My Sherlock Holmes

by Michael Kurland

  I wasn’t sure but nodded.

  “She borrowed a costume, some of my things. Know where she lives?”

  “Doubt she’s there.”

  “Why not?”

  “Moved up in the world, hasn’t she?”

  Vartan had an ax to grind … was it jealousy?

  “But at least I could inquire as to where she’s gone.”

  He stared me up and down.

  “Alors,” I said. “Making a living comes hard enough without buying new costumes.”

  “Rue Androuët. Her mother’s the concierge of the corner building. Can’t miss it.”

  I hiked the narrow Montmartre stairs called a street and by my place there stood Léonie in the shadows.

  Her matronly eyes glittered with excitement. She pulled me back into the dark recesses of the stairs. “Don’t knows as I’ll get me job back but I got these for you, Madame Irene.” She pointed to the hem of her long skirt. “A bag of papers.”

  “A bag?”

  “Remember the concierge with the gamey leg … the one I told you I help seeing as she’s ‘indisposed’ sometimes? She don’t throw away papers from the wastebaskets … . I found out she saves them.”

  “And that’s what you have in the bag?”

  “Mail and letters, too!” Leonie nodded. “Thinks me daft and a bit slow, she does, but that’s fine by me. Like you says, I’m to keep me eyes open and not much from me mouth. So yesterday, her leg was hurting something awful, swollen up it was, too. After I lit the fires, cleaned the big reception rooms, she says, ‘Fetch the contents from the baskets.’ I did and as I was fixing to slag them into the furnace she screams, ‘Non, non in here!’ Then she says pick up the letters from the boxes and takes some and don’t distribute … she gave me some daft excuse but I just nodded.”

  “Go on, Leonie, please!”

  “Then I thinks back … ’course, she has to have been been doing it while I’m there, too. But the kicker being these come from the military offices. Where the Comte Esterhazy worked. I only seen him the once. Yesterday. But he wrote on this here blue paper, this bordereau they calls it.”

  “Marvelous work, Léonie!”

  “This here’s a right jumble, but seein’ as I had no time to sort it, I puts the blue bordereau on top.”

  “You’re a fairy princess, Léonie!”

  She grinned her lopsided way, her eyes sparkled, and I regretted how my life included her so little. I slipped a wad of franc notes in her hands, gave her a hug, and told her to stay home for a few days with her child.

  In my garret I stashed the bag, knowing I’d later spread it out and try to make sense of it. The several crumpled blue bordereau I smoothed out, struck by the angular handwriting. But no signature! Merde!

  One step forward and two steps back.

  So now, all I could do was find Bijou and see if her trail led to Comte Esterhazy.

  Trudging to rue Androuet, I realized it faced the Cabaret aux Assas sins … . Was that how Bijou met the Comte?

  And it rested a block away from the place Goudeau … where Holmes had met me!

  I knocked on the concierge loge door. No answer. In the dim building courtyard, a woman bent over at the communal water spigot. She saw me and straightened up, then took halting steps with a bucket held over one arm. In the darkness, she appeared old and racked by slight shakes of palsy.

  “Oui?” she said, wiping her other reddened hand on her none too clean apron, squinting at me.

  “Bon soir, Madame, you must be Bijou’s mother …”

  “Older sister,” she said, interrupting me.

  “Aaah, of course, please forgive me. The light is nonexistent and I was told Bijou’s mother is the concierge here.”

  But Bijou’s sister could be her mother, so haggard and worn she looked. Old before her time. Too many children? Too much work at the washhouse which I could see from her painfully chapped and sore hands.

  “Neither one’s here. My mother’s gone to Lille, and Bijou … eh who knows?”

  I didn’t believe her for a moment. About Bijou anyway. Those careworn eyes were street smart. And well they would be. Survival was tough on the butte in Montmartre. Before I could say more, I noticed the portly man who’d followed me the other night, paused in the boulangerie window opposite. He wore a bowler hat, his gold watch chain glinted in the gaslight.

  A baby cried from inside the loge and Bijou’s sister hurried ahead. I walked with her, then paused at the large heavy door and bid adieu. Without so much as a good-bye she trundled inside the loge.

