The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols

by Nicholas Meyer

  We froze, listening for any reaction, but the clattering within continued apace, punctuated by talk and an occasional burst of laughter. And then luck favored us, for they commenced cranking the press, and its rhythmic clacking overlaid any sound we might inadvertently produce.

  “Close it, but not tightly,” Holmes whispered, gesturing to the door. “If we leave it ajar, they’ll feel the cold air…”

  I nodded. Anna Walling looked as if she were enacting the lead role in her own nightmare. She was by any measure a daring woman, but such an enterprise as this, to which she was, in addition, morally opposed, was quite beyond her experience and possibly her capacities. I was obliged to tug her forward inside the small entryway, wedging the door against, but not entirely into, its swollen jamb.

  Inside, the odor of printer’s ink mingled with the distinctive scent of the viscous paraffin oil printing presses require to keep them in working trim. Taking in our surroundings by the dim illumination, we spied a narrow staircase immediately to our left. Holmes gestured with an index finger, and we stole upwards behind him. There was a groan when he trod upon the fourth step. Again we stopped and listened. Again no one appeared to have been alerted to our presence over the furious rattle of the press. As we followed the detective, we made it our business to omit the treacherous stair. As we ascended, the sounds of work receded below.

  Near the darkened top of the steps, a faint, intermittent thwack was now audible from above. This, too, was familiar to me. I recognized the fits and starts of a typist in search of just the right word or phrase. We stopped where we were and listened. It was hard not to imagine the rage behind that erratic pounding. I exchanged looks with Holmes, and we both understood we were listening to the imaginative outbursts of Pavel Krushenev. Sometimes the blows would cease for a minute altogether. Had the writer finished for the night? But no, soon inspiration returned, and his fingers pummeled the keys anew before a distant ping! announced the completion of another line of vicious text.

  There were voices, too. At first only one, as though the writer were talking to himself, but then another, deeper, rumbled in return. I didn’t have to be a lip reader to understand Holmes’s mouth forming the word “Vladimir,” referring to the editor’s Cossack bodyguard, foretold by Ruminsky.

  With his hand, he pantomimed his wish, and I produced the Webley.

  Seeing the weapon, Mrs. Walling opened her mouth, but Holmes laid an emphatic index finger across his own. He inched up a step below the topmost, stood to one side, and then, with no warning whatever, deliberately and violently sneezed.

  Instantly, conversation behind the door ceased. I looked at Holmes in dismay. His hand slid into the pocket of his own jacket.

  The next instants were a blur. In less time than it takes to relate, the door was flung wide and an enormous figure, his shape defined by light from behind, appeared wielding a pistol whose proportions matched his own. But before he could discharge the weapon Sherlock Holmes had hurled two fistfuls of pepper in his face. The giant screamed, flinging away his weapon—which mercifully did not discharge—clawing madly at his eyes, sneezing convulsively (like the villain in The Scarlet Pimpernel I had disdained to believe), as Holmes smashed his legs from under him with a ferocious baritsu kick, followed by a nerve pinch to the neck and shoulder, peculiar to that Japanese form of combat.* The effect was instantaneous, forcing us to jump aside lest we be crushed by Vladimir’s massive form as it barreled down the stairs like a human avalanche to the bottom, where he remained in a crumpled heap.

  “Quick, Watson!”

  Long experience had enabled the detective and myself to communicate in such circumstances with a kind of shorthand. Without pausing to determine whether our fracas had been overheard by the typesetters over the roar of the press below, we leapt like madmen into the upstairs office in time for me to train the Webley on the scrambling figure of Pavel Krushenev, who was in the act of throwing open the sash behind his desk, evidently attempting an escape through the window.

  Seeing the barrel of my revolver leveled at his torso caused him to freeze in the act.

  “Tell him to stand still,” Holmes directed the ashen Mrs. Walling, “while I see to it Vladimir does not disturb us when he wakes.” Woodenly, she obeyed. Before leaving the room, Holmes helped himself to the long muffler wound about Krushenev’s neck, and on second thought appropriated as well the man’s handkerchief to use as a gag.

