“You spoke to the reporters?” I demanded.
“I am the chief surgeon.”
“You told them I was a criminal?”
“A misquotation. The reporters could not write as fast as I spoke, so they put words in my mouth.”
“You gave them my name?”
Dr. Maison folded the paper and dumped it in my lap. “You’d better get healthy and get out. I cannot shield you from the press any longer.”
Suddenly it struck me: I could use Le Temps to draw Silence in.
The demon within him desired one thing even more than blood: ink. He was planning to return to the public stage as Sherlock Holmes, was no doubt already committing the crimes that he would later “solve.” Every morning, he would be reading Le Temps from masthead to obituaries, would be looking for depictions of his own crimes to see how he was portrayed. I would make sure he got some bad press. A few printed sentences every day could draw him in for a final confrontation.
“There’s no need to shield me from the press,” I called after Dr. Maison as he walked out. “Let them come.”
HE LET them come.
First to arrive was a young, nervous man from Le Temps, and then a middle-aged Brit—the Paris correspondent of the London Times—and then a succession of men from penny presses. Each reporter said he would feature me if I promised an exclusive. I granted one exclusive after another for the mere price of a subscription to each paper, delivered right to my bed.
Next morning, I awoke feeling markedly improved: a clearer lung, a sharper mind, and a pile of newspapers across my bed. I read all of them with interest. My tale, which had grown tall in the telling, had grown even taller in the writing. Le Temps reported it as follows:
THE “VETERAN” TAKES ON THE “RIPPER”
A day after the double murder at Les Invalides, the witness has thrown down a gauntlet for the killer. “Harold Silence is a thug,” said Thomas Carnacki. “Paris shouldn’t fear this man. He’s not a Ripper. He’s not even a Cutter. He’s more of a Scraper, a Filer—irritating but not really dangerous. He’s no Moriarty. He’s playing at crime. Moriarty was crime.”
Carnacki received treatment at Les Invalides by pretending to be a French veteran. He is in fact an English con man who speaks only pidgin French. “Harold Silence wants to be a big man. He’ll stage a few crimes, badly planned, but sure to capture headlines. He’ll try to terrorize the city, but Paris shouldn’t fear a titmouse. Once I’m well, I’ll capture him myself.”
I smiled in satisfaction. The reporter had included all my best lines—all that Ripper, Cutter, Scraper, Filer nonsense, the bit about Moriarty being crime, the contention that Silence was a titmouse. That was rhetoric.
The account in the Times was less conscientiously written—but more powerful.
GENERALS FIGHT TO SUCCEED EMPEROR OF CRIME
James Moriarty, the Caesar of Crime, lies dead. Now the men who slew him are fighting for his throne. His Brutus, who struck the “most unkindest cut of all,” was a onetime underling named Harold Silence. Moriarty’s Cassius, the other “honorable man” who struck a blow, was a Cambridge-educated Russian named Thomas Carnacki. Both men now lay claim to Moriarty’s empire, and they are turning Paris into their battleground.
From his sickbed in the veteran’s hospital in Paris, Carnacki promised “murder and mayhem” once he was well enough to stand. Harold Silence meanwhile has begun what Carnacki considered a crime spree “bent on stealing headlines.”
Carnacki believes he is the rightful successor to Moriarty, who was brilliant and relentless. “Silence isn’t the right material. He’s a stupid post.”
I laughed aloud at those lines, even though I hadn’t actually spoken any of them. The middle-aged man from the Times was apparently a frustrated novelist, compelled to turn facts into literature. Still, he’d done well. It was just this sort of grandstanding that would bring Silence out of the woodwork.
The best piece of sensationalism, though, came from the Raconteur, a penny-press paper that twisted my tale by putting it into Silence’s mouth:
RIPPER OF PARIS VOWS TERROR
The “Ripper of Paris” sent a postcard to the RACONTEUR about his current crime spree. The postcard appears below:
Dear Raconteur:
Paris belongs to me. I will take all the money, and the Metropolitan Police cannot stop me. They are too stupid The one man who could help you is lying near death’s door at Les Invalides. I will kick him across the threshold. Once he is gone, I will crown myself emperor of France. Bide my warning!
