The Sherlockian (21 page)

Arthur thought of Sally and Morgan entering through these same doors, two virgins crossing the river Styx. He said as much aloud.

“If you’re Virgil, does that make me Dante?” Bram joked in response.

“I believe it to be the other way around,” said Arthur.

An employee in a crisp black suit approached Arthur and Bram. He was a thin white man, and he spoke with the lilt of the Scottish Highlands.

“And what ship has brought the two of you to my doors?” he said through half a smile.

“Charon’s raft, perhaps, but let’s leave that aside for now.” The house employee did not seem to catch Bram’s reference, but his face betrayed no impression either way. “We’re looking for some young women.”

“So are half the men you see before you,” said the employee. “I doubt they’ve the coin to pay for it. But you two, on the other hand . . .” He looked Arthur and Bram up and down, from their polished shoes to their ridged hats. “My name is Perry. I’m sure I’ll be able to help you find what you require.”

“Thank you,” said Arthur, “but we’re not looking for young women who are here tonight. We’re looking for a pair of women who came in here some months, perhaps as much as a year or so, in the past. They made use of your resident tattooist.”

Perry frowned. He had hoped to make a tidy profit off these two gents.

“You may find him in the back.” He pointed toward a far doorway. “And when you’ve finished speaking to him, we’ll see if there isn’t anything in which I can interest you gentlemen.”

A velvet curtain, drenched in smoke and pocked with pipe burns, separated the larger room from which Arthur and Bram came and the quieter back room into which they proceeded. Bram pressed the curtain aside.

The haze of smoke was thinner here, and sconces of thick candles were attached every few feet to the walls. On a cushioned table in the center of the room, a foreign sailor with skin the color of an ash tree lay shirtless. He reclined belly-down on the table, his back facing up into the light. A handful of colored designs were imprinted upon the sailor’s back and an equal number upon his arms, which hung down at the man’s sides.

Before the sailor stood the tattooist himself. He was the largest Japanese native Arthur had ever seen. His head was completely bald, a style made all the more pronounced by the intricate tattoos that were printed onto his scalp. As he turned to face Arthur and Bram, they could see the colored designs running up his neck, across to his ears, and over the top of his head.

The tattooist was dressed in work clothes: wool slacks and a white shirt. Before him he held a long, sloped needle, which he pointed directly at Bram as he spoke.

“You’ll wait outside, gentlemen,” he said, somewhere in between a question and a statement. His accent was purely native to the London docks, without a trace of his Eastern homeland. His voice was deep and ragged from smoke. Arthur thought that his insides must be as burnt as his skin.

Before Arthur could respond, Bram reached over into Arthur’s coat.

He pulled the crow drawing from Arthur’s pocket and held it before the tattooist without a word. The tattooist stared at it strangely. Arthur could see the recognition in his face, as well as a sense of pride in his work.

“Aye now!” barked the bare sailor on the operating table. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

“And where’d you find that, then?” said the tattooist, ignoring his customer.

“A young girl’s corpse. This image was printed on her leg.”

“A corpse? Somebody killed one of those girls?”

One of which girls?
thought Arthur, though he remained silent.

“Yes,” said Bram.

“Who?”

Bram paused for a moment, considering. The tattooist stepped backward, toward a small instrument table in the corner of the room. Arthur could see dozens of thin, sharp needles arranged from smallest to largest across the table. Some were straight, the size of clothespins, and others were long and hooked, like the beaks of seagulls. The tattooist stroked his needles menacingly.

“Not you,” Bram said at last.

The tattooist smiled. “All right, Smithy, off you go,” he said to his customer. “Let me have a minute with my friends here.”

With a series of hand gestures, the customer indicated his extreme displeasure at this turn of events. As he left the room, he bent over and spit on Bram’s shoe. Bram did not so much as flinch.

Arthur felt it was time to take the lead on the investigation.

“You tattooed a group of girls, at least two, sometime ago?” he said.

“I did,” said the tattooist. “Must have been more’n a year. The design was quite simple. No shading, just black ink on those pale little legs. I used . . .” The tattooist paused and turned to his instrument table. He selected a needle of medium grade, from the middle of the table. He handed it to Arthur.

