Murder, My Dear Watson

  “Dr. Watson,” he said, “I’m quite as excited to make your acquaintance as I am of Mr. Holmes. You cannot know what an inspiration you have been to me; though you would in the unlikely event you were ever to read my work. I’m a shameless imitator.”

  This confession—the very last thing I had expected from him—left me with neither speech nor ammunition. I had been prepared to accuse him of that same transgression, and for him to deny having committed it. In one brief, pretty declaration he had managed to turn a contemptible deed into an act of veneration.

  I was not, however, disposed to respond to guile. I said, “You might first have sought the opinion of the imitated, to determine whether the honour would be welcome.”

  He nodded, as if he were considering the matter. “I might have, and I should. I can only state in my defense that I thought you existed on far too lofty a plane to be approached by one of my youth and inexperience. Pray accept my apology, and I shall post the circumstances of my debt to you upon the front page of the Times.”

  This sentiment, and the obvious sincerity with which it was delivered, thoroughly unmasted me. For all his seeming repose, young Rohmer was clearly flummoxed by the celebrated company in which he found himself. This was evident both by his attitude and by his dress; his Norfolk and whipcords, although quite correct to his surroundings, were new almost to the point of gaucherie. He had dressed to please, and his efforts to ingratiate himself touched that which remained of the youth inside me. I told him no public abasement was necessary, and in so doing informed him he was forgiven.

  Moments later we were sharing the divan, enjoying the whiskies-and-soda which Holmes had prepared, as carefully as his chemical experiments of old, and with considerably greater success than some. My friend—showing subtle signs of discomfort born of rheumatism—had assumed his Indian pose of listening, with legs folded and hands steepled beneath his chin.

  “Dr. Fu-Manchu, who is the antagonist of my little midnight crawler, is not entirely a creature of fiction,” began Mr. Rohmer. “He is based upon a Chinese master criminal known only as ‘Mr. King,’ who was the principal supplier of opium to the Limehouse district of London at the time I was researching an article on the subject for a magazine. He was a shadowy figure, and though I heard his name whispered everywhere in Chinatown, I never laid eyes upon him until long after I had filed the story, when I chanced to glimpse him crossing the pavement from an automobile into a house. He was as tall and dignified a celestial as you are ever likely to meet, attired in a fur cap and a long overcoat with a fur collar, followed closely by a stunningly beautiful Arab girl wrapped in a grey fur cloak. The girl was a dusky angel, in the company of a man whose face I can only describe as the living embodiment of Satan.

  “That, gentlemen,” he concluded quietly, “is Dr. Fu-Manchu, as I have come to present him in writing and to picture him in my nightmares.”

  “Who was the girl?” I heard myself asking; and inwardly jeered at myself for harbouring the interests of a young rake in the body of a sixty-one-year-old retired professional man.

  Rohmer, who like Holmes was a pipe smoker, shrugged in the midst of scooping tobacco from an old leather pouch into a crusty brier. “His mistress, perhaps, or merely a transient. In any case I never saw her again.”

  Holmes intervened. “I take it by that statement that you did see Mr. King subsequent to that occasion.”

  “Not according to the information I gave to my publicist, or for that matter anyone else, including my wife.” He struck a match off his bootheel and puffed the pipe into an orange glow, meeting Holmes’s gaze. “But, yes.”

  “And has he anything to do with the package which you have brought?”

  “Again, the answer is yes.” His eyes did not stray to the bundle he had placed atop the deal table where our host had once conducted his chemical researches, now a repository for the daily post. Mine, connected as they were to a curious mind, did. The item was roughly the size of a tea cake, wrapped in burlap and tied with a cord. My fingers itched for my old notebook.

  “Mr. King is no slouch,” said Rohmer, “and like Dr. Watson, recognised himself immediately when he read my description of Fu-Manchu. Beyond this fact, the opium lord and the good doctor have nothing in common. Vexed though he might have been by my little theft, I’m convinced that Dr. Watson would not stoop to kidnap me and threaten my life.”

