The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols

by Nicholas Meyer

  “Diogenes. Seven” was all the telegram said. At least it wasn’t from Juliet. My shoulders unclenched.

  “Are you heading back to Pimlico?” Constance inquired.

  “Alas, no. Can I drop you?” I offered, in an effort to make up for the dreary work she had so conscientiously performed. I was searching for transportation, but at this hour neither hansom nor taxi were to be had.

  “Don’t be silly. It’s just around the corner.”

  She gave me a peck on the cheek and set out for Bedford Place. The weather was cold but bracing after hours of confinement in that airless cell.

  As a proper married man, and what is more, a doctor who kept regular hours, I knew where I was supposed to be and where I so clearly wasn’t. But by this point I had been so conspicuous a truant, I no longer dared telephone Juliet and took refuge behind a telegram of my own. As the boy was still lurking, hoping for a shilling, and asking if there was any reply, I said there was. I sent to Juliet, promising yet again to explain everything in due course and begging her patience. That bridge would have to be traversed at a later date, and I cannot say I relished the prospect.

  At the moment, my chief difficulty was one of transportation. This was unexpectedly solved for me when a taxicab already containing a fare pulled up before me.

  “You’ll catch your death,” cried a gentleman within. “I’m happy to offer you a lift, if you don’t mind going halves.”

  “Thank you, I’m sure I’ll manage.”

  “Nonsense, there’s nothing to be had at this hour for love or money. Where are you headed?”

  Startled by the abrupt arrival of a Good Samaritan, I chose not to look a gift horse in the mouth and answered, “Pall Mall.”

  “Splendid,” the voice from within replied. “I’m for Trafalgar Square. I can drop you. Do get in, old man.”

  With no alternative, and attaching no importance to my fortuitous rescue, I gratefully accepted his kind offer and climbed in beside a gentleman of roughly my own age who, from his attire, I judged worked in the City. Which I was pleased to discover proved to be the case. I was learning from Sherlock Holmes.

  “West, Cedric West,” he introduced himself. “Stockbroker. And you?”

  “I’m a doctor,” I explained, reluctant to give him my name, which I knew would prompt a conversation about the Great Detective I was too fatigued to indulge.

  “A doctor!” he responded with a laugh. “How clever of me to have come to your rescue. Should anything happen between here and…?”

  “Pall Mall,” I repeated.

  “I know I’ll be in good hands.” There was something in his bearing that suggested military experience at some point in his life. What I glimpsed of his hair in the dim light and underneath his bowler was the close-cropped grey of iron filings I associate with officers above the rank of major.

  We made idle conversation, chatting about the inclement weather, tangled traffic at this hour, and the like. Somewhere I noted the incongruity between his Saxon-sounding name and the slightest trace of an accent I was unable to place, but as I had much else to occupy my mind at the time, I did not trouble myself over this trifling anomaly. At no point, I blush to concede, did it occur to me to question the arrival of my rescuer. And not until much later did the connection between Cedric West and those shadowy personages who had followed Holmes to Manchester make itself known to us. In light of the unpleasant events that shortly followed, the whole episode entirely slipped my mind.

  The taxi dropped me off near the Reform Club, which seemed preferable to my true destination. My effort to hew to our agreement and share expenses was now graciously refused. My Good Samaritan had evidently had a change of heart.

  “Not a bit of it, Dr.…?”

  “Baskerville,” I improvised.

  “Baskerville.” Did he smile at this? “Perhaps you’ll return the favor one day. Drive on!”

  The meeting with Mycroft at the Diogenes later that evening did not go well. From the first, the brothers conversing in the privileged “Strangers’ Room” were at cross-purposes.

  Holmes gave Mycroft assurances that in all likelihood the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was nothing but a clumsy forgery.

  “Excellent.” Mycroft heaved a sigh of relief and hoisted his bulk out of his chair. “Your estimation is in accord with my own. No secret conclave bent on world domination. That is one crisis off my plate. Thank you, Sherlock, for all your dili—”

  “Surely it isn’t that simple,” the younger man replied, retaining his own seat. “Would it not be prudent to learn who created this forgery and why? You doubtless recall that one of your people gave her life to obtain the document.”

  “Such courageous folk are more than aware of the risks they are being asked to take on behalf of a grateful nation,” Mycroft answered, with, it struck me, little feeling. “They undertake willingly to do so,” he went on, adopting—or now affecting to adopt—a cool rationale for Manya Lippman’s death.

  “This naturally includes funds for the rearing of her orphaned son?” the detective commented, his upper lip curling slightly.

  Mycroft scowled in response. “Just so.” He was breathing heavily as he leaned down to adjust one of his misaligned spats.

  I saw the detective blink, grey eyes agleam with indignation.

  “And what of the convenient death of Theodor Herzl, upon the eve of being interviewed by another of your emissaries? Does this not strike you as suggestive?”

  “We have been over this before. Theodor Herzl was not a British subject,” stated the other firmly.

