Moriarty Returns a Letter (2 page)

The man with the net got ready to flail it again.

It was now or never. The American agent let his head fall again, this time deliberately. He would play it for all it was worth.

He muttered under his breath. If you want someone to believe a lie, you need to make them work to hear it.

“It was that bloody Holmes,” he said.

“What? What did you say?”

Redgil slammed the American’s head back against the post.

And the American began to laugh.

“Fools. You bloody, stupid fools. Do you really think I would sabotage my own operations? Think! Why would I do that?”

Redgil seemed puzzled by the laugh. He responded, with natural and justifiable suspicion: “You could be a copper. You could be working for the Yard.”

“Balls. If I were working for the Yard, you’d have all been in the nick a month ago. And so would everyone else in the Whistler pub. Use your head, man. This was Holmes’s doing.”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

The American channeled all of his pain into a laugh that was as loud and arrogant as he could make it.

“He thwarts me at every turn! It had to be him! There’s no one at Scotland Yard with a mind like that!”

The skinny man—the one who had brought the magazine into the pub, the only one of the three who could read, the American had guessed—jumped up from the table and ran over eagerly, within a foot of the agent’s face.

“You don’t mean…” He paused, eyes wide, and he spoke in a whisper: “Sherlock … Holmes?”

“What do you think?” said the American. He said this with a sneer, his voice dripping with contempt. Presentation wasn’t everything, but it was most of it.

“What are you talking about?” said Redgil to the skinny man. Then he looked over at the brute with the fishing net, who shrugged.

But the skinny one nodded affirmatively. “Sherlock Holmes,” he said, fully out loud this time. “I’ve heard of him. Sherlock Holmes! Holy Mother of God, if Sherlock Holmes is on to us, we’re done!”

The man tied to the post did not move his head. He did not move his eyes. He did not even breathe. If you want the fish to take the bait, you must stay completely still.

“An old wives’ tale,” said Redgil. “There is no Sherlock Holmes.”

“No, no,” said the skinny one. “I read about him. He’s real.” The skinny man ran to the table, grabbed the copy of
The Strand Magazine,
and brought it back like a puppy to the leader. “They can’t print it if it isn’t true.”

Redgil took the magazine, opened it, stared into it—looked stumped for a moment—and then he tossed it contemptuously back at the skinny man.

It hit the damp wood floor with a nasty-sounding splat; the skinny man ran quickly to pick it up, and did his best to wipe the muck off.

Redgil never liked it if someone else might be right. Especially he didn’t like being corrected in front of an audience, and the shackled American, at the moment, constituted an audience.

“No, no,” said Redgil, rather grandly after a moment’s thought, but not with genuine confidence. “Just because it’s printed doesn’t mean it’s true. It has to be what they call … what they call … published … published, that’s it … in a newspaper. Then it’s true. But this is not a newspaper. This—this is just something where some git made stuff up!”

The American agent fought through his pain and focused. This was the final hurdle in any scam. The moment when the mark’s basic common sense would try to take hold of him and let him realize exactly what was going on, and if that happened, then his basic instincts would take hold as well, and if that happened, with scum like these, then it was all over. The game was up, whether the mark had figured out all the details or not. He would be done with it and just cut your throat.

The American agent and Inspector Standifer at the Yard had always known that at some point the very success of the sting operations would begin to make the American’s cover identity suspect. Someone would want to know, as the lead bunghole here wanted to know, right now, why plots kept getting foiled.

The agent couldn’t keep blaming it on bad luck. He couldn’t keep saying that a couple of bobbies just happened to be walking by when the heist went down, or that one of the conspirators must have talked in his sleep to his paramour, or gotten drunk and let something slip in the pub. He needed an explanation that was all-encompassing. He needed a scapegoat. He and the inspector had tried to come up with one.

And then, a few weeks back, he had been at Scotland Yard when a letter arrived. A letter that the Royal Mail had seen fit to carry directly into the inspector’s office.

It was a confession letter.

