The news that the consignment had been stolen in Marseilles was a shock to Favraux, although not as much as Judex expected. The wily banker had gotten wind of the underworld’s interest and purchased some last minute insurance.
“It’s out of my hands now, Herr Gutman,” Favraux told the German. “What was that item again?”
“A black statue in the form of a bird... A falcon...”
“Well, I’m sorry, Herr Gutman, but it’s probably lost again. Forever, this time, I think.”
A Tales of the Shadowmen anthology would not be complete without, somehow, a mention of Sherlock Holmes. Xavier Mauméjean, an old hand at myth-making, as those who have read his League of Heroes may attest, breaks the usual boundaries of Holmesian fiction by throwing the Great Detective into a world very different from what he has, so far, encountered, a world which will undoubtedly be immediately familiar to any reader as the very epitome of the loss of freedom and dehumanization of the individual. A world where they took away his name and...
Xavier Mauméjean: Be Seeing You!
The Village, 1912
The Most Dangerous Man in the Kingdom stepped out of his cottage to have breakfast. His features were drawn as he walked down the Village’s flowerlined paths. When the residents passed his tall, lanky silhouette, dressed in a dark jacket with white trim, they saluted him, but only perfunctorily. They, too, were dressed in strange holiday accoutrements that would not have been out of place on Brighton Beach. The newcomer was known in the village as “Danger Man”–a man with whom it was better not to be associated. He, conversely, ignored them, not returning their salutes, not even that of the friendly cyclist atop his penny-farthing bicycle.
He sat down at the terrace of the Café. A waitress appeared almost instantly.
“A cup of tea,” he asked, ignoring her overly ingratiating smile.
She went back inside, relayed the order to the Chef, then coded a brief message which she handed to the operator for immediate transmission. It said:
Attention: Number 1. Stop. Confirming Arrival of Mr. Sherlock Holmes in the Village this morning. Stop. Awaiting Instructions. Over.
The Detective had no recollection of his kidnapping. It had been an ordinary summer day in Sussex. In late afternoon, he had attended his bees as usual before calling it a day. He had gone to bed at home, in his bed, and had inexplicably awakened in this near-perfect, brand new Village, which still smelled of fresh paint. A kind of “Neverland” as James Barrie, one of Watson’s literary agent’s friends, might have called it. Good old Watson! No doubt he would move Heaven and Earth to find him. But where would he start? As far as anyone knew, he was just an ordinary retiree enjoying his golden years in solitude on the Downs.
A young man showed up. He carried an umbrella and wore a top hat and a formal black suit, the type one saw at the Foreign Office. Somehow, he reminded Holmes of his younger self.
“Where am I?” asked the Detective.
“In the Village,” replied the young man.
“What do you want?”
“Information.”
“Information?”
“Information about your brother.”
“Ah. I see. And who are you?”
“Number 2.”
“What a preposterous label! Why not ‘Thursday?’ ”
The young man remained impassible. “If you cooperate,” he said, “your stay among us can be quite enjoyable. You may even be trusted with a position of responsibility in this community.”
“You won’t hold me.”
“Sooner or later, you’ll want to tell us what we seek.”
“I doubt it,” said Holmes contemptuously.
“Anything else?” asked Number 2.
“Yes. I hope your new position here will not make you regret having resigned your post as Police Commissioner in Burma.”
In the following days, Holmes found multiple other uses for his deductive powers. Even though the other residents were very guarded in their conversations with him, he did not fail to observe that most of them were retired or captured spies, some British, others not. There were Prussians and Frenchmen, Italians and Russians. Some, such as Von Bork and Azzef, he even recognized from files to which he had had access.
He gleefully shared his observations with Number 2 in order to show him that he was not fooled by the atmosphere of fake congeniality in the Village. Beneath its appearance of gentility, the place was as deadly as a nest of vipers.
