The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars

by Anthony Boucher

  He started toward the door. My eye, moving with him, saw a curious object on the floor. Now I am slightly myopic (short-sighted, I think you say), and to me it was but an indistinct thing of black and pinkish-orange.

  “He is indeed a curious man, your Dr. Farncroft,” I said. “See what he has left behind him—a strange sort of beaded bag, is it not? Who would suspect that vigorous man of carrying—”

  I leaned over to examine the thing more carefully. It was some fifteen inches long and two or three inches wide, decorated with an odd beaded pattern like to American Indian work. As I stretched out my hand to pick it up, it moved.

  At that instant Larry Gargan thrust me back. “You damned fool!” he cried. “Can’t you see—!”

  I indeed saw. What had seemed to me as a bag pretty struck me now with inexpressible revulsion when I knew that it lived and moved. And move it did, slowly, sluggishly, but inexorably across the floor from the door toward us. I knew not at that moment what it might be; but I did know as by some instinct that its painstaking movements were the laborious advance of death.

  “The stick’s too short now,” my companion muttered. “That breaking had more point to it than just showing off. The damned fiend; that’s probably how he—I should have carried a gun.”

  I was backing away from the thing helplessly, understanding almost the fable of the rabbit and the snake. Then my foot met a rug. The rug slipped. I sprawled headlong and found my open eyes staring into the unutterably ugly face of the thing, from my nose not two inches removed. It came on. I could not even speak. Upon me descended the paralysis of sheer terror.

  Then came a thudding crash and before my face I saw two heavy shoes. With a leap Larry Gargan had descended on the thing, crushing from it its evil life.

  He helped me to my feet and pushed me back into a chair. “Got a drink around here?” he demanded. “You need it. And God knows so do I.”

  I gestured, still speechless, at the proper drawer of the dresser. He handed me the bottle, and when I had a long and much-needed Schluck taken, he also drank.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, “you know just what that ducky little pet is that the dear doctor sicked on us?”

  I shook my head.

  “Heloderma suspectum, to use the doctor’s own language. The nastiest beast ever bred by the hot sun out of the deserts of Arizona. The only poisonous lizard known to mankind—thank God! In short, Mr. Federhut, you have just escaped from a Gila monster.”

  He drank from the bottle one last gulp, waved off all my protestations of gratitude, and took his leave.

  For minutes I sat in the chair incredulous. More even than the events of last night had this amazed me. I could not believe it. Again was the room quiet, the sun through the windows gave me warmth and comfort, in my hand was a bottle of my favorite Schnapps, all was as it should be.

  But on the floor before me lay a broken walking stick and the crushed remains of a beaded bag which had lived and moved and all but killed.

  “Evidence first,” said Lieutenant Jackson. “This is another story that can be fairly well checked. Hinkle’s off duty now, but I can get descriptions of these men from him tomorrow. And the cane and the Gila—?”

  “I appreciated, Herr Leutnant, their evidential value—though as evidence of what I know not unless I choose to place against the doctor a charge of attempted murder. I gave these articles into the care of Sergeant Hinkle.”

  Sergeant Watson spoke up. “And he turned ’em over to me, Lieutenant. They’re locked up in the hall closet and I got the key here.”

  “Good. Now—”

  “One moment, Lieutenant.” It was Harrison Ridgly’s drawling voice. “The picturesque horror of this murderous attempt is of course fascinating. But two other points interest me more. One is the connection of Amy Gray with Worth. Do you remember this Gray case?”

  “No,” said Jackson. “But that isn’t surprising with a verdict of death from natural causes. I guess the department just let it go at that.”

  “But you can check up on the records?”

  “I’ll do that tomorrow. What’s your other worry?”

  “What would it be but this extraordinary assertion by the young man that he was John O’Dab? We may very well be harboring a murderer in our select little group here; but it is, esthetically, an even more dreadful thought to suspect that we are harboring an impostor.”

