the boys were known, Wiggins had aided Holmes on many an occasion. It was, however, Holmes’s aid to Wiggins that proved more fortunate in the long run. A number of years earlier Holmes had secured the lad a position as bootboy for a great family, and Holmes and I beamed with pride as we watched the boy justify our faith in him, moving up to footman and then to valet through years of loyal service to his employers. Now in his early forties, the baby-faced man with the shock of black hair and toothful smile had been appointed butler to a small but influential household in Belgravia.

  “Yes, indeed, Mr. Holmes,” Wiggins said the afternoon of our return to London. “It should be no problem at all to locate this Senator Buchanan. Those who make the rounds of our finest homes are well known to us in service. A few discreet questions to the right addresses should yield results in no time at all.”

  True to his word and former Baker Street reputation, Wiggins reported back to us within the hour that Buchanan and his wife were currently residing at the nearby Langham Hotel. It was an obvious choice: the grand Langham not only suited the rich (the King of Bohemia had stayed there while visiting Holmes), but seemed to appeal to Americans in particular; the establishment claimed Mark Twain as one of its most famous guests. Since the hotel was just round the corner from Queen Anne Street in Portland Place, we proceeded to undertake the brief walk that very night. Unfortunately, however, we discovered at the desk that the senator and his wife were attending a performance of Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, whose opera season had only just commenced, so Holmes was forced to leave a note for Buchanan, informing him of our urgent desire to meet.

  “We shall return at midnight,” he announced to the sombre, moustachioed hall porter behind the desk. To me, he said with a smile, “Come, Watson, it is time to sample again the familiar taste of English cooking. I believe that roast beef at Simpson’s would not be out of place while we await the completion of Senator Buchanan’s enviable encounter with Mozart.”

  At the stroke of midnight we reappeared at the Langham. Seated in plush velvet chairs in the lobby, we awaited the appearance of Buchanan. Despite the lateness of the hour, the hotel was alive with pedestrian traffic. Visitors to London who wanted to squeeze vitality from every waking moment rushed in and out of the hotel as if the garish electric light were sunshine and it was the middle of the afternoon.

  Three-quarters of an hour later, Senator Buchanan in evening dress and his wife in an elegant white-brocade gown and matching white fur entered the foyer. They were accompanied by another formally attired couple: a dark, extremely young woman and a much older man, distinguished by his thick moustaches as well as his considerable height.

  “Colonel John Jacob Astor and his wife,” Holmes explained, “the owners of the New York hotel in which we so recently luxuriated. Forced by the scandal of the difference in their ages to honeymoon abroad—Egypt, I believe.”

  “A beautiful young woman,” I observed, “and judging from her radiance and marital status, undoubtedly pregnant.”

  “Watson, Watson”—Holmes sighed—“ever the romantic. You couple the science of medicine to the science of deduction then rely on intuition.”

  I had no time to react to what I chose to accept as a compliment— although I am not certain that it was so intended—for the hall porter was just then offering the senator the note Holmes had written and nodding in our direction.

  Buchanan perused the paper, excused himself to the Astors, and swhispered something to his wife whose raised eyebrows seemed to signal a sense of alarm. Bidding them all good night, he made his way in our direction through the assemblage of hotel guests. Since I had met him before, I introduced the senator to Sherlock Holmes, and then we all adjourned to a small round table in the corner of the large hall. Only after Buchanan insisted on ordering a brandy and soda for each of us could Holmes begin.

  “You know of Altamont’s death?” Holmes asked. “And Van den Acker’s?”

  “Yes, poor souls,” Buchanan said. “I read about Van den Acker. And Altamont seems to have been a thief of some sort. Or so I was told by the Embassy. Was he not killed in a freakish robbery attempt?”

  “That’s what the New Jersey authorities are maintaining, Senator,” Holmes said, “but I have another hypothesis.”

  Buchanan leaned back in his chair, studied the drink in the cut-crystal glass, and asked, “Just what might that be, Mr. Holmes?”