“I disagree,” said the young man. “We see this as a prototype for the World of Tomorrow. A blueprint for a new order, peace and enlightenment under the governance of the great western powers.”
“If that is your new world, I might want to hitch a ride on Mr. Barbicane’s next rocketship,” said Holmes.
All the time, he had been planning, scheming, and now he was ready to make his move.
The darkest recesses of Her Majesty’s Secret Service were a State within the State, a cancer growing on the Empire. Their “Number 1” was variously known as “M,” “Control” or “Hunter.” The current holder of that title was more dangerous that even the nefarious Professor Moriarty, more scheming than his predecessor, his brother Mycroft, who had been overthrown by a Whitehall cabal.
Funnily, he had had only to invert his initial to assume the title.
“W” had become “M.”
Winston Churchill.
The ambitious First Lord of the Admiralty–a more effective cover than that of the Diogenes Club–was his enemy. Of that, Holmes had no doubt. He was the one who had had him arrested and transported to this ingenious, new Bastille that Churchill’s fertile mind had devised to find out what was in the files Mycroft had entrusted to him before disappearing.
Holmes was pulled out of his musing by Von Bork’s arrival. The elegant German agent sat near him.
“Do you have a light?” he asked. Then, as Holmes handed him a lighter, he grabbed the Detective’s wrist and whispered: “Your plan is working–so far. Ned Hattison reached his father’s medium, who in turn contacted him, as you suggested. He has now arrived. My men are ready. The watchers will be disabled at my signal. We’ve put all our hopes in you, Mr. Holmes. Don’t disappoint us.”
Then, like in a perfectly rehearsed musical number, Azzef walked into the Café, looking for all the world like a man who was hopelessly drunk.
The Russian anarchist bumped into the Prussian agent, who pushed him back forcefully. Azzef stumbled into the table behind him, where four residents were eating. It collapsed with a fracas of broken dishes and insults.
Soon, a general melee started; but a canny observer would have noticed that certain men were, in fact, ganging up on others, immobilizing them, preventing them from raising the alarm.
As soon as the scene had started, Holmes had jumped to his feet and run towards the beach. Some of the residents waved at him as he ran. A couple tried to stop him but there was an obliging umbrella swung by one or the other of the prisoners to put a stop to their actions.
As the Detective set foot on the beach, the not-so-friendly-anymore cyclist on his penny-farthing pulled out a gun and fired. The bullet whizzed by Holmes, missing him by mere inches. Suddenly, the cyclist fell to the ground, pushed by someone who had come out of a bush. It was Ned Hattison who pointed towards the distant surf.
“The tide is up. He’s waiting for you over there,” he told Holmes. “Run! And beware the Rover!”
This was perhaps the hardest physical effort Holmes had ever undertaken. Running on wet sand, especially at his age, was like torture. He felt his heart pounding wildly in his chest, blood vessels throbbing in his temples. But he could not stop. He had to get away. He had to escape.
Suddenly, behind him, Holmes heard an inhuman, high-pitched whistle.
Without stopping, he turned his head to look back. What he saw almost froze him in place.
A huge sphere made of bolted metal plates was bouncing madly in his direction, propelled by jets of steam, uncannily defy
ing gravity. Another of Cavor’s maddening inventions, Holmes thought.
He had reached the water, soon waistdeep, and began swimming with renewed energy towards the small submarine which had just appeared. Its turret opened and he was there just in time to grab him and pull him inside.
But the damnable Frenchman could not just pack up and go. In his typical fashion, he had to indulge in a last act of Gallic bravado. He made a funny salute, thumb and index circled, hand tipped to his cap, and shouted:
“Bonjour chez vous!”
Then, Arsène Lupin slammed the hatch behind him, the submarine dived and disappeared.
“You might as well call back your guard dog now, Number 2,” said Number 1, puffing on his cigar.
“I could still have one of our destroyers go after him,” suggested the young man in the dark suit.