  I saw the bowler-hatted man approaching the door.

  Caught between an unfriendly woman and stalking man … Where could I go?

  The door leading to the downstairs cave lay ajar. I slipped inside, pulled it shut, figuring I’d wait until he left, then come out. But as I reached the end of the steep damp limestone steps a glow of light came from ahead. This was no dead-end cellar but a tunnel branching ahead.

  Montmartre was full of limestone quarries, webbed by tunnels and full of quarried holes and pockets like cheese. Yet buildings were built over them. I followed the tunnel to the light. Could this be the adjoining cellar for Cabaret aux Assassins?

  On the damp wall crude lettering indicated the street names, gas main locations written in chalk. The smell of damp mold and refuse grew stronger. Mounds of moist earth and stacked wine bottles greeted me as I entered what appeared to be the cellar of the cabaret. Trying to keep my bearings I calculated this would be the right direction.

  A low hum of conversation drifted from behind a water-stained wood door, buckled and sagging. The clammy feel in the air bothered me. Grabbing a smock from a pile of dirty blue ones, I took off my coat, slipped the smock over my muslin dress, smoothed my hair back, and tied a napkin over my head, as so did many washerwomen and restaurant kitchen scrubbers, I hoped my cover would tide me over until I discovered Bijou or the Comte.

  I knew I didn’t have far to go when I heard a load oath.

  “Damn you, Esterhazy … that’s five thousand you owe! Settle your scores. Pay up!”

  “Who are you?” A wine-laced voice hissed in my ear.

  I jumped.

  “The washing up woman, sir.”

  “And what are you doing here?” This voice belonged to a very drunken man with stains and dribbles of food on his waistcoat. He held my elbow with a pincerlike grip.

  Panicked, I looked around. “Them, sir.” I said keeping my head down and pointing to a pile of dirty crockery.

  “Get to it, then,” he said, pinching my behind hard and chuckling.

  He flung open the door. “Now, gentlemen, don’t say I’m too late for the game!”

  I looked up quickly. Inside, around an oval table, the air thick with cigar smoke, sat three men. Glasses and cards in their hands. Piles of colored chips and a whisky decanter were on the table.

  “Always ready for a new partner,” said a voice. I looked closer. Bijou, fanning herself and clearly bored, leaned on that man’s shoulder. Handsome and flushed, he sported a manicured red goatee and mustache. That must be him!

  “Don’t get out of this, Esterhazy,” one of the other men said to him. “Settle up before …”

  “Let our friend join us,” said Esterhazy, smoothing the edge of his mustache. The drunken man tottered inside.

  “Clear this. Make me some room.” He jerked his hand to me. “Did you hear me … clear up!” he thundered.

  My hand shook, but I kept my head down, picked up a tray and moved into the smoky cellar room. I prayed to God Bijou wouldn’t recognize me.

  “Bring us some more whisky,” said the man.

  “Good idea,” said Esterhazy. “I’ll pay this time.”

  “And how?” queried the suspicious man.

  “A promissary note.”

  “Like all the others?” He shot his hand forward as Esterhazy scribbled something on a napkin.

  “Take this,” he said pushing it in my hand. “Bring the Iris
h whisky and clean glasses.”

  “Yes, sir,” I kept my voice low, my eyes down, and tried to breathe.

  But servants were invisible except for easy shots of abuse. No one paid me any heed.

  I swiftly loaded the tray, swiped the table with a cloth, avoiding the colored chips, and edged out.

  “Hurry up! Help’s become so lazy these days …” was the last I heard as I hurried through the cellar looking for the stairs. I put Esterhazy’s napkin in my dress pocket. As I emerged behind the counter in the cabaret, I shoved the loaded tray onto the counter.

  The cabaret’s tables were filled. Accordion strains and tinkling glasses filled the air. As I walked, several patrons, the worse for wear from drink, asked me to clear their tables. Ignoring them, I reached the heavy velvet curtain, hung to prevent drafts from entering the door.

