The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols

by Nicholas Meyer

  I sat where I was, trying not to let my imagination run off in all directions.

  Some minutes later, Holmes returned, resumed his seat by the window, and stared at the countryside, still without a word. I thought it wiser not to speak.

  * * *

  6 February. The rest of our journey continued in this vein. While we scoured the Vienna bahnhof for another train heading west, Holmes drew funds from Rothschild’s and purchased sandwiches, as well as cigarettes and such necessaries as he could procure for Mrs. Walling. These included a blue muffler obtained from a shop across the road.

  “Thank you” was Mrs. Walling’s only murmur when he offered it to her.

  While our improvised trains and accommodations were not on a par with the Orient Express, neither were they as problematic as the unforgiving benches on the “Odessa Flyer.” We took turns sleeping against the window, Holmes proffering his coat for Mrs. Walling’s use as a pillow. I don’t believe she acknowledged this kindness on his part.

  “I don’t understand this gloom,” I said as we later left Munich, finally in a compartment of our own, bound for Paris. “We should be celebrating. Holmes, you have pulled off what will prove the triumph of your career!”

  “You will write about this?” Anna Walling inquired dully.

  “Of course he will not,” the detective hastily replied.

  I saw no reason to make mention of these notes.

  * * *

  10 February. It all fell out as Holmes prophesied. Four days later, my own best beloved met me on the platform at Victoria, where I stumbled into her arms like a drowning man grasping at a life raft. As such, I did not witness the parting of Sherlock Holmes and Anna Strunsky Walling. Perhaps it would be more truthful to say I did not dare to witness it. What passed between them on that occasion I have no way of knowing.

  “John!”

  “Juliet!”

  We stood there motionless for I don’t know how long and then, arm in arm, floated from the place and hailed a taxi from the rank.

  “You must tell me everything. John, I was so worried.”

  I promised her I would but explained there was a meeting I had to attend first.

  “A meeting? So soon? At the hospital? You’ve only just got back. John!”

  “Not the hospital, dearest. It can’t wait.” I patted her hand, and she understood.

  * * *

  The Diogenes was much the same as on my last visit. Harcourt, the blue-liveried steward, ushered me into the Strangers’ Room, where I found Holmes already seated. Even the dust appeared unchanged.

  “Watson,” said he with a faint smile. “Good old reliable Watson.”

  Whatever carapace he had shed during our exploit, I now perceived, with a mixture of emotions growing back in its accustomed shape, altered only by the addition of a faint white scar on his right cheek.

  “Holmes.”

  “All is well?”

  “That ends well.” There was a pause. “Mrs. Walling?”

  “Sails this afternoon from Southampton.” He occupied himself intently packing his pipe. The awkwardness ended when Mycroft joined us.

  “Sherlock, well done!” He shook his brother’s hand with jovial energy, as if he meant to prime a pump. “And you, Doctor. Splendid. Really, brilliantly brought off.”

  “Mycroft—”

  “No, truly. I think I may tell you—in confidence, of course—that you are both due for formal recognition.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, a private investiture will take place at St. James’s Palace in a fortnight’s time. I’m afraid you will not be able to wear your decorations. They must be returned at the end of the ceremony.”

  “Naturally.” I saw the faintest hint of a smile on the detective’s face.

  “And now,” Mycroft said, seating himself in his long-suffering armchair, which wheezed air as he compressed it, “tell me everything.”

  We then proceeded to do so. More precisely, we told him a great deal, not, in fact, all, but enough for Mycroft to utter a running commentary of exclamations and surprise; also to raise toasts in our direction with what he averred was an outstanding lemon squash.

  Holmes delivered Krushenev’s confession. “A trifle worn,” he admitted, handing over the much folded and wrinkled pages.

  “But the signature legible nonetheless. I’ll have one of our Russians go over it.”

  “Not Mrs. Garnett?” I chided.