That, by itself, did not make it a rarity at Scotland Yard, or even unusually important.

What made it important was that it had not been addressed to Scotland Yard. It had been addressed to someone else.

And it wasn’t the first. There had been others—confessions to crimes, tips about crimes, questions about crimes—all addressed to Sherlock Holmes, and being delivered to Scotland Yard.

To the Special Branch inspector, such letters had been just a curiosity, and sometimes an actual annoyance.

But the American agent saw an opportunity.

Like everyone else in the English-speaking world, he knew the name Sherlock Holmes quite well now. And he had seen how eagerly the crowds would gather around the street vendor every month for each new issue of
The Strand.

But more important, he had now begun to hear the name Sherlock Holmes muttered in fearful whispers in the Docklands’ dirtiest, toughest pubs, by men with souls as hard and mean as lobster claws, huddled around pub tables like children around a campfire and scaring themselves with tales of the bogeyman.

This, thought the American at the time, could be useful.

And so he had invested sixpence and picked up last month’s issue of
The Strand
and read “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty.”

And then he had backtracked and read all the others, all the way back to
A Study in Scarlet
. He wanted to know who this fictional detective was, and why even streetwise felons seemed to want to believe him to be real.

The American thought he understood.

Bleeding and barely conscious, he was now going to put it to the test. He had no other choice.

His tormentors in the cargo hold were practically begging for some reason to believe that the failures of their vicious, shortsighted schemes were due to some other cause than their own personal faults. He would give them one.

He was ready. He looked up at his interrogator.

“What are you smiling at?” said Redgil, and he gestured for the brute to deliver another lash from the cargo net.

“Oh, yes, you are the smart one,” said the American quickly. And then the lash of the whip came anyway. He held back his scream, he did his best to control the frantic, involuntary hyperventilation that the pain induced, and then, after several agonizing, dizzying seconds, he maintained consciousness. He looked up.

“Yes, the smart one,” he said, forcing the smile again. “I knew that about you. You’re right. That rag right there is just
The Strand Magazine
. Not a newspaper, where everything is God’s own truth. No sir, not a bit of it. It’s just a magazine full of halfpenny stories. Stories that everyone repeats. In every pub. On every dock. That every whore and pickpocket and stockbroker in London knows about. But all the same, it’s just stories. You are absolutely correct.”

“Right, then,” said Redgil, buying the flattery, but suspicious of where it was going.

“Except it isn’t just.”

The thick man with the net whip raised it again, eyes gleaming, and looked at Redgil.

But Redgil hesitated. Too many of these and the shackled man would actually just die; he would go into shock or bleed out; he didn’t look to be far from it now. And he still hadn’t revealed what he knew.

Redgil raised his hand to stay the whip.

“What do you mean?” he said.

The American took a moment to spit blood out onto the floor. Then he looked up, calmly and contemptuously, at Redgil.

“The stories in this magazine are not something some writer made up. They are biography. You know what biography is, don’t you? It’s not fiction; it’s fact. The stories are a biographical account, written by an educated man, a doctor, this John Watson. He’s writing biography—actual reminiscences—about this detective he knows. If you’d been reading them all along, you’d know that. The very first one said right up front ‘a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.’ It’s fact. And he’s not just a doctor; he’s an army doctor. You know they wouldn’t have let him write things that aren’t true.”

Redgil was suspicious, but he looked again at the skinny man. The skinny man nodded emphatically. “That’s right,” he said. “I read that in the very first one. A reminiscence. By John H. Watson, M.D. Late of the Army Medical Department.”

“So there you are,” said the American agent to Redgil. “Read it for yourself, if you like.” Then he added, “You can read, can’t you?”

That remark brought another slap across the jaw. The American knew that would happen; he was already pretty damn sure Redgil couldn’t actually read. The slap confirmed it, and it was worth the inconvenience—because now he had made the leader of the little group defensive about what he didn’t know, and anxious to prove he knew more than he did.

“Sure I can,” said Redgil. “Of course I’ve read them. I’ve read all of them.”

