He mentally reviewed the few murders he had in his files. Nothing came close to this; he’d seen few poisonings. Most of his murders were committed in the heat of drunken anger by family members.
Death by what appeared to be illness but turned out to be poison instead—suddenly his eyes lit up and he cried, “Benja.”
“What does that mean?” Louis asked.
“He was a boy, the fifth child of his family, which is why he was called Benja,” Taed explained. “He died of what seemed to be a fever, just like the colonel. But when I went to his room, I found beans of lahung. The boy had eaten them and died.”
With a strange look on his face, Leonowens explained, “Castor beans. They are quite poisonous, you know.”
Castor—that meant something else. Something he was supposed to do for a man called Pollux. Castor and Pollux. He was supposed to contact the agent for the Borneo Company.
But Leonowens was the agent for the Borneo Company. He gazed at his host with a question in his eyes, a question he dared not ask and hoped would be understood.
Louis, seeing a quick flash of intelligence, sighed with relief. He gave a brief nod, and went on, “Five hundred times stronger than cobra venom.”
“We know how,” Holmes said in a firm voice. “Ricin poisoning. The question now is who did this.”
“Do you think this death is related to the bones in the graveyard?” Louis asked.
Holmes opened his mouth to reply, then turned to the Siamese policeman. “What do you think about that, Sergeant?”
Taed found it difficult to answer at first. He was used to deferring to Europeans, and it was not the Siamese way to push oneself forward. It was the utmost in bad manners to contradict another person, and stating your own opinion too clearly and forcefully could lead to open disagreement, which would cause all to lose face. But this farang was different from all the others he’d met; unlike the colonel, he did not seem to consider himself superior to everyone who wasn’t English. He seemed genuinely to want Taed’s opinion.
“The colonel seemed most insistent that the elephant hair ring meant little,” Taed began slowly. “He threw it down as if it were nothing, but Khun Seng thought it was something. Remember how he behaved when he saw that ring?”
“Superstition,” Leonowens said dismissively. “Just like the men who ran when they first saw the bones.”
Under the steady, approving gaze of the hawk-faced farang, Taed did the unthinkable. He looked an Englishman straight in the eyes and bluntly disagreed with him. “But Khun Seng did not run when he first saw the bones. If he feared evil spirits, why would he not have run when he first came? No,” he continued, “it was the ring that caused him to flee. He knew that ring. He knew that woman.”
“Excellent,” Holmes pronounced, rubbing his hands together. “You have the makings of a fine detective, Sergeant. The fact that you have no superiors telling you that thinking is conduct unbecoming a policeman has allowed you to develop your faculties admirably.”
To his dying day, Sergeant—later Captain—Taed Chutima of the Royal Siamese Police Force maintained that while Sherlock Holmes had the reputation of being the world’s greatest detective, he was outshone by an obscure Norwegian named Sigerson, with whom he had once had the honor of working.
“We must talk to Khun Seng,” Taed said, willing himself not to blush at the European’s praise. “We must question him about the woman.”
When Leonowens rang for a servant, the girl who had served the cheroots at the dinner party informed them that Khun Seng was in his little hut behind the house. He had not been seen all morning, and it was assumed he was mourning his master.
There was a strong odor of incense outside the hut occupied by the Shan. Incense mingled with something else, something more elemental. Blood.
Khun Seng was alive, but barely so. The blue scars that crisscrossed his body had been sliced open, and blood oozed from wounds freshly made. He had carved his own body, mutilated himself with an ornamental kriss that lay on a small teak table next to a cheap statue of Buddha.
In a bowl on the same table lay fourteen gleaming gems, as red as the blood that stained the sheets.
The three foreigners gazed at the man in the bed without a word. The mutilation was a confession of sorts—but a confession of what? Why had he harmed himself, and what did he know about the dead woman in the graveyard?
Taed began the questioning. He knew how he ought to proceed: he ought to scream at Khun Seng that all was known and that he had better confess or he would face a beating like none he’d ever endured in his life. That was how he’d been taught to deal with a man he suspected of murder.
