Of course you saw it, too. The Irregulars had brought a younger version of yourself, though the boy’s hair was blond, not dark, and the eyes, guarded like yours, were brown.
Nicholas Hawkins did not utter a word, while the others were as always so noisy that Mrs. Hudson cast me a gloomy glance each time she filled their plates once again with gravy and mashed potatoes.
No, he didn’t say a word and he barely ate. But he stole a fork of the old family silver that you allow the Irregulars to use, despite Mrs. Hudson’s protests.
I cast you a glance.
Yes, you had noticed the theft.
The boy tried his best to hide the silver under his dirty shirt, but he clearly wasn’t as practiced a thief as the others.
You signaled me to stay in my chair when I was just preparing to rise from it. We know each other so well, that we rarely need words to communicate about matters like that. A slight raise of your left eyebrow, your lean finger trailing the arc of your nose, a slight touch of the upper lip or just a hand on the knee . . . our wordless vocabulary is very reliable by now.
There is an unwritten rule the Baker Street Irregulars obey as strictly as if they signed it with blood (a ritual they perform quite regularly, as we know, for other forms of contracts): The lodgings of Sherlock Holmes are sacred ground and therefore not stained with theft, swearing, spitting, or the disposal of lice and other unpleasant creatures housed in their hair and clothes.
Nicholas Hawkins had no doubt been informed about this rule. But despair breaks even the most strictly enforced law and despair nested in his eyes, blacker than any I have seen in the eyes of any adult seeking your help at Baker Street 221B.
With a quick movement of your gray eyes you drew my gaze to the mug of lemonade, that Mrs. Hudson had brought in as reluctantly as she had the food.
I have become quite a good actor in your service (not as good as you, perhaps: Sherlock Holmes could probably make me believe he is one of the cats Mrs. Hudson feeds at the back door.) I managed to spill most of the lemonade over Nicholas Hawkins without raising any suspicions in the notoriously suspicious minds of our rascal guests, and thanks to my obvious clumsiness and Mrs. Hudson’s extremely sticky lemonade, Nicholas Hawkins (I was quite touched when I found out that he had stolen the last name from a favourite book) had to stay behind while the other boys stampeded down the stairs to shadow a well-known banker whom you (rightfully) suspected to have financed some of the late Moriarty’s endeavors.
Nicholas betrayed his good upbringing once again when he mumbled excuses while putting on the dry clothes Mrs. Hudson brought from the well-filled wardrobe we keep for the Irregulars. The boy had managed to hold on to the fork. It was by now hidden in his left sleeve, but he was clearly embarrassed about it.
You sat in your chair puffing your pipe when I brought the boy back to the living room. You looked at him with the silent gaze you use on both clients and future victims, a gaze as cold and detached as that of a snake ready to strike. But there was something else in your face, a hint of the compassion I detect there only on very few occasions—and usually not at such an early stage of acquaintance.
“I think you underestimate your current companions,” you said without taking your eyes off the boy. “They have an astonishing capacity for sympathy. I am sure they would have raised the money for the ticket if you had informed them about your situation.”
Nicholas Hawkins’ face was almost as expressionless a mask as Sherlock Holmes likes to wear. But he was too young to erase all hints of shame, fear, and wounded pride. A winter like that which you impose on your own emotions was coming for this young boy, but the spring of youth still found its way through the frozen surface.
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Sir.”
“Well, you certainly don’t know much about the criminal trade in this city. A fork like the one you hide in your sleeve will never pay for a train ticket to . . . shall I guess . . . York? Scarborough? The silver is barely fifty years old and shows strong traces of wear. Apart from the fact that it sadly shows an inferior hallmark. As it does have some sentimental value for me, though, I must ask you to return it.”
The boy hesitated, as if he still hoped to keep the pose of the innocent, but then he opened his sleeve and brought the fork forth. He had tears in his eyes when he dropped it into your outstretched hand. His look of injured pride . . . you show it rarely, but I have seen it.
“How did you know what I need it for?”
You put the fork on the table. “You weren’t especially hungry while the others were eating. I don’t see symptoms of any addiction you have to feed. You are obviously not from London, though your accent is covered by a good teacher’s efforts, and the state of your clothes suggests you haven’t been home for at least two weeks. You wear a locket that you touch quite often. Considering your age, I assume it doesn’t bear witness to a romantic attachment, so that leaves a son who is tenderly fond of his mother.”
I still cannot say who was paler when you uttered these words, my friend, the unfortunate boy or you yourself.
“I need to get back. It was wrong to run away.”
“Yes. And no,” you replied. “Yes, you will have to go back, or you may never forgive yourself. But this return has to be prepared, or it may prove dangerous. Which leads to the ‘No’. No, it was not wrong at all to run away, because it brought you here and I will do my very best to help you.”
You nodded at the boy’s chest. “Would you mind opening your shirt to show Dr. Watson the traces I am sure you wear on your chest and back?”
The boy just looked at you, as white as a corpse.
“There are certain rushed movements that betray you. The fear of physical pain does amazing things to us. We become as alert as a deer. Not that it helps, for the hunter is our master. Isn’t he?”
