by Неизвестный
Holmes shrugged. “Who can say? Perhaps it is only a matter of time for me as well.”
The captain shuddered. “Let us hope not, Mr Holmes. I for one am profoundly grateful that you have returned my ship — and my son — to me. How can I ever thank you?”
Holmes waved his hand dismissively. “Please do not trouble yourself. I have made but a single stab in the effort to make our mutual world more inhabitable … though it does me good to see my efforts here were successful, there is still more to be done.”
The captain extended his hand. “I will be sending you a check — and, in the meantime, please do take care, as I imagine your enemy, as you call him, will not be pleased that you have defeated his efforts yet again.”
Holmes smiled as he took the captain’s hand. “No doubt you are right there. But I cannot spend my time worrying about it; there are more important things to attend to.”
Later that day, the Andrea Morgan returned to port in London to let us off, and then continued on its journey to Portsmouth.
As we rode home in the cab, Holmes glanced out the window at the humanity teeming all around us.
“The rational versus the sacred, Watson … sometimes faith is stronger than reason. And perhaps that isn’t entirely a bad thing after all. In a way, the Captain’s belief in the ghost of his wife was a way of expressing his love and faith.”
If I was startled at hearing my friend talk like this, I didn’t say so; sometimes with Holmes it is best to listen and not interject one’s own opinion. Moreover, I was afraid if I expressed my surprise at hearing him make such a statement, he would clam up entirely on the subject. So I just sat quietly and listened, but he said no more, and stared moodily out the window the rest of the way home.
The next day I called on Holmes to accompany him to the train station, from whence we would take a train to the Lake District. He was standing at the desk staring at that morning’s paper, which had evidently just arrived.
“Holmes?” I said, but he did not reply. “Holmes?” I repeated. “Are you ready to go?”
“Oh, hello, Watson,” he said, looking up at me, or rather past me, for his expression was preoccupied.
“Are you all right, Holmes?”
“What? Oh, yes, Watson, quite all right,” he answered with a deep sigh.
“What is it, Holmes?”
He held up the paper. “The chickens have come home to roost, as they say. Or the vulture, rather.”
I looked at the section he indicated. It was a small article in the bottom corner of page four.
MAN TRAMPLED UNDER CAB
Bystanders watched horrified yesterday as an intoxicated sailor lurched under the wheels of a speeding cab on Mary-Le-Bone Street yesterday. The man’s identity has not yet been released, but witnesses say he was a sturdy red-haired man dressed as a sailor.
*
I looked at Holmes. “Snead?”
“No doubt. And I would lay odds that he wasn’t drunk, and that it was no accident.”
“Moriarty?”
Holmes nodded grimly. “Snead may have escaped drowning, but he was unfortunate enough to fail the Professor, and that is not wise if you wish to remain alive.”
“But why would Moriarty have his own man killed?”
Holmes shrugged. “Who can say? To set an example, perhaps. Because he had outlived his usefulness, because he knew too much — who can say?”
I shuddered. I had no great affection for Snead, and did not doubt that he was a villain, but to be trampled to death — murdered by his own employer — surely that was too horrible a fate for anyone.
Holmes pulled back the curtain from the window and looked down into the street. “It is also possible that Moriarty intends to send me a message.”
“You!” My blood ran cold in my veins.
“Surely Moriarty recognized my hand in this affair, and he is not finished with me. We shall hear from him again, no doubt.”
“Holmes, how can you speak of such a threat — such a monster — so calmly?”
He shrugged. “What else am I to do? We are two players on the same board. He makes his move; I make mine. And so on. Sooner or later, one of us is bound to win. Until then, what can we do but continue to play the game?”
But I had enough of such talk.
“Holmes, let’s go — we have a train to catch.”
“Very well, Watson. I have agreed to come with you, but I don’t want to put you in any danger, in case Moriarty is intent on exacting revenge upon me.”
“Since when have I ever refused to face danger with you?” I said.
Holmes smiled. “Good old Watson, stalwart to the last. Come on, then,” he said, laying a hand upon my shoulder. “Mrs Hudson has packed us a lunch, so we won’t starve, at any rate.”
With that, he picked up his suitcase and followed me out into the street, closing the door behind him. The sound of the closing latch echoed hollowly behind us as we walked down the stairs and out into the early morning glare, to be swallowed up into the sea of humanity that is London.
* * * *
Carole Buggé‘s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies. Her first Holmes novel, The Star of India, received good reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The Boston Globe, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, among others; her second novel, The Haunting of Torre Abbey, received a coveted starred review in Kirkus. The 1992 Winner of the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award, she is also the 1996 First Prize winner of the Maxim Mazumdar Playwriting Competition and the 1992 Jean Paiva Memorial Fiction award, which included an NEA grant to read her fiction and poetry at Lincoln Center. Her play, Strings, has recently been optioned by The Open Book Theatre Company for a production in New York.
THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING AUTOMATON, by Ron Goulart
On that rain-swept morning in May of 1900 only five automobiles existed in the capital city of the small middle European country of Orlandia. By the time Harry Challenge had been in town less than an hour the total was down to four.