  I held the publisher at bay with my revolver, and we stared at one another, or rather, I stared at him and he gazed intently at the muzzle of my weapon, which he seemingly found of compelling interest. His glazed brown eyes, wide with alarm, put me altogether in mind of a twitching rodent’s. His trick of constantly gnawing at the bottom of his impressive moustache added to this impression.

  Pavel Krushenev was a smallish man of medium build with a bulbous nose and receding hairline. His chief distinction was a neatly trimmed beard, topped by the aforementioned moustache, whose artfully tapered and waxed tips in the style once called “Imperial” suggested a certain vanity. Later pondering these events, I noted a fleeting resemblance to that other wax-tipped-moustachioed scoundrel, Napoleon III. Given what we were to discover, this was certainly fitting. In England I would have set him down as impoverished gentry, which he more or less proved to be.

  “Tell him to place his palms flat on the desk,” I commanded.

  He did as Mrs. Walling instructed.

  “What now?” she inquired in a quavering voice quite unlike her own confident timbre.

  “We wait.”

  And so we did for perhaps two minutes before Holmes returned, a trifle breathless but evidently satisfied.

  “May I?” he asked, holding out his hand. I handed him the revolver, which he examined briefly.

  “Now then.” He turned to the writer. “I shall put some questions to you, and you will answer truthfully.”

  “Nyet! I shall say nothing!” Krushenev replied in a defiant tone when he understood Holmes’s words.

  The detective appeared both untroubled and unsurprised by this response. Studying the weapon in his hand, he appeared to give the matter impartial consideration.

  “Do you enjoy games?” he addressed this question to the Russian but looked at Mrs. Walling, who hesitatingly repeated it in that language.

  “Games?” the other responded in a tone of evident bewilderment. His rodent eyes shifted from one of us to the other and back again.

  Holmes held up the revolver and snapped open the cylinder. As the editor watched with increasing apprehension, the detective tipped out five bullets into the palm of his hand, taking care to leave the sixth snug in its chamber.

  “Games of chance.” Holmes lined the five bullets upright like palisades on the man’s desk. “Have you ever tried your luck in Monte Carlo?”

  As we all watched in disbelief, Holmes spun the cylinder, then placed the barrel of the gun to his own forehead.

  “Holmes!”

  And pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  “A variation on roulette,” he explained equably.

  Mrs. Walling sank into a chair with a gasp. I felt my knees about to buckle and grasped at the table’s edge for support.

  “Holmes!”

  Ignoring me, the detective smiled, lowered the gun from his temple, and spun the cylinder once more.

  “I see you understand how the game is played,” he told Krushenev in language and gestures which necessitated no help from Mrs. Walling, who was in any case, at this juncture, incapable of supplying any assistance. “Now then, my first question, this one merely a formality: Did you publish the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion?”

  Before the quivering man could answer the translation, Holmes had put the gun to the publisher’s sweat-soaked forehead and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  “Da!”

  “Very good.” The detective patted him approvingly on the shoulder. “We understand one another. And you have beaten th
e odds. This time.”

  No translation was required.

  “Sherlock, in God’s name—”

  “This will take but a moment,” he assured our interpreter, spinning the cylinder yet again, this time nestling the barrel between Krushenev’s eyes, slightly above the bridge of his nose. “Where did you obtain the Protocols? Mrs. Walling, if you please.”

  The question, when he understood it, appeared to puzzle the man. He looked about in confusion. Again, Holmes was not surprised.

  “Let me rephrase the question. Parlez-vous françcais?”

  Click!

  “Oui! Mais oui!”

  “Well done, Little Father. Bien fait. You have beaten the house again. Give him my congratulations,” he ordered Mrs. Walling. Numbly, she conveyed them.

  I heard a confusing noise, a dripping I could not at first identify, then realized the man had lost control. He screamed something at Holmes.

  “You are insane,” Mrs. Walling said. It wasn’t clear whether she was speaking for herself or on behalf of the editor. Holmes remained impassive.

