Irene Adler 08 - Spider Dance

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “Victoria Station posting,” I observed. “From the very heart of London, where millions pass by each week. Your correspondent both advertises his movements and despises the usual means of tracking his movements. He is not to be underestimated.”

  “You assume a personal enemy?”

  “I assume only someone who wishes to be paid what he believes is owed. Have you any ‘debts’ of that sort?”

  “Of course not. In an unstable business climate, any breath of insolvency is suicide.”

  “Are you operating in an unstable business climate?”

  “Anyone of my wealth is, Mr. Holmes, but the United States government is particularly vulnerable at the moment, with the argument for the silver standard versus the gold standard at white-hot fever. That is why the subsequent messages become more sinister.”

  By now our correspondent had arrived at local New York City postmarks and the use of innocuous small envelopes, the sort that might include invitations to the lady of the house. Yet the contents were hardly invitations.

  I read one message: “Pay what you owe or the consequences will be dire.”

  “Do you have any notion what payment is demanded?” I asked Vanderbilt.

  He shook his dapper head. With his center part and dark waves to either side, I could not help but think of some of the slipperier variety artistes I had briefly encountered during my excursion into Madam Irene Adler Norton’s rather lurid American past. I almost smiled, but of course Vanderbilt would misinterpret mirth at this juncture.

  “This next billet-doux, for it is on quite frivolous paper, finally becomes specific and demands ‘the gold and the jewels.’ Have you any idea what gold and which jewels are meant?”

  “Mine, I suppose. My gold and my wife’s jewels, which are formidable.”

  “Are they also in safekeeping?”

  “Some in banks and others in our own safes.”

  “How much actual gold do you have?”

  Here he shifted uneasily so the huge leather chair squeaked most disagreeably, like a lapdog with its tail stepped upon.

  “Now there, Mr. Holmes, you tread upon what you might call a state secret. There are three or four of us . . . millionaires, that is . . . who have enormous gold reserves. Not Vanderbilts. The others won’t say how much, because that could set the markets soaring or plummeting. And then, too, the government is mighty interested, and it’s to the financiers’ advantage to keep them guessing as well.”

  “You are saying that the monetary state of the United States is best kept a mystery?”

  “From my point of view, and the government’s, yes.”

  “Hmmm. Even your unnamed correspondent seems willing to keep this all a mystery. And this is the last message, until the presumed object lesson left upon your billiard table?”

  “Yes.”

  “Obviously, he, or they, had intended to kill that poor old fellow all along, for his presence here only announces that these are not people to be crossed.”

  “You assume more than one.”

  “One man would be sorely tried to import a body into a household as large as yours. There are at least two, and the entire sequence smacks of some sort of cadre. These written notes are in different hands. What is most disturbing is not the wretched soul left on your billiard table but the vagueness of the demands. It is almost as if the blackmailer expects you to know exactly what is wanted: how much gold and which jewels. Can you explain this?”

  “Mr. Holmes, I cannot. I am a millionaire. I am known for amassing money, and the finest form of money is in hard gold bars. It does not rot. My wife is the leader of New York society and as such has always impressed upon me that it is my duty to swath her in jewels.”

  “As far as you know, none of your gold or jewels is missing?”

  “Not one gold bar, not one diamond brooch. It would appear that these thugs are so vague because they want it all. Of course that can’t happen. Before I call out the entire New York City Police Department, such as it is, I would rather work through you and the Pinkertons or my own discreet staff members.”

  “Indeed. These are rather interesting criminals. They threaten before they make their demands known. I suspect a determined band of brigands. I also suspect further warnings, probably even more appalling than the man you will shortly remove from your house. They tortured him for some reason, and are letting you know that they are on the trail of the goods you have that they claim.”

  “But all I have is the means I inherited from my grandfather, the Commodore, and that my own father multiplied many times over in the eight years he lived after my grandfather died, and left to me and my brothers and sisters. Who would claim the whole of the Vanderbilt fortune?”