  “Not this time.” He patted my arm in a fashion that seemed unusual. It was only when he withdrew his hand that I saw the word “Remain” on a slip of paper torn from a familiar source.

  Holmes, it must be said, appeared distracted throughout our conversation and disposed to leave as soon as he felt he could without exciting curiosity or comment. “A new case,” he murmured. “Most suggestive. Demands my full attention. Watson?”

  “I believe I’ll have a lemon squash before I make my way.”

  “As you please. Mycroft.”

  “Congratulations again, my dear Sherlock.” The big man walked his incongruously slender brother—a giraffe and a grizzly bear, or perhaps tortoise and hare?—to the door and waited a decent interval, until certain the detective had left the premises, before turning to me.

  “Thank you for staying, Doctor.”

  “Why have you asked me to do so?”

  He sniffed, took a turn about the room, bringing a large hand down the back of his head, as though to smooth the remaining hairs there. I realized abruptly that he was melancholy.

  “I’m not quite sure how to begin.”

  “The Caterpillar tells Alice to begin at the beginning and when you get to the end, stop.”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “I seem to recall Alice being invoked in this room before.”

  I waited, passing the interval by lighting a pipe of my own.

  “You once wrote, and I recently had occasion to cite your observation, that my brother’s knowledge of politics was—how did you describe it?—‘feeble.’”

  “I daresay it is less so than formerly.”

  “I daresay less than formerly.” He cocked his massive head, a man not entirely convinced. “But still…” He stole a glance in my direction and seemingly determined on another tack. “We live in strange times, Doctor.”

  What ailed the man? I rose to my feet.

  “What are you endeavoring to tell me, Mycroft?”

  He turned and faced me directly at last.

  “I’m endeavoring to tell you that my brother has failed. That Sherlock Holmes has failed.”

  I don’t know what I thought he was about to say, but this was certainly the farthest thing from my mind.

  “Failed? How?” I protested. “Your brother went to Russia, ingeniously obtained a full confession from the perpetrator behind the nauseating hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and managed to keep hold of it despite the most urgent personal promptings to surrender it.”

  “The problem is it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Doesn’t make any difference,” I dumbly repeated.

  “The damned Protocols of the Elders of Zion have taken root in the popular imagination; confessions be damned, they are disbelieved. Worse, the confessor, this Krushenev creature, has recanted.”

  “Recanted?” All I seemed able to do was echo every final word.

  “Mr. Krushenev declares the confession to have been coerced, and if I understand what transpired, he is in fact telling the truth.”

  He waited, peering at me closely.

  “He is,” I found myself admitting. “But I was there! I tell you his confession was genuine.”

  “It makes no difference, alas. Those people who are determined to hate and fear the Jewish race have fastened onto it in half a dozen languages already. Of course we have contacted the newspapers,” he went on, anticipating my next remark. “There will be the inevitable retractions, articles, and exposés.” He shook his massive head again. “But people believe what they want to
believe.”

  “I think I expressed that idea in this very room not so long ago.”

  “What they need to believe—and no facts will convince them otherwise,” he went on, speaking as much to himself as me. “They will not be accepted as facts. They will produce alternative facts. Sherlock was naïve to think otherwise. We all were.”

  Now it was my turn to subside heavily into a chair as the realization sank in.

  “Then everything we went through, everything she went through—”

  “Mrs. Walling?”

  “Rivka Nussbaum. And Manya Lippman. What they all went through. It was all for nothing.”

  Mycroft didn’t reply. There was, I suddenly understood, nothing he could say.

  “What will you tell Sherlock?”

  This question he had at least anticipated.

  “I shall tell him nothing. And I suspect he will not ask,” he added before I could object. “He will not ask because I imagine that somewhere he has already understood. There will always be a war between light and darkness, between science and superstition, between education and ignorance. Ignorance is easier. It requires no study. Faith is the enemy of thought,” he added, mordantly pleased with his aphorism.