“You did not recognize that submarine. I did. That was the Bouchon-de-Cristal, Monsieur Lupin’s own craft, built from Louis Lacombe’s designs. We have nothing yet than can match its performance. I’m afraid we have lost our Mr. Holmes for good. We will have to be more careful in identifying and monitoring his type in the future. We need a special code... Hmm... Remind me already, what is Mr. Holmes’ birthday?”
“January 6,” replied Dennis Nayland Smith, the man who was the first Number 2.
“Let’s call them Number 6 then,” said Winston Churchill, the man who was the first Number 1.
Like Paul Féval, Alexandre Dumas is one of the founding fathers of modern popular literature. He is, for example, credited with the famous motto “Cherchez la femme,” which first appears in his proto-detective novel, Les Mohicans de Paris. The first volume of Tales of the Shadowmen featured Dumas’ notorious Count of Monte-Cristo, and this one drops us right at the center of the writer’s most famous novel, The Three Musketeers. But as always is the case with our stories, nothing is quite what it seems. Sylvie Miller and Philippe Ward, who have already peeked behind the curtains of History in their novel Le Chant de Montségur, now reveal what really happened to D’Artagnan in London during the Affair of…
Sylvie Miller & Philippe Ward: The Vanishing Diamonds
London, 1898
“Another whiskey and soda, Mr. Jorkens?” asked Allan Quatermain, knowing full well that his fellow Club member always told one of his fabled stories when offered his favorite drink.
Joseph Jorkens grabbed an empty glass that rested on the coffee table next to him and offered it to Quatermain. While the famous explorer mixed the drink, Jorkens spun one of his yarns.
When he was done, he looked at the little group that had gathered around him near the great fireplace. That night, the Club had attracted a fine sampling of explorers and adventurers. In addition to Quatermain, there was Nemo, silent and brooding in the corner, Lord Baskerville, recently returned from Asia, Hareton Ironcastle, already planning his next expedition, Griffin, his face wrapped in bandages as usual, sipping a glass of port in a leather armchair, and the man they knew only as the Time Traveler.
The story Jorkens had just told them concerned Charles de Batz-Castelmore, Comte d’Artagnan. The real D’Artagnan. Or so claimed Jorkens.
“So, my dear fellow,” said Baskerville at last, with a thinly veiled note of glee in his voice, “that pesky Musketeer never came to England to recover the Queen’s diamonds from the Duke of Buckhingham after all.”
“I didn’t quite say that,” Jorkens clarified. “What I said was that it was highly doubtful. I don’t think Queen Anne would have fallen in love with the Duke anyway, and even if she had, I can’t imagine she’d have given him the very diamond necklace King Louis XIII had just presented to her. It defies credibility.”
“For once, I’m inclined to agree with you, Jorkens,” said Baskerville. “I think that fat Frenchman Dumas invented the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel.”
“It is a good yarn, though,” said Ironcastle.
“An exceedingly good one, indeed,” said Baskerville. “But wholly unsupported by historical evidence.”
“I disagree.”
The man who had just spoken stood, unprepossessing, leaning on the mantelpiece of the fireplace. His grey eyes shone and twinkled and his usually pale face was, for once, flushed and animated.
“D’Artagnan did come to London and did get the diamonds back to thwart Cardinal Richelieu,” he continued. “Dumas may have embellished the story somewhat, but it is, nevertheless, true.”
No one in the room knew the man’s name. For some reason, known only to himself, he had refused to divulge it when he had first joined the Club. But he had been sponsored by Challenger, who had vouched for him, and that was enough. So, as per his wishes, he was merely–the Time Traveler.
“How would you know?” asked Quatermain. “No, don’t tell me, you’ve used your... machine to check on D’Artagnan?”
“No, but I met Dumas once during one of my journeys. I asked him about D’Artagnan and the Queen’s diamonds and he swore to me that the story was true. He is, er, was, a man of many secrets, but overall, he struck me as a truthful man. I’m inclined to believe him.”
