“Why do you believe such a thing ?”
“Because last night he fired a shot at me. It was well after midnight. I’d had a dream, of the ordinary variety if there is any such thing, and I could not get back to sleep. I thought a short walk might serve as a constitutional. I got dressed. No one was out. But soon I spotted a man in shadow who seemed to be tailing me. He was very tall. Blond hair. Then the gunshot, which tore a chunk of plaster out of the wall beside which I was standing, a hair’s breadth away.”
“It could have been a common criminal.”
“Then why did he depart after the shot? Why didn’t he rob me?”
“Perhaps he meant only to scare you, Señor Borges. Perhaps you’re already out of danger.”
Borges shakes his head. “The tall man who keeps to the shadows has hovered about my house every night between midnight and four a.m. I need him to be identified. That is where you come in. Will you take the case?”
The PI looks away. “If this manuscript is what you say it is . . .” He touches the bundle of pages with his fingertips. “It would be worth a fortune to publishers and even more to those countless, obsessive truecrime collectors of mementos of the great Sherlock Holmes.”
Borges nods agreement. “But this assassin wants more than just to acquire the manuscript.”
The PI waits.
“He wants me dead.”
“Why?”
“You will have to read the manuscript to understand.”
The PI sits back in his swiveling chair as if he’s had enough of Borges and his fantastical claims.
That’s when Borges puts two thousand pesos on the desk. He has saved the money for a holiday to Europe. “Your reading fee.”
The PI sits up straight once more. He nods and reaches for the manuscript. “I’ll read it tonight at my home and get back to you tomorrow.” He stands, as if to dismiss his new client.
Borges remains seated. “I can’t allow the manuscript out of my sight, as its value is impossible to overestimate. And, in saying this, I refer to more than its monetary, collectible value, which you’ve already recognized. I’m paying you to read it now, while I remain here. Surely, you’ve worked harder in your career to earn a good day’s wages.” He indicates the stack of pesos on the desk. “A good month’s wages.”
The PI takes the money. He sits back in his chair. “So you’ll just watch me read.”
Borges nods.
The PI points across the room. “I keep a pot of coffee on the hot plate over there, Señor Borges. It may be a bit stale by now, being the end of the day, but I’m sure you know how to make a fresh pot. Everything you’ll need is there.” Then he reaches for the calabash gourd on his desk. “I’ll have my maté, if you don’t mind, as it promises to be a long night.” He picks up the manuscript and reads the title aloud, “Uncertainty, by Sherlock Holmes—a True Account.”
He turns from the title page to page one.
CHAPTER ONE
ENGLAND, 1928
I am not who you think I am.
Nor am I who you think I was, which may be more to the point, considering the misinformation disseminated to readers of true crime by my late friend and chronicler Dr. John H. Watson. Oh, I acknowledge that his inaccuracies were never complete falsehoods but more matters of exaggeration, concision, or omission. Rather, it is I who bears responsibility for the single instance of pure fabrication in the accounts, namely, that I retired to a country life. Not so. Watson opposed the ruse. He argued it would be a breach of his “journalistic integrity,” to which I reminded him of the paltry liberties he’d taken with details in his accounts of our cases. Unmoved, he demanded my reasons. I told him the truth: that I needed refuge from the reading public, who’d turned my London residence into a tourist attraction. So Watson set aside his “journalistic” ethics and, in a late account, described my having retired to a pastoral cottage with a lovely view, a housekeeper, achingly dull pastimes, and not the slightest hint of further, intellectual interest.
The ruse worked well, despite the explicit disclosures in early accounts of our cases that inactivity is the bane of my existence, suggesting that if ever I actually were relegated to the life of a country squire I would, before two full moons illuminated the insipid pastures, put no needle into my vein, as I did in my youth to ward off boredom, but a bullet into my brain.
So, if the great detective did not retire years ago to the country, doddering among harmless hobbies, then where has he been?
