by Marvin Kaye
Miss Tarbell saw she was standing in a puddle of that dead man’s blood and jumped back. “Those poor men. God help their families,” she said and covered her mouth as if to cut off further emotionalism.
By now the frantic policemen had stopped scurrying and stood in small groups. The chain of command in the station had been permanently broken, and surviving officers did not seem to know how to proceed. Anger is more comfortable than grief, so two officers argued over which station would take over jurisdiction of the scene. “Who saw what happened?” Holmes demanded of anyone who could respond. “Qui a vu ce qui est arrivé?”
“I saw them coming in when I was going out,” a young policeman told Holmes miserably. He was whole and healthy, unharmed except by the horror of what he had seen. “Luc—his body is upstairs—was leading in a policeman and a clerk who was holding a large canister out in front of him. The man was carrying it like a waiter bearing a large fowl, and they put me in mind of a holiday dinner.” The witness wiped his eyes.
“I was down the street when I heard the terrible sound. It was like the cracking of an iron bell—as if it were the day of judgement.”
“What is Darmaux?” Holmes asked.
“A city in Lorraine,” he replied, as if he were answering a headmaster’s geography drill.
I would not have thought it possible, but Miss Tarbell was taking notes with her pen and pad. She said, “The Compagnie de Darmaux is a big industrial firm with interests in iron ore, Mr. Holmes. Its miners have been out on strike for some time. I have been following it in the papers.”
“Where is its office?” Holmes demanded. A well-dressed man, whom we later learned was Monsieur Henri Troutout, who had been sent to the scene from someone in the Palais de Justice, gave Holmes an address a few blocks away on the Avenue de “I’Opéra”.
Troutout was a slight man with dark hair under a top hat. He wore the formal cutaway of the French civil servant of top rank. He could not have been more than forty, and when he spoke the corners of his mouth turned up slightly to reveal his teeth.
There was little time for conversation, however. Holmes, Miss Tarbell, Troutout and myself raced there, surely looking like what we were in truth—emissaries from the carnage of hell. But news of the disaster rippled out in waves to every part of the quarter. It was the calm person and not the agitated one who was out of place.
When we reached the building that houses the offices of the Compagnie de Darmaux, Troutout flashed his credentials and demanded to see the man in charge. One of the attendants led us to the president of the company. We mounted the marble staircase carpeted in deep, thick red. At the board room doors Holmes, wide-eyed and disheveled, banged his fist on one of the carved oaken panels and pushed his way in. The five directors, who had been safe and oblivious to everything but their deliberations, jumped in fear and outrage. The eldest of them, thin, frail and fast, cried “Anarchists!” in a strangled voice and dove below the table. The two youngest hurled themselves at Holmes, who was obviously our leader, but his knowledge of martial arts stood him in good stead. From the floor, the brave but hasty pair looked up at the rest of us and decided Troutout, Miss Tarbell and I posed no physical threat. The taller of Holmes’s assailants, whose face was either marred or distinguished by a deep frown line permanently between his brows, was winded, but the younger, rounder one seemed not quite ready to give up the fight. Both brushed the lines of jackets back in place as Troutout introduced himself and Holmes.
Holmes’s taller antagonist, whose name was Martin Kaspi, said in almost unaccented English, “My dear Mr. Holmes, I do beg your pardon. You can imagine—“But Holmes cut off his apologies with a nod of his head and began the story of the morning’s events. “We are here because you may have been the target of an anarchist’s bomb,” The Great Detective said. “A dying man’s last word was ‘Darmaux,’ which may have referred to your firm and the area you mine.”
The directors resumed their seats, seeing that it was to their advantage to cooperate. Miss Tarbell took a place at the table, but the fourth director, who introduced himself as Georges Jacquot, seemed to question whether she should be allowed to stay. He was slight in build with a face under so much contained tension that one longed for him to release it in a nervous twitch. Miss Tarbell, who had no trouble expressing herself to any of the Parisians we encountered on that terrible day, pretended not to understand his French. Troutout and I saw no reason to intervene. The American stayed.