“. . . this one.” It felt impossibly light in Arthur’s palm, as if it weren’t even there. The needle was made of ivory and was only as wide as a charcoal pencil. Arthur looked up at the tattooist to find him staring back, waiting for a sign of Arthur’s approval. There isn’t a craftsman alive who doesn’t take pride in his tools.

“It’s a lovely . . . device,” said Arthur.

“I carved it myself. In Kyoto.” The tattooist sighed, and his eyes went soft. He lost himself for a moment to nostalgic recollection and then quickly returned his mind to his surroundings.

“It was the first and only time a flock of mollies came in for a set of matching ink,” he said. “I put that crow there on all four of them.”

“Four?” exclaimed Arthur.

“Right so. There were four girls that came in together, with a copy of that drawing on a piece of paper. Just like the one you have now.”

“What were their names?”

“Well, let’s see, allow me to consult my bankbook. I’m sure they each provided me with a check.” The tattooist’s voice dropped even lower to convey his icy sarcasm.

“I see,” said Arthur. “And how about the drawing itself? I’ve never seen such a design in my life. What does the three-headed crow symbolize? From where did it derive?”

“I cannot hardly say. Isn’t it just the devil’s own, that image? The girls brought that paper in here with them, told me how they wanted it inked. I practiced a few times on paper before moving on to the skin. You saw the image I tacked up outside this place? One of my practice drawings. I took a liking to it. The girls never said what it meant.” The tattooist gave a chortle. “But do you know? I tacked it to the wall in here, and sailors, they have made inquiries. Off the boat they’ve come, and when they’ve seen that design, they’ve said, ‘Aye, paint me up with that.’ I moved the sketch outside, since it had become so popular. Don’t think they know what it means any more than I do. But it’s a spooky shape, isn’t it, that crow, and I think it drums me up business.”

“What did the girls’ conversation consist of, when they were in your shop?”

“I hardly remember, there was so much chattering. They were loud. Giddy, I think, nervous about the pain from the needle. People will go one of two ways when it’s their first time. Either they grow quiet like little mice, too scared to speak, or else they talk my ear off, can’t shut them up for anything. And they cried out, too, when the needle hit. Had to give them each a double dose.” The man gestured to his table, at a hypodermic syringe.

“Morphine?” inquired Arthur.

The tattooist nodded. “And lately I’ve been adding a shot of that imported heroin. It seems to make the customers less drowsy than the morphine, but just as docile.”

“We believe that these girls were part of some club. Or a group of some sort. Can you recall if they spoke at all about women’s suffrage?”

“What’s that, then?”

“Never mind,” said Bram. “Can you recall anything they said? Even the littlest word or phrase could make all the difference.”

The tattooist raised his hand to the top of his head while he thought. He tapped idly on his bald scalp. It sounded like the ticks of a clock.

“A faucet,” he said at last.

Arthur and Bram exchanged a look.

“A faucet?” said Bram.

“Yes, odd, I know,” said the tattooist. “That’s why I remember it. One of them would make some joke, and another would say, ‘Tell it to the faucet!’ And they’d all double over in giggles. They kept repeating the jokes again and again. The morphine will do that to you. Little girls, really, couldn’t have weighed more than six, seven stone apiece. Probably should have used less anesthetic. Anyhow, they became quite giggly.”

“About a faucet?”

“ ‘I’d like to see the faucet do that!’ Or, ‘And what’ll the faucet say now?’ And then, ‘Drip, drip, drip!’ and they’d flop on the floor with their laughing.”

“What in the world does that mean?” asked Bram, a puzzled look across his face.

“It means,” said Arthur, “that these girls were disgruntled members of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.”

Even the tattooist looked impressed. He and Bram regarded Arthur with cocked heads and raised eyebrows.

“And how do you know that?” asked Bram.

“Because when you’re pumped full of opiates, a lot of things seem funny that really are not. Even bad puns. It appears our girls didn’t care too much for the leader of the NUWSS, one Millicent
Fawcett
.”

“Arthur, my God, you’ve given Holmes a run for his money today. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never heard of this Millicent Fawcett.”

Arthur sighed, wishing that he, too, had never heard that woman’s name.