Patience, please.
Allow me to remain a moment longer in the confessional mode, hopeful of establishing that what is to follow is not akin to the single, aforementioned fictional enterprise I foisted upon Watson but is true down to its most minute detail. Thus, I must acknowledge one last misleading element of my friend’s famous chronicles, which involves neither fabrication nor any of the minor dramatic license that characterized Watson’s narrative strategies; rather, this chronic inaccuracy turns on subtler elements of style, tone, and attitude over which he had no real control.
Specifically, I refer to the Victorian sensibility of John H. Watson himself.
It is true that most of our recorded adventures occurred forty or more years ago during the Victorian era, gas-lit streets, and hansom cabs, so one may argue that there is nothing misleading about Watson’s texts reflecting the values and tenor of the times. However, what complicates this justification is that among those values, particularly in cultured circles, was the propensity to paint over violence and mortality with either the absurd grotesqueries of the gothic or the banal consolations of the sentimental, both of which elevate bloody murders or premature death to perverse art. Inevitably, the solving of crimes was likewise elevated in the public consciousness from its gritty reality into a reassuring, ethical object lesson. In truth, the solution to a mystery usually proves a mere final, pathetic turn in a morally empty series of logically related events. Real crime almost never offers reassurance.
So, Watson was not insincere in his depictions.
He was simply a man of his time, a true believer in the inherent supremacy of Western (specifically, British) civilization. The death of Victoria did not spell the end of the era for my friend. Nor even did the slaughter of the Great War disillusion his view of nationalistic glory. Indeed, on numerous occasions during the past decade, as my friend and I took the air together on the crowded promenades of London, he’d break midconversation to race across the street, dodging trolleys and auto-omnibuses, to hand five bob to one of the legion of crippled veterans (amputees, burn victims, the blind) who were scattered like wind-blown dandelions on street corners all over the capital. My friend’s charitable impulse was all to the good. But in each instance he’d spoil his generosity by reciting Tennyson to the wounded wretches as he handed over the coins, “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley of Death rode the six hundred,” determinedly unaware of the skeptical expression on the faces (or, in some cases, what passed for faces) of the disfigured boys subjected to his recitations. I’d usually have to pull Watson away or he’d recite the whole damn poem.
I loved him none the less for it.
Was I changed by the new century or the horrors of the Great War? Actually, no more than Watson.
But here’s the difference between us: I never was a Victorian gentleman (and dash it all if I want to be remembered as one, however romantic the glow of gas streetlights or the clopping of horses’ hooves on pavement may seem to the nostalgic legion who attend Leicester Square playhouses to watch actors in period costume portray me as a Victorian hero).
So, finally, the most significant inaccuracy in Watson’s chronicles of our adventures was to suggest that he and I were, essentially, of like sensibility. His authorship was limited by his imagination, and he could not imagine my being anything but a Victorian gentleman. He often acknowledged in his writings my unconventional characteristics and habits, some of which were real, some misunderstandings. Once, when I told him I
was both ignorant and indifferent as to whether the sun revolved around the earth or the earth around the sun, he took me literally and reported as much in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Absurd! Of course, many of my interests were esoteric. But, for all my eccentricities, Watson always held an unshakable confidence that I wanted to uphold the right, to deliver justice like an avenging angel, and to serve my monarch and country. As a gentleman, he could imagine me no other way. And I did uphold the right. But not out of commitment to right over wrong, whatever those words may mean to you or to anyone. And I did deliver justice, but only because others insisted on it and proceeded with its execution upon completion of my work. And I did serve monarch and country. But not for monarch and country. So what explains my years of single-minded work to solve complex criminal problems? Sympathy for the victims? What interest have I in the anonymous dead? Didn’t the Galilean philosopher Himself say, “Let the dead bury the dead”? Alternatively, was it for money or glory that I practiced my relentless craft? Of course not. Such egotistic considerations are a waste of brain cells. The truth is I accomplished much as a consulting detective simply because it was my nature to do so, to hunt prey, as instinctual and absent of moral considerations as a lion stalking a gazelle. What more obvious phrase might I have employed with Watson to indicate such animalistic motives than “Watson, the game’s afoot!”