  The cylinder was spun again.

  “Alors, dites-mois, donc, est-ce que vous connaissez l’ouevre de Monsieur Maurice Joly, écrivain français?”

  Click!

  This time his answer tumbled from his mouth before the click was even complete.

  “Oui! Da, mon Dieu! Oui!”

  “Quelle surprise,” Holmes remarked acidly. “We’re almost finished,” he reassured us before turning back to Krushenev.

  He now withdrew our copy of the Protocols from his breast pocket and placed them before the terrified man.

  “You cannot explain where you obtained the Protocols because in fact you wrote them yourself. Is this not the case? Not only did you publish, you are in fact the actual author, creating the Protocols of whole cloth. Well, not entirely,” the detective allowed. “You copied and adapted language from Monsieur Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu for your own purposes?”

  Mrs. Walling translated the question slowly so as to ensure it was comprehended in its entirety. Krushenev stared at the pages set before him. Though in English, the paragraphs separated by familiar numerals cast little doubt as to their contents, which served to convince the man we knew a good deal more than he’d supposed.

  Holmes raised the Webley once more, but before he could place its barrel again—

  “Da. Da!”

  Heaving sobs; there could be no question the detective had broken his prisoner.

  Holmes now opened his other hand to reveal the sixth bullet. The weapon had been empty the entire time. I had never in my life beheld or believed him capable of such behavior. Only his own fury could have accounted for his chosen means of interrogation.

  Krushenev stared at the bullet with incredulity, then raised tear-filled eyes to Holmes. I shared his stupefaction. How had Holmes managed to extract the last bullet?

  “Why do you so hate the Jews? What have they done to you?”

  Hearing the question, the writer shot the detective a look of stubborn silence.

  “Was it because of the girl?” Holmes asked quietly. He nodded, and Mrs. Walling, bewildered, rendered the question in Russian.

  The explosive response was almost as surprising as the question itself.

  “She has nothing to do with this!” Krushenev shrieked, leaping to his feet and trembling from head to foot. “The little baggage! Nothing, do you hear?” Foamy spittle flecked his lips. His mottled cheeks and beard were soaked with tears, the melted waxed tips of his once impressive moustache now sagging. Curiously, now that the woman—whoever she was—had been mentioned, he could not abandon the topic. “Jew slut! I offered her everything! My name! I begged her to marry me, and she laughed! She laughed!”

  Even now, in the midst of his collapse, the memory of his rejection pushed the present moment aside, unleashing his fury anew. “They must all die!”

  Mrs. Walling flatly translated the appalling language. She was fully absorbed now, notwithstanding her principles.

  “Including Theodor Herzl?”

  “Who? Oh,” Krushenev recollected with a sniff. “The Zionist. Why bother? He was going to lead them all to Africa or someplace.”

  Holmes considered this.

  “Would that have contented you?”

  The question was enough to set the maniac back on his hobbyhorse.

  “Jew scum! Scum of the earth! Liars! Cheaters! Shysters! Usurers!” He had no interest in Herzl.

  “Final question. Who commissioned the Protocols?” the detective inquired. Opening his silver case, he offered the man a cigarette, but Krushenev, still in the grip of his fever, ignored the gesture.

  “Pharaoh should have pushed them all into the sea! Drowned them like the vermin they are!”

  Shrugging, Holmes lit his own cigarette and had Mrs. Walling repeat the question.

  “There is another way to play this game,” he added, flicking open the gun under his victim’s nose and letting Krushenev watch the lone bullet sliding into one of the chambers before snapping the cylinder into place. This time there would be no sleight of hand. Mrs. Walling and Krushenev flinched in unison at the sight, which appeared to focus the Russian’s mind. He sagged into his chair, reminding me of nothing so much as a balloon with its hydrogen leaking out. Had he been capable of rational thought, the editor might have reasoned Holmes was again bluffing; were he killed, the detective would never learn the answer to his question, and a gunshot would certainly attract attention and capture. But the hypnotic stare with which the monster had followed the bullet’s deliberate progress into a random chamber, and watched entranced as Holmes suggestively rolled the cylinder back and forth against his sleeve, assured me such logic was giving him no comfort. A quick glance in Anna Walling’s direction likewise convinced me no such rationale had occurred to her.

