Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

The man who called himself Houdini looked disappointed, but not for long, his innate bumptiousness rapidly reasserting itself. “That state of affairs will unquestionably change. Soon the whole world will have heard of me, for with the assistance of my brother Theo I am developing a magic act which is wholly unique and which will one day be a marvel to all. Harry Houdini will become a household name to match yours, Mr Holmes. You mark my words.”

“With such a force of vigour and passion behind it, I have no doubt your prediction will come true, sir.”

“Holmes,” I said with some surprise, “you are behaving very amicably towards this man. Does the fact that he is a criminal mean nothing?”

My friend turned to me, head cocked. “A criminal, Watson? I am hard pressed to fathom what actual crime he has committed. Is donning the guise of a two-thousand-year-old Egyptian god-king against the law? I can’t say I’ve seen that in any of the statute books.”

“How about frightening museum watchmen after dark? Surely that is an offence? Trespass, too.”

“But this is all just flimflam. Chicanery. Showmanship. Am I not right, Mr Houdini? You have been employed by Wallace Rubenstein as a cunning means of drumming up custom. He is paying you to rise from Djedhor’s sarcophagus wreathed in cotton bandages and give your best impression of the walking dead, in order to generate interest in the exhibit and earn it a ‘spooky’ reputation. People’s credulousness and word of mouth has done the rest. Rubenstein, despite his news publishing empire, remains a theatrical at heart. You can take the man out of vaudeville but you can’t take vaudeville out of the man.”

“Sensationalism is Wallace Rubenstein’s middle name,” Houdini admitted. “In his newspapers and in all aspects of his life. I did have my concerns that pretending to be a mummy would not work. Would the public fall for it? Yet there is something profoundly fascinating about a person seemingly rising from the grave. It touches a deep-seated nerve – our dread of death and our hope of an afterlife beyond it. This little stunt has power. I am convinced the same power will bolster my magic act and make it a roaring success, once it is fully developed. Apparent death, apparent rebirth – who will not pay to see that?”

Houdini managed to look both wistful and avaricious at the same time.

“Watson,” said Holmes, “I believe it is safe for you to return your gun to your pocket.”

I acceded to the request with some slight reluctance. Houdini watched me do it with no small relief.

“Mr Houdini,” Holmes continued, “what impresses me most of all is the self-control you so clearly have in abundance.”

Houdini offered a low, gratified bow. “It is one of my foremost qualities.”

“To be entombed in that sarcophagus for so long a period – eighteen hours, did you say?”

“Since it was unloaded from the wagon just after six this morning and carried to this room. I am ostensibly part of the team of specialist removals men who are accompanying the collection on tour; that is my cover. Just before the sarcophagus is wheeled indoors, I sneak inside and ensconce myself. It is otherwise empty, by the way. Djedhor himself is waiting back at Rubenstein’s mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, his body stored in a dry, well-ventilated basement room. Then, with great care, I strip out of my civilian clothing, bind myself up in bandages, and wait for the witching hour.”

“Is it not claustrophobic?”

“I have ways of combating fear. The mind is a powerful tool, Mr Holmes, you know that as well as anyone. It can, provided it is subjected to the correct training and discipline, conquer all physical and emotional infirmities. I have studied the methods of Hindu fakirs and yogis, who are able to transcend the limitations of the flesh to a sometimes superhuman degree, and have applied them to my own work. I am now able to place myself in a kind of trance state, such that hours pass like minutes. I slow my breathing and lower my heart rate, even sometimes falling into a doze. Confined spaces with limited air supply hold no terror for me. I am as cosy in them as in my own bed.”

“Remarkable. Would your magic act, then, involve entering into a confined space?”

“And then absconding from it. Dash and I – that is, my brother Theo and I – are also hoping to involve handcuffs, and possibly a straitjacket. The act is still very much in its infancy, hence I am obliged to take paid engagements of every description, however irregular, such as this one. Tell me, Mr Holmes, am I to be arrested? Handed over to your London bobbies? Is that your plan?”