The boy bit his lip so firmly that it turned even whiter than his face. “I see what he is doing.”
“Yes, you do. And he knows.”
And there they were, my friend. On your face. Memories. Not the boy’s, but yours. And I write them down, as I have been the scribe of your memories for so long. The paper is a safer place to preserve them than your mind, where you decided to turn them into ice. In my days of war I sometimes asked men who had been traumatized by the events on the battlefield to write down the memories that haunted them and then burn the paper. I fill these pages only for that purpose. But you’ll have to burn them at the right time . . . when the words are ready to take the memories with them. Sadly this method doesn’t always work.
“There is one thing I can do,” you continued. “As I suspect you don’t want me to involve the police.”
The boy shook his head vigorously.
“Well, let’s leave that option aside for now.” You straightened the fabric of your trousers, as if straightening your thoughts. “In fact, I fear you are right. Domestic situations like this are seldom improved by the police.”
You got up and stepped to the window, something you often do when your emotions threaten to escape the corset you forced them to wear.
“Please promise you won’t go back without my letter,” you said without turning your head.
The boy nodded, but I saw that all he wanted was to get away from this man who read his heart and mind like his own. You would have done the same. And of course you were aware of it.
“The letter will also protect your mother,” you added.
The boy just stared at your back. He didn’t believe you. He was past believing that anything could protect her.
You sent me after him, when he left.
To make it short, although it is one of the heaviest burdens on my heart: I lost the boy.
I have never seen you angrier.
You went yourself to find Billie, but Hawkins, as he called himself, hadn’t gone back to the Irregulars.
You had them search for him. You paid them to guard all the main stations. And stayed up all night, the letter you’d written wa
iting on your desk.
The boy could not be found.
Two days later the Times reported that Beatrice Beauchamp, wife of Richard Beauchamp, a rich merchant with vast estates near York, had committed suicide. She left a son behind. An only child called Nicholas.
When I still heard your steps at three in the morning, pacing the living room, I knocked at the door. You called me in, my friend. I am still grateful for that. This night explained so much and I never received a greater proof of trust from you.
“He didn’t have a brother. I found that to be the most worrying detail.” You stood by the window and stared into the night, as if trying to penetrate a different kind of darkness with your gaze. “I would never have been able to stop it without Mycroft. At that young age my brother was even more my superior when it came to deduction and logic unblurred by emotion. I would have drowned in my emotions without him.”
The hoarse voice of a coachman rose from the street, as if to remind us of the violence that lurks under the surface of our world. And that it sometimes doesn’t pass by the places we call home.
“We stopped our father with blackmail. We found proof of several petty crimes he had arranged in order to threaten a business partner—nothing that compared in our eyes to what he did to our mother, but which would have ruined him if the police had found out. We were scared he would kill us when he realized we had sent the letters, or have one of his men do it. But he decided to escape to the colonies, taking most of the money and leaving a highly indebted estate behind. My mother never quite forgave us. Though Mycroft still believes that her strongest emotion towards us is the embarrassment she feels about her own weakness and the fact that she still loved him.”
You turned and looked at me. “I had forgotten how it feels to be so young, Watson,” you said. “And how such a father teaches us to not trust anyone. I feel quite embarrassed about my ignorance. Please find out where the boy is. I still want his father to get my letter.”
I found him. At the terrible school his father had sent him to, half mad with grief. Holmes’ letter made sure that Nicholas Beauchamp was sent to the best school in the country—I delivered it in person—and that he was never forced to leave for home visits.
He didn’t have a brother, my friend. But he found Sherlock Holmes.
THE THINKING MACHINE
by Denise Hamilton
Bill Gleason was eating lunch at his computer and running some consumer analytics when his eyes wandered to a picture frame at his desk. Pondering the sublime geometry of its crisp angles and parallel lines, Bill sank into a mathematical trance.
But something nagged at him.
Slowly, the numbers receded, the image inside the frame swam into focus and Bill beheld his older daughter Portia, smiling as she accepted a trophy at the Science Olympiad.
Bill examined the beloved face. Soon Portia would be off to college, and only Samantha, whom Bill called daughter number two, or “Dos,” would remain. He envisioned packing up the Volvo station wagon and driving Portia off to her dorm at some. . . .
Suddenly, Bill made a strangled sound and sat up straight.
What if he could muster up enough data to determine which families had kids leaving for college? Those kids would need lamps, bedding, pillows, shelves, and tech. And Landmart, the national chain of big-box stores where Bill toiled in R&D, could target those families with strategically placed coupons and ads.
For several weeks, Bill kept his thoughts to himself. Because having an idea was different from explaining it to a room of people and requesting money to pursue it. At such times, his childhood stutter returned with a vengeance, along with a facial tic to deflect the stares of his colleagues.
Bill often felt like the resident alien at the Landmart Corporation. After earning a Ph.D in mathematics while barely out of his teens, he’d spent the next decade at a research university dwelling happily in a world of pure numbers. It was a comfortable world where he felt at home. Numbers were precise and did exactly what they were supposed to. They never let him down, unlike the human world, with its messy emotions and unpredictable behavior. A world Bill was so bad at navigating.
