He gave me a scornful look. “You, of all people, Watson, should know that what you ask is beyond impossible. It is ridiculous. Kindly desist.”
He was right. I knew my efforts at cajoling were a waste of time. I said no more.
Chapter Thirteen The Truth Hurts
“AH, MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES AND DR. WATSON,” enthused Envoy Munro as we were shown into his office. “So good to see you. I have heard splendid reports of your lectures through the country. Lovely of you to come and report in so promptly.”
“I regret,” said Holmes, “having to insist on an immediate meeting.”
“Not at all. Not at all, my good chap. The timing is perfect. I shall be leaving in two days for Singapore. Whitehall has called a special council of its agents in this part of the world, and I am compelled to attend.”
“Oh dear,” I said. “Why, you will miss the final athletic event. The one for the yellow ribbon.”
“Yes, Doctor Watson, I’m afraid I shall. Frightfully disappointing and all. But it seems that at this meeting the elevation of our legation to a full embassy will be made official and I suppose that I shall be invested as the ambassador. So it is best that I show up.”
“Of course,” I said. “And I believe that congratulations are in order. Henceforth you will be His Excellency, the Ambassador. Congratulations, indeed, Mr. Munro.”
“Yes,” added Holmes. “Our congratulations.”
“Oh, thank you. Both of you. You are being very kind and generous. But the truth, as I am sure you know, is that I had nothing whatsoever to do with it. It is all because of the thorough thumping the Japs gave to the Ruskies. Had they lost the war, this office would have remained a lowly legation for several more years. The Japanese press and the boys over at the Diet have already started calling our office an Embassy and me the Ambassador, but that it only because our promotion is a feather in their cap. Officially, I am still an Envoy in charge of a Legation until several days hence. But Fortune does what she will, and I am a most fortunate man.”
“Congratulations all the same,” I said. Holmes, sensing the futility of the current course of the conversation brought it to a sharp stop.
“Mr. Munro,” he said, looking directly at the envoy. “I fear that our report may cause you to change your cheerful opinion of your good fortune.”
Mr. Munro shut down his smile and looked directly back at Holmes. “Is that so, Mr. Holmes? Very well then, please be seated and deliver your report. I am all attention.”
He sat behind his large desk and Holmes and I in chairs in front of it. Holmes began his account and would work his way up from the less important to the utterly devastating in impeccable and logical order.
“Permit me to begin,” said Holmes, “with the matters of lesser concern.”
“Begin wherever you wish, Mr. Holmes.”
“Very well. You should be aware that the young man who was provided to us, the one named Toshi or Tommy, is a spy. I have good reason to believe that he is informing on us, and I need to make you aware of that.”
The Envoy responded with a blank look on his face.
“Of course, he is informing on you Mr. Holmes. I pay him jolly good money to inform on you and so does the Office of the Prime Minister of Japan. Every night the lad writes up a report first in Japanese and then in English and makes sure that it is delivered to the correct desk by ten o’clock the following morning. Surely you don’t think that the world’s most famous detective and England’s most popular writer were going to prance all over these islands without our knowing every place you went, every person you met, every word you said and that was said to you, every blessed thing you ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Tommy has exceeded our expectations in his job. Quite the brilliant young man. That’s why we got him a Rhodes and sent him off to Oxford for two years.”
He paused and shook his head before calmly assuming a practiced diplomatic posture.
“The next items on your list of concerns, Mr. Holmes. Please”
Holmes likewise retained a passive face, although I knew that behind it, he did not like what had just taken place.
“I assume,” Holmes responded, “that your Second Minister, Mr. Redvers Humphrey, informed you that I had tracked down your missing cultural attaché?”
I observed a very slight twitch in the Envoy’s face. I guessed that his Minister had not so informed him. But he smiled and spoke in a carefully measured tone.
“No, Mr. Holmes. He is a rather busy chap and has not yet had the opportunity to make that report. So why don’t you just go ahead and do it for him.”