“I am undecided,” said Holmes. “No real misdemeanour has been perpetrated. No one has been hurt or materially disadvantaged.”

I felt moved to point out that certain museum employees on the Continent had needlessly and unfairly lost their jobs.

“That is a fact,” said my friend with a nod. “Perhaps then, Mr Houdini, we can come to some sort of arrangement. If you were to cable Mr Rubenstein and convince him to make suitable reparations to those people Watson has mentioned, the balance of justice will be righted and there will be no call to take matters further.”

“That is most reasonable of you, sir. I should warn you, Mr Rubenstein may not like it. He is not fond of parting with money. Yet he will, if the only alternative is a public embarrassment. And in return, your and Dr Watson’s complicity is assured?”

“I give you my word. I would advise, however, that in future you vary the timings of your excursions as Pharaoh Djedhor, for that is what first alerted me to the possibility that human rather than supernatural agency was involved here. Before I came to the museum this evening, while my friend Watson was tending to his patients at his practice, I made enquiries. I sent a number of telegrams and spoke at length with Sir Edward Maunde Thompson. I soon ascertained that Djedhor only ever made his presence known on the night after the Rubenstein Collection was installed in a new venue. Thereafter neither hide nor hair was seen of him until the collection proceeded to its next destination, whereupon he would immediately put in an appearance again. That was more than suggestive. It indicated a fixed pattern. It also indicated the involvement of a person of subtle courage and singular inner fortitude, just such a person as we have met tonight. I congratulate you, Mr Houdini, on your achievement, and salute you. Bravo.”

Again Houdini bowed, this time from the waist with both arms stretched out to the side, as though receiving rapturous applause from an audience.

He and Holmes talked for some time afterward, their conversation focusing on the picking of locks – an area of mutual expertise – and various makes of handcuffs, particularly the Hiatt Darby and the notorious Bean Giant. Then we went our separate ways, Holmes and I to Baker Street, Houdini back to the sarcophagus, wherein he would change into his ordinary clothes and re-emerge at opening time to join the museum’s first influx of visitors.

I myself had not taken to the arrogant, stocky little man at all. Holmes, on the other hand, was quite enamoured of him, and for the next few days sang his praises whenever possible.

“Harry Houdini is destined for a stellar career,” Holmes said more than once. “You’ll see, Watson.”

And of course he was right. Houdini the Handcuff King became one of the most famous performing artistes on the planet, entertaining and enthralling millions with his death-defying escapological tricks, until his tragic premature demise in October of last year.

It is not with Houdini, however, that this narrative is concerned. Rather, it is with the events that occurred a couple of months after that night at the British Museum, by which time the Rubenstein Collection was securely back across the Atlantic and settled again in its owner’s palatial summer home. Those events, not entirely unconnected with the mystery of the living mummy, were set in train on a cool spring morning in March, when Sherlock Holmes was perusing
The Times
over breakfast and abruptly let forth a shout that was half bemusement, half disgust.

“Confound it all!” Holmes cried. “Have you read this, Watson?”

“I haven’t yet taken the opportunity to look at the paper,” I replied, setting down my teacup. “I have been attempting to finish this book, which so many of my patients have recommended to me, though for the life of me I can’t think why.”

“
The Sorrows of Satan
by Marie Corelli,” said Holmes, eyeing the title embossed on the spine. “Improving stuff, I’m sure.”

“The only thing it could possibly be said to improve, given its sales figures and the number of editions it has gone through, is the state of Miss Corelli’s bank balance. I have never read such badly written tripe. This fellow Tempest, the protagonist – everyone keeps telling him that the aristocrat who is so interested in helping him dispose of his newfound inherited wealth, Prince Lucio Rimânez, is the Devil incarnate. Lucio! Might as well call himself Lucifer and have done with it. The situation is patently Faustian, yet Tempest remains oblivious. The fool doesn’t deserve the money. And as for the author’s chronic overuse of long dashes… Ugh. How rot like this ever gets published, let alone command such a wide readership, beggars belief.”

“Professional envy, eh, Watson?”