But then math got sexy and guys like Bill who knew analytics and data forecasting were suddenly in high demand. After years of turning down overtures from Silicon Valley and corporate America, Bill said a reluctant goodbye to university life when Landmart dangled a salary that was 4.256864 times higher than what he earned at his cash-starved institution.
Because by then there was Lisa.
Somehow, Lisa had found him and unlike most humans of the female persuasion, she refused to be scared away by what she diplomatically referred to as his “quirks.” And now they had Portia and Dos, who were an endless source of marvel.
Bill had been nervous about fatherhood. He knew he got along better with pixels than people. But to his great relief, Bill discovered that he loved his daughters with a ferocity he hadn’t known he possessed. With a trembling finger, he traced the Fibonacci spirals of their pink seashell ears as they slept. He spent hours testing diaper absorbency to find the best brand for his waddling darlings. He hunched dutifully over the cereal box, making elf sandwiches of Cheerios, cheese and turkey.
And if he was halting and clumsy with them, and rather wooden in his hugs (though he’d gotten better), they still hurled their small bodies at him when he arrived home from work and demanded that he read bedtime stories with proper drama instead of a mumbling monotone.
And as Little House on the Prairie gave way to Twilight, Bill learned not to argue about the biological impossibility of vampires or question the attractiveness of certain hairstyles and outfits because of the statistical probability of outrage (21.7%) and tears (17.6%). And then one day when the girls were fifteen and seventeen, Lisa announced she wanted another child.
At her age, that meant fertility doctors, invasive tests, and painful shots. They decided not to tell the girls until things “took,” a decision whose wisdom was confirmed when Lisa suffered two miscarriages.
Bill hoped that might be the end of it, but Lisa channeled her grief by redoubling their efforts. She insisted he drive home at lunch when she was ovulating and once he even flew back two days early from a Data Analytics Conference in San Francisco. Bill loathed these “dates” because they turned the best thing ever into a mechanical act and brought back taunts from his childhood:
Ro-bot
Ro-bot
Billy’s just a Robot!
The lunchtime rendezvous also distracted him at work when he could least afford it. When Landmart hired him, Bill had built a computer database to analyze the buying patterns of the firm’s customers, which Landmart called “guests.”
Since then, he’d sliced and diced the data in every conceivable way, amassing a frighteningly large pile of information. For instance, guests with credit cards emblazoned with photos of their children kept up payments better. So Landmart launched an aggressive campaign of free credit cards with personalized photos and the store’s delinquency rate fell 3.2%.
For Bill, whose social intelligence hovered near negative googleplex, this was proof that cold hard numbers concealed—but could also reveal—unassailable emotional truths.
Despite the corporate praise that followed, Bill was far from content. Staring at his gleaming pillars of data, he saw only a pale ghost of the statistical portrait he really wanted.
And then came that eureka moment in his office.
The following month, Bill bragged to his bosses that he’d soon be able to identify Landmart guests with college-bound kids. He just needed more data.
“I believe there are numerical patterns hidden in the data that can be revealed using forensic modeling,” he told the bosses. “This would be nothing like those morons in marketing endlessly focus-testing which color headers and fonts work best for e-coupons. It would be revolutionary.”
Landmart declined to buy the expensive consumer data Bill wanted, saying he already had plenty to work with. A
nd when it came time for his annual review, his evaluation mentioned a “caustic and abrasive” manner with colleagues.
“You need to sugar-coat things a little more,” the HR manager said.
“But their ideas are stupid and they don’t work.”
The HR manager flinched.
“Look, Bill. We all know you’re a brainiac. You’ve done great work here. But there’s book smarts and there’s people smarts. The people who get ahead in this world are the ones who have both. Who know how to navigate the system.”
Maybe I don’t want to navigate the system, Bill thought mutinously. Maybe I should just go back to the university where I belong.
The next time his department met, there was a new person with blinding teeth and fancy shoes at the conference table. A vice president for research and development. He introduced himself as Moriarty.
And this time, when Bill finished his usual pitch about data mining, Moriarty stared thoughtfully and didn’t complain about Bill’s lack of people skills. Later, Moriarty glided into Bill’s office, sleek and silent as a shark.
He picked a half-eaten protein bar off a chair, dusted the seat and sat down.
“I think you’re on to something, Bill. Psychologists say people are most vulnerable and open to suggestion when they’re going through life changes. Can your data predict things like marriage, divorce, and home ownership? If so, we can hit our guests with targeted ads.”
Bill’s eyes goggled. His Adam’s apple moved up and down. In his excitement, he could barely speak, but then he did, for five minutes, until Moriarty cut him off.
“I don’t need the details. Just tell me how much you want and we’ll draw up a budget,”
Bill trembled as he named a figure.
Moriarty said he’d see what he could do.
Then he stared at Bill, narrowing his eyes in a way that made Bill nervous. Despite himself, Bill’s foot began to tap
“This has to stay top secret,” Moriarty said. “If our competitors get wind of what we’re doing, it’s all over. We’ll have the lawyers draw up a non-disclosure statement for you to sign. Just pro forma, of course.”
In the Company of Sherlock Holmes Page 18