  As I opened the door I came face-to-face with the portly gentleman in the bowler hat whom I thought I’d escaped. He stared at me. I cringed. Someone jostled him forward and I, thankful for the scarf and still wearing the smock, lowered my gaze and kept going. My heart pounded. Once outside, I ran.

  Suffice it to say, as soon as I reached a covered doorway, I tore off the disguise, caught my breath, regretting my winter coat left in the cellar. Shivering in my thin muslin dress. I took a circuitous route back through Montmartre.

  My concierge, Madame Lusard, handed me my mail. More bills. Inside my garret I kicked off my wet lace-up boots and set them by the warm brick.

  Loud knocks sounded on the door.

  Had Madame Lussard overlooked a piece of mail?

  I opened the door to see the stocky side whiskered man, his wet great coat crooked under his arm. His small pig eyes filled me with fear. How had he found me?

  “Madame Norton?”

  I nodded slowly.

  “Emil Cavour,” he said, doffing his rain-speckled hat, panting from exertion. “Pardon my boldness, but I assure you we have something to talk about.”

  “Who are you, Monsieur?”

  He tugged his goatee. “A question, Madame, that the wisest philosophers ponder even to this day. If you permit me entry, we can get out of hearing of your concierge.”

  Peering downstairs, I saw the glow of her oil lamp on the landing.

  I had no recourse but to comply.

  Emil Cavour had lamb-chop side-whiskers. He made himself at home on my garret’s one chair, wobbly leg and all. He surveyed the costumes hangared on nails poking from the walls, as he lit a short stubby cheroot.

  “Why do you follow me, Monsieur Cavour?”

  “You favor the bohemian lifestyle, it appears, Madame Norton,” he said, not answering me. “Some artistic bent?”

  His presumptive manner rankled me.

  “Liking and having no choice aren’t the same thing,” I said. “How does that concern you?”

  “Nice view,” he said, rising and approaching the window. Pinprick lights dotted the blue-black Paris evening below. “We know Montmartre’s a hotbed of anarchists, misfits seething to sabotage the Third Republic.”

  The startled look on my face did not go unnoticed by him. Did he follow me thinking I plotted to undermine the government? If so, how could I dissuade him without revealing Meslay’s assignment? But I’d jumped ahead … . Who was he? … Where were his credentials?

  And then my eye caught on the bag, under the table, Léonie had brought me. What to do?

  “My concierge’s son’s with the police,” I said, putting on the expression I once wore at the baccarat table in the Monaco casino. I opened my door. “He’s helpful. Very helpful when tenants are insulted. I’ll ask you to leave before I feel so inclined.”

  “Asking me to leave, Madame Norton?” he said, his brow crinkled in amusement.

  “My manners betray me.” I smiled. “I always ask before I demand.”

  Cavour remained at the window. “Close the door, Madame. I don’t think you want the building hearing about your past.”

  What had this portly weasel got up his cuffed sleeve? I could bluff, too. My debts were paid. Just paid. But no matter. I earned a living—albeit a sparse one. I wouldn’t reveal anything until he furnished credentials.

  “A certain liaison with a then crown prince, Madame Norton, does that refresh your memory?”

  I closed the door.

  “Who are you?”

  “Let’s say I’m part of the greater good, as the military refer to themselves, safeguarding Mother France.”

  Some inner sense warned me to leave my brother-in-law Meslay’s name unspoken. “The Prussian ignominy of 1870 and the communards tear the fabric of our society apart,” he said, and his voice rose, as if addressing a crowd. He was almost comical but he knew my secrets. That made him dangerous and someone to be listened to. Had my former lover, the present king, kept me under surveillance? But I doubted that … . Cavour’s manner and rhetoric bespoke a disappointed warhorse.

  His next words surprised me even more. “Bijou, the contortionist, at le Chat Noir mentioned you.”

  “That’s why you follow me?”

  “Let’s say it makes you interesting.”

  “Yes, of course, we’re in a revue popular with the working class and the slumming aristos and bourgeoisie. Lines form down place Pigalle for the late-afternoon matinees.”

  “Count Esterhazy, a French officer, her paramour, interests us,” he said.

  “But why?”