  “Good Lord.” I exclaimed. In my foolish complacency I had formed the fancy that such incidents had been left behind with the dead century.

  Holmes’s guest proceeded to exhibit his flair for narrative with a colourful but concise account of his recent adventure. While strolling the twisting streets of Limehouse in quest of literary inspiration, he had been seized and forced into a touring car by two dark-skinned brutes—Bedouins, he thought—in shaggy black beards and ill-fitting European dress, who conveyed him to that selfsame house before which he had first set eyes upon Mr. King. There, in a windowless room decorated only with an ancient Chinese tapestry upon one wall, he was left alone with that weird Satanic creature, attired in a plain yellow robe and mandarin’s cap, who interviewed him from behind a homely oak desk about the source of his novel. In precise, unaccented English, Mr. King expressed particular interest in the character of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the wicked Chinese ascetic bent upon world domination by the East.

  “He is a creature of my imagination,” Rohmer insisted, for he intuited that to profess otherwise would seal his doom.

  “Pray do not insult me,” Mr. King replied evenly. “I am a law-abiding British resident. Import-export is my trade, and I have no wish to conquer this troubled planet. Beyond these things, your description of me is accurate in every detail. Was it your purpose to malign my character?”

  “It was not.”

  “And yet I find myself incapable of doing business with gentlemen who placed absolute faith in my integrity before your canard appeared. If the situation continues I shall face ruin.”

  “I sympathise. However, I am not responsible for your sour fortune.”

  “Will you withdraw the book from circulation?”

  “I will not. I am informed its sales are increasing.”

  Mr. King stroked his great brow. “May I at least extract your word that this ogre who resembles me will not be seen again once the novel is no longer in print?”

  “You may not. I am writing a sequel.”

  “I could bring suit, of course. However, the courts take too long, and in the meantime I shall have no source of income. Shall I threaten you?”

  “I rather wish you would. This conversation has become tedious.”

  At this point I laughed despite myself. Here was an Englishman! Rohmer continued without acknowledging the interruption.

  Mr. King’s devilish features assumed a saturnine arrangement, he informed us. “I am, as I said, respectful of your laws. This was not always the case. It is difficult for a Chinese to advance himself in business in this society; I was forced to take certain measures, the nature of which I shall not describe. I assume you are aware that if you were never to leave this house, your body would never be recovered?”

  Rohmer confided to Holmes and me that he had not been so sanguine as he’d pretended. He knew the house stood before a dock, and that many a weighted corpse lay on the bottom of the Thames with little hope of recovery. The thought that his wife should never learn of his true fate very nearly unmanned him. Yet he held his tongue.

  “I shall accept your silence as an affirmative response,” said the Chinese. “However, I am not without reason, and I am in the way of a sporting man.”

  Hereupon he struck a miniature gong which stood upon the desk. It had scarcely finished reverberating when one of the villains who had abducted Rohmer, now draped in the burnoose and robes of the true Bedouin, entered through an opening hidden behind the tapestry, placed a singular object next to the gong, and withdrew.

  “This bowl belonged to the Emperor Han, who ruled China from 206 until 220 A.
D.,” said Mr. King, lifting the ornate object. “It is solid gold. I lend it to you, in the certainty that a clever fellow such as you will succeed in unlocking its riddle. If in Thursday’s Times I read the answer in the personal columns, the bowl shall be yours, with my compliments. If upon that day the late edition has come and gone and no such item has appeared, you will not live an hour more. You have seen how easily my subordinates may lay hands upon your person. I believe you know I speak the truth.”

  Rohmer concluded his tale at the moment he finished his pipe. He laid it in his lap to cool.

  “I accepted the bowl, for what else could I do? Mr. King then used the gong to summon the Bedouins, both of whom were again costumed as Occidentals, and they returned me to the spot where they had first accosted me. I went home, and puzzled over the thing the night through. Then morning came and I was nowhere nearer the solution than I was yesterday evening, so I sent you the message which resulted in your kind invitation. Tomorrow is Thursday. Can you help me, Mr. Holmes? It is for my wife I am concerned. I’ve cost her many a sleepless hour with my rash wanderings. To leave her a widow at her tender age would be a mortal sin.”