But my friend never comprehended the atavistic nature implied in my enthusiastic imperative.
I was not who he thought I was.
Now, I am seventy-three years old. But I am no dinosaur, moving through the world unaware of my own extinction. I am a Modern, just as I’ve always been (even before there was such a term). Trust this: it is not I who has kept up with the age, but the age that has caught up with me. Yes I, the rational paragon, the human calculating machine designed to narrow all possibilities down to a single truth . . . but I have always known that some uncertainties never narrow to one truth. And this awareness might have been evident in Watson’s chronicles except that he could never keep from adding his own modifying phrase to assuage his discomfort with uncertainty. For example, in “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” he quotes me as follows: “I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would cover the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct can only be determined by fresh information, which we shall no doubt find waiting for us.”
No doubt find waiting for us?
I never said such a thing. I live in the real world. I always have. And there is always doubt as to what awaits us. My Boswell was incapable of accepting that I was literally suggesting there could be seven separate explanations, each as valid as any other, for perpetuity. For my chronicler, altering my dialogue (a mere phrase) was hardly a matter of choice. Doubtless, he recorded what he recalled hearing me say. He could recall it no other way. Why? Because Queen Victoria’s Empire could not be built upon uncertainty.
But, like it or not, Modernity is.
Which brings us to these past years, placing me . . . where? We’ve ruled out the country.
Still, you would never have found me—not if you were standing three feet away.
Nevertheless, I will tell you where I’ve been. I do so to set into motion this narrative, which, when finished, I will show to no one, but will arrange for its being transported and hidden unlabeled in the stacks of some disorganized library far away, to be found by a stranger perhaps decades from now, or, just as likely, never. You may ask: why opt for obfuscation when publication would please so many (my fame alone insuring publishing success)? After you read to the end you will need not ask.
When it comes to my use of disguise, often noted in Watson’s accounts, I have no secret method. Competence and attention to detail suffices. And so, under various assumed identities, I spent most of the past five years disguised as a variety of visiting lecturers at Oxford and Cambridge Universities—a new identity and area of expertise each term. For example, an exiled Russian expert in zoology, a disgraced Italian nobleman recognized as the world’s leading authority on medieval alchemical studies, an American industrialist with controversial views on Economics that are reviled and respected by both capitalists and communists, and other such extravagant and expert personages. I attained these positions through counterfeited curricula vitae and actual publications in respected international journals in numerous disciplines, all under a repertoire of assumed names. This provided me with diversion as well as the occasional intellectual exchange with a brilliant young mind. And there was value even in my interactions with ordinary thinkers, including fellow faculty members, who, incidentally, were no more difficult to fool with my disguises than were the students. These ordinary exchanges kept me apprised of the new, be it Surrealism, Dadaism, jazz, the “hardboiled” school of American detective stories, German Expressionist cinema, and analytic philosophy (as an aside, I was the guest of Bertrand Russell for numerous “welcome” luncheons in the splendid dining hall of King’s College, each time in one of my new guises, and even the famous sage himself has never been wise to my trick). This rogue academic life eased the passage of time. I was looking for nothing more, though I must say, not without a hint of pride, that there are few alive who could have accomplished such a ruse, particularly at such prestigious universities. By the time of this final case, I was, under a series of pseudonyms, a leading authority and contributor of major breakthroughs in half a dozen academic subjects. All without ever leaving England, even if the subject was Siberian tigers or Bauxite formations on the salt flats of Utah. Clues to significant academic advancements are always contained in the current literature, at least for one who is fully trained in the art of deduction. That is to say, me.
Nothing to brag about.