“Gentlemen,” Holmes began, “did any of you observe anything unusual today?”
“We have been conducting business as usual!” said Charles Coman, the elderly director, who had been the first to take refuge under the floor.
“He wants to know if we noticed anything out of the ordinary anywhere this morning,” snapped the plumper of Holmes’s two attackers, a man named Edouard Knodler, who apparently had decided to release his aggression verbally, but not at Holmes.
The managing director, a plump man with a domed forehead and only a wide fringe of dark hair, looked at his colleagues as if deciding whether to speak. His name was Gilbert Daziell and he said, “I arrived early, before anyone else. The board room door was closed, and I saw a large round object covered in newspaper on the floor in front of it. It worried me. I sent for Picot, the concierge. There was quite a delay, but he finally appeared. Picot cut the string around it with his pocket-knife. The newspaper wrappings fell away and revealed a cast-iron canister. Picot picked it up and said it felt like it weighed five kilos. We neither of us wanted to open it, so Picot carefully held it upright and carried it away. The cast-iron canister seemed to be enough protection.”
I had a vision of the corpse I’d seen with the grey trousers, and I might have asked what the porter was wearing, but Holmes ended our encounter by prevailing upon the directors to continue their important work. To his credit, the manager, Daziell, ended the meeting, instructed his secretary, a somber young man with a full moustache and pince-nez, to lead us to Picot the concierge’s post. Daziell accompanied us.
His saturnine secretary had hair parted in the middle as if to form a curtain for the tragic mask that was his face. He had the manner of one who knew he would always be in a supporting position, and the weight of the responsibilities his superiors carried was something he himself had to bear. Holmes asked his name, and he said “Basil Pontell,” as if surprised that anyone would want to know.
Pontell led us to the concierge’s post, where, to our surprise, we found Picot sitting, alive and not at all a victim of the bomb. Picot was that same man we saw at the door when we arrived. Neither too slim nor too tall, he had the calm demeanour of a professional greeter who knows and facilitates all. He was about thirty, and so fair that although he was a city dweller, his face was blotched from the sun. He seemed about to ask us what we were about, but then our distracted attitude began to make sense to him.
“Where is Ernst?” the concierge demanded. “Do you know?”
“Perhaps you should tell us who Ernst is,” said Holmes, not unkindly.
“Ernst went to the police station in the Boulevard des Italiens,” Picot said in a strangled voice, seeming to age as he sat before us. “I found a package upstairs that was suspicious, so I called a gendarme. The policeman wouldn’t touch it, so Ernst, one of our clerks, said he would take it to the station if the policeman showed him the way.”
Certainly things looked grim for Ernst. Troutout, the representative from the Palais de Justice, told Picot that he would arrange for the concierge to view the body of one of the victims, who might well be the helpful clerk Ernst.
“Before you do so,” the managing director said to Picot, “please place one of our offices at the disposal of Monsieur Sherlock Holmes.”
The stricken concierge led us to an office on the ground floor that was probably used for maintenance staff, but the desk and chairs were all that we required. Miss Tarbell displayed no inclination to leave us, and Holmes was too preoccupied with the case to fin
d the force to banish her, although normally he would not scruple to evict any unnecessary person at such a time.
“There may be no logical connection in this crime,” Holmes observed as he seated himself behind his desk. “Even if this firm was chosen because of the strike, the anarchist may have had no personal connection to Darmaux. That’s what makes these anarchists so damnably hard to find. Each must have a feeling of almost godlike power, but he does not accomplish a great deal beyond making martyrs of his dead victims. Holmes shook his head with rare anticipation of defeat. “We must now turn our attention to how the bomb came to be at the board room door.”