“Hardly. By any objective reckoning I do respectably well from my sideline as an author.”

“Not least because you have such sterling material to work with.”

Holmes spoke wryly, with a deadpan expression, but he was preening, I could tell. I have already said elsewhere that I had never known the man be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year 1895, and that his career as a consulting detective was at an acme of success, bringing him renown, acclaim and a handsome livelihood. With this, alas, came an air of ebullient satisfaction which occasionally bordered on conceitedness and was very hard to swallow, particularly at those times when my own temperament was of a more choleric disposition.

“If you dislike the book so much,” he went on, “why are you so keen to finish it?”

“Because I want to know how it all turns out and discover what, if anything, Tempest learns from his fall from grace.”

“Then Miss Corelli has done her job admirably, has she not? The purpose of a novel, after all, is to keep the reader spellbound and turning the pages all the way to the end, and I note you have been doing that with some avidity.”

“Perhaps,” I allowed. “Although I hate myself for it.”

“If it’s any consolation, I would be very surprised if the works of Marie Corelli and her ilk, that crowd of gushing romantics with their flock-wallpaper melodramatics, were still as popular a hundred years from now as they are today. Cultural tastes are fickle. Your chronicles of my exploits, by contrast, will in all likelihood continue to captivate future generations. That is a kind of immortality for both you and me – one, moreover, that does not require us to partake of a mystical Ancient Egyptian elixir like John Vansittart Smith’s mysterious Sosra.”

“Ah yes. Vansittart Smith. What do you make of his story of a seemingly centuries-old priest and his pursuit of the mortal remains of his lost love?”

“I am inclined to dismiss it as, at best, a misinterpretation of quite readily explicable events. Having looked him up in
Who’s Who
, I know that in addition to Egyptology Vansittart Smith has studied botany, zoology and chemistry, becoming the proverbial jack of all trades and master of none. I suspect he is as easy to impress as he is to distract. One night in Paris a Middle Eastern fraudster told him a tall tale, which he swallowed whole, with the gullibility of the lifelong dilettante.”

“That or he made the whole thing up himself.”

“There is that possibility. His field of study attracts those who have a tendency to romanticise the distant past. Is Egyptology not more exciting when there is a whiff of mystery and enigma hanging over it? Would that not make Vansittart Smith appear more mysterious and enigmatic by association? For a scientist, he is something of a fantasist, and his spine-tingling little narrative may well be a genuine anecdote sprinkled with a great deal of imaginative spice. At any rate, it and he need not detain us any further.”

I nodded in agreement, before returning to the topic from which we had allowed ourselves to become diverted.

“Do you really think, Holmes, that my writings will still be read a century or more hence?”

“I flatter myself that my name will be familiar to all long after I am gone from this world, thanks in no small part to you and your literary endeavours.”

“You are too kind.”

I set aside
The Sorrows of Satan
, having saved my page with a leather bookmark. In the event, I never did get round to finishing the novel, and I can’t say my life is in any way diminished for that.

“I have brought a small smile to your face,” said Holmes. “That is good to see. You have oftentimes been glum company of late. I understand why, of course. Your wife…”

My Mary had passed away the previous year while Holmes was still abroad, owing to complications arising during childbirth which had taken the lives of both mother and baby, and although I was over the worst part of my grieving, still I mourned her. The loss remained a gaping wound. It might take nothing more than the sight of a pretty young woman whose face reminded me of hers, or a whiff of a perfume similar to the rose-scented
eau de toilette
Mary had favoured, to renew the ache in my heart, as though only days had elapsed, not months, since she perished. Equally, I might find myself waking up of a morning in a dreadful funk and not knowing why, until I realised that it was because Mary was not there and I missed her.

Moving back into 221B with Holmes had been beneficial, in that it afforded me daily companionship and I was no longer rattling about at home on my own with sad mementoes of my time with Mary all around me. Holmes and the escapades he and I went on had proved a useful diversion from melancholy. Melancholy, nonetheless, crept up on me now and then like a venomous serpent and left me prone to sourness, as I was on that March morning.