Evan Wilson concludes instead that the country in question is El Salvador, the dictator Rafael Zaldívar, who ruled from 1876 to 1885 and oversaw numerous Indian uprisings. Charles Higham, in Adventures of Conan Doyle, suggests José Santos Zelaya (1893–1909), president of Nicaragua. Zelaya, a true dictator who annexed the Mosquito Coast, incited revolutions in neighboring countries, and attempted to assume control of the Central American Federation, made plenty of enemies—including the U.S. government, which, frustrated by his refusal to allow a canal to be built through Nicaragua, encouraged his Conservative opposition to revolt. Zelaya was forced to resign and go into exile, but not until one year after “Wisteria Lodge” was first published. In a detailed examination of the problem, Henry Dietz also fingers Zelaya as the Tiger, arguing that Watson “anticipated the end of the adventure before it took place in the hopes of hurrying Zelaya’s downfall.”
Klas Lithner is persuasive in arguing for Justo Rufino Barrios, a dictator of Guatemala from 1873 to 1885. Most fancifully, Rick Lai proposes that Murillo was the man named Mayes, known as the “Tiger of Haiti,” whose evil deeds were recorded by Arthur Morrison in The Red Triangle (1903), a record of the adventures of Holmes’s rival Martin Hewitt.
25 Watson undoubtedly means “Señora”; “Signora” is an Italian title.
26 The logic of killing Garcia but not Señora Durando seems convoluted, argues D. Martin Dakin, seeing as how “his body was bound to be discovered, whereas she could have disappeared without anyone being the wiser.” Chris Wills-Wood answers that Murillo and his confederates were seeking to avoid drawing attention to High Gable itself. Señora Durando’s death would have caused the police to make troublesome inquiries of her employers, whereas Garcia’s murder could have—had not the wily Holmes and Baynes been involved—presumably eluded any connection with the house down the road.
27 “But why didn’t the fool Lopez wait to pounce until she’d addressed the envelope herself?” D. Martin Dakin asks. “It would have saved them the trouble of torturing her, as well as giving the letter a more authentic appearance. It is strange enough as it is that the address in a different handwriting didn’t arouse Garcia’s suspicions.” That Garcia did notice is the contention of Chris Wills-Wood, who remembers that, after receiving the letter, Garcia seemed (according to Eccles’s account) “even more distrait and strange than before” and later became “lost in his own thoughts.”
28 As the county seat of Surrey, Guildford would have hosted the semiannual legal hearings for the entire county.
29 In England, a rank of the peerage below that of a duke and above that of an earl. In other countries, the title has been debased.
30 Clearly “Signor” should be “Señor,” and “Rulli” is an unlikely Spanish name.
31 See “The Golden Pince-Nez,” note 19.
32 The magical power attributed to a fetish (which may be either the remnant of a living thing, such as a bone, a shell, or a claw; or an artificially constructed object, such as a wooden carving) is said to come from a god that inhabits the item and imbues it with his desires. In some cases, the fetish is thought to have a will of its own. Had the cook placed a “taboo” on his fetish, it would have taken on even greater power, and no one but the cook would have been able to touch it.
33 The references to “unclean gods” and cannibalism reflect a Victorian revulsion for voodoo that largely persists today. Yet the staying power of Haiti’s primary religion has forced even the Catholic church to come to uneasy terms with its practices. In fact, some of voodoo’s rituals are derived from Catholicism itself. Brought to Haiti by West African slaves (particularly those from Benin), voodoo holds that the world is governed by spiritual forces, or loas, who must be appeased through ritual animal sacrifice, food offerings, and ceremonial song and dance. Loas, which may be identified with deceased ancestors, African gods, or Catholic saints, are sometimes said to inhabit the bodies of voodoo devotees who have entered into a trance state.
It is from voodoo that the leering, lurching zombies of horror films originate. A zombie is the soul of a deceased person summoned by an evil sorcerer to enact magic, or a corpse raised from the grave to perform manual labor. Voodoo priests may also appear to create zombies by administering a poison that renders one paralysed for several hours.
