alt.sherlock.holmes

by Gini Koch

  Mrs. Hendrix’s nephew sat next to Bill and took a sip of his coffee. He was a Black Panther, sure enough, in full uniform: turtleneck, black leather jacket, only missing the beret. “Mr. Holmes. Dr. Watson.”

  “I like your new style. Don’t worry about us. We like the Black Panthers, don’t we, Watson?”

  Joseph cracked a smile. “They told me about you stopping by. I wished I’d been there to see it.”

  “Your aunt is worried about you. Your mother, too.”

  Joseph looked down at the table, then back up at us. “I know. They shouldn’t worry. Can’t you tell them not to? I know they’re trying to get by. We are, too. Why can’t they be proud of me, of us? Things are starting to change. We have to show that we can’t be stopped by the pigs. They bash in our window, we gotta fix it. They smash in our faces, what should we do? Doctor won’t see us. Nobody listens. They tell you and my mom and my auntie that we’re thugs with guns, that’s what you all believe.”

  I had had just about enough of this. “Now listen here, Joseph. You want to run around with guns, blowing stuff up, go ahead. But don’t get mad when people are scared of you and call you thugs. Every change that’s come has come about from peaceful protest. Violence never solved anything.”

  “Violence never solved anything except creating slavery while stopping it. You really don’t see it, do you? You don’t see the black brothers and sisters being put down on the street, stopped, searched, groped, and beaten for no reason at all? Those people you see on your televisions being hit is news to you, but it has never been news to the black man, the red man, the brown man, or the yellow man. The world you operate in is a different world than we live in. We do not advocate violence, but we will not have violence done to us, do you understand? We will demand our rights and maintain our dignity ourselves. We will create change, and if it must come from the barrel of a gun, then so be it.”

  “Well said, Joseph. Well said.” Bill was smiling at me. “All this military industrial complex is tied up together, doctor. The war isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom. Like if you have a patient with a cancer who’s vomiting. You don’t give him Alka-Seltzer. You don’t treat the nausea. You find the root cause and work on that. Cancer. What causes the cancer? Stop them smoking. Mr. Holmes is right. I’m an anti-war activist, but I also work for civil rights. Women’s lib. I do the dishes as does my wife. The Panthers are an enviable organization. You should go up there and see for yourself. The women work just as hard as the men. They train with guns. They do the front line work.”

  Joseph spoke back up. “That’s not how it used to be last year, they say, but the sisters started explaining a few months ago how they were being treated like second class citizens. They could shoot a gun just like we could cook the children’s breakfast. They were right. Like Mao says in the little red book: ‘We’re all resources for the revolution.’ Every one of us receives the blows of oppression on our backs, so every one of us can live and die for the revolution. We lost a few people, but after it all shook out, it seemed like it was the right ones who remained. The only ones we lost were people not committed to the struggle.” Joseph looked at his watch. “Anyway. I got to go. Bill, I’ll let you know when Chairman Fred’s coming into town. Might not be till springtime, maybe even the summer.”

  “Okay, Joseph. Please pass on my regards. I look forward to meeting him.”

  Joseph stood up and shook Bill’s hands, then Sherlock’s, and finally mine. He stared me in the eye like he was daring me to look away, and I could see the controlled rage burning in him.

  “WELL, THAT YOUNG man has changed in the past six months, hasn’t he, Watson?”

  “He sure has. He’s gotten all angry and strident; sounds like a young Malcolm X in training.”

  Sherlock looked at Bill. “The last time we spoke he was so timid he barely shook my hand, and wouldn’t meet my eye at all.”

  “I don’t know which is worse, to be honest,” I said. “I’m glad he’s got some self-confidence, but he’s so angry about everything. Racial relations’ve made great strides in the past ten years. Hell, just in the three years I was away stitching people up in Vietnam things changed so much I almost didn’t recognize America. He would have had trouble coming in here, in ’62, ’63, but today he hardy drew a glance. All that... I don’t think they really appreciate all the strides, how far things have come.”