  Jonadab Evans had the center of the stage as he had never had it before in his life. The mild drab little man rose and faltered. “I am sure,” he began hesitantly, “that you will all understand—”

  “Say it out clearly, Mr. Evans,” Federhut admonished him with judicial authority. “Was my friend right? Is he John O’Dab?”

  “Well,” said Jonadab Evans, “he … In a certain sense one might say … As a matter of fact—yes.”

  Ridgly laughed—a high-pitched and unpleasant noise. “The mouse turns,” he gasped. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much guts? Our dear meek little Milquetoast is a first-class fraud!”

  “No, please. It isn’t like that at all. It … Oh dear! I wonder, Mrs. Hudson, if you … Thank you.” And Jonadab Evans amazingly gulped a jigger of straight whisky. His next sentence or two was hopelessly lost in a series of choking struggles. “You see,” he resumed, “I knew Larry when he was the physical-ed instructor at dear old Sampson Military Academy—a school in which I taught. He showed me a novel which he had written. It was exciting, but oh my, it was bad! I took it and saved all his plot and his crucial situations, but I—I might say I translated it into English. We submitted it under ‘John O’Dab’ from my own name Jonadab, and we sold it. Then Larry wandered off again; he couldn’t ever stay in one place. And wherever he is he keeps sending me novels and I take their bones and put new flesh on them. It works very well. So in a sense I suppose he is John O’Dab just as much as I am. I have done a few stories without him, but they haven’t been nearly so successful. And now you know.” He hung his head and looked utterly abashed.

  Maureen’s laugh was sweet and sympathetic. “There,” she said. “It isn’t anything so dreadful.”

  He half smiled. “But I did so enjoy having people think that I made up all those exciting things that Derring does.”

  “And that,” said Harrison Ridgly scornfully, “is the Dread Secret. Dear me!” he echoed Mr. Evans’ wistful tones. “If you have sufficiently recovered from the shock of this terrible unmasking, Mr. O’Dab, you might now give us your contribution to the day’s narratives. And then, if we can lure the insulted medico from his sulking retreat, we shall settle down to full discussion.”

  Chapter 15

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE OLD

  RUSSIAN WOMAN

  being the narrative of Jonadab Evans

  After a shockingly late breakfast (I say shockingly because the rigors of private-school life have accustomed me to hours more like those of a farm hand than those of a civilized man of letters), I retired to my room and spent several quiet hours in a vain attempt to decipher that series of numbers found in Stephen Worth’s brief case. The chain of reasoning by which I arrived at what I thought to be its secret still seems to me flawless, and I should like to discuss this point with you more fully after this narrative sequence is concluded; but at the moment all that matters is that I got nowhere.

  I was intensely absorbed in my problem. I did hear some disturbance in the hall, which I realize now must have been the irruption of Dr. Royal Farncroft; but I paid no attention to it. Nothing distracted me until I came to the sudden realization that I was hungry.

  This household was so upset today that no fixed luncheon time had been scheduled; but I felt sure that a little rummaging about in the kitchen would provide me with something to stay my pangs until dinner. I entered the kitchen expecting to find it empty or at most tenanted only by Mrs. Hudson; but instead I saw before me the most beautiful head of brown hair which I had ever seen on a male.

  This man was of medium height—th
at is, an inch or two taller than I—and dressed in a black suit which had been cheap and drab to start with and had become no more fetching with the obvious passage of many years. But these long Absalom-like locks of fine rich brown which poured luxuriantly and luxuriously down over his shoulders lent him an extraordinary distinction which no clothes could obscure. His face I could not see; but I felt at once that this man was a Presence—a forceful authority who must dominate the room in which he stood.

  Mrs. Hudson was facing him. Her bright rubber kitchen apron, of a shade known, I believe, as crushed raspberry, seemed in his presence like the vestment of an acolyte. In her hand was an egg whisk, transformed, to carry on the illusion, into an aspergillum for sprinkling holy water. On a table beside her stood a bowl of partially beaten eggs, forgotten as she listened to the man in the shiny black suit. She caught sight of me over Absalom’s shoulder. “Oh, Mr. Evans,” she said. “Come in. Perhaps you can help us. Mr. Evans,” she explained, “lives here in the house.”