  “I believe, Senator, that Altamont intercepted a message from Peter Van den Acker to me about an incriminating dispatch he had received from Washington. I further believe that as a result of Van den Acker’s attempt to contact me and the suspicions he had of what really happened to David Graham Phillips, Altamont went to Van den Acker’s house and brutally killed him, attempting to make the murder appear a suicide. I also believe that Altamont planted your copy of Viereck’s The House of the Vampire at the scene of the crime so it would seem that Van den Acker had been the one who’d given that book to Goldsborough, the very book that helped ignite in Goldsborough’s twisted mind the desire to kill Phillips.”

  “Indeed,” Buchanan said softly once my friend had finished. The Senator’s expression had changed not at all throughout Holmes’s indictment. In the same soft voice Buchanan asked, “Now why would Altamont want to do all that, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Because, Senator, he was working for you, and you were becoming frightened that Mrs. Frevert’s desire to re-open the enquiry into her brother’s death would ultimately implicate you.”

  Buchanan sipped his drink again; neither Holmes nor I had touched ours.

  “There were many people,” Buchanan said, “let alone senators, who wanted to see Phillips dead. Why pick on me, sir?”

  I had heard stories about the ability of American legislators to remain so calm during their heated debates that they could refer to their contemned rivals as “The Honourable” or “Most Distinguished Gentleman.” Now I was witnessing just such a performance firsthand, the volatile Buchanan appearing as civil as if he were conducting a harmless tête-à-tête. Instead, he was being accused of murder.

  “Allow me to explain,” Holmes said. “As much as I detest conjecture, the trail of this case was quite cold, and thus I had to rely on surmise as well as on the historical record. There were only two senators with a sufficiently compelling motive to have killed Phillips in January of 1911—the two who had lost their attempts at re-election the previous November thanks in great measure to Phillips’s writings. One of those two senators is dead. You, of course, are the other.

  “I assume that your hatred for Phillips had been growing ever since you first read the article he’d written about you in The Treason of the Senate. After meeting Goldsborough at a concert or some other cultural event and discovering his fascination with Phillips, you must have dangled the promise of money in front of him even before you actually decided to murder Phillips. You perceived that Goldsborough was an impressionable young man, suffering no doubt from what Dr. Freud might term paranoia. You cultivated his neurosis, twisting his interest in Phillips to a kind of repulsion. It must have been you who convinced him that his own sister was portrayed in that novel by Phillips and that Phillips himself was drawing the very identity out of Goldsborough’s body.

  “I further believe that after the November election, with the help of Viereck’s book and those claims about vampires—not to mention the pledge of more money to come in January after he had done the villainous deed—you persisted in prodding the poor wretch to destroy the cause of his anguish. I think you aided Goldsborough in finding rooms across from Phillips’s flat and had your man Altamont follow him to be certain the murder was com
pleted successfully. I believe that Altamont—or you—forged Goldsborough’s diary, and that no doubt it was Altamont who, hiding behind the shrubbery just as he attempted to do when he obviously followed us to Gramercy Park, fired that extra bullet into Phillips’s guts to assure himself of Phillips’s death. I imagine that in all probability he was even prepared to finish off Goldsborough if the poor soul hadn’t done it himself.”

  “An interesting tale, Mr. Holmes,” Buchanan said. He still sounded as controlled as he had at the start of our interview, although I thought I detected a slight jerk of the hand holding the glass at Holmes’s utterance of the word “guts.”

  “Maybe,” the Senator continued, “in a fit of madness Altamont believed Phillips had harmed me and deserved to be dispatched. Or maybe he mistakenly thought I did order Phillips killed, just as you suggest, and believed he was protecting me. Or maybe, unbeknownst to myself, he was under the secret employ of any one of the dozen other senators who, I tell you in the strictest confidence, were more than happy to see Phillips dead. But even if all that you ascribe to Altamont is true, I see no link to myself.”

  “What about your copy of the Viereck book found at Van den Acker’s murder?”

  “So I loaned it to Altamont. I can’t be responsible for what he did with it. No, Mr. Holmes, I’m afraid you will have to do better than that.”

  Buchanan put down his glass. At the same time Sherlock Holmes reached inside his jacket and produced his small notebook. From between its well-worn pages, he extracted the newspaper cutting we had discovered with Altamont’s body. Holmes slid the small piece of paper across the shiny tabletop.

  Buchanan perused the story about himself and Goldsborough; but, as collected as ever, he simply slid the paper back to Holmes. “Would you gentlemen care for a cigar?” he asked innocently.