The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols

by Nicholas Meyer

  “Occupational nuisance. I wish we’d never acquired one. Hullo? Who is speaking?”

  “I think I’ve remembered where I read it.”

  “Constance?”

  “What? Oh, yes, Constance.” She seemed surprised not to have identified herself. Her excitement, now evident in her tone of voice, was contagious.

  “Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where did you read it?”

  “I need to be sure. Could we meet tomorrow in the Reading Room? Say ten?”

  “At the British Museum?”

  “I need to be sure,” she repeated. I looked over at my wife, who was regarding me with an expression that hovered dangerously between curiosity and annoyance.

  “One moment.”

  I covered the mouthpiece with my hand.

  “It’s Constance. She wishes me to meet her at the British Museum tomorrow.”

  “Say you’ll ring her back.”

  “Constance, may I ring you back directly? Yes, I know it’s late. Five minutes.” I replaced the receiver in its cradle, and we faced one another.

  “John, when you asked me to marry you, you assured me that your…” What word did she want this time? “… adventures with Mr. Holmes were behind you.”

  “In the cab just now you found them exciting.”

  “To read about, yes. But you swore before we wed, those days were over.”

  “And so they are, my love, so they are!” I insisted, taking both her hands in mine and summoning the most earnest countenance in my repertoire. How to smooth her ruffled feathers? “But earlier tonight you asked for the truth, and I gave it to you. Events beyond my control are unfolding as we speak. There is some question of the national security involved, or you may be sure Mr. Holmes would not have asked my assistance.”

  This was an evasion at best; at worst, another taradiddle. The larger and plain truth was the game was afoot and the detective’s faithful hound was baying at the scent. I had not realized how much I missed the chase.

  She bit her lip, lost in thought.

  “Juliet?”

  “You’re not carrying on an intrigue with her, are you?”

  “With Constance?” I thought briefly of that disordered pile of grey hair, those steel-rimmed spectacles. “How can you ask such a question?”

  She shrugged, disconsolate. Really, sometimes I found Holmes’s opinion of women more persuasive than I cared to admit. They baffled me.

  “Juliet, this is unworthy of you. I have never given you the slightest cause to question my devotion, and you can’t imagine that Constance, of all people—”

  She stopped my protestations with a kiss and handed me the telephone. I cranked it vigorously and gave the exchange. It was answered on the first ring.

  “Constance? Yes, it’s all right. Tomorrow at ten.”

  “This is Edward Garnett. To whom am I speaking?”

  I burst out laughing. “Edward, it’s Watson! It’s your old GP!”

  “John!” The stiffness in the muffled voice on the other end gave way to a good-natured chortle. “I’d heard you’d stopped by. I’m sorry to have missed you. Did you want Constance? Hold the wire. Constance!”

  I heard a succession of the indeterminate sounds that telephones seem prone to producing before she came on the line.

  “John, yes?”

  I was still laughing. “It’s all right. I’ll be there at ten.”

  “Bring the pages.”

  “I will. Good night, Constance.”

  After which I took my wife in my arms.

  Later, with her soft form nestled against mine, I found I was unable to sleep. After years of widowhood followed by a new marriage, a revived practice, and surgical duties at the Royal Marsden, my routine, a train accustomed to running along a familiar and agreeable route, had been abruptly thrown off the metals and was now careering towards a new and unknown destination.

  The French Protocols, or, more properly, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, as Holmes and later Constance had rendered it, proposed, however fantastically, that there was a Jewish plot to take control of the world. The very phrase, so nebulous, made no sense to me, yet Mycroft and, presumably, those whom he served, were sufficiently alarmed to call upon my remarkable friend, who was even now in Manchester (Manchester!) running clues to earth. Was he in danger? Ought I to have let him go there alone?

  What was I to think? That the likes of Baron Rothschild, Sir Samuel Montagu, Sir Moses Montefiore, Prime Minister Disraeli(!), and Karl Marx (had any of those imposing personages been alive!), as well as Sir Ernest Joseph Cassel, the Catholic-converted banker to His Majesty, King Edward, the seventh of that name, were all in some dark conspiracy to—what, precisely? Control the price of sterling? The Suez Canal? The stock exchange? The coal mines? Politicians? Railways? The military? What possible combination of capital and labor, left and right, could “control the world”? And what sort of world would it be if they succeeded?

  Mycroft had made some remarks about Jewish prowess, and they sparked a vague recollection on my part. I stole quietly from bed and fetched my robe and slippers. In her sleep, behind me, Juliet mumbled something.

  “What, dearest?”

  “Women shall have the vote.”