Picot, still much shaken at the certain death of his friend Ernst, sat on the chair beside Holmes’s desk. The concierge explained the late night schedule of the cleaning staff: “They are always out of the building well before midnight. During the night, one watchman guards the door. He stands inside the rear entrance, which is locked, as is the front door. The guard is expected to do nothing more than use a police call box if he sees anyone suspicious.”
“When does he go off duty?” Holmes asked.
“At eight A.M., when those who work in the building arrive.”
Picot told us that many people had access to the board-room: the directors, their secretaries, and a porter who brought an easel and various supplies that were sometimes wanted for meetings. “Monsieur Daziell summoned me personally just before eleven. Less than three hours ago,” the concierge noted, forlornly checking his watch.
“Monsieur Daziell,” said Holmes, “thought you were slow to arrive.”
“I went as soon as I knew he wanted me.”
“Who brought you word?”
“Basil Pontell, the president’s secretary. The director must have told him to get me.”
“Did Pontell return with you to the board room?”
“No. He said he had to go out on an urgent message for the president. In fact, Pontell asked me to accompany him because he thought he might need my assistance, and I was on the point of doing it, but then one of the porters came down from upstairs. Pontell got flustered and said he was so preoccupied he almost forgot to give me the director’s message. He told me to go with the porter and then rushed out. It was most unlike him.”
“How did Ernst get involved?” Holmes inquired.
“Ernst was coming out of the cloak room as I was bringing the package to my room. He thought the matter could be serious, so he went for the policeman. He was sure nothing would happen so long as the metal casing wasn’t opened, and so when the policeman refused to pick it up, Ernst offered to carry the canister to the station. I sent word to his supervisor to explain Ernst’s absence, and that was it. I hope, I still hope, that he will come back.”
“What made Ernst think he understood bombs?”
“I don’t know. But his observation about the cast iron made sense, we thought.” According to Picot, Ernst was in his middle twenties and lived with his parents in Neuilly, where he was born.
After the concierge left, Miss Tarbell said, “You do plan to interview everyone in the building, don’t you, Mr. Holmes? There seems to be no other place to start.”
I knew the look that crossed Holmes’s face when Lestrade volunteered his opinions, but unlike the London inspector, Miss Tarbell had not jumped to a conclusion, but only suggested a sound way to proceed. “Madame, I must keep my thoughts to myself,” my friend said, with less rancour than I might have expected.
She seemed to realize that Holmes was about to ask her to leave. Her steady brown eyes rested on him as she made her decision. “I know you have work to do. Would you agree to finish our interview another time?”
Holmes was pleased by her proper sense of the mood of things. “Of course, madame. You may depend upon it.”
She picked up her bag, wished us good day with a pleasant little smile, and walked to the door, closing it carefully after her. Holmes stared at the door as if lost in thought and then said, “Watson, follow her, but do try not to let her know it.”
This last remark was of course gratuitous. Holmes knew he could trust me with my mission, but he was under some strain.
The guard at the front door told me he had not seen any women leave, and I was sure she had not gone out by the service entrance. I made a quick check of all the rooms on the first floor and learned that she’d had a brief chat with one of the porters. Then I started up the staircase. Jacquot, the director under so much contained tension, stopped me on the landing as he was coming down. He was clearly irritated. “La femme américaine m’parlé en français!” was the only sentence I understood. She had spoken to him in French, so he knew she had understood him earlier when he tried to make her leave the board room, but what she had just been saying to him I could not tell. He gave up in disgust and stamped his feet down the stairs. Somehow, she had offended him afresh, that much was clear.
Luckily, I caught sight of the hem of her skirt between the marble pillars of the second floor bannister as she walked on the floor above me. She seemed to be headed back down the hall towards the directors’ room. The thick carpeting muffled my footsteps, but I must say that I was lucky that she did not think to turn around. She looked into an open door and greeted Basil Pontell, the managing director’s melancholy assistant. His desk was in a large antechamber to Daziell’s office, as I learned when I peeked in at them. Her back was towards me and Pontell’s eyes were focused on her face so that he did not notice me. The work of the day had been suspended, so Pontell seemed to have little to do and sat with the tips of his fingers pressed together as if he clutched a ball of air.