His train came chuffing into the vast, chill South Gate Railroad Terminal roughly a half hour behind schedule. Harry, a lean clean shaved man in his early thirties, had been in Paris incapacitating a team of blackmailers who’d been plaguing Jules Verne. A cablegram from his father sent him to Orlandia.
The cable, now neatly folded in the breast pocket of his conservative dark business suit, said:
Dear Son:
Time to be up and going to Zevenburg, capital of dinky Orlandia. Colonel Milford Bascom, the circus entrepreneur, is in Europe gathering acts and artifacts for that halfwit Museum of Marvels here in Manhattan. He’s in Orlandia to buy an automaton that plays the zither. However, the owner of the mechanism was murdered and the gadget swiped. We’re hired to find it. Notify him of your arrival time and he’ll meet your train. Your loving father, the Challenge International Detective Agency.
The rain was striking hard at the high glass-domed roof of the station. The platform was thick with disembarking passengers, bright-uniformed porters and a wide selection of portmanteaus, reticules, trunks, carpet bags and suitcases festooned with travel stickers.
Carrying his single piece of luggage, Harry stepped clear of his compartment and onto the platform. He set his suitcase down, fished a thin black cheroot out of his breast pocket and lit it with a wax match.
Nearby a small plump woman was mentioning to her small plump husband, “We had six pieces of baggage when we left Paris, Stanley.”
“I thought it was only five, Marilyn my dear.”
Exhaling smoke, Harry glanced around. Since he’d seen Colonel Bascom’s picture on quite a few posters, he was certain he’d be able to spot him. So far, though, there was no sign of him.
“You’re seriously late. I certainly hope this isn’t a s
ample of the efficiency of your agency, Mr. Challenge.”
Turning to his right, he saw a tall, dark-haired woman who was enclosed in a full-length black cloak. “Nope, it isn’t, ma’am,” he assured her. “Usually, when I see that my train is running late, I get the engineer to let me take over. Since I don’t mind if I skip a station stop now and then or hit an occasional cow, I make much better—”
“Flippancy, I find, is not an excuse for inefficiency.”
After a long careful puff on his cigar, he inquired, “Who are you?”
“I see that, in spite the bill of goods your father sold Colonel Bascom,” the young woman said, “you haven’t sufficiently familiarized yourself with the Colonel’s various business enterprises.”
“I regret that, yep,” he said. “But when I only have a couple of days or so between cases, I find it curtails my research efforts terribly. Are you with the Colonel’s freak show?”
Making a disdainful noise, she pulled open her cloak and spread her arms wide. She was clad in sparkling tights of an intense pink. “I happen to be Opal Archer, Queen of the Circus Aerialists.”
Nearby Stanley gasped at the sight of the revealed young woman.
“Don’t look,” cautioned his wife.
“Yes, my dear.”
Harry asked, “So where’s Bascom?”
“At the hotel obviously,” Opal Archer replied. “Surely you don’t expect him to journey out in bad weather simply to greet an employee.”
“Well, sir, I did yes,” confided Harry. “Fact, I was also hoping for a bouquet of roses and possibly a fruit basket.”
Scowling, the young woman shut her cloak. “If you’re through making inane remarks, Mr. Challenge, I’ll drive you to the hotel so you can start doing your job.”
“Okay, and en route you can fill me in on this missing automaton and—”
“The automaton, known as Mme. Theresa, was built in 1835 here in Orlandia by that gifted technological craftsman Ogden Zimmerman. It soon gained fame all over the Continent and in America,” she said, bending from the waist to grab up Harry’s small black suitcase. “After a disastrous fire in the Zimmerman’s workshop — that was nearly fifty years ago — the zither-playing mechanism was believed destroyed.”
“But apparently it wasn’t.” He took the suitcase back from her and followed her along the terminal platform toward the exits.
“No, obviously. Two years ago the Mme. Theresa automaton, after being lost for close to a half century, mysteriously resurfaced. The present owner, who lived in a chateau near here, eventually decided to offer it for sale.”
He pushed open one of the heavy glass and wrought-iron doors, stood aside and Opal Archer, pulling up the hood of her cloak, stepped out into the rain. “Then somebody killed the guy and made off with Theresa and her zither.”
“The Colonel is counting on your being able to find it again, though, having seen you, I have my doubts,” the acrobat said. “I left Colonel Bascom’s horseless carriage in a side street near here.” She went striding off along the wet sidewalk.
Catching up with her, Harry said, “I didn’t know the Colonel brought his automobile to Europe with him.”
She gave an annoyed sigh. “Obviously he did, Mr. Challenge,” she said. “Or I wouldn’t be able to drive you to the Ritz-Zauber Hotel.”
The acrobat frowned back over her shoulder at Harry. “Do try not to dawdle,” she called. “We’re frightfully late as it is.”
Harry had paused at the narrow window of a narrow curiosity shop. He was looking in at the scatter of artifacts on display. Sprawled amidst a clutter that included three ornate gilded music boxes, a glazed yellowish skull, a stuffed owl and a top hat were the rusted remains of what had once been a fortune telling automaton.
Nodding, Harry left the window and moved along.