Ripper of Paris
An obvious fabrication: Silence would never admit that I could stop him. In fact, he would be affronted by the notion.
A postcard that sounded much more authentic appeared in another article in Le Temps:
METROPOLITAN POLICE WAYLAID BY “BOMB”
The city police department was paralyzed this morning by a postcard signed “Ripper of Paris.”
Good morning, men!
Hit your beats. Keep the street urchins safe, but let your own brats die. A bomb! A bomb! Call off classes and get the kids out and look under the headmistress’s desk.
Ripper of Paris
This threat sent the detectives of the Metropolitan Police rushing to the school of Madame Bouvoir, where their children were enrolled. Officers cleared the building and found, beneath the headmistress’s desk, a wooden box crudely nailed to the floor. After hours of careful work, they removed the box to discover that the prankster had left not a bomb but a similar postcard, which said simply, “Next time … boom!”
This was no joke. Terrorizing children, waylaying law enforcement—Silence was showing Paris how powerful he was and how vulnerable it was. And while Paris focused on this great, empty crime, it nearly missed what Silence truly was up to:
FOILED BREAK-IN AT THE LOUVRE
The palace of the Louvre and its treasure trove of great artwork were the targets of a petty and cowardly criminal last night. In the early morning hours, a night watchman heard a crash and came running to discover a back door hanging ajar. Its wrought-iron knob and lock had been shattered by the blow of a blunt instrument. The guard called for comrades to sweep the museum, but the perpetrator had apparently been scared away. By dawn, the management had sent a locksmith to replace the ruined knob and lock.
This was no foiled break-in. No thief would destroy a wrought-iron lock when the building had a thousand windows. The perpetrator’s target could not have been artwork, but rather the lock itself.
Silence must have been the “locksmith” who appeared the next morning. He probably hadn’t even been summoned by “the management,” but had simply shown up, counting on bureaucracy not to notice. He had then replaced the lock with one to which he held the key, giving himself an open door into the Louvre.
But what was he after? I could only guess that he planned an elaborate heist—to strike at the heart of Paris, steal her most precious artworks, sell them for a fortune on the black market, and then “solve” the crime by handing a patsy over to the police.
Next morning, Le Temps reported a story that confirmed it:
RIPPER THREATENS ARTWORKS
The Louvre received the most recent Ripper postcard last night. The card is reprinted with the hope that readers might identify the penmanship.
Dear Louvre—
I’m coming. Your art is mine. No masterpiece is safe. Watch me take Mona from under your eyes. You cannot stop me. No one can, especially not that pretender Thomas Carnacki.
Ripper of Paris
This message was undoubtedly from Silence. I recognized the handwriting, for one, but also, I recognized the demon’s opinion of me—disdain bordering on loathing. The postcard had prompted the Louvre to hire two more security guards—and I would have wagered that both of them were in the employ of Silence. He was stacking the deck with men on the inside and a door on the outside. No doubt he was making dozens of other adjustments so that he could walk out with the greatest
works of Western art.
Then, of course, “Sherlock Holmes” would arrive on the scene and catch the thief.
My plan had failed. I had not drawn Silence in for a final confrontation. The only way to stop him was to go to the Louvre. But how could I, weak as I was, alone as I was?
NEXT MORNING, a man appeared at the door, a man with a kindly, mustachioed face and broad shoulders and a long black doctor’s bag clutched in one hand. He approached my bedside and said, “Hello, Thomas. You may not remember me, but I helped save your life. I am Dr. John Watson.”
Stunned, I stared at him for perhaps ten seconds before I found my tongue. “An honor, sir.” I shook his hand.