  Bill was watching me with a look of horror on his face. “Now hang on there just a minute, sir. Just try, just imagine, for a few minutes, that everything he says is right. That the police go after him, stop him on the street for no reason. If you spat on the sidewalk, you might a dirty look, but if you were black, you might get brought downtown. Stopped for no reason, imprisoned on trumped up charges. That you couldn’t get a mortgage in a good neighborhood, weren’t allowed to buy property, that if you lost your job, someone just said, ‘Oh, it’s the troublesome whitey again. We shouldn’t hire them no more.’ What would that be like, do you think? What if you had all that, plus a history of slavery and Jim Crow and all that to boot?”

  “Well, that... that would be terrible. I couldn’t believe it’s that bad.”

  “Maybe that’s why you don’t have any sympathy for him. Try an exercise, just for a little while. Try believing what he says, see where it gets you.”

  “Do you know Joseph well, Bill?”

  “First time I’ve met him, actually. We’re trying to build alliances off the back of the disruption in Chicago. We need more than laws. We need social change. Black people need to come over for dinner, and we need to go to their churches, and find out what each other’s like. It’s not as easy as you might think. You have to work at it. I called and asked if I could meet with a representative of the New York Black Panthers, and Joseph is the one that showed up. That’s about all I know. How do you know him?”

  “Believe it or not, he’s related to our landlady. A formidable woman. I think you may have met her, in the bakery where you left your message? Speaking of, what seems to be your problem, that you would seek out the services of myself and Dr. Watson? I must warn you, I did not approve of the story which Watson typed up for Collins, and I imagine that nothing we do will prove to be very exciting.” This he said looking at me. “Tell us about your trouble, and please, don’t leave out any details, no matter how unimportant.”

  “You’re going to think it’s crazy.”

  “I promise you, Bill, I take great care to not prejudice my opinions on anything but bare facts. Ask Doc there if you want, but I have no reason whatsoever to judge you for your problems.”

  “Okay. Well. I’m an academic. Maths and physics, as you say. It seems like someone’s stealing my research. I published a paper last year, and then within six months the formulae became obsolete. I’ve always been better at doing research and coming up with formulae and proofs than I have been at writing up, but in the past two years I’ve submitted half a dozen papers only to be told that there was similar work already under consideration, that I’d been beaten to the punch. I’m afraid that people are starting to think that I’m spying on my colleagues, but I haven’t even met any of the people who appear to be publishing my work.”

  Sherlock put his hand up. “So this is... six papers in the past year? That’s fast work.”

  “It’s a new area, reasonably wide open. And, like I say, I’m slow at writing up, but my head of department suggested that I might get sidelined for funding if I didn’t publish soon, so I’ve been trying to focus, get some work out, but it’s almost like people have access to my notes.”

  “Surely this isn’t so surprising? That people would be working in a new field, and that others might have come up with some of the same ideas or the same proofs that you have? There’s a long history of people coming up with the same ideas in science over the years. Fermat and Descartes; Darwin’s discoveries in the Galápagos and Wallace’s voyages near Indonesia.”

  “It could be, but it seems really unlikely. It doesn’t seem
to be happening to anyone else. I got asked to peer review one of the articles, and it repeated a mistake in my first pass.”

  “Who are these other researchers? Do they know each other? Are they at the same university, or conference, or members of the same academic society?”

  “They’re spread out: at Cal Berkeley, Purdue, Case Western, MIT. Some of them work in different areas. None of it’s impossible, but it seems incredibly unlikely: I’ve been essentially unable to publish for over a year. Maybe it’s just bad luck.

  “The weird thing is that my notebook keeps disappearing. I did lose it today. And the last time I came to New York. I carry it with me everywhere. My research and work has gone beyond physics into more pure math—set theory and mathematical logic. Inspiration might strike anywhere, and you need paper and pen to write it down. Thoughts. Theories. All that. Pretty boring stuff, unless you’re a mathematician. It’s always here, in my breast pocket.” He patted the pocket of his tweed jacket, flashing his suede elbow patches.