But he looked at the suppurating wounds in the Shan’s body and the pain in his face, and instead he said gently, “You loved her, didn’t you? You made the ring for her.”
“Her name was Kyi Nanda, which means Clear River in the language of our people. She was beautiful, and I loved her very much.” Khun Seng’s eyes misted, and he shook his head as if to clear away the cobwebs of memory. “She was brought to the Royal Palace in Mandalay as a child and trained as a servant to Queen Supayalat.”
“The queen would never let her marry a man of your rank,” Louis pointed out. He’d seen a similar situation in the Siamese royal palace when he was a child; a slavegirl brought from the hinterlands who wanted only to love and be loved by a young man of her village was beaten to near death for secretly meeting her lover.
“That is why I agreed to Prothero thakin’s plan,” Khun Seng replied, clearly eager to be understood. “It was the only way Kyi Nanda and I could be together. The soldiers allowed the royal servants to go into the palace and take away some of the precious things. Kyi Nanda opened the royal coffers and took out rubies, but not for the queen, for us. For our future. The colonel was to take some and leave some for us to start a new life.”
“But the colonel took it all, leaving you destitute,” Louis guessed.
“Worse than that,” Holmes corrected, shaking his head.
“It was worse, Sigerson thakin,” the Shan agreed, giving his interrogator the honor of the Burmese equivalent of Sahib. “The colonel told me Kyi Nanda took her portion of the rubies and ran off with an Englishman, a sergeant in the Army. I knew that sergeant. I knew he had eyes for her, and I knew he liked native women. I believed the colonel, and I left Burma to come here with him because my heart was broken. I didn’t care where I went once I’d lost Kyi Nanda.”
“But when you saw the ring with the bones in the European graveyard, you realized Kyi Nanda had come looking for you,” Holmes said, his own voice as gentle as Taed’s. “You suspected the colonel had lied to you about her defection. You realized Colonel Prothero had killed her rather than risk exposure.”
“Yes,” Khun Seng said, his eyes blazing with anything but regret and remorse. “I knew my happiness had been destroyed, not by the woman I loved, but by a greedy farang with a lust for rubies so strong he must steal even from a poor man. He killed her; I killed him. I say it with pride, for what man worthy of the name would not have done the same?”
“I suppose the colonel’s ready access to the Foreign Cemetery made it easy for him to arrange a burial for a nonexistent soldier and put the woman’s corpse into a coffin,” Louis remarked.
“He did not even grant her a proper funeral,” Khun Seng said in a sleepy-sounding voice. “He did not burn her as we Buddhists burn our dead. Even in death he used her as he used all his servants.”
“Are these the stolen gems?” Louis turned to Sigerson for enlightenment. Why a man noted as an explorer and mountain climber should be able to answer his query he did not know, but that he could answer it was beyond doubt. “How did Khun Seng get them? Wouldn’t the colonel have hidden them somewhere safe?”
Holmes reached out and grasped Khun Seng’s tattooed arm. Louis saw the truth at once. Khun Seng confirmed it with a nod of his head. “My people consider rubies the luckiest of gems,” he said. “We tattoo ourselves wi
th sacred runes to keep the demons away, and we sometimes embed rubies or sapphires into the knife cuts to protect us from harm. A man with a ruby under the skin cannot be killed by knife or spear, everyone in the Shan States knows this.”
“How many rubies were in your flesh?” Louis shuddered as he gazed at the man’s mutilated arms and legs, realizing that he’d carried his master’s booty under his very skin—carried the reason his lover had died.
“I had fourteen. My fellow Shan servants had the same number. The colonel knew our tradition, and he also knew that he might be suspected of stealing gems from the palace. When he needed money, he cut the flesh of one of us and took the ruby into Bangkok to sell. He is not suspected if he sells one ruby at a time to different dealers.”
“You will have to come with me to jail in Lampang,” Taed said with a shake of his head. He privately thought that Khun Seng had good reason to kill the colonel, but he had his duty and he would do it.
“He won’t live to make the trip,” Holmes said.
“His wounds will heal.” Taed spoke curtly to hide the pity in his eyes.