Despite some of voodoo’s more idiosyncratic aspects, cannibalism’s role in the belief system is no more than an urban legend, as is the sticking of pins into so-called voodoo dolls. Varieties of voodoo are practised not only in Haiti but also in the Guyanas, Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil, and the United States. In light of Don Murillo’s flight from one capital of Europe to another, it is not surprising to find a servant without references in the Don’s retinue, and the cook, whom the Don “picked up in his travels,” is of indeterminate geographic origin.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED CIRCLE1
Long before Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola romanticised the Mafia for the American public, “The Red Circle” involved Holmes with an Italian secret society so powerful that Watson was compelled to disguise its name. The “Italian colony” in London, although a distinct feature of the landscape, by and large kept itself apart from the rest of the population, and only one other case, “The Six Napoleons,” involves Italians. Here, Holmes accidentally joins forces with the Pinkertons, America’s premier private detective agency of the nineteenth century, to capture a cross-Atlantic killer. The Pinkertons appear again in The Valley of Fear, but this is the only record of Holmes working with them. Scholars consider that Holmes may well have been duped by the beautiful heroine into letting the real murderer go.
PART I
WELL, MRS. WARREN, I cannot see that you have any particular cause for uneasiness, nor do I understand why I, whose time is of some value, should interfere in the matter. I really have other things to engage me.” So spoke Sherlock Holmes, and turned back to the great scrapbook in which he was arranging and indexing some of his recent material.
But the landlady had the pertinacity, and also the cunning, of her sex. She held her ground firmly.
“You arranged an affair for a lodger of mine last year,” she said—“Mr. Fairdale Hobbs.”
“Ah, yes—a simple matter.”
“But he would never cease talking of it—your kindness, sir, and the way in which you brought light into the darkness. I remembered his words when I was in doubt and darkness myself. I know you could if you only would.”
Holmes was accessible upon the side of flattery, and also, to do him justice, upon the side of kindliness. The two forces made him lay down his gum-brush with a sigh of resignation and push back his chair.
A Reverie.
H. M. Brock, R. I., and Joseph Simpson, R. B. A., Strand Magazine, 1911
“Well, well, Mrs. Warren, let us hear about it, then. You don’t object to tobacco, I take it? Thank you, Watson—the matches! You are uneasy, as I understand, because your new lodger remains in his rooms and you cannot see him. Why, bless you, Mrs. Warren, if I were your lodger you often would not see me for weeks on end.”
“No doubt, sir; but this is different. It frightens me, Mr. Holmes. I can’t sleep for fright. To hear his quick step moving here and moving there from early morning to late at night, and yet never to catch so much as a glimpse of him—it’s more than I can stand. My husband is as nervous over it as I am, but he is out at his work all day, while I get no rest from it. What is he hiding for? What has be done? Except for the girl,2 I am all alone in the house with him, and it’s more than my nerves can stand.”
Holmes leaned forward and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman’s shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the chair which he had indicated. “If I take it up I must understand every detail,” said he. “Take time to consider. The smallest point may be the most essential. You say that the man came ten days ago, and paid you for a fortnigh
t’s board and lodging?”
“He asked my terms, sir. I said fifty shillings a week.3 There is a small sitting-room and bedroom, and all complete, at the top of the house.4
“Well?”
“He said, ‘I’ll pay you five pounds a week if I can have it on my own terms.’ I’m a poor woman, sir, and Mr. Warren earns little, and the money meant much to me. He took out a ten-pound note, and he held it out to me then and there. ‘You can have the same every fortnight for a long time to come if you keep the terms,’ he said. ‘If not, I’ll have no more to do with you.’ ”
“What were the terms?”
“Well, sir, they were that he was to have a key of the house. That was all right. Lodgers often have them. Also that he was to be left entirely to himself and never, upon any excuse, to be disturbed.”
“Nothing wonderful in that, surely?”
