CHAPTER XVI.
TRIUMPH
“Sharp, Watson! There isn’t a moment to lose!”
No sooner had I blurted out my news than Holmes was on his feet, jerking open the stateroom door and shoving me out into the passage. He scrambled up the ladder to the upper decks with me close behind.
“I’ve been an egotistical fool, to think myself the only target,” he said as we climbed. “A close call in the boarding house and a paper threat were intended as warnings, as I surmised. After they went unheeded—in a most public fashion, thanks be to the press—Lungo raised his sights, so to speak. Murdering you, the closest to me in all this world, would be an alarm not even I could ignore. I shall spend the rest of our lives, short or long, begging your forgiveness.”
“There’s nothing to forgive, Holmes.” I was panting; years and an expanding waistline were taking their toll. Yet I remained close at his heels as we surmounted the last ladder and raced down the deck towards the scene of my near-assassination, revolvers in hand. “Obviously, he doesn’t know you as well as I. You would never give up the search, with me or without me.”
“I certainly should not, without you. I would hound this beast over both sides of earth and over all sides of land until he lay dead at my feet. There it is! Up we go!”
A steel ladder bolted to the deck cabin bore a tin sign reading CREW MEMBERS ONLY. The ship was pitching in the roughening sea. We put away our weapons to use both hands and clambered up onto the roof.
It was as high as I had ever been aboard ship, and I am no sailor. The surface underfoot was slick with wash and wind shoved at me, snapping my coattails. The sway of the craft forced me to my hands and knees lest I be swept overboard. Holmes, half-cat, half-housefly, dashed upright to and fro, eyes on the corroded steel at his feet. At length he cried out and pointed at a small oval depression in the generations of soot that had settled there from the smokestacks. There was but the one, and as we watched the wind freshened, blowing a fresh black layer onto the mark, obliterating it.
“Small,” said he, and pounded his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Think! No, no foot so dainty among passengers and crew; at least, not the men.”
“But you said—”
“You, there! You’re not allowed up here! Go back!”
The harsh voice belonged to a man in a nor’wester yellow slicker and floppy hat secured with a band under his chin and large black boots on his feet. He was coming our way from the direction of the bridge, waving a heavy belaying-pin as if it were a bludgeon.
I started to explain ourselves, but before I could get a word out, Holmes flung himself down on one shoulder, skidding across the slippery cabin roof feet first, directly towards the advancing crewman. The soles of his boots collided with the man’s ankles, knocking him down to his knees. But he kept his hold on his weapon and swung it at Holmes’s head. Shouting, I launched myself to my feet and lunged for the belaying-pin. By sheer luck my fingers closed upon it—but it came away in my hand. He’d abandoned it to reach under his slicker. Out came his hand, holding something that resembled a long, narrow pipe; but Holmes had braced himself with his hands, and with a mighty kick knocked the object aside. Orange fire leapt from the end of the pipe, simultaneous with a report such as I’d heard before, and from that very spot.
But the shooter wasn’t finished. The gun came back around; but by then Holmes had excavated his pistol. I drew mine, and fired it an instant behind his. The man in yellow dropped his long-barreled gun and fell on his knees.
“Catch her, Watson! We must take her alive!”
The ship was leaning hard to starboard. The crew member was sliding towards the edge of the roof. At that angle he would bypass the deck entirely and vanish into the ocean. I leapt, ignoring my terror of falling, and closed both fists on oilcloth, dragging the weight of the one who wore it away from the edge.
“Wait,” said I then, panting from the excitement and exertion. “Her?”
• • •
The ship’s doctor emerged from the tiny infirmary, looking grave. “She hasn’t long. One bullet, and she might survive, with one lung. Two—” He shook his head.
“The lady offered no choice.” Holmes spoke without regret. “Can she talk?”
“Yes; but don’t be long. She’s asked for a priest. We haven’t one aboard, but there’s an Anglican minister in Three-B. She must save some breath for prayer.”