  I left her with this drowsy non sequitur, descended to my waiting room, and switched on the lights. There, for the benefit of patients, I had amassed a collection of magazines and periodicals dating back several years. I always intended culling them but somehow had never got around to it. It was among these that I now rummaged, searching for a back issue of Harper’s American magazine, which a patient from New Jersey had left behind after I performed an emergency appendectomy.

  In short order I found what I was looking for, a piece by the prolific Mark Twain, who, having recently lived in Vienna (he seemed to have lived everywhere at one time or another), had been prompted to write an article about Jews. It concluded with the passage that had somehow pressed itself on my memory:

  If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also far out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

  How long I stared at this passage I cannot say. Twain’s words were evidently conceived as laudatory, but I could not help remembering one of Holmes’s dictums, namely, that evidence which on the face of it points in one direction, viewed from a slightly altered perspective, may admit of precisely the opposite interpretation. Having now seen portions of the Protocols, a dark corner of my mind found itself wondering if the Jews were as noble and noteworthy as Twain described them. I confess I have never given Jews much thought. Following my discharge from the Army, I have rubbed shoulders with them daily—as I have with Italians, Frenchmen, Greeks, and other nationalities crammed side by side in our bustling metropolis. I see Jewish patients and never c
onsider them noteworthy because of their race. But now, in the stillness of the night, acknowledging the American’s pithy observations, I was mortified to find myself wondering if, despite all logic and probability, there might not be some grain of truth in the Protocols. How have the Jews managed to endure where more potent tribes and civilizations failed? What are their secrets? The scurrilous pages had already begun their insidious work, tunneling their way into my poor, addled brain. And if they could manage progress in mine, which was to some degree, armed against them, what might they do to others, who were not?

  4.

  COMBUSTIBLE

  “At Euston, I realized I was being followed,” Holmes told me later.* “You know my methods, Watson; observation and inference. Thrice my shadows were masculine. Initially I observed a traveling salesman with a sample case too light to contain any goods. He was succeeded by an effete gentleman with a monocle traveling incongruously in second class, who was in turn replaced by a haberdasher who cared for his bowler with an indifference that belied his alleged profession. And finally—leaving the terminal in Manchester and finding digs for the night—a slattern wove uncertainly in my wake, but I perceived her drunkenness to be feigned. Clumsy as they were, from these antics I deduced two points. “Primo, that, however inept, employing agents in rotation to track my movements indicated a professional operation. Secondo, that, unlike Manya Lippman, I was in no present danger. I had nothing they wanted; they were merely supernumeraries, instructed to keep track of my movements. The question remained: Who were they, and what was their purpose in keeping me in their sights? Of course I could easily have given them the slip, but then I would know rather less than before. I might instead have chosen to confront or subdue one of them, but decided it was more prudent to grant them free rein. Were their actions related to my present business or possibly to another issue altogether? Difficult at this juncture to say, but I had no doubt that when they saw fit, they would reveal their intentions, or, if circumstances favored me, our positions might be reversed and I might trace their movements instead.”

  “And did you?”

  He shook his head. “I miscalculated. By the time I left my hotel the following morning, all sign of them had disappeared. Against my own instincts I was inclined to believe these events were unconnected to my present errand. Hubris, Watson. If you should ever discern symptoms of it again on my part, I should be infinitely obliged if you were to merely whisper the word ‘Manchester’ in my ear.”

  The Diary Resumes

  8 January. As a young chemist living in nearby Montagu Street, Sherlock Holmes had frequented the Reading Room in the British Museum. I, however, could not recall ever having set foot in the place. Surely I would have remembered had I done so. The high-domed chamber with its sky-blue ceiling panels, more reminiscent of heaven than St. Paul’s Basilica, larger than Rome’s Pantheon but imagined along the same lines, was clearly designed to stupefy any visitor. The vast, vaulted space emitted an echoing, respectful stillness as I entered the following morning. Innumerable readers and researchers were distributed among its concentric rings of desks, each boasting its own green-shaded lamp, the only sound in the place being an occasional sibilance of whispers, the shuffling of papers, or the faint scratching of pens making notes. The room had played host to virtually every English writer with the possible exception of Shakespeare. It took some little time to locate Constance towards the centre, where she had barricaded herself behind a pile of large, dark blue volumes that almost obscured her from view.

  “What have you found?” I inquired, gesturing to the stack of books.

  A white-haired gentleman opposite to her, sporting a food-stained yellow cravat and his own supply of texts, glowered in my direction.

  With a finger on her lips, Constance signed to me that I must carry the tomes and follow her from the wondrous chamber to one of the adjacent study cubicles, which, for the moment, had her name on the door, indicating the space was presently reserved for her exclusive use.

  “Now then,” she began, eyes bright with excitement behind those spectacles, when I had set down the load and she had shut the door behind me. “Have you ever heard of a Frenchman named Maurice Joly?”

  I said I had not.