“Not in reason, sir. But this is out of all reason. He has been there for ten days, and neither Mr. Warren, nor I, nor the girl has once set eyes upon him. We can hear that quick step of his pacing up and down, up and down, night, morning, and noon; but except on that first night he has never once gone out of the house.”
“Oh, he went out the first night, did he?”
“Yes, sir, and returned very late—after we were all in bed. He told me after he had taken the rooms that he would do so, and asked me not to bar the door. I heard him come up the stair after midnight.”
“But his meals?”
“It was his particular direction that we should always, when he rang, leave his meal upon a chair, outside his door. Then he rings again when he has finished and we take it down from the same chair. If he wants anything else he prints it on a slip of paper and leaves it.”
“Prints it?”
“Yes, sir; prints it in pencil. Just the word, nothing more. Here’s one I brought to show you—SOAP. Here’s another—MATCH. This is one he left the first morning—DAILY GAZETTE.5 I leave that paper with his breakfast every morning.”
“Dear me, Watson,” said Holmes, staring with great curiosity at the slips of foolscap which the landlady had handed to him, “this is certainly a little unusual. Seclusion I can understand; but why print? Printing is a clumsy process. Why not write? What would it suggest, Watson?”
“That he desired to conceal his handwriting.”
“But why? What can it matter to him that his landlady should have a word of his writing? Still, it may be as you say. Then, again, why such laconic messages?”
“I cannot imagine.”
“It opens a pleasing field for intelligent speculation. The words are written with a broad-pointed, violet-tinted pencil of a not unusual pattern. You will observe that the paper is torn away at the side here after the printing was done, so that the ‘S’ of ‘SOAP’ is partly gone. Suggestive, Watson, is it not?”
“Of caution?”
“Exactly. There was evidently some mark, some thumb-print, something which might give a clue to the person’s identity. Now, Mrs. Warren, you say that the man was of middle size, dark, and bearded. What age would he be?”
“Holmes stared with great curiosity at the slips of foolscap.”
H. M. Brock, R. I., and Joseph Simpson, R. B. A., Strand Magazine, 1911
“Youngish, sir—not over thirty.”
“Well, can you give me no further indications?”
“He spoke good English, sir, and yet I thought he was a foreigner by his accent.”
“And he was well dressed?”
“Very smartly dressed, sir—quite the gentleman. Dark clothes—nothing you would note.”
“He gave no name?”
“No, sir.”
“And has had no letters or callers?”
“None.”
“But surely you or the girl enter his room of a morning?”
“No, sir; he looks after himself entirely.”
“Dear me! That is certainly remarkable. What about his luggage?”
“He had one big brown bag with him—nothing else.”
“Well, we don’t seem to have much material to help us. Do you say nothing has come out of that room—absolutely nothing?”
The landlady drew an envelope from her bag; from it she shook out two burnt matches and a cigarette-end upon the table.
“They were on his tray this morning. I brought them because I had heard that you can read great things out of small ones.”
Holmes shrugged his shoulders.
“There is nothing here,” said he. “The matches have, of course, been used to light cigarettes. That is obvious from the shortness of the burnt end. Half the match is consumed in lighting a pipe or cigar. But, dear me! This cigarette stub is certainly remarkable. The gentleman was bearded and moustached, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t understand that. I should say that only a clean-shaven man could have smoked this. Why, Watson, even your modest moustache would have been singed.”
“A holder?” I suggested.
“No, no; the end is matted. I suppose there could not be two people in your rooms, Mrs. Warren?”
“No, sir. He eats so little that I often wonder it can keep life in one.”
“Well, I think we must wait for a little more material. After all, you have nothing to complain of. You have received your rent, and he is not a troublesome lodger, though he is certainly an unusual one. He pays you well, and if he chooses to lie concealed it is no direct business of yours. We have no excuse for an intrusion upon his privacy until we have some reason to think that there is a guilty reason for it. I’ve taken up the matter, and I won’t lose sight of it. Report to me if anything fresh occurs, and rely upon my assistance if it should be needed.