We found the patient lying on a cot under a thin blanket. Beneath her dusky colouring she was nearly as pale as the sheet. I judged her less than thirty, and reasonably attractive under normal circumstances. She had the long, almond-shaped eyes of Asia and her black hair was cut short. I barely recognized her without the wig; she was, of course, the “East Indian princess” I had seen our first day aboard. The foul-weather gear, including the clumsy black boots she’d pulled over her small feet, lay heaped in a corner. She had likely stolen the items from some sailor’s slop chest to assist her in her final charge.
“You are not a priest.” Her voice, although weak, had the musical accents I associated with her country. Earlier, she had roughened it in order to sound masculine.
“You know who we are,” said Holmes coldly. “Why did you not ask for a Hindu holy man?”
“I was baptized in my father’s church. Colonel Sebastian Moran was an Irish-Catholic.”
“It can do you no good now to keep your story secret.”
She closed her eyes, shuddered with a sudden spasm, then opened them wide and bright. “If I miss the priest, will you tell him my confession, that I may be saved?”
“I shall.”
She spoke, interrupting herself only when pain racked her. Her name was Lakshmi Moran, the only child of Colonel Sebastian Moran and an Indian mistress. Moran had never publicly acknowledged her, but when she was of age, he took her along on his tiger hunts and amused himself by teaching her to shoot. To his amazement, she had inherited his natural talents. Thinking her useful to his civilian employer, the late Professor James Moriarty, he’d promised to send for her after he’d resettled himself in England.
“You inherited more than his marksmanship,” ventured Holmes. “Morality is a trait inbred or not at all.”
“Hear me out. My mother died of typhus whilst we were waiting. I was sixteen, a half-caste, scorned by whites and natives alike. I cut my hair, disguised myself as a boy, and joined a Sepoy regiment, where after proving myself on the firing range I was transferred to a company of sharpshooters. I was the best they had, and until I began to develop physically, I managed to dissemble my sex.
“Eventually, I was discovered, and dismissed without ceremony. But I had managed to save enough of my soldier’s pay to buy a steerage ticket to England, to be reunited with my father. It was not until I made inquiries in London that I learnt he’d been hanged for the murder of a man named Ronald Adair and the attempted murder of a man named Sherlock Holmes.”
Lakshmi then made her way as a woman of the streets, but only as a means to an end. She learnt to disguise her mature womanhood, and through her contacts in the London demimonde applied for a position as an assassin for the Black Hand. Her first assignment, once she had proven her skill, was to slay a candidate for office in Macedonia who had pledged to rid his country of organized crime.
“Conscience, what is that?” said she. “I had learnt at firsthand that human life was disposable.”
The Mafia never suspected her gender, and named her Lungo in honour of her gift.
“Length; a generous compliment.” She laughed weakly, coughed, waited for breath. Her mouth foamed pink at the corners. “Upon reflection, I’m sure some of my colleagues guessed my secret, but by then I was so successful they kept silent rather than face their superiors’ wrath. Omerta has been my padrone all these years.”
When it was learnt that Sherlock Holmes had gone to America to meet with an expert on the Mafia, Lakshmi bought a ticket—this time at first-cabin rates—on the next ship.
“I
toyed with you in New York; it pleased me to make you quake, by deliberately missing a clear shot and sending you that crude note. I should have been more professional, and less artistic. When the newspapers announced you were returning to England to continue the investigation, I bought a berth under an assumed name, donned an expensive disguise—for murder pays well—and made my attempt at sea: I would kill Watson first, and when you came running to investigate, ambush you when you were in shock at the loss of your friend and most vulnerable.”
“For what reason?” Holmes pressed. “The Mafia in England wanted to prevent the disinterment of Pietro Venucci to avoid publicity, but surely it would stop short of following us to America and escalating the operation.”
There wasn’t much time. Her eyes were glassy and her voice had fallen to a whisper. Then she stared at him with complete lucidity. A smile tugged at her lips.
“You mean you don’t know? The great detective failed to deduce? I was not sent. I came on my own; to kill the man responsible for my father’s death.”