  “Few have,” she acknowledged by way of consolation. “He died about thirty years ago in Paris, an apparent suicide.”

  “Who was he?”

  She gave a dismissive sniff.

  “A lawyer.”

  “Ah,” I responded, for lack of anything intelligent to contribute.

  “Also a pamphleteer, a sort of satirist. And a monarchist,” she put in as an afterthought, shrugging as much as to say in toto an inconsequential figure whose life had counted for little.

  If he was indeed a suicide, I reflected, perhaps he had realized this as well.

  “And what has Monsieur Joly to do with the Protocols?”

  Instead of replying, she opened one of the large volumes and peered at tiny print.

  “Joly is most famous—to the degree he is known at all—for his Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t…”

  “A pamphlet titled Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.”

  I blinked uncertainly. “Machiavelli, I remember, was an Italian schemer from the Renaissance, but Montesquieu—”

  “Was an eighteenth-century French philosophe. Joly’s tract was intended as a bitter critique of the so-called Emperor Napoleon III,* whom Joly despised for a preening tyrant.”

  “He was certainly not alone,” I offered. “There were many who felt that emperor had few clothes.”

  “Many costumes but few clothes,” she agreed, running an index finger slowly beneath the French words. “Though he was fond enough of uniforms, Louis Napoleon was no Napoleon.” She looked up. “In any event, the emperor was not amused by a conversation fancifully undertaken between a Renaissance pragmatist and a French philosopher. He duly had the book banned and its author clapped in gaol.”

  “I’m sorry, but I still fail to see what you are getting at.”

  “May I have the papers?”

  I extracted them once more from their manila-envelope home. She placed the first page opposite the page in the large open book.

  “As I thought…” She trailed off. Without looking up, she threw a backward hand over her shoulder, waggling her fingers, silently commanding me to supply another sheet of the typescript. As I did so, she turned the leaves of the big book before her and set the second page opposite the text.

  “What is it?” I demanded, more than a trifle impatient.

  “Stolen,” she murmured, glancing briefly in my direction before returning to the pages. “Plagiarized, to be precise. Listen carefully. Here is what Joly wrote in the first of what he calls his ‘dialogues.’ Machiavelli is speaking.”

  Translating slowly from the French for my benefit, she read aloud: “Men must not scruple to use all the vile and odious deceits at their command to combat and overthrow a corrupt emperor and restore the republic to power.”

  She regarded me expectantly over the tops of her spectacles.

  “Go on.”

  “Very well.” She now picked up one of the Protocol pages. “Here is the so-called Tenth Protocol: Jews must not hesitate to employ every noxious and terrible deception at their command to fight and overturn a wicked tsar and his goyim and deliver the Jews to power.”

  I stared at the two sets of French words.

  “They are certainly similar.”

  “Similar?” she scoffed. “They are identical save that the word ‘Jew’ has been inserted in place of ‘men’ in one instance and ‘the republic’ in another.”

  “And ‘goyim’ has been squeezed into the Protocols version.”

  We spent the next two hours pawing through the two texts. In Joly’s original, a great deal of talk was spent on the question of modernizing France; in the Protocols, Russia had been substituted. Pages were inexplica
bly devoted to interest rates. Both proved repetitious, unsurprising since the Protocols so slavishly imitated Joly’s interminable jeremiad. Our tedium would have been inevitably quadrupled, were it not for the provoking curiosity of the duplication itself.

  In my bored state, something began nagging at me.

  “Stop a bit,” I said. “Can you go back to the first two passages?”

  Without answering, she shuffled the typescript and flipped through the big books.

  “Now, please read them both again. Slowly.”

  Without comment she did as I asked.

  “Curious.” It was my turn to employ the word.

  “Curious, how?”

  I stole a look at my watch. It was afternoon. Holmes would be expecting me by now.

  “Well, it’s not merely the insertion of ‘Jews’ in place of ‘men,’” I observed, “but as you read it again, it becomes clear other words have been substituted as well, though not, apparently, so as to effect any alteration in meaning.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  I pointed.

  “‘Overturn’ in place of ‘overthrow.’ ‘Noxious’ instead of ‘vile.’ ‘Terrible’ in place of ‘odious.’ ‘Fight’ instead of ‘combat.’ ‘Hesitate’ where the original says ‘scruple.’ And so on. It all comes to the same meaning, but why have these irrelevant changes been made?”

  She frowned, implicitly conceding my thesis. “Doctor, you scintillate.”

  I tried not to blush by returning to the question at hand. “Why?” I repeated.

  She stared blindly at the words. “In an effort to disguise the plagiarism?”

  “A lazy expedient if true. And fruitless. You saw through it handily enough, Constance. Come to that, so have I.”

  “Why, then?”

  We could neither of us imagine.

  But I knew there had to be a reason.

  * * *