by Mark Frost
They picked their way down three floors before realizing they had heard no sounds of the gang following behind them: There were apparently some places even the Houston Dusters wouldn't go. Easy enough to stake out the rooftop while the rest of their war party waited on the street below, and, yes, when the four men looked out a filthy staircase landing window, there they stood, fifteen strong, outside the front doors.
"What do we do?" asked Stern.
Jack did not answer, took a reading on their location to set his internal compass, then led them to the western extreme of the tenement, into a room lined with six dark masses huddled on wooden pallets; entire families, they discovered, staring at them like wounded herd animals waiting for predators to finish the job. Doyle noticed one group sheltering the frail shrouded body of a dead child. Jack threw open the room's single window and measured the distance to the next building; eight feet away across an open air shaft. As the cowed inhabitants scurried away, Jack pulled a short iron bar from his jacket and pried loose a sturdy length of planking from the floor. He worked tenaciously, his expression never changing, the only one of them outwardly unaffected by their journey down through the tenement; his actions under fire, which had once seemed to Doyle the model of dash and heroic vigor, were now ruled by a brutal efficiency.
They laid the plank from one ledge to another across the air shaft and Jack went across first, testing his weight; the plank bowed slightly as he reached the middle but held firm. He smashed the window of the far tenement and hissed ferociously at the darkness inside, discouraging its residents, if there were any, from defending their territory. Stem followed, clutching the Zohar to his chest, then Innes, in three vaulting steps, and finally Doyle, whose bulk strained the plank to its limit. He could not sensibly close his eyes, but neither could he bear to look down; when the plank cracked, he was exactly halfway across and his response was to shout once in alarm, stand perfectly still until the board stopped bouncing, and then to stand still some more.
In spite of the others' frantic prompting, Doyle seemed completely unable to manufacture another step forward; a massive short circuit between his brain and feet. When the cries and war whoops from the ground below indicated that his shout had drawn the Dusters around the side of the building to them, he was still unable to move. Even when rocks and debris began flying around him, he could not convince his legs that one more step on this plank wouldn't splinter it and send him crashing to his doom, but as he waited the rift in the wood spread through it like a spider web.
"Come on, Arthur..."
"Two steps, old man."
The plank seemed to shrink down to the width of a toothpick; a single move in any direction will spell your end, Doyle's brain screamed at him. The three men in the window flapped their lips and waved their arms at him but he seemed to neither hear nor recognize them, resigned to spend the rest of eternity locked in this moment. A rock thumped into his shoulder, setting him swaying; the stinging bite of the blow had the salutary effect of unscrambling his mind and returning to him control of his limbs.
"Good Christ!" he shouted, realizing his predicament.
He took one long stride forward on the board and it caved in toward the middle, forming a momentary V before collapsing altogether; his hands desperately groped forward and found something to grab as the plank fell away beneath him. He looked up into Jack's face, framed in the window, felt something cold in his hands, and realized he held the hooked end of the crowbar that Jack was grasping. Jack and Innes pulled him up through the window and over the sill like an exhausted trout.
"I'd forgotten about your fondness for heights," said Jack.
"Like riding a bicycle," said Doyle. "You never forget it."
Bricks and bottles smashed against the walls, spraying shards of glass around them, and a second barrage angled down through the window from above; the Dusters on the roof of the Gates of Hell had discovered their position as well.
"We're not out of it yet," said Jack.
Doyle nodded gamely and climbed to his feet, the knees of his worsted trousers shredded, the toes of his shoes scrubbed raw. They moved into the hallway of the new building, ran down the first flight of stairs they came to, and immediately heard the Dusters breaking through the doors two floors below. Thumps and war cries from above told them that the rooftop contingent had bridged the gap as well: both feet in the jaws of a trap with nowhere to run.
Another sound took over: a low rumbling that increased with shocking suddenness, bearing down on them from every direction at once. The walls shook, plaster clogged the air, banisters and light fixtures rattled, and the intensity of the turbulence grew to a deafening roar. Jack threw a shoulder to the door directly before them; they rushed through an unoccupied apartment and were astonished to see the lurching, illuminated interiors of a train whipping by a few feet outside the window.
"The elevated train," said Stern. "Thank God; that's Second Avenue, I'd nearly forgotten where we were."
After the train passed, they leaped from the window to the train platform, resting a floor above the empty shop-lined street, running north and south as far as the eye could see. No sight or sound of the Dusters.
"Two questions," said Jack, staring down the narrow tracks. "Where's the next station and when's the next train?"
"The next station is north, Fourteenth Street, that way about nine blocks," said Stern, pointing ahead. "The trains run every few minutes."
Jack took off running to the north, stepping nimbly between the rails and ties, and the others tried to match his pace. Doyle could not accommodate his longer stride to the awkward width of the gaps, misstepped frequently, and was soon lagging behind, so he was the first to hear the yelps of the Dusters as they discovered the path they'd taken to the platform. Glancing over his shoulder, Doyle saw hoodlums pouring out of the window onto the elevated tracks two blocks behind; they ran after him right along the top of rails, their unnerving whoops and hollers echoing through the artificial canyon of the street.