The car, parked near an ornate lamp post, was glistening black in the rain. It was big and square, looking somewhat like an immense safe with windows and wheels.
“I have some parcels and items of luggage in the back seat,” Opal Archer told him as she opened the front door on the passenger side. “You’ll be obliged to seat yourself next to me.”
As Harry started to enter the vehicle, she caught his arm.
“Goodness, I’m a fine one to criticize you about inefficiency,” she confessed ruefully.
“How’s that, ma’am?”
“I’ve just remembered that I left my handbag back at the pastry kiosk in the terminal.”
“Describe it and I’ll trot back to—”
“No, no, Mr. Challenge. I don’t believe in making anyone run my errands for me. Just settle yourself in the automobile,” she suggested. “I’ll be back in no time.” Turning on her heel, she started striding back along the route they’d come.
Shrugging, Harry climbed inside the car, shut the door. After glancing over into the backseat, he dropped his suitcase atop a large bulging canvas sack.
“Yikes!” exclaimed the sack.
Harry leaned over. “Beg pardon?”
“They knocked me for a loop,” muttered a gruff, groggy voice. “How long have I been out cold, chum?”
“Well, it just struck eleven,” Harry told the sack’s occupant. “If you know when you were—”
“Holy Hannibal! The bomb’s set to go off at five past eleven. I heard those rats plotting that during one of my spells of lucidity before they coldcocked me yet again.”
“A bomb? Planted in this car?”
“You got it, pal. Not someplace in Egypt or North Dakota.”
Harry jumped clear of the machine, hit the wet sidewalk and yanked open the rear door. He tugged out his suitcase and then the canvas sack, which was noticeably light.
Dropping the sack just beyond the lamp post, he loosened the drawstrings and took a look inside.
A very small man, dressed in a wrinkled suit of evening clothes, was scrunched up in there. “Save your gawking for a later date, rube,” suggested the small man, “and help me get the hell out of this blinking sack.” Twisting, turning, he managed to thrust up his white-gloved right hand.
Harry helped the midget get free. “Now let’s get clear of the car.” He grabbed up his suitcase in one hand, the small man by the back of his formal coat with the other, then started to run along the slippery street.
They’d covered less than ten feet toward safety when Harry slipped on the slick paving and fell, dropping both the suitcase and the midget. “A hell of a time to turn clumsy,” complained the falling man.
As Harry went slamming into the ground, the horseless carriage exploded with a series of immense whumpings and thumpings.
Smoke, flame and shards of twisted black metal shot up and an intensely hot wind came chasing after them.
Harry pushed down with both hands, striving to rise. A large chunk of the automobile whacked him across the back of the head.
He dropped forward, but hit blackness before he hit the pavement.
“I thought that by this time, Harry, you wouldn’t let a duplicitous woman lead you into an obvious trap. Especially one who is, in my opinion, not all that attractive.”
Slowly Harry opened his eyes. “Now you’ve taken to nagging me when I’m only partly conscious, Jennie,” he said to the pretty auburn-haired reporter who was sitting in a fat purple armchair beside his bed. “You might’ve started off with some concerned questions as to how I feel or whether I’m on the brink of expiring from my wounds.”
“You don’t have any wounds, just a pretty big bump on your head,” Jennie Barr assured him. “A mild concussion is all you’re suffering from. I asked the doctor.”
Harry, fully clothed except for his jacket and shoes, found himself lying atop an emerald green comforter in the middle of an ornately-carved four poster bed. “This isn’
t a hospital,” he concluded.
“You’re in a bedroom of Colonel Bascom’s suite at the Ritz-Zauber,” she told him. “He had you brought here from the Zevenburg Municipal Hospital. He and Major Nemo, that’s the midget, will be barging in here momentarily. Soon as they realize you’re awake.”
“And why are you here in Orlandia? Has that yellow Manhattan newspaper you work for set you to dogging my trail again in hopes of coming up with another sensational story to entertain its vast readership of dolts and yahoos?”
“If you’d taken the time to read the cable I sent you at your Paris hotel, Harry, you’d know that I’m covering Colonel Bascom’s European talent hunting tour for the Daily Inquirer.”
“I never saw any—”
“And I suppose you never got the three letters I’ve sent you since we—”
“Okay, all right.” With some effort, Harry sat up, lurched in Jennie’s direction to take hold of her closest hand. “Excuse my surliness, Jen. Every time I get bonked on the skull with any portion of an exploding car, I tend to turn cranky,” he said. “As to the letters, I got preoccupied with those smugglers in Sweden and then—”
“Sure, I know. Our trying to carry on any kind of romance is probably a—”
“No, it’s possible. I’m the one who’s at fault.” Swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, Harry stood. He found that he had a tendency to sway a bit.
“Hey, the doctor suggested that you ought to lie quietly for a few more hours.”
“Even so.” He walked, very carefully, over to the window and looked down.
The suite was at least ten stories above the rainy street and the day had moved fairly close to twilight while he’d been unconscious. “Any idea why somebody wants to knock off both me and Major Nemo?”
“There must be folks who don’t want the Colonel to have that automaton.”
“Can’t be a rival miracle museum.” He settled on the arm of her chair. “They rarely go in for murder.”