  “Who indeed, but a criminal, or criminals, as paramount in the world of misdeeds as the Vanderbilts are in the world of finance? I predict that we confront a truly fiendish scheme concocted by men who are prepared to use any atrocity to accomplish their ends. Were we in London, I know whom I would suspect. Here in America, the possibilities are endless.”

  “Then it is hopeless. I must convert my house into a fortress and forbid my family all egress.”

  “This house was not designed to be defended, Mr. Vanderbilt, even though some call it a castle. The only solution is to discover who these people are and what specifically they want, and perhaps why they want it from the Vanderbilts. Are there any your family exploited to rise in the world?”

  “Many, probably.”

  “‘Many’ alone will not do. A few ruthless men driven by desires too dark to divine readily must be behind this mystery, and it must have to do with your family history.”

  “How can you say that? Being a captain of industry makes for ruthless competition, and may produce violent unrest among the working force, but none of this rude jostling among the lower classes touches the ruling families.”

  “Yes, that is quite obviously the case, Mr. Vanderbilt. My scathing tone was lost on the American millionaire, as it had been on the King of Bohemia earlier. Absolute power not only corrupts absolutely but it apparently renders the possessors deaf and blind.

  “Good heavens, Mr. Holmes! I would have to say our most vicious enemies are the newspaper cartoonists. Though they are indeed merciless with pen and ink, I hardly think they would torment old men with knives.”

  “I saw nothing artistic in the indignities done to him, although there is a certain element of ritual to the method, if not the means.”

  “This is a brutal and senseless puzzle.”

  “The first, yes, but I beg to differ on the second. It is a commonplace to call what is brutal senseless, but I have found the opposite to be the case. It is simply that the motive is not evident and makes no sense to us yet”

  8

  FAMILY MYSTERY

  In any appreciation of the American Renaissance, as the period

  from the 1870s to the first world war is sometimes called, the era

  that saw the United States emerge from its earlier republican

  simplicity and isolation to ingest the glories of European art

  and culture, some account has to be taken of the Vanderbdts.

  —LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

  FROM THE CASE NOTES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  I’d gotten my old briarwood going and rose to stretch my legs while I marshaled my thoughts into a form that would penetrate a millionaire’s brain, addled as it must be with buying and selling men and machines.

  I was, in a sense, taking the stage in order to keep the attention of this surprisingly dense man. He made Watson glitter like the veriest Aristotle by comparison.

  “Mr. Vanderbilt, I have had cases laid before me by everyone from humble clerks to the crowned heads of Europe. In each instance, they reported a puzzle or a dilemma that often had them fearing for their fortunes, their lives, their very sanity. At all times the circumstances that brought them to me were strange, frightening, and contradictory. In all cases, every one, I was the mere epilogue to a s
tring of events that were rooted firmly in my clients’ pasts.

  “I am not much a reader of fiction or drama, but I can say that if there is a motto that guides my detection work, it was uttered by England’s Will Shakespeare four hundred years ago. ‘The past is prologue.’ I know not the play or the speaker, and I don’t care. To help you, I must know your past and that of your forebears.”

  “My father has been dead these five years, and my grandfather, the Commodore, has been gone for twelve.”

  “Again to quote the Bard, and I assure you I don’t have a large store of such: ‘Age cannot wither nor custom stale’ the interest to be found in a saga of worldly success built from a pittance. I presume that was the Commodore’s story, or was he truly a well-born and placed soul?”

  And so I invited upon myself the usual rags-to-riches fairy story, save that it was set against the rude American background of a frontier becoming a world force.

  Invited to tell the family tale, the affable William Kissam Vanderbilt, a handsome man only a few years my senior, selected another Havana cigar and gestured me back into the comfortable armchair.

  “The Commodore was not an official title, as you divined,” be began. “It came as a result of his extensive shipping interests, and, I suppose, a certain commanding manner.”