“His wounds won’t kill him. The ricin will.”
Taed nodded. It was justice, of a sort.
“He wanted water from the moon,” he said sadly. “This is what we Siamese say when a man wants what he cannot have. Water from the moon.”
It was assumed by all who read of the event in the Bangkok Times that the Order of the White Elephant was awarded to Arne Sigerson of Norway for his brilliant adventures in Tibet. Taed knew otherwise; surely the great honor was given because Sigerson solved the murder of Colonel Prothero but did not reveal the truth about the colonel’s theft. He knew enough about the British to realize that stealing from a deposed Asian king would mean little to them, but once the palace became the property of the empire, the colonel would have been thought a man who stole from his own queen. It was for this reason that he had concealed his theft by murdering Kyi Nanda.
The rubies were quietly removed from the other Shan servants and sent to the British Museum in London, and the colonel was buried in the Foreign Cemetery with full honors. Only Louis Leonowens knew the complete truth: that the Order of the White Elephant was also awarded for saving Siam from a bloody clash with British Army troops in Burma, a clash fomented by Shan leaders trying yet again to break away from Burma.
Holmes sat at his ease on the verandah of the Oriental Hotel, the finest hostelry in Bangkok. He could have chosen to write his letter inside at a desk, but he enjoyed watching the incessant river traffic, and the evening was a sultry one. Outdoors was far more comfortable than the stuffy writing room.
The cool evening breeze wafted the musky scent of the Chao Phraya into his nose. He could hear the calls of boatmen and see twinkling lanterns on the prows of their tiny sampans. The Oriental Hotel boasted electricity, but all around him lay a city flickering with gaslight, cooking fires, and oil lamps. Just for a moment, its bustle and river smells reminded him of the London of twenty-five years earlier, when he had been a boy newly come from university to make his fortune in the capital.
Thoughts of London led inexorably to thoughts of his past life. He sipped his brandy, picked up a pen, dipped it in India ink, and began to write on the hotel’s embossed vellum paper.
My dear Dr. Watson,
I wish you to know from the deepest part of my soul, how much I regret the fact that I was obliged to deceive you. My brother Mycroft convinced me that Her Majesty’s government requires my continued state of “death,” which means that this letter will never be sent. I shall do the bidding of the Foreign Office in places where the empire’s future is uncertain and I shall play the role I have long trained for, that of objective observer of truth, in places where truth is anything but expected or respected.
Perhaps someday you will read this unposted correspondence and you will know how much your absence means to me. I may solve a crime or two, unravel a puzzle put before me, but I am only half the man I was in England since I am without the friend whose mind I use as a whetstone for my own.
I shall never mail this letter. My brother Mycroft and his gang of Whitehall thugs have seen to that. I am bound by a hundred oaths of secrecy, a convoluted web of obligations that collectively mean little to me, but the bond of blood outweighs that of desire. Besides, I am quite certain that even if I were to post one of these missives, it would be efficiently intercepted and destroyed before it reached the Siamese border.
I long for your good British common sense, my friend, as much as I long for a dinner of good British beef at the Savoy, a concert at Covent Garden, and a snifter of brandy before a roaring fire at Baker Street. It may be years before we meet face-to-face …
Holmes put down the pen and rubbed his tired eyes. What was the point of completing a letter that would never be read? Come to think of it, what was the point of thinking about Baker Street and the rooms that awaited his return?
He might as well ask for water from the moon.
Mr. Sigerson
Peter Beagle
My name is Floresh Takesti. I am concertmaster of the Greater Bornitz Municipal Orchestra in the town of St. Radomir, in the Duchy of Bornitz, in the country of Selmira. I state this only because, firstly, there is a centuries-old dispute between our ducal family and the neighboring principality of Gradja over boundaries, bribed surveyors, and exactly who some people think they are; and, secondly, because Bornitz, greater or lesser, is quite a small holding, and has very little that can honestly be said to be its own. Our national language is a kind of untidy low German, cluttered further by Romanian irregular verbs; our history appears to be largely accidental, and our literature consists primarily of drinking songs (some of them quite energetic). Our farmers grow barley and turnips, and a peculiarly nasty green thing that we tell strangers is kale. Our currency is anything that does not crumble when bitten; our fare is depressingly Slovakian, and our native dress, in all candor, vaguely suggests Swiss bell ringers costumed by gleefully maniacal Turks. However, our folk music, as I can testify better than most, is entirely indigenous, since no other people would ever claim it. We are the property of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or else we belong to the Ottomans; opinions vary, and no one on either side seems really to be interested. As I say, I tell you all this so that you will be under no possible misapprehension concerning our significance in this great turbulence of Europe. We have none.