“Do you remember my run for Parliament, at the seat from Edinburgh?”

“Of course,” said Bram, surprised at the question.

“Do you remember that my candidacy was sunk by a set of vicious rumors as to my alleged papist sympathies?”

“Yes. They were petty drivel. Balderdash.”

“Just so. And Millicent Fawcett was the one who spread them.”

C
HAPTER 22

The Great Hiatus

“Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries

is this: that when we talk of him we invariably

fall into the fancy of his existence.”

—T. S. Eliot,

from a review of
The Complete

Sherlock Holmes Short Stories,
1929

January 9, 2010, cont.

Harold and Sarah sat in a run-down Internet café, sipping tea and staring at two dim computer screens. A few computers to their left, a heavy man in his forties clicked through page after page of online porn.

There had been a lengthy debate earlier, in the cab, about the relative safety of returning to their hotel. The driver had seemed remarkably invested in the outcome of their conversation. Both Harold and Sarah eventually came to the conclusion that the men in the black car—the Goateed Man and his associate with the gun—must have known who they were. Who knew how long the men had been following them? The hotel couldn’t be regarded as safe. And so, as the first order of business was to access the contents of the flash drive that Sarah had filched from Alex Cale’s desk, the cabbie had deposited them at the Kensington Internet Café, where they now searched through the drive’s files.

Harold was still impressed with Sarah’s cool in the car chase. His body had been practically convulsing, and it was only through the single-minded focus of will that he was able to plant himself in front of the oncoming car. But Sarah had slipped behind and punctured the tires without pause. He felt himself to be an endless buzz of confusion, of questions and doubt and uncertainty. Outside of his books, the whole
world
was a mystery to Harold. And Sarah always seemed to understand. He wished he could be more like her.

He opened up the flash drive and thought he’d hit pay dirt. A massive text file labeled “ACD BIO DRAFT 12.14.09” greeted him promisingly. He opened the document, and there it was—the most recent draft of Alex Cale’s long-awaited Conan Doyle biography. Obviously, Harold thought, there must be a lengthy section in the manuscript about the missing diary, where Cale had found it, and what it contained.

Harold spent two hours reading through the entire biography while Sarah sipped green tea and checked her e-mail. She went outside once to make a call, then again when her phone rang and she left to take it.

Harold went through the manuscript quickly. He was already familiar with most of the details of Conan Doyle’s life—born in Edinburgh in 1859, studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, married to Touie in 1885, married to Jean in 1907—and so Harold read even faster than usual.

Alex’s tone was loving and deliriously antiquarian. He seemed to mimic the prose of Conan Doyle himself. “Determined was the face, and hardened was the resolve, of Arthur Conan Doyle as he descended from the steps of the P&O ocean liner to the dirty port of Cape Town,” opened the passage on Conan Doyle’s time in the Boer War. It was pretentious and yet infectious, a delight for Harold to read. His eyes watered as he got to the section on Conan Doyle’s death, in his bed, in the loving arms of his second wife. “You are wonderful,” were Conan Doyle’s final words, whispered to the teary face of his wife of twentythree years. Harold thought of Alex Cale dying alone, in a sterile hotel room, his eyes bulging from his head and his muscles taut from struggling. Harold realized that in the days since Alex’s death he had not paused to mourn. To measure the loss. What would it matter, really, if Harold did find the diary? What difference would it make if he found Alex’s killer? If the man were put in jail for the rest of his wretched life? Alex would never see his own life’s work completed or published. He would never be able to undertake a new project. The world had lost his voice, it had forever lost the maker of these sentences—“Defying Conan Doyle’s incorrigible belief in the supernatural, Harry Houdini sought to prove to him once and for all that genuine magic did not exist. Houdini did so by performing feat after feat for the author but was confounded to find that Conan Doyle refused to believe, after each card was pulled from the deck, that no magic had transpired. ‘I produced your card by sleight of hand, not paranormal force,’ one imagines Houdini saying. ‘And yet my card is here,’ one imagines Conan Doyle responding. ‘However it was done, it is magic to me.’” Harold concealed his tears with a napkin, blowing his nose and crumpling the cheap white paper into a tight little ball before flicking it into the trash.