  Sherlock perked up. “Oh, really? That is interesting. Tell me everything about these notebook disappearances. Anything you can remember.”

  “I came down yesterday. I had my notebook on the train; I was trying to work out some puzzles about bounded sets of infinity, and how they would work using different laws of physics. Doodling, mostly. Then I put it in my pocket. I got to NYU and the boilers must have been on overdrive because I had to open my window a crack just to breathe. They’d put me up in a dorm room this time. I put my notebook down on the desk and went down the hall to the toilet and had a quick wash and a shave, then came back to get ready to have dinner with my colleague. My notebook wasn’t there, and I looked through all the drawers. I didn’t think much of it, but there it was in the top drawer the next morning before I went out. I might’ve put it in there—I remembered the drawer being opened before I came in, like the student who’d stayed there before had forgotten to shut it when he unpacked, but I could swear I looked through the drawers when I came home.

  “I know how this sounds... crazy, right? I thought so, too, the first time it happened; I didn’t give it a second thought. But then I was thinking about it on the train going back the last time, and I could swear—I know, the mind plays tricks on you about this kind of stuff—that it’s happened every time I’ve come to New York for meetings.

  “I was telling my wife about it, how crazy it was, and she said, ‘Wait a minute, Bill, I have just the person you should talk to about it,’ and she pulled out her copy of Collins and there it was. New York, and the way you’d pulled all those threads together—well, that sure was something. I’d basically dismissed the whole idea, but then my notebook went missing again this morning, and I thought that maybe you’d have some ideas. You sure impressed me with that thing you did, knowing all that stuff about me when you came in. Maybe you could tell me if there’s anything to worry about, or if someone’s stealing my ideas or... or whatever. Or maybe that I’m just actually turning into an absentminded professor, and I’m actually not good enough.”

  “I didn’t do anything coming in here, Bill. I just observed and paid attention to what I saw, which is what most people don’t. Tell me, what’s in these notebooks of yours?”

  “Just mathematical formulae, scribblings, charts, sets. Doodles, sometimes, but I pretty much always use them when I’m working on some math problem. I don’t use it for anything else—look, I do grocery lists and things like that on deposit slips from my check book. Drives my wife crazy, because she’s always afraid I’m going to run out. There might be a doodle but it’s just that I can look at a doodle and it’ll jog me back to what I was thinking.”

  “And these formulae and data sets. Who could understand them? What are you working on, and with whom?”

  “It’s pretty abstract stuff. You’d have to have a PhD in mathematics. Most of the last six months we’ve been looking at ways of finding the roots of derivatives of multidimensional problems.”

  “So. Useful, but not an applied science; not likely to be corporate espionage, say.”

  “Not really. Some of it could be exciting to other people in bow ties and tweed jackets, but there aren’t so many like that out there. Certainly not cat burglars.”

  “And who have you been working with this on?”

  “A couple of guys from England. They come over a couple of times a year. There’s someone at NYU as well, though we’re mostly using him for his stock of Master’s students that we can get to think without paying them. We had a breakthrough a few years back, but I think we might be getting somewhere else, soon.”

  “Could the notebook disappearing be a prank?”

  “Maybe. I don’t stay in the same place, though. I get put up in student housing, and I stay with friends sometimes. Mathematicians and people I met on the Fulbright. There’s some anti-war activists as well. I’ve... I’ve been known to demonstrate against the war. It’s no secret. I’ve even printed up cards for people to carry in their wallets if they get arrested. Sometimes I stay with friends, most of whom are anti-war activists. They’re all over Brooklyn, in the upper east side, Spanish Harlem. Everywhere.”

  “Do you lose the notebook at the start of the trip, the end? Any pattern?”

  “Nope. I always find it again within a day, and it’s always when I come to New York, but never quite where I’ve left it. It’s maddening. Almost like...”