"Come on, Arthur; don't look back," said Innes, slowing to run alongside him.
Doyle nodded. Lungs on fire, speech beyond their capacity now, the brothers devoted every last effort to following Jack's lead, but the relentless hunters held the edge of local knowledge: As they moved north, the gap slowly and steadily closed. Runners following on the street below actually began to pull ahead. On the parallel south-running tracks across the street, a train lumbered by, momentarily obliterating the scuffling of their footsteps in the cinder bed, the rasp of their breathing. Rocks and bottles began to crash around them as the Dusters pulled within range. Doyle caught a glimpse of a gingerbread Swiss chalet built onto the margins of the platform and wondered if he was hallucinating. A street sign popped into his field of vision: still three blocks to go.
Jack stopped abruptly ahead of them and tossed back a cannister into the narrowing span between the Doyles and the Dusters: White pepper smoke billowed, but the Dusters had learned from their earlier engagement and either sprinted quickly through or waited for the cloud to dissipate: a net gain of only seconds.
Now the station came into sight ahead, but the gap between groups was less than fifty yards and closing fast—on the verge of collapse, Doyle's muscles seizing up, Jack apparently out of tricks—when the platform began to rumble and hum. A hot white beam of light sharply outlined the churning Houston Dusters as the train bore quickly down on them. A hundred yards to the platform: Innes grabbed Doyle's arm and urged him to the finish like an Irish jockey.
The booming sonic horn of the speeding engine blasted the Dusters off either side of the elevation, some dropped to the street, others clung to the outside shell of the scaffolding as the train thundered by. Doyle tripped and fell hard, cinders embedding his palms as he skidded on the railbed. Drawing on some untapped superhuman reserve, Jack appeared beside them and, with Innes's help, lifted and threw Doyle up onto the platform just as the braking train glided by them into the station.
The doo
rs opened. Stern carried the Zohar; Innes dragged Doyle into the last empty car, and they collapsed in the final row of seats. As the train pulled away, Jack dropped the false copy of the Zohar on the tracks and they watched the reassembled Dusters' final rush toward the back of the car fall short by inches.
chapter 8
When the ringing at his door woke him from a dead sleep in President Cleveland's bed the next morning, Doyle had completely forgotten his appointment with Peregrine "Presto" Raipur, the alleged Maharaja of Berar. Elaborate apologies from both men as Doyle rang down for breakfast. Jack, who had spent what remained of the night in one of the suite's vast parlors, materialized like a wraith as Innes and Stern—wonderful, capable, reliable Innes—arrived with a timely pot of coffee. Doyle on his feet, trying to work the persistent kinks out of his joints, mildly concerned about the scene he'd caused in the lobby last night, arriving after midnight covered with grime, bloody knees poking out of the rips in his trousers; another tourist finding fun and adventure in Old New York.
Jack and Presto sized each other up like opposing chess players, Jack finally outlasting the stranger, but Presto did not rattle easily. Although he was still dressed for the part—riding jacket, jodhpurs, high boots, a red velvet vest—the foppish persona he had projected at the party was clearly an invention. His gaze level, steady, and assured, his voice a pleasing baritone; instead of fluttering like startled pigeons, his hands moved in silky, confident gestures that underscored his story about another missing book.
A rare manuscript edition of the Upanishads, centerpiece of the Rig Vedas, the constellation of books that formed the foundation of the Hindu religion: stolen six months ago from a holy temple in the city of Golcanda, in the princely state of Hyderabad, India. The theft had been kept a state secret by order of the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, the ruling maharaja, estimated by many to be the richest man in the world. When he tapped someone to investigate the crime, the Nizam called on his distant cousin and contemporary, high-born, English-educated Presto Raipur, one of the few members of his privileged generation who had devoted his life to anything other than the pursuit of self-indulgent pleasures.
"Does that mean you're actually a prince?" asked Innes.
"In a word, and I say it with some embarrassment, yes: I am, technically speaking, the Maharaja of Berar, which I assure you sounds more impressive than it actually signifies." As he spoke, Presto effortlessly rotated a silver coin back and forth between his long, tapered fingers.
"Why so?"
"Forty years ago, in a spasm of misguided loyalty, my grandfather deeded our ancestral lands to the Nizam, ruler of the neighboring province of Hyderabad; the Nizam promptly turned over control of our holdings to the British as settlement of a long-standing debt. My outraged father, denied his title and left virtually penniless, further scandalized the family name by marrying an Englishwoman, taking a job as a banker, and living in London, where I was born and raised."
Presto paused, made the coin disappear, and with formidable self-possession took careful stock of their reactions.
"My interest in magic began as a child, attending the English music hall. I've grown accomplished enough to perform the occasional benefit myself: Presto, the Prestidigitating Barrister!"
He gestured; the coin reappeared in his hand. Doyle stopped pacing, gulped down his coffee, and for the moment forgot about the pain in his knees. Stern and Innes leaned anxiously forward. Only Jack's expression did not change, his eyes frigid, analytical.
"I see that I have your attention," said Presto.