Even my own standing as concertmaster here poses a peculiar but legitimate question. Traditionally, as elsewhere, an orchestra’s first violinist is named concertmaster, and serves the conductor as assistant and counselor, and, when necessary, as a sort of intermediary between him and the other musicians. We did have a conductor once, many years ago, but he left us following a particularly upsetting incident, involving a policeman and a goat—and the Town Council has never been able since to locate a suitable replacement. Consequently, for good or ill, I have been conductor de facto for some dozen years, and our orchestra seems none the worse for it, on the whole. Granted, we have always lacked the proper—shall I say crispness?—to do justice to the Baroque composers, and we generally know far better than to attempt Beethoven at all; but I will assert that we perform Lizst, Saint-Saëns, and some Mendelssohn quite passably, not to mention lighter works by assorted Strausses and even Rossini. And our Gilbert and Sullivan closing medley almost never fails to provoke a standing ovation, when our audience is sober enough to rise. We may not be the Vienna Schausspielthaus, but we do our best. We have our pride.
It was on a spring evening of 1894 that he appeared at my door: the tall, irritating man we knew as Herr Sigerson, the Norwegian. You tell me now that he had other names, which I can well believe—I can tell you in turn that I always suspected he was surely not Norwegian. Norwegians have manners, if they have no cuisine; no Norwegian I ever knew was remotely as arrogant, implicitly superior, and generally impossible as this “Sigerson” person. And no, before you ask, it would be almost impossible for me to ex
plain exactly what made him so impossible. His voice? his carriage? his regard, that way of studying one as though one were a canal on Mars, or a bacterium hitherto unknown to mankind? Whatever the immediate cause, I disliked him on sight; and should I learn from you today that he was in reality a prince of your England, this would not change my opinion by a hair. Strengthen it, in fact, I should think.
Nevertheless. Nevertheless, he was, beyond any debate or cavil, a better violinist than I. His tone was richer, his attack at once smoother and yet more vivid; his phrasing far more adventurous than I would ever have dared—or could have brought off, had I dared. I can be as jealous, and even spiteful, as the next man, but I am not a fool. He deserved to sit in the first violinist’s chair—my chair for nineteen years. It was merely justice, nothing more.
When he first came to my house—as I recall, he was literally just off the mail coach that sometimes picks up a passenger or two from the weekly Bucharest train—he asked my name, gave his own, and handed me a letter of introduction written by a former schoolmate of mine long since gone on to better things. The letter informed me that the bearer was “a first-rate musician, well schooled and knowledgeable, who has elected, for personal reasons, to seek a situation with a small provincial orchestra, one preferably located as far off the conventional routes of trade and travel as possible. Naturally, old friend, I thought of you …”
Naturally. Sigerson—he gave no other name then—watched in silence from under dark, slightly arched brows as I perused the letter. He was a tall man, as I have said, appearing to be somewhere in his early forties, with a bold, high-bridged nose—a tenor’s nose—in a lean face. I remember clearly a thin scar, looking to be fairly recent, cutting sharply across his prominent left cheekbone. The mouth was a near twin to that scar, easily as taut and pale, and with no more humor that I could see. His eyes were a flat gray, without any hint of blue, as such eyes most often have, and he had a habit of closing them and pressing his right- and left-hand fingertips against each other when he was at his most attentive. I found this particularly irksome, as I did his voice, which was slightly high and slightly strident, to my ear at least. Another might not have noticed it.
Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years Page 7