Holmes then gave a detailed account of our successful efforts during our journey from Oshima to Atami. He left out any reference to towels.
“On the basis of what we have uncovered,” he continued, with no pun intended, “I have deduced that the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that your attaché has become a turncoat and is now engaged in clandestine espionage activities with agents from Eastern Europe. All of them, as I am sure you would agree, all are in direct contact with the regime of the Czar.”
Mr. Munro tilted his head and smiled ever so slightly.
“You did say, did you not Mr. Holmes, that he has set up operations in the private section of an exclusive onsen in Atami?”
“I did.”
“And that he has been known to bring in guests who are obviously Poles, or Ukrainians, or Bulgarians and so forth and to make sure that they are provided with copious amounts of sake and the companionship of an onsen geisha.”
“You are repeating what I have told you, Envoy.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. I guess I am. Pardon me. But permit me to ask you, Mr. Holmes, do you know the difference between a geisha and an onsen geisha?”
Holmes looked a little perplexed but, in keeping with his character, was frank and forthcoming.
“No, Envoy Munro, I do not.”
“Then allow me to add some data to your brilliant mind, Mr. Holmes. A geisha is a highly respected and educated woman who has trained for years to be a musician, an artist and above all a skilled and informed conversationalist who provides excellent company for a Japanese gentleman. An onsen geisha is not a geisha. She is a prostitute. A cut above those that inhabit the streets of the East End, perhaps, but a prostitute all the same. What you have just told me, Mr. Holmes, is not that my attaché has become a spy but that he has become a bloody pimp.”
The last words were spoken through a face that was struggling to contain laughter. Now the Envoy broke into a merry chuckle.
“However, Mr. Holmes, please do not think that I am ungrateful for the information. I will so inform Whitehall and list him as having resigned and move ahead with finding his replacement. Thank you, Mr. Holmes. Now, what is next on your list?”
If Holmes was disconcerted by that exchange, he again did not show it. He carried on.
“You already have my report on the dead American fellow who ended up in the river, do you not?”
“I do. Now that was indeed very helpful. It gave me a delightful one-upmanship opportunity with my American counterpart. I do thank you for that one. Is there something else you need to tell me about that?”
“What I deliberately left out of the report was the name of the Russian agent who was making the sales. His name was General Federov.”
Mr. Munro looked puzzled.
“You mean Yaroslav Federov? That fellow? Who else could it be?”
“You know this man?” Holmes asked.
“Of course, I know him. He’s in charge of all sorts of the buying and selling of arms and armaments for the Russians. Our fine British arms manufacturers have sold him millions of pounds worth of rifles, bombs, grenades … you name it. One of our best customers. Why in the world, Mr. Holmes, would you think it necessary to withhold his name from your report?”
“I did so,” said Holmes, sounding not entirely sure of himself, “because he bears the same family name as your wife.”
Yet again, Mr. Munro
looked at Holmes and shook his head. “Are you telling me, Mr. Holmes, that you suspect that there is some sort of familial connection between my wife and General Federov?”
“That is always a possibility that cannot be ruled out?”
A smile of condescension bordering on contempt swept across the Envoy’s face. “I take it, Mr. Holmes, that you have never been to Russia. Yes, I can see by the look on your face that you have not. So let me enlighten you, Mr. Holmes, you have just claimed that two individuals who both bear the names of Smith, or Johnson, or Brown or Williams must be in familial collusion with each other. That is what you are suspecting and that, Mr. Holmes is absurd. Federov is one of the most common names in Russia. There must be half a million of them. Yaroslav Federov is from Novgorod, and my wife’s family is from Vladivostok. They are over five thousand miles apart, and I assure you, they do not get together over Christmas.” Again he laughed.
“I see,” said Holmes.
“Good, please continue, Mr. Holmes. I have set aside an entire hour of the morning for our meeting, and I am finding it thoroughly entertaining.”