"Please go on," said Doyle.
"I spent each summer as a boy visiting my grandfather, who still lives as a retainer in the Nizam's court at Chow Mahalla; the Nizam's son, the current Nizam, and I were playmates together. My friend the Nizam ascended to the throne of Hyderabad eleven years ago, at the age of eighteen; I had seen him only briefly in the intervening years while starting my career as a barrister—one of the first men of mixed racial heritage to practice before the English bar, a matter of some pride to me—when I received an urgent summons to visit the Nizam in Madras six months ago; I thought surely my grandfather's health must be failing so I undertook the journey. Instead I discovered my grandfather to be, as they say, in the pink, and living with a most extraordinarily nubile fifteen-year-old dancing girl—"
"Really?" blurted Innes. "How old is he?"
"Eighty-five and still a dedicated libertine. I should explain that their culture does not share our Christian conviction that earthly delights have a corrosive effect on the soul: Quite the contrary, some of the most devout Hindus believe the road to heaven is paved with sensual gratification."
Doyle cleared his throat theatrically, and Innes retrieved his jaw from the floor.
"As happy as I was to find Grandfather in such high spirits—this nymph was truly quite delectable—my purpose in being there remained obscure for three more days until the Nizam returned from a tiger hunt. That night we shared a dinner in his private quarters—my friend has spent the last decade decorating his palace to compete with the excesses of Louis Quatorze: a solid-gold water closet for starters; appallingly tasteless but nonetheless impressive for it—and then he told me of the missing Upanishads. The crime had been committed in the dead of night; there were no clues and no offers had been received to return the book for ransom, which the Nizam would have been only too willing to pay.
"With my background in English law, the Nizam had assumed, however illogically, that of all the men he knew in the world I would be the one most able to shed light on this mystery. When I attempted to graciously decline, citing the fine but crucial distinction between a barrister and a policeman, the Nizam expressed sympathy for my position then casually intimated that it would be a shame if he were unable to retain Grandfather in the manner to which he had throughout his life been so thoroughly accustomed."
"Why, that's just plain extortion," said Innes.
"And spoken with a smile; my friend the Nizam has the personality of a cobra. As you can imagine, any thought of bringing the old man to London after eighty-five years of princely extravagance was unsupportable—and an absolute disaster to my social life—so I agreed to lend a hand as best I could. For my troubles, I received what is by any man's standard a staggering amount of money from the Nizam to cover my expenses, not thinking for one moment that accepting this assignment would lead me to the highest levels of English government and then to America."
Presto paused dramatically to take another sip of coffee.
"Don't you find this to be the most peculiar country?" he asked pleasantly.
"Absolutely," said Doyle.
"Fantastic," said Innes.
There's the pots calling the kettle black, thought Stern, the only American in the room, glancing around at these odd English ducks.
"What involvement with English government?" asked Jack.
"When I returned to London and began making inquiries about stolen holy books of my acquaintances in the Foreign Office, I was greeted with an increasing chorus of astonishment, steadily ushered up a ladder of ever more eminent representatives of state—each of whom made the mistaken assumption that I appeared in some official diplomatic capacity, which I'm afraid I did nothing to disabuse them of—finally landing in no less than the office of the Prime Minister."
"Gladstone?" asked Doyle.
"Lord Gladstone himself. We chatted briefly about some mutual friends, and he then explained that a book of equal importance to the Anglican Church had similarly gone missing and that the trail as far as they could tell led to New York, with grounds for suspicion that a wealthy American collector of books might be responsible."
Doyle glanced at Jack for his reaction; there was none.
"I arrived here two weeks ago and have been making the rounds of society in the ridiculous guise with which I greeted you last night, Mr. Conan Doyle: This is regrettably what people seem to expect from a maharaja, and I have succeeded in making a perfect ass of myself,
if I do say so____"
"Smell-A-Rama?" said Innes.
"The most outrageous attention getter I could think of; you'd be amazed at the offers I've received from potential investors...."
"How stupefying," said Doyle.
"Americans seem able to sniff out a potential for profit the way sharks find blood in the sea. And all the while, I've been busy dropping hints about my interest in the illicit traffic of rare religious books...."
"Why did you approach Doyle?" asked Jack, still holding his approval in reserve.
"Fair question: I received a wire direct from the prime minister's office day before yesterday that upon Mr. Doyle's arrival I should attempt to contact him and enlist his assistance; here, I've brought the wire along."
Jack snatched the telegram from Presto's hand and studied it, finding no fault with its credentials. Then he stared at Presto with an unnerving intensity, as if realizing some secret about him.
"What were you trying to warn me about last night?" asked Doyle.
"I saw a man watching you from the corner of the room: a tall, blond man with a look of unmistakable bad intent. When he began to approach you from behind, reaching into his jacket for what I imagined might be a weapon, I simply acted on instinct."
"A tall, blond man?" said Doyle, remembering the man who had replaced the young lieutenant on the bridge of the Elbe. Before Presto could elaborate, Jack pulled the paper with Rabbi Stern's sketch from his pocket and held it out to him.