CHAPTER XVII.
TRAGEDY
My tale is nearly told, but there is a coda.
With Holmes’s help, the pin-setter’s murder fell to his partner, Rossi, the billiards sharp. “A man who can manipulate balls upon a table can surely find his way round so quaint a system as an English gaol,” said Holmes, whose testimony at the Assizes convicted Rossi and the guard he’d bribed to let him into the victim’s cell. Just who set the mechanism in motion is unknown to this day.
In the flurry of all this attention, the Mafia kept silent whilst Magdalena Venucci escorted her father’s remains back to Sicily.
Some six years after the events I have related, Holmes shared with me a cable he’d just received:
AT LAST CHIEF AGREES SEND ME SICILY BEARD THE DEVIL IN HIS DEN STOP UNABLE VISIT WAY OUT BUT LOOK FORWARD TO IT WAY BACK STOP BUONA FORTUNA MI AMICO
J PETROSINO
“I look forward to it also,” said Holmes. “I receive a letter from him occasionally, keeping me abreast of his inexhaustible activities on behalf of his honest brethren. He fails more often than he succeeds; but in this he isn’t alone. You have much to answer for, Watson, touting my triumphs whilst dissembling my tragedies. Your intuition regarding the Indian woman was just, unscientific as it was, whilst my dismissal was based upon blind dogma.”
He was a master at chiding one whilst paying him a compliment, and so I ignored his remarks. “It will be good to see him. I hope our pasta and tomatoes rise to his standards. I dream about that meal often.”
It remained a dream.
The reports in the London newspapers were brief: On 13 March, 1909, after sending home encouraging reports of his progress, Detective Giusseppe “Joe” Petrosino was shot twice in the back by two men with revolvers on his way to police headquarters in Palermo. His murderers were never arrested.
Holmes laid aside the Times, drew Petrosino’s pearl-handled knife from the drawer of his desk, and tested the blade once again with his thumb. “This isn’t the end, Watson. I’d hoped to retire to an apiary in Sussex next year, or the year after, if there is no war. But the bees must wait. This spawn—forgive me if I break my oath—”
“They are Moriarty’s sons,” said I grimly. “May their tribe decrease.”
“So it will—with you at my back. Would that Petrosino had had a Watson of his own.”
THE END
Copyright © 2013 by Loren D. Estleman.
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“The Infernal Machine” previously published in The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes edited by Martin Harry Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Rossel Waugh, copyright © 1999 by Carroll & Graf. ISBN 10: 0-7867-0698-8 ISBN 13: 978-0-7867-0698-3.
“The Adventure of the Double-Bogey Man” previously published in Schlock Holmes: The Complete Bagel Street Saga by Robert L. Fish, copyright © 1990 by Gaslight Publications. ISBN 10: 0-9344-6816-8 ISBN 13: 978-0-9344-6816-9.
“The Case of the Bloodless Sock” previously published in Murder in Baker Street edited by Martin Harry Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower, copyright © 2001 by Carroll & Graf. ISBN 10: 0-7867-1074-8 ISBN 13: 978-0-7867-1074-4.
“Sherlocks” previously published in P.I. Files edited by Loren D. Estelman and Martin H. Greenberg, copyright © 1990 by Ballantine Books. ISBN 10: 0-8041-0555-3 ISBN 13: 978-0-8041-0555-2.
“The Field Bazaar” previously published in The Student by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, copyright © 1896 by the University of Edinburgh.
“The Adventure of the Deptford Horror” previously published in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes by Adrian Conan Doyle and John Dickson Carr, copyright © 1954 by Ace Books.
“Before the Adventures” previously published in Murder, My Dear Watson edited by Martin Harry Greenberg, Jon Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower, copyright © 2002 by Carroll & Graf. ISBN 10: 0-7867-1081-0 ISBN 13: 978-0-7867-1081-2.
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Sons of Moriarty and More Stories of Sherlock Holmes Page 21