  I now recalled Holmes’s prescient question at the start of this entire misbegotten affair. He had asked me if I thought it better were the Protocols bona fide or fraudulent. I had unhesitatingly chosen the latter, but now I perceived my error. Authentic, the Protocols could be halted in their tracks, their nefarious perpetrators—Jewish or otherwise—found and dealt with. But how to stop a lie from spreading?

  “You paint a gloomy picture of our new century.”

  “I’m afraid I do.”

  He saw my expression change. “What are you thinking?”

  “I was just remembering—it was only weeks ago. Holmes, Sherlock, I mean, and I were celebrating his birthday. He was bemoaning the lack of criminal ingenuity and talking of retirement…” I trailed off.

  “And later?”

  “Later he said the crimes were getting bigger. He spoke of Dr. Pavlov and his conditioned reflex as applied to people.”

  “He understands more than I gave him credit for.” Mycroft Holmes loved his brother.

  My pipe had gone out. Or perhaps I’d entirely forgotten to light it.

  Shortly thereafter, I left the Diogenes Club and walked for some time before boarding the Underground. Juliet knew me well enough by this time to comprehend my moods. Supper was waiting, and Maria was happy to welcome me back with mutton, dressed as I preferred, with mint sauce, parsley, and new potatoes. I did the best I could by way of enthusiastic conversation, but there was so much I could not tell Juliet, much that would only distress and confuse her.

  I did see Holmes once again, not two but three weeks later at St. James’s Palace, where, in a small ceremony attended by Mycroft, and no one else so far as I was able to determine, we were duly decorated by His Majesty King Edward VII. In fact, this is not strictly speaking, accurate. Before our investiture, His Majesty solemnly affixed a decoration we could not see to the lapel of a young boy whom I judged to be roughly thirteen years of age, telling him something I could not make out. The lad was accompanied by an older woman of perhaps sixty. Both were dressed in black and left directly the King shook their hands. My sense was that Edward VII had a heavy schedule that day, for after pinning OBEs on our lapels and mumbling perfunctory salutations on behalf of a grateful nation, His Majesty took himself off at a brisk pace, surrounded by his bevy of attendants, leaving his equerry to gracefully repossess the blue fleur-de-lis crucifixes and purple-ribboned honors we could never display, for services that would remain forever secret. For some reason the whole exchange put me in mind of a trip to the dentist, a mere detour out of one’s normal day. Afterwards, in the open air on Kensington Gore, I could inhale the first inklings of spring.

  “Come, Doctor, we have a visit to make.”

  I did not need to ask where. The Highgate Cemetery was already quite green, and we threaded our way in silence through its pleasant leafy pathways without speaking. We found the sexton, who directed us to Manya Lippman’s simple headstone. According to the dates, the woman had been only thirty-four years of age. Beneath her name, and dates of birth and death, was engraved a startling postscript:

  Beloved Mother of Boaz.

  With a shock of recognition, I now realized who the young boy was whose investiture had preceded our own.

  “Perhaps the lad will be allowed to retain his medal,” Holmes murmured, reading my thoughts.

  “Small enough recompense” was my only comment. I wondered, without saying so aloud, if the woman known as Manya Lippman had also been awarded a medal. Come to that, had she possibly been buried with it?

  We stood by the grave for some moments, each wrapped in our own thoughts. And then left her as we had abandoned her in the London City Morgue.

  * * *

  March 15. Our old, comforting routines—Juliet’s and mine—soon reasserted themselves. “A kingdom for an appendectomy!” I laughed, and soon our mad chase back and forth across the Continent receded from immediate memory. Time passed, and I heard little from my remarkable friend. There was a short note on our wedding anniversary in which he alluded again to the possibility of retirement. I read the line with a twinge and wrote back asking if he had replaced the Stradivarius. Its destruction, I was convinced, had taken a toll on him that music might redress—that remedy had worked wonders before—but he did not answer.