As I moved out of eyesight and a few feet from the open door, I heard Pontell tell her that they could speak English.
“I believe I left my umbrella in the board room, Mr. Pontell,” Miss Tarbell told him, and I tried to remember if I had seen her carrying one.
He led her back to the board room, which fortunately did not require them to pass the alcove where I was concealing myself behind an urn. It required a good deal of luck not to be discovered, but I had it that afternoon. I hardly had a chance to wonder if I could move closer to them when they reappeared in the hall.
“I must have left it elsewhere. It has been a distracting day,” she said sadly. All the blood and carnage she had witnessed must have weighed in on her, because the flinty Miss Tarbell slumped into a straight-backed hallway chair. She seemed to study the bloodstain on her foot before looking up at him again. “As it happens, I know a great deal about bombs, Monsieur Pontell,” she said. “This one was made with gunpowder.”
“I doubt that, madame. Will there be nothing else?”
“Why do you doubt that it was made with gunpowder?”
“It was too powerful.”
“But it was carried about the streets without exploding. Trust me, monsieur, it was made with carbon and sulfur, the ingredients of gunpowder.”
“Gunpowder also contains potassium nitrate,” he said with some impatience.
“I am sure that is not so,” the woman insisted. “Carbon and sulfur are all that is required for gunpowder. I studied chemistry in America, which means I know.”
“Madame, I studied chemistry at the Sorbonne. I can assure you, potassium nitrate is a component of gunpowder. There is no doubt.”
Miss Tarbell stood up. “I don’t believe it,” she said, determined to have the last word. She took leave of him with a brisk and haughty air. Pontell must have been irritated: his exhale was like the snort of an animal and he walked stiff-legged back to his office.
I imagined Miss Tarbell’s long strides down the corridor and the hem of her skirt dusting the stair carpet as she raced to Holmes’s makeshift office. From the top of the stairs when I was coming down, I heard her rattling the glass panel of its door with her quick insistent raps. Her ladylike demeanour had been quite cast aside.
By the time I reached them, I was out of breath. I did not bother to knock, nor did they pay any attention when I came in. “Pontell
knows about the makings of a bomb, Mr. Holmes,” she announced. “I tricked him into admitting it.”
“Have you been conducting inquiries, madame?”
“I talked to a few people. They had little to say, except for the secretary. I don’t doubt you would have found it out yourself, but Pontell was less guarded with me. He was determined to put me in my place, and he did so with his knowledge of chemistry. This is important news, Mr. Holmes.”
“Yes, Miss Tarbell, it is. But I cannot have you here when I interview him. I have to try to trick him into revealing himself to me, if such a thing is possible now that you’ve interfered and put him on his guard. I dare say he knows he made a mistake.”
The journalist thought better of replying as she still wanted Holmes to finish her interview. “Must I leave the building?”
“No,” he said as a concession to her help. “Just make sure he does not see you.” With that she disappeared, we knew not where.
When he answered Holmes’s summons, Pontell was calmer than Picot had been, but a good deal more sad. “I believe I saw the murderer, Mr. Holmes,” he said.
“How is that?”
“I came in a little before eight so that I could go over the preparations for the morning’s meeting. Just as I was going up the back stairs, a man who was too bundled up for this time of year came down.”
“Why did you not ask who he was?”
“Frankly, I assumed he had business here. Our directors sometimes employ men who—let’s say they do not always use gentlemen to carry out their commissions. I did not tell you about him in front of the directors for this very reason. Since this suspicious man was leaving, rather than coming into the building, I thought it was best to let him go and ask no questions.”
“What did you do after Monsieur Daziell asked you to call the concierge?” Holmes asked him.
“Don’t you care about this man?”