“How is it possible then,” said Baskerville, “that no history books, no letters, no documents of the times mention these famous diamonds? How do you explain that?”
“I can’t,” replied the Time Traveler, “but just because the diamonds aren’t mentioned in history books doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Certainly, King Louis gave many presents to his wife. Richelieu’s dislike for that foreign princess who consorted with the hated British is well-documented. Besides, why should anyone have written about the diamonds? The whole matter was shrouded in secrecy from the start and no one was eager to brag about their role in it. D’Artagnan brought them back in the nick of time, the King then saw them at the ball and must have instantly dismissed the whole matter as mere Court gossip. As for Richelieu, he had bigger fish to fry... The diamonds vanished between the cracks of history, that’s all. That is, until Dumas somehow unearthed their existence.”
“With all due respect, that’s a rather preposterous argument, sir,” said Baskerville. “You are relying on the word of a Frenchman of dubious morality, known for concocting yarns that even Munchausen would have been ashamed of.”
“Are you calling me a liar or a fool?” said the Time Traveler, with barely repressed anger.
The two men looked at each other with undisguised hostility. It was not inconceivable that they might have come to blows had Nemo not stepped in.
“Please, my friends. Such arguments are not worthy of you. Especially when there is a much easier way to get to the bottom of this...”
“You don’t mean?...” said the Time Traveler.
“Yes, I do,” replied Nemo, twirling his moustache for dramatic effect. “Use your fabled Time Machine to travel back to the past and bring us back indisputable proof of the existence of these diamonds.”
“I say, that is a jolly good idea,” said Jorkens.
“Let’s make a bet on it,” said Ironcastle. “I love bets. Like when I bet Zephyrin Xirdal that...”
“I’m not afraid of any bet,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “However, we must agree on what would constitute indisputable proof in your eyes. I can hardly bring the diamonds back as that might change the course of history...”
“Quite right,” said Quatermain. “I think a good photograph would be satisfactory. What do you think, my friends?”
“Provided that it includes some recognizable background or historical figure to eliminate any possibility of trickery, yes,” said Baskerville.
Everyone nodded his assent.
“Very well,” said the Time Traveler. “I’ll leave at once and will see you tomorrow, here, at the same time. You know what they say: there’s no time like the present.”
In the hallway, the Time Traveler bumped into Griffin who was going to the cloakroom. He had an instinctive dislike for the Invisible Man who was often selfish and arrogant. He had been let into the Club only at M’s insi
stence, but was barely tolerated, if not ostracized, by the others.
On his way out, the Time Traveler was joined by Nemo, who put a large, leathery hand on his shoulder.
“Do not mind them too much, my friend,” said the sub-mariner. “You and I are scientists, inventors. The lands that we explore are not of this Earth. We journey beyond the boundaries of the physical world. They can be a little jealous of that, at times.”
“I know, but sometimes I wish they gave us a bit more credit...”
“It is hard for any man to believe in what he cannot see.”
The Time Traveler nodded in silent agreement.
The Club’s butler handed the Time Traveler his coat. As the heavy oak door closed slowly behind him, he stepped outside and sniffed the damp London night. He pulled up the lapels of his coat and started walking. Luckily, a cab was passing by. He hailed it and soon was on his way home.
Having paid the driver, the Time Traveler rushed towards the front steps of his house. As he crossed the front garden, he idly thought that his rose bushes needed some pruning and that he needed to oil the hinges of the gate which creaked horribly as it sluggishly shut behind him. But he had been so busy lately...
Once inside, he briskly walked upstairs and entered a large dressing-room. There, he kept a collection of costumes and accessories that enabled him to blend relatively unobtrusively into the various eras he visited. He selected an unremarkable 18th century suit and put it on. Then, he opened a drawer and found a purse full of period gold coins.
Tales of the Shadowmen 2: Gentlemen of the Night Page 16