  “Be useful and I’ll be useful to you,” he said handing me a visiting card engraved with Emil Cavour, Office of Statistics.

  “Ask Bijou yourself.”

  His small eyes narrowed. “Certain ministers in a certain government seem bothered by your …”

  “Existence? The fact that I withheld compromising evidence of the said monarch, but have not and will never, use it? They don’t trust me, isn’t that it, since they rank as connivers and deal with liars.”

  Cavour made a deep bow. “They never said you were smart.” When he looked up his face contorted with amusement. “Deception is the currency, as you seem aware of, in these matters.”

  Bizarre. I wanted him to say why me and why now.

  “Madame Norton,” he said. “The evidence against Dreyfus must not be compromised. I count on your utmost cooperation.”

  “What kind of threat is that?”

  “If one military man is attacked, we all stand with him.”

  “But I don’t understand, why didn’t you defend Dreyfus, an officer …”

  “He’s a Jew, Madame,” he interrupted. “They defend their own kind.”

  “So that’s what this is all about?” Disgust rose in me.

  “He was an outsider, of course; he sold secrets.”

  “Assuming he didn’t, and someone else from the officer pool did, it would disgrace your branch. Never admit a mistake but blunder on. Isn’t that the military motto?”

  He raised his cane towards me. I’d scratched the truth and gone too far.

  “Get out before …”

  The door opened. “I believe Madame Norton requested your departure. Of course, I’m ready to assist should you need help in that regard on the stairs.”

  Both Cavour and I turned. I stared into the face of Holmes, a.k.a. Due de Langans.

  Sensing trouble behind the sarcastic tone, Cavour bristled a quick “good evening,” glared at me, then left.

  Holmes waited until he cleared the stairs, then stepped inside. Immediately he pinched the candle wick between his fingers, my only light, and went to the window.

  “He’s gone. But his spy, the organ grinder, has taken over watching you.”

  I found it hard to feel anger. Poor man, I didn’t begrudge the organ grinder any job he could find in this cold.

  “I could have handled that, Holmes,” I said.

  “And no doubt you would have done well, Irene. I, for one, have limitless respect for your capabilities. But nothing is the way you imagine,” he said. “Trust me.”

  He approached me, the
n abruptly went to the bricked up chimney and sat down cross legged.

  “But you have told me nothing. Nothing.”

  I went to the window, a dark frame of sky pockmarked with stars. “All this bone-chilling weather; it’s freezing and it hasn’t even snowed! I’ve never seen Paris with snow. Can you believe that, Holmes?”

  “Neither have I, Irene,” he said, his tone tinged with resignation. “I owe you an explanation.”

  “Explanation? Why not start with who you work for and why. Then we’ll go from there.”

  “The only problem, Irene, is that the French and we English make the strangest bedfellows.”

  “You forget, Holmes, I’m American.”

  For once he was quiet.

  I sat down, curled next to him, resting my head on his shoulder. The spreading heat of the toasty warm brick and his slow, steady breathing calmed me.

  We sat quietly for I don’t know how long. Until Holmes made up his mind to tell me what he wished. But ahead of our very eyes, under my gouged table, sat the bag Leonie brought from the ministry with Esterhazy’s bordereau. And in my pocket his promissary napkin for whisky.

  Somehow that all had to tie in.

  “We don’t want another war. With Kaiser Wilhelm least of all,” Holmes said, with a sigh. “The Royal Navy hasn’t recovered from the last one. Shocking but true, the navy keeps it hush-hush. Under wraps for years. Somehow the Balkan plan, with our diminished fleet and less than sterling capabilities, is something the French know about and privately gloat over. Yet, their fleet is almost as decimated, wouldn’t withstand a German naval attack, and they would rely mightily on ours. The dastardly conundrum for all is that this information might have been furnished with military secrets.”

  So the British were “selfish,” as Meslay put it but for good reason. And so were the French.

  “But how can you tell if this Esterhazy passed the Balkan plan on?”

  Holmes stretched his long legs out. “Not the most imaginative fellow, he called it ‘B’ … that’s all. But we don’t have copies of his bordereau; seems the concierge spies for the Germans and rifles through the trash.”