  Absalom turned and regarded me. “That is not the man,” he said slowly, in a heavy and almost unintelligible voice.

  The front view of him was a surprise. The high forehead, the deep glowing eyes, the heavy almost beaked nose—all these I had expected; and the long beard, falling halfway to his waist, was in itself nothing unanticipated. But that beard was a pure white, as smooth and beautiful as the brown cascades of his hair but completely incongruous to them.

  “Can I help you, sir?” I asked, in tones whose reverential nature astonished me.

  “I do not know. I hope it.”

  “He came to the back door,” Mrs. Hudson said. “I thought he … Well, after all, that suit … I offered him some food, but it seems he wants to know something about one of the men in this house.”

  “I am Russian priest,” he rumbled. “Old Russian. They drive me from my country twenty years ago. I have here little church. White Russians come to me much, slava Bogul” He paused as though to find words.

  “If I can help you in any way—” I prompted.

  “I live among my people. I know not your words. I try. Prikhozhanka moya—how do I say? One from women in my care—”

  “Parishioner?” I ventured.

  “It may be. My pah-rree-shonn-airr—so?—send me here. She have seen man in this house. She know too much from him. She must make known.”

  “Who it it?” I asked quickly. “Stephen Worth?” I was eager. Information on Worth, from however strange and unlikely a source, might well prove invaluable to us.

  “She knows not name. She saw him as she goes by this house. She drives strange trade, my pah-rree-shonn-airr. You see? I learn.” There was a touching simplicity in the childish pride with which he pronounced his new word. “Me please not this what she does. I tell her so, and she swears no more to do so. But now she lies in death pains. She remembers what she must tell from this man, but she knows not name. You help perhaps?”

  “What does he look like, this man of yours?”

  “He is tall, Clean face.” (I assumed that he meant cleanshaven.) “Dark hair, black almost. Thin. He smiles too much.”

  My eyes met Mrs. Hudson’s. “That Ridgly man,” she said. “That describes him to a T. Especially smiling too much.”

  The priest was regarding me with fixed and plaintive eyes. “You come?”

  “You want me to go to this woman?”

  He nodded. “Radi Boga, you come and let her tell what she need.”

  I could see efficient mercy glistening in Mrs. Hudson’s eyes. “Does she have a doctor?”

  “No, gospozha.”

  “But you say she’s dying. She must have somebody there to look after her.”

  “She knows of herbs. She says she can care for herself without doctor. She will not have one.”

  “Doesn’t she even have another woman to care for her?”

  “No one, gospozha.”

  “This is absurd. To think of a woman dying and no one there to look after her but an old man, even if you are a priest.” With deft hands she was untying the crushed-raspberry apron. “I’m coming with you,” she said decisively. “Are you ready, Mr. Evans?”

  I must confess reluctantly that I invented no elaborate subterfuges to evade the police. Although I admire the little comedy by which Dr. Bottomley and Captain Agar eluded Sergeant Hinkle, I must modestly state that it is nothing beside the pranks (not all of them the fruits of Larry Gargan’s inventiveness) which the Honorable Derring Drew has often played upon his ancient friend and enemy, Sergeant Inspector Pipsqueak. But instead of duplicating Derring’s prowess, I simply, and in the most prosaic manner possible, followed Mrs. Hudson and Absalom out of the back door and down the street to the priest’s automobile.

  Please do not look so grim, Lieutenant. I fear from your expression that dire axes are being sharpened for the sturdy neck of Sergeant Hinkle. But it is probably at that very moment that Otto Federhut was showing him item, one loaded cane snapped in two, and item, one Gila monster crushed to a pulp. Small wonder, then, that his attention was distracted from the kitchen door, which, after all, he might think safely guarded by Mrs. Hudson herself.