Dr. Watson lowered himself into the chair where Anna had last sat. “I hope you’re doing well.”
“No,” I said truthfully. “Well, physically, yes—thanks to you, and to Dr. Maison. But in other ways, no.”
Watson nodded. “I know. Or at least, I know in part. You’ve been the speculation of Paris—you and this Harold Silence … heirs to a criminal empire.” He laughed bleakly. “I have to wonder what sort of man I rescued.”
I sat up—the wound in my chest ached to do it, but I wanted to look Watson straight in the eye. “The papers have it wrong. I’m not trying to become a crime lord. I’m trying to stop Silence from becoming one.”
Watson blinked thoughtfully. “I’d suspected as much. A good doctor has intuition about his patients—those who are telling the truth and those who are lying. You were unconscious, of course, on the day that I saved you, but the woman—Anna—she was a truth teller, and she loved you, and in her eyes I knew you were a good man.” A gentle smile creased his face, but the look dissolved a moment later into sadness. “How is it that you got tangled up with Moriarty—?”
“Well, uh—it was because of Anna. She was his daughter.”
Watson clenched his jaw. “Yes, I’d read as much.”
How much should I tell him? How much could he absorb before believing me to be insane? Guardedly, I told him about that first day: “I met her in Meiringen, Switzerland, and fell in love with her. She took me out to the Reichenbach Falls”—Watson stiffened—“and we witnessed a murder.”
“The murder of my friend Sherlock Holmes,” Watson supplied.
“Yes,” I responded, “and the death of her father, too. Anna was traumatized. She hadn’t known what her father was planning. I tried to whisk her away, only to get shot in the shoulder.” I pulled down the neck of my hospital gown to show him the wound. “It was one of Moriarty’s henchmen—the one you read about. To him, Anna and I were just loose ends—Anna because she was Moriarty’s heir and I because, well, because I loved her. We escaped him at Reichenbach, but the man caught up to us at the Gare Saint-Lazare station, and, well, you know the rest.”
“Yes. I know. I was on that train. I had tracked that man to Bern and followed him onto the train, but I lost him then. He had assumed the disguise of a porter, which I later found out, but not before you were stabbed.”
I nodded grimly.
“But why have you been giving all these interviews?” Watson asked, his eyes wide and almost feverish. “Why have you been—filling the papers with all these stories?”
What to tell him? “Are you a religious man, Doctor?”
His hale features flushed. “Not less than any other good Englishman—but not more, either.”
“Do you believe that spirits live on after death?”
“I do,” he said with a firm nod. Watson seemed to stare beyond Les Invalides, beyond Paris to some dusty battlefield. “I was in Afghanistan, and I saw thousands of men die. Sometimes … I could feel the uncanny creep of the spirit up into the air.”
“Then I will tell you what I saw a week ago. I saw my Anna die, and I saw the evil soul of her killer rise from his body and take hold of Harold Silence. Do you understand?”
“I do,” Watson said, as if in a trance. “I had the most … preternatural experience …” He turned to me, his eyes lit by an inner flame. “When I was in my stateroom on the Paris Express from Bern, I felt a presence. I felt a mind—the mind—the greatest mind of the nineteenth century there with me, prodding at me, almost laughing, telling me not to grieve or fear, telling me that he was still alive. Do you understand? I mean the mind of Sherlock Holmes!”
I stared in shock at the good doctor and could not find words.
Watson waved a hand before his own face, and his eyes clouded. “I know! I know! Fantastical tales. Faerie stories. Holmes is dead. I know that. I must accept that.” He slowly lifted his face, and the flame had returned to his eyes. “But for a moment on that express train, I knew that he was alive. In some land of the dead, my friend Sherlock Holmes was still alive. And so, Mr. Carnacki, I very much understand what you are saying.”
“That’s … that’s good. But you had the opposite experience to me,” I said. “You felt the soul of a good man return to you from beyond. I saw the soul of an evil man enter Harold Silence and remain here on earth. And I want to stop him, if for no other reason than to avenge Anna.”