Indeed, my academic impersonations were always something of a bore, if truth be told. So why did I engage in such endeavors?
That is a question for which I hadn’t a good answer, until recently.
Everything changed earlier this year at St. John’s College, Cambridge.
There, in my final guise, as a goateed, hunched, and slightly palsied visiting lecturer I’d named Heinrich von Schimmel, I conducted a weekly seminar, quite comfortable in the paneled, second-floor rooms I’d requested for their view of the college’s finest Tudor period courtyard. This time, my expertise, or, rather, the heavily accented Dr. von Schimmel’s expertise, was the history of classical physics, Aristotle through Newton. My recent publications on the subject had proven sufficiently important that the good Dr. von Schimmel had been offered a full lectureship at the Sorbonne (naturally, I turned it down, as I had no interest in lecturing on any subject for more than one term and, of equal importance, I wanted to remain close enough to London to occasionally enjoy the comfort of my townhouse, which, incidentally, is no longer located anywhere near the noisy tourist attraction that 221B Baker Street has become).
But Dr. von Schimmel would not finish the term. It happened like this:
I had just completed the week’s tutorial. While the last of my students clumsily gathered his writing materials to leave my rooms, I settled imperiously into one of the two comfortable club chairs angled at forty-five degrees on either side of a great, stone fireplace.
I lit a cigarette.
“Good day, sir,” the ungainly student muttered, as he fumbled his way out, shutting the door behind him.
Alone, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply of the fine Turkish tobacco.
But after a moment, the door opened again. Had the young bungler forgotten something ? Surely he hadn’t returned to discuss the afternoon’s lecture, as I’d given to Dr. von Schimmel an uninviting personality and a propensity to ridicule questions (perhaps I’d allowed the common British stereotype of German sternness to narrow my characterization, but no one gets his dramatis personae perfectly right all the time). I looked up with an aggrieved, Teutonic expression.
But it was no student standing in the doorway.
A man of nearly my years stepped inside, lea
ving the door open behind him. He wore a thick, walrus-style moustache and boasted the powerful body of a former cricket or rugby player who had taken somewhat too enthusiastically to second helpings of Yorkshire pudding. Still, the big man moved with a grace that echoed the athleticism of his youth. He looked familiar, though I did not at first place him.
“You must be looking for another room,” I asserted in my thick German accent. “Please be on your way.”
“Are you Professor von Schimmel?” His accent indicated that he’d been raised and educated in Edinburgh but had lived the past four or five decades in England, specifically Surrey and then London.
“Yes, I am Von Schimmel,” I snapped. I took a drag on my cigarette, holding it in the continental fashion, between thumb and forefinger. “Who are you and what do you want?” I asked, exhaling the cloud of smoke.
He shook his head as if the words he sought would not come. He merely stared at me, fascinated or confused by my appearance. After a moment, he opted to answer only the first of my questions. “My name is Arthur Conan Doyle,” he said, nervously rubbing his thumb and forefinger on the brim of the bowler hat he held at his side.
I should have placed his face immediately.
Conan Doyle was a writer of minor repute. He was best known for a recent novel featuring dinosaurs still existent in modern times, a series of Medieval-period romances, and an extensive history of the Boer War, for which he’d been knighted. I’d never read any of his books but knew about his oeuvre because his one foray into mystery fiction, a short story called “B.24,” published decades before, had drawn the ire and, ultimately, the legal action of Dr. Watson, who believed it to be a barely concealed plagiarism of our true experiences involving Lady Brackenstall. Watson and Conan Doyle settled their conflict and, to my knowledge, Conan Doyle never again ventured into detective writing. Still, I’d observed his name in periodicals. Some years ago he had written a few mercifully forgotten articles in support of two country girls who claimed to have photographed fairies; of late, most of his “nonfiction” work had consisted of essays expressing his ardent support of Spiritualism, the pseudoscience of séance room fraud.
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