  He nodded at a black-and-white sketch on the wall framed by a broad border of gilt that would have overpowered the subject had he not been a lean old man of martial bearing. His hat and cane occupied each hand, and he wore a high-buttoned frock coat with the soft collar and tie favored at midcentury, or earlier.

  “A large man, I see, muscular and athletic. Something of a frontiersman in his youth, like your president, Andrew Jackson.”

  My dapper host blinked in amazement. Ah, it is good to encounter a portable Watson now and then. “How on earth did you know that, Mr. Holmes? There can’t be much knowledge of our family’s roots in England.”

  I nodded at the sketch. “All the knowledge I need is there. His size I determined from the length of his arms and size of the hat in relation to the figure we see from head to knees. His firm grasp upon the walking stick implies a man who has had more concrete rudders in his hands than metaphorical ones. The knuckles are also enlarged, either the sign of a pugilist or a laborer”

  “My grandfather was born in a Staten Island farmhouse.”

  “Modest, I presume.”

  “Quite. He had no education, but a journalist once said that ‘he would have become rich on a desert island.’”

  I nodded at the Commodore’s strong old face. With the fashion in which he wore his hair, one need only add a goatee and a hat clothed in Old Glory and he would make an excellent “Uncle Sam.” I said so.

  “Unfortunately, your observation is correct, Mr. Holmes, including the cruder aspect of life earlier in the century. The Commodore was never ashamed of himself, but the fact is he was not socially acceptable.”

  “How so?”

  “He cussed like a pirate’s parrot, loudly, pinched the servant girls black and blue, used chewing tobacco, and believed in the occult. But he never was a true robber baron, like Fisk and Gould. He never preyed on other people’s investments. He simply built huge transportation concerns for a burgeoning country . . . shipping lines all over the world, railroads that crossed the continent as far afield as Nicaragua, where he made a million a year for saving prospectors six hundred miles on the Central American overland route to the gold fields of California. When he died January fourth in 1877, his fortune exceeded the cash reserves of the entire United States government.”

  “And how did he leave his wealth?”

  Vanderbilt laid his cigar in the crystal tray. Its scent perfumed the air, quite overwhelming my modest pipe.

  “There’s the rub. He had ten surviving children. My father, William Henry, the eldest son, was virtually the sole heir of a hundred million dollars.”

  “Did this occasion some rancor between the survivors, then?”

  “Rancor, Mr. Holmes? It unleashed a firestorm. True, none of the boys were cut entirely off; they were given from two to five million each. Our scapegrace uncle Jerry, Cornelius Jeremy, got nothing, nor did any of my father’s many sisters. They did challenge the will in court.”

  “On what grounds, sir?”

  Vanderbilt squirmed in his chair, ill at ease for the first time. “It was quite ugly, Mr. Holmes. My father was a gentle soul whom my grandfather dismissed as a ‘blatherskite’ when he was alive.”

  The son gazed at the smoking cigar in its tray and some emotion passed over his features.

  “There’s a family story, Mr. Holmes. The Commodore took the entire clan to Europe on the North Star, the largest private yacht in the world, in ’53. My father was a married man of thirty then, but when the Commodore caught him smoking a cigar on the deck, he denounced tobacco as ‘a dirty habit’ and offered my father ten thousand dollars if he never touched it again. My father immediately tossed his prime Havana overboard. He didn’t need the money, he told the Commodore. He would do it to please him.

  “At that the old man took out his own Havana, grinned, and lit up.”

  Vanderbilt shook his head. “My father was a greatly underestimated man. He’d overworked himself into a nervous breakdown on Wall Street trying to please the Commodore in vain, but when relegated out of sight to a Staten Island farm, he made such a profitable go of it the old man finally took him seriously. It was my father who expanded the railroad holdings, even beyond the U.S. borders, and he did it paying decent wages. When the Commodore’s will was challenged, he was charged in court with heinous things that did little to make our family acceptable to the Four Hundred. Perhaps that’s why my father died only eight years later, but he had managed to double the inheritance by then.”