“Envoy Munro,” Holmes continued, “I am also obliged to state some more serious concern that relate to Mrs. Munro?”
“To Effie? Good heavens. She’s a dour Baptist from New Jersey and is currently in Taiwan doing training of the new recruits for the Baptist mission. Who would want to threaten her?”
“No one, sir is threatening her. She herself has become the subject of suspicions.”
Mr. Munro gave Holmes a sharp look and then quietly asked, “Is it possible, Mr. Holmes, that your illustrious brother, Sir Mycroft Holmes, was responsible for introducing these suspicions about my wife?”
I had observed Holmes over the years, convincingly lie through his teeth when he considered it useful in the pursuit of criminal conspiracy and wondered what he would now do. He chose to be truthful and forthcoming.
“That is correct, Envoy. Both of us are aware that my brother is something of an eminence grise in Whitehall and Westminster.”
“Is he now? To those of us in the Foreign Service who have to contend with his interference, he is more commonly known as the ‘meddlesome priest.’ And that is when we are being charitable.”
I could feel the tension in the room rising with that response. The historical reference could not be mistaken and the image that formed in my mind of the bloated corpse of Mycroft Holmes, all stuck with swords and daggers and lying on the High Altar of Canterbury, was beyond nightmarish.
“He has raised some credible concerns, sir, I assure you.”
“Please then, out with them.”
“Are you aware that your wife is carrying on a secretive relationship with a Mr. Lobachevesky, the mathematics teacher at the Friends School?”
“Nicholai Ivanovich Lobachevesky? That imbecile? Good lord, what has that fool been up to now?”
“You know this man?”
“Know him? He was almost a disastrous embarrassment to me. He is a moderately bright math professor from the college in Vladivostok who instead of teaching his students their algebra, geometry and trig spent every lecture spouting Marx, Kropotkin, Bakunin and all their silly ilk. He got word that the Czar’s boys were about to send him off to a gulag, so he hightails it out of Russia on a fishing scow, lands in Japan and demands that Great Britain grant him asylum as a poor political refugee. He is nothing more than a raving anarchist. I assume you can appreciate, Mr. Holmes, that His Majesty’s government is not having any of that nonsense. And furthermore, we have a good working relationship with the Czar and are not about to be seen to protecting those who are calling for his violent overthrow.
“It was all I could do,” he continued, “to get him to be allowed to stay in Japan. I had to beg Sister Biddle and her Quakers to give him a job and then convince the boys at the Diet that he was an enemy of the Czar, and since the Czar happens to be their enemy, nutty Nicky must be their friend. Fortunately, Nick has done not badly at the school. The dear Japanese girls just smile and ignore him if he talks politics; he is not at all bad as a math teacher, and he has found his niche as the coach of their athletic team. I am not surprised that Effie knows him. She is on the board of the school. She knows all the teachers.”
“I am not, sir,” said Holmes, “concerned with her expected degree of acquaintance with the teachers. I am concerned with an illicit relationship she may be having with Mr. Lobachevesky. And not only that but they are both involved in a sinister plot to assassinate the Emperor in conjunction with your final yellow ribbon race up Mount Fuji, and I have intercepted documents that substantiate my concern.”
Mr. Munro was no longer smiling at Holmes. He was glaring in anger. In a slow, controlled voice he said, “Holmes, you are impugning the fidelity of my wife. You had better have something to back up your claims, or I will have you thrown out of my Legation and sent packing back to England. Now either show me what you have or get out.”
“Can you account, sir, for the times every fortnight when your wife is not at home for two or three nights, or for the large sums that appear and are transferred out of her bank account every month?”
The envoy gave Holmes a look of contempt. “No, Mr. Holmes I cannot and kindly tell me why you think I should be able to? Prior to the day we were married, I had no idea what Effie did or where she was ninety percent of her time and not a clue as to what her income was. Under what sort of antediluvian social arrangement should I expect that to change? I am a married man and her husband, not her owner. May I remind you that, by force of law, as a diplomat I am forbidden to disclose to her most of what I do or where I go. Why would I expect that she would have any more obligations than I do? Perhaps you, Mr. Holmes, are still of the mind that wives and daughters are mere chattel. I assure you that I am not.”