“Then think about it. Who could possibly make up such things? Figuring out the meaning of the five orange pips? Deciphering the note written by the Reigate squires? Do you really think some git of a writer in a penny magazine could make those things up?”

Redgil looked back at the skinny man, and the skinny man, proud of his own knowledge, shook his head emphatically.

“All right,” said Redgil slowly, turning back to the shackled American. “I suppose they’re not made up.” And then, to prove that he figured this out of his own accord, he added: “This Mr. Watson being an army doctor and such.”

“Of course not,” said the American. “Only a true genius could decipher those clues. And only the greatest of minds could deduce and unravel the plots I have laid. Only a man with an intellect that rivals my own. But great minds have great egos, and the great weakness of Mr. Sherlock Holmes is that he cannot bear to work in anonymity. And so he allows his feats to be published. And that’s what you see in
The Strand Magazine
—biographical accounts of his actual doings, with only an occasional detail altered here and there.”

“All right,” said Redgil, still pondering that possibility. “But just because Sherlock Holmes is real—that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the reason your plans didn’t work, now does it?”

“Hell, he’s thwarted more of my plans than I can count!” said the American. “I set up a burglary just last year that would have shook the world if Sherlock Holmes hadn’t figured it out.”

“Prove it,” snarled Redgil.

“Look it up yourself,” said the American. “It’s in last month’s issue.”

The skinny man came running over.

“You don’t mean the Naval Treaty?” he said, quite eagerly.

“Bloody hell yes, except it wasn’t just a Naval Treaty. They change things you know, even in biographies, when they write them up. But I was behind it, it was no simple burglary, and it would have worked, too, if Holmes hadn’t sussed out where the document was.”

“So all the crimes that Sherlock Holmes solved in these … these biography things that Dr. Watson writes,” said Redgil, “they were all schemes of yours?”

The American hesitated. He wasn’t claiming that at all; it could be too easily disproved. But he couldn’t be seen to be backing down. He needed a denial that didn’t sound like one.

“All?” he said. “Well, that’s a mighty big word. Your crimes of passion, someone’s long-lost love surfacing in a quest for vengeance, snakes crawling down ropes—those had nothing to do with me, although I’ll admit that snake thing might have come in handy. Mine were just the ones where a lot of money was at stake, and even one or two of those accounts had nothing to do with me. That Red-headed League thing?”

The skinny man nodded enthusiastically. Clearly, he had read them all.

“Not mine,” said the American. “Not my style. If I’d been starting a Red-headed League, it’d have been only women could join, if you take my meaning. But the important point here is, the few failures I have had, and there have been very few, have all been due to Holmes.”

“So you say,” said the leader, rubbing his chin. “So you say.” He looked over at the magazine on the table. “But I’ll wager that if we take a look in the one that came out today, whatever the Sherlock Holmes story is—”

“Biography,” said the American.

“Whatever the hell it is, it will have nothing to do with you.”

“Fair enough,” said the American. “I’ll wager a quid.”

“No,” sneered the leader. “You’re wagering your life.”

“Fine,” said the American. “Just bring it over here. I can help you with the long words if you want.”

The skinny man eagerly ran forward toward the American agent, the magazine in hand.

“Stay back!” commanded Redgil, before the skinny man could get too close. “Don’t let him see what’s in it.”

The American shrugged, though it hurt to do so. “Well, we can’t settle the bet if you won’t open it up.”

“You read it,” said Redgil to the skinny man. “Read it aloud.”

The skinny man opened the magazine. He was quite eager about it, but he wasn’t a fast reader, and it took almost a full agonizing minute for him just to locate the story in the magazine.

“I found it!”

“Well, read the bloody thing!” commanded Redgil.

The skinny man began to read aloud: “‘The Final Problem,’” he announced.

“What’s that mean?” said Redgil.

“That’s the title,” said the skinny man. “‘The Final Problem.’”

“Well, get on with it,” said Redgil.

The skinny man began to read.

“‘It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which—”