  Juliet and her friend Edith Ayrton—aka Mrs. Israel Zangwill—continued their efforts on behalf of women’s suffrage. After my experiences with Anna Strunsky Walling, the idea struck me as increasingly sensible, if not inevitable.

  I did not confide my reasoning to Juliet, but now and again, when my schedule permitted, I found I was marching, banner in hand, for the cause.*

  The following Christmas I was agreeably surprised to receive a note from Mrs. Walling, wishing me the season’s greetings and relating the progress she and her husband were making spearheading their brainchild, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

  Nowhere did she mention Holmes.

  And I doubt the detective, his carapace fully reformed, will ever again allude to her.

  As years passed, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion intermittently resurfaced, usually in hate sheets and always rebutted in The Times of London and other reputable publications.

  But sometimes, fast asleep, I would dream of Rivka Nussbaum and wake weeping.

  THIS IS WHERE WATSON’S NOTEBOOK ENDS.

  EPILOGUE

  Watson’s notes were made contemporaneously with the events he describes. The reader may be interested to learn what followed.

  In 1905, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, President Theodore Roosevelt helped negotiate an end to the ruinous Russo-Japanese War. For his contribution, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first president to receive one.

  Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, head of the Okhrana, the man who commissioned the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sometimes referred to as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, died in 1910 at the age of fifty-seven. (The actor Michael Bryant portrayed him on television in Fall of Eagles.)

  In 1917 Foreign Secretary and former prime minister Arthur Balfour made a declaration that His Majesty’s Government would look “with favour” on a national Jewish homeland in Palestine.

  Israel Zangwill lived until 1926. Many of his works were staged or filmed, including an unsuccessful musical based on his book, The King of Schnorrers.

  The abortive Russian revolution of 1905 merely postponed the inevitable collapse of the Romanov dynasty, which the catastrophic losses of World War I brought about in 1917. The Tsar was forced to abdicate. The following year, Nicholas, his wife and children, including his hemophiliac son the Tsarevitch, were all shot to death in a cellar. If you compare their photographs, cousins Tsar Nicholas II and King George V (who ascended to the throne
in 1910) look like identical twins.

  The death of the charismatic Zionist Theodor Herzl was put down to heart failure.

  Anna and William English Walling remained married until 1917. The marriage foundered in part when Walling resigned from the Republican Party (he had also been a Socialist), in protest because of its opposition to participation in the war in Europe, which he felt America was morally obligated to join. Anna, a lifelong pacifist, could not accept this. Walling died in 1936; Anna lived until 1964. A prime mover in the movement for women’s rights, she was also a novelist.

  Constance Clara Garnett, translator of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, and Chekov, died in 1946.

  In 1949, chemist Chaim (Charles) Weizmann became the first president of Israel.

  In 1919, copies of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were distributed by White Russians to delegates at the Versailles Peace Conference. The Protocols were first exposed as fraudulent by The Times of London, but printings continue to flourish. They were translated into Polish in 1920 and were published intermittently but in their entirety also in 1920 by Henry Ford in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. (After a lawsuit charging him with libel ended in a mistrial, Ford issued a public apology and closed his newspaper in 1927.) The Protocols appeared in Arabic and Italian in 1921, by which time they had been translated into sixteen languages and sold half a million copies in America alone. In 1925, the Protocols were endorsed as authentic by Hitler in his book Mein Kampf.

  In 1964, Senators Dodd and Keating wrote a report for Congress that denounced the Protocols as “a fabricated ‘historic’ document,” but in 1972, a second Spanish edition appeared to explain and justify certain reforms by the Vatican. That same year, the Protocols were published in Egypt. In 1974 they appeared in India under the title “International Conspiracy Against Indians.” In 1977, the Protocols were republished in the United States, and in 1978, they reappeared in England. In 1987, the first Japanese edition appeared, and in 1988, they were published by Hamas. Some Catholic schools in Mexico made the Protocols required reading in 1992, the same year they reappeared in Russia.