  “Your Mr. King is transparent, and hardly inscrutable,” said Holmes. “He fears attention and investigation more than the loss of legitimate business, if the résumé you supplied is reliable.” He rubbed his hands in the way I remembered from long ago, signifying his eagerness to solve the problem which had been set before him—though he may merely have been massaging his joints. “You were correct to come to me rather than the police. Scotland Yard teems with fresh new faces, behind which churn the same old brains. Let us examine this wondrous bowl.”

  Rohmer stood, retrieved the bundle he had brought, and placed it in Holmes’s hands. A twitch of the cord, and the sun came into the room in the form of a beautiful thing which glistened as if still molten. I rose and bent over my friend, that I might see what he saw at the moment he saw it. It seemed that even in my extremity I remained the same curious creature I had been when I was no older than young Rohmer.

  The workmanship was exquisite. The bowl was just large enough to hold in two hands, so bright and gleaming it might have been just struck off. Around the outside of the rim paraded a row of playful monkeys in relief, no two of which wore the same expression, and each so lifelike as to seem poised to leap from its perch and gambol about that staid room. There were thirteen in all, some crouching, some reclining upon their backs, others in the attitude of stalking, rumps in the air and noses nearly touching the ground. One, of more mischievous mien than all the rest, hung from its tail, the tail curling well above the bowl’s rim, and stared straight out with arms crossed and lips peeled back into a jeering grin, as though daring the casual handler to unlock the riddle of the golden monkeys.

  “This is formidable craftsmanship.” Holmes studied the outside, the inside, then turned it over and studied the bottom, which bore no mark. At length he proffered it to me. “What do you make of it, Watson? I confess chinoiserie is far from my long suit.”

  I hefted it. It weighed, I should have judged, nearly four pounds. “It is twenty-four karat, Holmes. I would stake my life upon it.”

  “Mr. Rohmer has already staked his. It seems scarcely large enough to support more than one.” He took the bowl from me and charged his own pipe. “I commend to you both the sea air. Mind the bees. They are in a petulant humour this season.”

  I understood this to be a dismissal, and conducted the writer to the outdoors, where we strolled along the chalk cliff listening to the restless Channel coursing along the base. To our left, Holmes’s bees swarmed about his city of hives, which reminded me so much of the mosques and minarets of Afghanistan.

  “Mr. Holmes is older than I’d suspected,” declared my companion. “Your accounts paint such a youthful and energetic picture that I suppose I thought he was immune to dissipation. Do you think his mental powers sufficient to this challenge?”

  “The crown jewels reside in an ancient structure,” I replied. “They shine now as they have for four hundred years.”

  “That is true.” He sounded unconvinced.

  We spent the remainder of our outing discussing Egypt, which Rohmer was eager to visit, and which I had known intimately long before any tourist with the wherewithal could hire a camel and have his likeness struck before the Sphinx. We took our rest upon a marble bench while he bombarded me with questions. When after two hours we returned to the villa, I was quite drained and looking forward to a whisky-and-soda and silence; the latter a requisite during Holmes’s deliberations.

  Much to my surprise, we found him quite loquacious. He looked up with sparkling eyes through a veritable “London particular” of tobacco-smoke and bade us be seated. The floor about his feet was piled with books from his shelves, many of which were splayed open upon their spines or stood like tents on the carpet. I noted Lutz’s History of the Chinese Dynasties, Walker’s Ancient Metalwork, and Carroll’s World Primates among the variety of titles. The wonderful golden bowl rested in his lap.