Watson sat for a long while, considering.
“Silence is planning a heist at the Louvre,” I said.
Watson paled. “I’d hoped that postcard was a hoax!”
“I’m afraid not. He plans to steal the greatest works of Western art and fence them on the black market. I want to stop him, but I need your help.”
Watson bit his lip but then said, “Why do you need me?”
“You’re the partner of Sherlock Holmes—the greatest detective who ever lived!”
“Quite.”
“I need your expertise,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “Will you come with me to the Louvre for a final confrontation?”
Watson drew a long, slow breath and said, “Yes.”
47
EXORCISM
Dr. John Watson felt certain reservations about his new companion—this callow lad who had so readily deceived the press. So proficient a liar as Thomas Carnacki could in fact be lying once again.
But Watson believed Carnacki, for a number of reasons.
First of all, the lad loved Anna, and he was trying to avenge her. He wouldn’t lie about something like that.
Secondly, Watson was certain that Carnacki was no crime lord. Thomas was capable of caprice, yes, but not malice. He was a scamp, not a murderer. During the Afghan campaign, Watson had learned to take the quick measure of a man and decide if he was friend or foe. Watson had guessed wrong only once, and it was the reason he took a bullet and was retired from the service. He felt certain he was guessing right about this man.
But perhaps the most compelling justification for Watson’s trust was that Carnacki was just the sort of man that Holmes would have trusted. Carnacki could have been a graduate of the Baker Street Irregulars—a bright-eyed, streetwise rogue with hands dirty from hard work and a back strong from heavy lifting. He would have scored well with Holmes, and so he scored well with Watson.
“I trust him,” Watson told himself. “But I still want to see him in action.”
The first measure of Carnacki’s tactical skill would be his escape from Les Invalides. Dr. Maison had decided to bill young Thomas for a great many things: a four-hour surgery, a week of aftercare, personal damages to Dr. Maison’s cheek (caused by the slap of a gendarme), property damages to Les Invalides (caused when Harold Silence broke a window to escape), and ethical damages to Paris itself (caused by the rabid reporters and their sensational stories).
Watson could have paid to get him out, but instead he planned to test the young man. Carnacki was the only patient in the entire ward, the ward had no low windows or easy egress, and he could not move very quickly. If he succeeded in this small matter, perhaps Watson would throw in with him in the Louvre operation.
Thomas had a plan, and the first step was to summon the reporters of Paris. Watson arrived to watch the show.
“Gentlemen of the press,” Thomas Carnacki said, his
voice ragged and his face ashen as he glanced weakly around his sickbed. “Thank you for coming … to witness my death … my murder!”
That got them. The whole flock of reporters scratched and scribbled furiously.
“Thank you for writing about me … . I’d hoped … that your words could save me … but my enemy was too strong. He has killed me.”
“Harold Silence!” hissed one of the reporters, his voice charged with disbelief and anger.
Flash powder went off, casting the scene in stark light and spectral shadows. The dry scratch of lead on paper trailed off, and one or two reporters swallowed.
“Silence has silenced me at last … . I was under his thumb … . Lived and died by his whim … . My only hope was blackmail. Yes. That’s what they call it … . But it was not blackmail for money. It was for my life.”
“What did he do? Why are you dying?” one reporter asked.
“Look at my face,” Thomas said, raising his blue-white visage toward them. “Cyanosis. Cyanide!”
That caused a sensation. Reporters wrote down that terrible word and nattered about the horrible crime.
“How could Harold Silence get past Dr. Maison?” asked one reporter.
Thomas fixed the man with a terrible look. “Harold Silence is Dr. Maison!”
The room erupted in angry cries. In the welter of emotion, Thomas slumped back gently into his pillow, let out a last long breath, and stared with fixed, dead eyes. The reporters froze. More flash powder went off, and Thomas did not blink.
The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls Page 25