  “‘The past is prologue,’” I quoted again. I fancied I could be quite as commanding as the Commodore when I chose to be so.

  The younger Vanderbilts struck me more as pot metal than of the Commodore’s steel, no matter how crudely smelted.

  “Uncle Jerry and the aunts accused my father of manipulating an old man by . . . ‘procuring’ was the term . . . parlormaids. They said my father had arranged with phoney spiritualists to manipulate my grandfather into giving him all the money. He was even accused of bribing the Commodore’s young second wife into assisting with the charade. My father was a man who had married a modest minister’s daughter. It quite leveled my mother. The newspapers and the cartoonists ran riot.”

  “Hmm. And this was when?”

  “The trial ran from late ’78 to early ’79. At the end, my father had to setde with the dissidents. He actually drove in his carriage to each of their homes and handed over a million in bonds to Uncle Jerry, and half a million each to the aunts.”

  “I assume the eldest son is still the heir, in your case.”

  “Yes, only now it is the two eldest. My brother Cornelius and I share the wealth, and the onus of managing it. When my poor father died, he was the wealthiest man in the world.”

  “And what killed him?”

  “Wear and tear, Mr. Holmes, wear and tear. He’d made an unfortunate misstep in front of the press seven years ago. It was during a railroad junket with some of his fellow moguls. The Chicago press wanted an interview and my father explained that he maintained the crack passenger service between Chicago and New York less from profit than to keep the rival Pennsylvania Railroad out of the market. Didn’t he feel that good passenger service was a duty to the rail-riding public? he was asked. My father, relaxed and thinking only of his rivalry, answered ‘The public be damned,’ and was vilified for that ever after, which for him turned out only to be three years, no doubt due to the onslaught of vicious cartoons portraying him as a heartless robber baron. He retired soon after, and began work on the Staten Island mausoleum he had promised the Commodore he would build. Ironically, he was all too soon serving himself. He died almost four years ago, while lunching at home, just down the avenue. The pre
sident of the B & O Railroad had a bone to pick and went over Neily and myself to call on my father, who collapsed of a stroke the moment he rose to receive him.”

  “A pity. It does indeed seem that your father had a fine head for business, but no heart for it. How did he leave his millions? Was another scandalous court case necessary?”

  “He would have died to prevent it.” Vanderbilt frowned, realizing what he had said. “He often announced that the Vanderbilt fortune had become ‘too great a load for any brain or back to bear.’ He said he had no son on whom he would wish such a burden. We elder sons were the major heirs, but he created two forty-million-dollar trusts that all eight of us shared equally, one was untouchable except for interest, the other not.”

  I nodded, amused by the unthinkably enormous sums Vanderbilt bandied about

  “And the Vanderbilts are still social outcasts?”

  “Indeed, no! My own wife, Alva, produced a ball so lavish a few years ago to inaugurate this very house that even Mrs. Astor’s daughters were begging their mother for invitations.”

  “And the result?” I asked, although I already knew it, thanks to Miss Bly.

  He laughed. “Total truce. Mrs. Astor capitulated completely and accepted Alva into the bosom of New York society.” He nodded at another wall where a framed photograph was hung.

  I recognized the imperious lady of the morning, although her aspect was much altered. She was arrayed in an elaborate gown with a train long enough for a coronation curled around her feet. Stuffed doves perched upon her wrists and fluttered like courtiers on the carpet before her. Pearls and diamonds draped her neck, wrists, and bosom. She wore some haloing headdress. I was reminded of representations of the Roman goddess Juno, she of the signature bird, the peacock, and of the upheld hand of Lady Liberty in her spiked crown of copper.

  I rose to further inspect this apparition, reminded of another, simpler cabinet photo that sat on my mantel in Baker Street. The face set in all this glory was as adamant as a dyspeptic bulldog’s.