  “Dr. Watson can attest that it is a long-held axiom of mine that one cannot make bricks without clay,” Holmes informed Rohmer, who unlike me had declined an invitation to make free with the siphon and bottle. “I am to some degree an autodidact, and most of my education regarding arcane subjects has taken place in the pursuit of the solution to problems which at first appeared puerile. When we met, I astounded Watson with the announcement that I was unaware of Copernicus or his theories; however, I have since qualified as an expert. At the end of two hours, the lost-wax process is not lost to me. Similarly, I may converse with some authority upon the Emperor Han’s propensity towards painful boils, the origin of the Troy ounce, and some indelicacies in the matter of the posteriors of certain species of gibbon. I am enormously wealthier for the time spent.”

  “But is my wife any less likely to suffer bereavement?” Rohmer’s tone was impatient. He had evidently concluded that Holmes’s remarkable mind had commenced to wander. It shames me to confess that I harboured similar doubts. Stapleton and his cursed hound had been mouldering now for a quarter-century, and time was scarcely more kind to the faculties of reason.

  “That I cannot say,” Holmes declared.

  Rohmer’s face fell.

  “The future is a closed book, even to me,” continued the retired detective. “For all I am aware, your driver may become distracted on the way back to Newhaven and precipitate you both over the cliff. However, assuming that your Mr. King is a man of his word, Mrs. Rohmer will not grieve because the golden monkeys have refused to give up their secret. The riddle is solved.”

  The young are easily read. I saw hope and relief and a dark shadow of doubt upon his face. He leaned forwards to hear Holmes’s explanation, Holmes leaned forwards to provide it. Those two hawklike profiles in such close proximity gave me the fancy that Rohmer was gazing into a somewhat clouded mirror.

  “I call your attention once again to the graven figures. Does anything about them strike you as remarkable?”

  Rohmer accepted the return of the golden bowl and rotated it slowly, scowling in deep concentration. “They are exceptionally life-like. To think that the Chinese were executing such things when we English were living in mud huts makes one wonder why they do not already rule the world.”

  “Just so. However, that is material for another conversation, one which will almost certainly not involve this particular piece.” Having made this cryptic pronouncement, Holmes plunged ahead without pause. “I direct your young eyes towards the monkeys themselves. Does any one of them stand out from the crowd?”

  “The one with its arms folded has claimed my attention since the beginning. Cheeky little fellow, this. He seems just this side of thrusting out his tongue.”

  “Devilishly clever, these Chinese,” said Holmes. “It could be a diversionary tactic to lure the casual observer away from something more informative. Not in this case, however. What do you know of monkeys?”

 
; His guest sought his answer in the ceiling. “According to Professor Darwin, they are related to you and me, and the Americans are of the opinion that they are quite amusing by the barrel. I know a bit more about marmosets, but none is represented here. I’m afraid that’s the sum total of my knowledge as regards the species.”

  “Perhaps you will find Mr. Carroll of assistance.” Holmes scooped up World Primates from the floor and presented it with his thumb marking the place to which it had lain open. “I would direct your eye to the passage I have underlined.”

  Rohmer carefully laid the precious bowl beside him on the divan and accepted the book. He read aloud, “‘Monkeys occupy two separate and distinct groups, one native to the Old World, the other to the New, in particular Central and South America. Old World monkeys are characterised by their narrow probosci, and are referred to as Catarrhine; none possesses a prehensile tail. Their American cousins are recognised by their flat probosci, and these are designated Playtyr-rhine; their tails are prehensile.’”

  The young man closed the hook, picked up the bowl once again, and studied each of the golden monkeys in turn. “All the noses appear similar. I believe they are flat, but lacking the other variety for purposes of comparison, I cannot say definitely. How narrow is narrow?”

  “A valid observation. As Aristotle said, one requires a place to stand. Disregard, then, the question of monkeys’ noses. What do you make of this business of tails?”

  “Merely that Old World monkeys are incapable of swinging or hanging by them, while those from the New . . .” Rohmer’s voice trailed off. He was staring at the insolent primate with arms folded and tail curled over the lip of the bowl. “Great heavens! And I presume to call myself an Orientalist.”