“I have,” said Holmes, “an entire file of messages that pertain to your wife and do not reflect well upon her. All of them were sent by your wife to Lobachevesky. One is in code, and we have not been able to decipher it. The rest are in English, replete with affectionate phrases in Russian and containing discernible references to their plot. Which would you like to see first?”
“Bloody hell, give me the one in code.”
“Here it is. The message cannot be understood but the terms of endearment are obvious, and there is no doubt it was sent by your wife.”
He handed the envoy the message that contained so many indecipherable mathematical symbols. Mr. Munro took it and stared at it for half a minute.
“Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson, would I be correct in assuming that neither of you pursued the study of algebra beyond grammar school? Is that correct? Please, gentlemen, it is a simple question. Your answers, please.”
I was not eager to respond but did so first. “I took a class in my first year at medical college but that was twenty years ago, and I fear I do not remember any of it.”
“And I,” said Holmes, “have no use for such a study as it does aid in the pursuit of crime.”
“Well, gentlemen,” the envoy said, “I did study it at Cambridge, and I will tell you that what I am looking at is no more than a standard homework problem in algebra, a quadratic equation that has been solved without resorting to factoring. What you have given me, Mr. Holmes, is some student’s homework assignment. I would have expected that Nick would have known how to solve this, but it appears he did not. For the sending of the message, I have no explanation. But the content is meaningless.”
He handed the paper back to Holmes, with a sneer on his face.
“Next.”
Holmes offered the file with the all the remaining correspondence. “All of these messages were sent by your wife to Lobachevesky. You need to read them, and I will be very surprised if you do not find them incriminating.”
Mr. Munro took the file and spent the next ten minutes reading through them one by one.
“Would I also be correct,” he asked, “in assuming that neither of you speaks a word of Russian beyond ny
et and yah. Am I correct, gentleman?”
I nodded. Holmes did likewise.
“Well now, it so happens that I do. I had to master it before I sat the Foreign Service exam. So let me instruct you in some basic Russian. The gender of a greeting or compliment is specific to the sex of the person being addressed. The feminine gender is used when addressing a female, and the masculine when addressing a male. Some expressions are neutral. In these notes, there is not a single phrase that is addressed to a male. They are all addressed to a female, except for those that are gender neuter. Whoever Effie sent these messages to, they were not sent to a man. Utterly impossible, Mr. Holmes.”
He closed the file and handed it back. I was prepared to walk out of the room in utter shame and embarrassment. Holmes was not yet ready to give in.
“You do not deny, however, Mr. Munro, that the notes are full of terms of endearment, nor that they make reference to your upcoming yellow ribbon event?”
“Are you now suggesting, Mr. Holmes, that my wife might be involved in some unnatural friendship with another woman? I am warning you, sir, men have been shot for less than that.”
“What then is your explanation, sir? And how do you explain the references to Fuji, the race, the arrow that breaks the heart of the Emperor?”
Mr. Munro glared back at Holmes. “I do not have one at this moment. What is yours?”
For a few brief seconds, Holmes closed his eyes and touched his fingertips together. Then he jerked his head up and popped his eyes open.
“Of course! They have recruited one of the girls.”
“I beg your pardon, Holmes.”
“Yes. This now makes perfect sense. These messages were sent to one of the students, one of the seniors who are on the running team. Somehow the teacher and your wife have so twisted the innocent mind of a young woman that she is prepared to win the race, take the arrow from the Emperor, and then use it to murder him. There is no other possible explanation. It is the only one left to us.”
“Poppycock, Mr. Holmes. I will wager you ten to one that you are spouting complete nonsense.”
Sherlock Holmes Never Dies- Collection Four Page 33