“There are certainly some points of interest in this case, Watson,” he remarked, when the landlady had left us. “It may, of course, be trivial—individual eccentricity; or it may be very much deeper than appears on the surface. The first thing that strikes one is the obvious possibility that the person now in the rooms may be entirely different from the one who engaged them.”
“Why should you think so?”
“Well, apart from this cigarette-end, was it not suggestive that the only time the lodger went out was immediately after his taking the rooms? He came back—or someone came back—when all witnesses were out of the way. We have no proof that the person who came back was the person who went out. Then, again, the man who took the rooms spoke English well. This other, however, prints ‘match’ when it should have been ‘matches.’ I can imagine that the word was taken out of a dictionary, which would give the noun but not the plural. The laconic style may be to conceal the absence of knowledge of English. Yes, Watson, there are good reasons to suspect that there has been a substitution of lodgers.”
“But for what possible end?”
“Ah! there lies our problem. There is one rather obvious line of investigation.” He took down the great book in which, day by day, he filed the agony columns of the various London journals. “Dear me!” said he, turning over the pages, “what a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual! This person is alone and cannot be approached by letter without a breach of that absolute secrecy which is desired. How is any news or any message to reach him from without? Obviously by advertisement through a newspaper.6 There seems no other way, and fortunately we need concern ourselves with the one paper only. Here are the Daily Gazette extracts of the last fortnight.7 ‘Lady with a black boa at Prince’s Skating Club’—that we may pass. ‘Surely Jimmy will not break his mother’s heart’—that appears to be irrelevant. ‘If the lady who fainted in the Brixton bus’—she does not interest me. ‘Every day my heart longs—’ Bleat, Watson—unmitigated bleat! Ah, this is a little more possible. Listen to this: ‘Be patient. Will find some sure means of communication. Meanwhile, this column.—G.’ That is two days after Mrs. Warren’s lodger arrived. It sounds pla
usible, does it not? The mysterious one could understand English, even if he could not print it. Let us see if we can pick up the trace again. Yes, here we are—three days later. ‘Am making successful arrangements. Patience and prudence. The clouds will pass.—G.’ Nothing for a week after that. Then comes something much more definite: ‘The path is clearing. If I find chance signal message remember code agreed—one A, two B, and so on. You will hear soon.—G.’ That was in yesterday’s paper, and there is nothing in to-day’s. It’s all very appropriate to Mrs. Warren’s lodger. If we wait a little, Watson, I don’t doubt that the affair will grow more intelligible.”
So it proved; for in the morning I found my friend standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, and a smile of complete satisfaction upon his face.
“How’s this, Watson?” he cried, picking up the paper from the table. “ ‘High red house with white stone facings. Third floor. Second window left. After dusk.—G.’ That is definite enough. I think after breakfast we must make a little reconnaissance of Mrs. Warren’s neighbourhood. Ah, Mrs. Warren! what news do you bring us this morning?”
Our client had suddenly burst into the room with an explosive energy which told of some new and momentous development.
“It’s a police matter, Mr. Holmes!” she cried. “I’ll have no more of it! He shall pack out of that8 with his baggage. I would have gone straight up and told him so, only I thought it was but fair to you to take your opinion first. But I’m at the end of my patience, and when it comes to knocking my old man about—”
“Knocking Mr. Warren about?”
“Using him roughly, anyway.”
“But who used him roughly?”
“Ah! that’s what we want to know! It was this morning, sir. Mr. Warren is a timekeeper at Morton and Waylight’s, in Tottenham Court Road. He has to be out of the house before seven. Well, this morning he had not got ten paces down the road when two men came up behind him, threw a coat over his head, and bundled him into a cab that was beside the kerb. They drove him an hour, and then opened the door and shot him out. He lay in the roadway so shaken in his wits that he never saw what became of the cab. When he picked himself up he found he was on Hampstead Heath; so he took a bus home, and there he lies now on the sofa, while I came straight round to tell you what had happened.”
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories: The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (Non-slipcased edition) (Vol. 2) (The Annotated Books) Page 56