  “Like someone’s out to get you, undermine your confidence in yourself? Ruin your reputation?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Is there anyone you’ve made angry? Not necessarily someone in academia, now. And, this is important, it could be anyone at all. An ex-lover, friend, rival mathematician. Even, especially, if it’s someone for whom being kept out of the spotlight would be advantageous.”

  “I’m... I’m pretty boring in terms of enemies, as far as I know, Mr. Holmes. I’ve never cheated on my wife or anything like that, and I’m pretty sure she hasn’t either. I win research grants, but I’m not especially good at it, and it isn’t so hard, really. There’s always use for math and physics spilling out of the government, NASA and the Army and all that. Maybe I beat someone for a grant or a Fulbright and they’re jealous? But I don’t think so. I’ve been arrested and done sit-ins and all that.” He leans over and lowers his voice. “I’m, uh, very sympathetic with civil disobedience. I refused to pay income tax in 1966, and went public about that. I’ve also helped people plan break-ins to burn draft cards. There are a lot of Catholic priests and nuns who do the same kind of thing. Bishops, too, sometimes. They think that, despite what the government is saying, there are greater issues at stake. I can get behind that, you know?”

  Sherlock stared into an area about ten inches off of the top of the table, his chin on his fist. “Can I have a look at your notebook?”

  “But it’s lost, I’ve just told you. I could call you when it shows up again, if you want.”

  “Have you looked in your overcoat pocket?”

  Bill looked at Sherlock, his pupils dilating and his cheekbones flushing. He reached over to his London Fog overcoat folded on the chair next to him, and pulled it up, feeling in the pockets. He looked up at Sherlock with widening eyes. “How on Earth did you?”

  “I noticed it as soon as we walked in. I observed. I was beginning to wonder if you were testing me, but I wanted to hear you talk. Let’s assume that this is as you say, however. May I?” Sherlock pulled the notebook out with two fingers, holding it up to the light, and turning it this way and that, looking at the edges, and carefully at the spine and cover, before laying it on the table. “Can you see anything that looks different? Anything at all—a smudge, a crease, anything? I can see that you’re left-handed, see, there, where you open the pages. That’s your thumbprint. Let me see your hands.” Sherlock grabbed Bill’s hand and held it up, stretched the finger and thumb out, and then put the notebook in it. “Go on, open it up. Let me watch you. Yes, that’s what I thought.” And then he too
k it right back out of Bill’s hand, holding it up to look at the edge, and then spreading it open and looking in at the stitching. “Write in it. A formula. The quadratic equation. Anything will do.”

  Bill took it and laid it on the table, holding it open with his hands and bent over to write in it, and had barely drawn a sigma when Holmes snatched it away again, laying it on the table. “Why do you hold it open, hmm? Look. It lies perfectly flat.”

  “I don’t, not usually. My father was fanatical about books. He knew too many people who’d lost books to Hitler. We were brought up to be careful. In our house, you didn’t break the spine.”

  “But this... this is completely broken, and I think someone else has been flipping through it. Look: that’s where your thumb goes, but see how it’s wider there? That’s another person thumbing through your notebook. Doctor Bill, you have yourself a fan, or someone interested enough in your work that they’re liberating your notebook from its resting place when they think you’re not looking. Okay. Here’s what we need to do. You send me a list of all the articles that have been published with your work. Professors involved, their journals, universities, all that kind of thing. If you can, include photocopies of the relevant pages of your notebooks. Think you can do that? Don’t send it to the bakery. Send it to this address.” He handed Bill a preprinted card that I had never seen before. “Don’t put my name on the envelope, just ‘Baker Street Ltd.’ We’ll do some research and plan our next steps. When are you next in New York?”

  Bill looked at Holmes, then at me, then back to Holmes. “What... what do you mean?”

  “When are you next in New York? I think, yes, I’m pretty sure that we can come up with a way to uncover the plot against you, but there’s no way to do it unless you’re in New York, so when will you be back?”

  “Well, this time of year it’s pretty busy. Exams coming up. Probably not till after we mark them and get the grades recorded. June, probably, but maybe July, I guess.”