  I know next to nothing of automobiles. To me, they are strange and hideous monsters which occasionally, in the possession of one’s friends, may be useful vehicles; more intimate acquaintance with them I shun. To me there is very little difference between a 1939 Packard and a 1929 Ford. But even I could see that the priest’s car was an extraordinary museum piece. One’s first thought on seeing it parked on a Hollywood street would be, “Ah, so they’re shooting a period picture here!” I cannot describe the peculiarities of its internal mechanism nor imitate the noises which issued from it; but I can give you some indication of its vintage by saying that it possessed a raucous horn operated by squeezing a bulb by hand. So far back in time did the sight of this machine take me that I was tempted to ask Mrs. Hudson if she had brought her motoring veil.

  The priest did not speak during the drive. This was just as well. The merry jouncing of the high seat on which we rode would have left us little breath with which to answer him. Unfamiliar as I am with this city, I cannot describe our route, save that it lay in a southeasterly direction and that the journey took more than a quarter of an hour even at our none too rapid rate of progress. The only landmark I can proffer is a white frame church with green trimmings surmounted by a miniature Oriental dome, which the priest, briefly breaking his silence, pointed out to us as his parish church.

  The dwelling to which he brought us was a small garret over a garage. As we climbed the rickety wooden flight (which seemed the bastard offspring of a staircase and a ladder), I felt as though we were leaving the bright and sunny world without and entering into the narrow abode of evil and darkness. In my mind ran the immortal line of James Thurber, that phase at once so intensely comic and so pregnant with suggestions of unnameable terror: “Now we go up to the garrick and become warbs.” We were going up to the garrick all right, and warbs suddenly seemed the least terrifying of the things we might become.

  The sight of the garrick itself—I beg your pardon, of the garret—did not add to my comfort. One small window allowed a minimum of sunlight to filter through, hopelessly weakened by its losing battle with a heavy coating of dust. The only other illumination came from a red vigil light burning before the garish painting of a somewhat Byzantine saint—a bishop who held in one hand the toy model of a cathedral.

  It was a moment before my eyes could make out, in a far corner of this cubicle of obscurity, a heaped bundle of rags, and another moment before I realized that these rags were a crude bed and that huddled in them lay a gaunt and agonized old woman. Mrs. Hudson had seen her before me and started toward her; but with timid precaution I took her arm and held her back. The fetid air of the room suggested unmentionable contagions. “Of what is she dying?” I whispered to the priest.

  “It is her back,” he said. “She was struck by automobile.” (the u curiously became a v-avtomobile
) “perhaps by chance. Perhaps also not by chance.”

  The old woman had heard the bass rumbling of the priest’s voice. She stirred a little, half sat up, and addressed plaintive words to him in Russian.

  “Po-angliskii, Anna Trepovna,” he commanded. “It is need to talk English. They have come.”

  She uttered a long phrase with such rapturous intensity that I recognized it as a prayer of gratitude. She made the sign of the cross, concluding it by kissing her thumb, and smiled contentedly at the saint who had presumably contrived our coming. Then she beckoned us close to her and began to tell her story.

  I shall not attempt to reproduce this verbatim. Her speech was even thicker and less intelligible than that of the priest, and her thoughts kept wandering to her approaching death and to some unnamed agency which, she feared, might at any moment enter and hasten that deathly approach. I shall simply retell the tale freed of her wanderings and her strange idioms, and you must picture us hanging on her every word, questioning her, interpreting her, securing occasionally from the priest the translation of an especially obscure passage, and, in short, finding ourselves so absorbed in her narrative that Mrs. Hudson even forgot the merciful attentions which she had come prepared to offer.

  This, then, is the story which we heard from the old Russian woman in the dark garret, while a vivid and oddly proportioned saint balanced a church in his hand and watched us.

  Anna Trepovna (even under the spell of that dark garrick the name pleased me. You will recall that another of the untold cases filed by Watson in the vaults of Cox & Company recounts Holmes’ “summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder”; and I believe that a woman of the Trepoff family would be known as Trepovna)—Anna Trepovna, I say, came from New York, where she had long practiced the curious art of the herbalist. Her mother before her had been the combined midwife, general practitioner, and witch doctor of a small village in the Caucasus; and Anna had been taught from earliest childhood the secrets of her mother’s craft.