  Holmes raised the gun.

  “Rachkovsky,” Krushenev sighed. “Rachkovsky ordered it—to explain the pogrom.”

  “The pogrom you fomented with your tale about Jews and their human Passover sacrifice.”

  He nodded absently. “And to alarm the Tsar.”

  “Rachkovsky? Who is that?”

  Krushenev eyed Holmes with a short laugh of disbelief. “You know nothing. You have no idea what your meddling has begun.”

  “Who is Rachkovsky?” Holmes repeated.

  “Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, director general of the Okhrana. He was here after, immediately after the—immediately after. He gave the order in this room.”

  Holmes frowned and exchanged looks with us.

  “Did he specify—?”

  “It was all left up to me. ‘Give us a casus belli,’ says he. May I have one of those now?” This last in a plaintive tone, accompanied by a feeble gesture that required nothing from Mrs. Walling.

  Holmes lit a cigarette for him and placed it in his mouth. The Russian had barely the strength to suck at its glowing contents. What he inhaled prompted a coughing fit that doubled him over for a time. Holmes waited for his convulsions to end with the patient air of a man who had all the time in the world.

  “And you knew about Joly,” he resumed, tapping our pages when the coughing had ceased. Krushenev regarded them and gave an exhausted shrug.

  “I studied in Paris. It was perfect. I didn’t have to change very much.”

  “The Tsar’s secret police commissioned a forgery to deceive the Tsar?” I asked. “What is the sense of that?”

  He looked at me. “Many people wish to influence His Majesty. Justifying killing Jews and seizing their property—”

  “Is easier than trying to modernize a country the size of Russia,” Holmes finished for him. “Why translate the Protocols into French?” he added as an afterthought.

  Krushenev favored him with a patronizing expression. “Because no one outside Russia can read Russian. All Europe understands French.”*

  The room fell silent. Daylight would shortly be upon us, and with
it the risk of discovery. Holmes looked about the office.

  “Where is your carbon paper?”

  “What?”**

  The response required no translation. The detective frowned at this but again appeared unsurprised. Looking about, he tore the typescript from the platen of Krushenev’s cumbersome typing machine—its long keys looking like so many spider legs—and crumpled it, inserting in its place a sheet of blank paper. “Now then,” he told the man. “You will write a full confession, including names, dates, and places. You will affix your signature to the bottom. And remember”—he displayed my Webley beneath Krushenev’s running nose—“any hesitation, any omission, and we will resume the game with the difference of an actual bullet.”

  The man nodded dully, looking for his handkerchief, and then, remembering the detective had taken it, wiped his nose unceremoniously with the back of his sleeve and sat before his typewriter.

  “Begin with today’s date. ‘I, Pavel Krushenev, owner and editor of the broadsheet Bessarabets, do hereby confess that I alone forged and published the document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I did this at the direction of Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, director general of the Okhrana, for the purpose of inciting hatred against the Jewish race.”

  Holmes strode about the small room as he alternately dictated and waited while Mrs. Walling translated and Krushenev transcribed her words.

  “I further state that to accomplish this, I plagiarized portions of Monsieur Maurice Joly’s…”

  There were fewer hesitations by the typist on this occasion. Krushenev had no need to search for words as Holmes was supplying them. The spider’s long legs thwacked the paper in the otherwise silent room. When he had finished, Holmes presented the two pages to Mrs. Walling for her review.

  She read carefully, silently mouthing the Russian words as we watched, then nodded without speaking, whereupon Holmes set the document before Krushenev and witnessed his signature. After the exhausted man reluctantly affixed his name to both pages, Holmes briskly retrieved and folded them before striking a match and setting fire to our copy of the Protocols, placing the smoldering ashes in a nearby dustbin. He then tapped the publisher forcefully on the shoulder, eyeing Mrs. Walling to translate his next words.