  “But if the man was murdered by a British ally, say the Tsar and his secret police, the Okhrana—”

  “Really, Sherlock,” Mycroft interrupted with asperity, “you are out of your depth.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The issue is settled. Go back to your little London crimes. Remember: knowledge of politics ‘feeble.’ Stick to those curious incidents in the night that so absorb your interest and your admirers. Missing papers, purloined jewels, deadly snakes, kidnapped racehorses…”

  “I wish I could, Mycroft,” the detective snapped in reply, “but this is no longer the nineteenth century; it is the twentieth, and crimes, you fail to observe, are getting bigger. It was you, remember, who tasked me with looking into this affair of the Protocols. Sticking your head up—into the sand,” he amended, “will avail you nothing. The Russian bear, whose excesses you propose to tolerate, is doubling over as we speak, pulverized by little Japan, her enormous but ill-commanded army slaughtered as revolution has finally taken h—”

  “The revolution has failed!” Mycroft fairly shouted. “It has been put down! It’s in all the evening papers! Even as we speak, President Roosevelt is negotiating peace between Russia and Japan! The revolution has failed!”

  “For now!” Holmes, no longer in control of his own emotions, shouted back. “But do you not imagine the Tsar’s other cousin, not our Prince of Wales, but Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, is not himself closely following events from Berlin? Waiting to seize the advantage should he perceive one? And are you fine gentlemen of the Diogenes, in the meantime, content to dispose of your … ‘employees’ when they have outlived their usefulness, like so much superfluous damage?”

  What had begun as a schism now threatened to become a chasm. I had never witnessed such a bitter exchange between the two men. And neither, evidently, had the steward, who hastened into our presence, alerted by raised voices.

  “Gentlemen, please!” he protested. “The Diogenes does not permit—”

  “Yes, yes, Harcourt,” Mycroft assured him with a wave of his large hand. “We are just concluding our business.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, looking searchingly from one to the other brother, the steward withdrew, closing the door softly but firmly behind him.

  “We need not pursue this,” Mycroft said when we were again alone.

  “Why? Because it involves Jews?” The detective’s tone was s
cathing.

  Even in the dim light I perceived Mycroft flush, stung by the accusation. “That is unworthy of you, Sherlock. Some of my closest associates—”

  “Oh, to be sure,” murmured the detective. “But for the record, this is not about Jews—”

  “You are one to talk,” his brother shot back. “With your Jewish clients.”

  “Would I do better, in your view, to change my name from Sherlock to Shylock?”

  “Captain Dreyfus, I remind you, was convicted of high treason!”

  “Captain Dreyfus is not, as you would point out, a British subject. What is more, Captain Dreyfus, as you seem reluctant to concede, has been pardoned and brought home from Devil’s Island, where he languished unjustly for twelve years in a grotesque miscarriage of justice.* Mycroft, listen to me, I entreat you. This is not about Jews; it is about truth. Which we are bound to seek and to value. These Protocols are almost certainly spurious news, but left unexposed, they will take root and grow in strength and credibility.”

  “People will believe what they want to believe,” I interjected, in an effort to draw their fire. Holmes regarded me almost as if to say, Et tu, Brute.

  “Watson, you are pleased to say that I do not follow international developments, to which I plead guilty. But as a man of science, surely it did not escape your notice that last year the Nobel Prize in physiology was awarded to Professor Pavlov of Russia, who has demonstrated the conditioned reflex in dogs, who can be trained to salivate at the sound of a bell without the presence of any actual food.” He shook his head. “So it is with these pernicious Protocols. If canines can be conditioned to salivate over nonexistent food, may not men one day be likewise taught to salivate at the prospect of nonexistent facts? Is it not possible that men may one day be trained to accept such tripe as your Protocols? Am I not correct, Doctor?”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. “To my knowledge such a thing has not yet occurred,” was the best I could manage.

  Holmes turned back to his brother.

  “Mycroft, a lie can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its boots. I implore you, let me look into the death of Theodor Herzl. Into the origin of these so-called Protocols…”

  “Theodor Herzl and a homeland for Jews are not the concern of His Majesty’s Government,” the other reiterated stubbornly, but I sensed he was weakening.

  I knew it was on the tip of Holmes’s tongue to invoke Prime Minister Balfour’s support for a Jewish homeland and dispute this, but Chaim Weizmann had sworn us to secrecy on that score.

  “Let me begin with the Protocols, then. Send me to Russia.”

  Mycroft remained maddeningly silent. With a great effort of will, Holmes mastered his temper and spoke quietly.

  “Mycroft, you will, I think, allow that in my lifetime I have done some service to the Crown. I asked no reward. But I am asking now for this. Send me to Russia. I am begging you. This business is far from finished. Let us at least justify Manya Lippman’s sacrifice.”

  Mycroft withdrew an enormous handkerchief from his breast pocket and blew a blast like a trumpeting elephant. Then, replacing the handkerchief, an operation that appeared to consume an inordinate amount of time and effort, he stared out the window at nighttime London, his back to us.

  In the dim light, Holmes was paler than I had ever beheld him.

  “On one condition,” Mycroft said finally.

  “What condition?”

  He turned.

  “Interview someone else here who attended those Zionist meetings in Switzerland. So far, all your evidence appears to have been gathered from a single source.”

  Holmes looked at me briefly. “Very well.”

  With that, he led me from the room. The brothers did not even bid one another good night.

  Outside, Holmes stared at the pavement, oblivious to the cold.

  “We must pay Constance Garnett for her work,” I reminded him, in search of a neutral topic.

  “To be sure,” he murmured, seemingly fascinated by the cracks in the macadam. “It’s late,” he noted, finally looking about, and insisted on walking all the way back to Baker Street, the temperature notwithstanding. I knew better at such times than to remonstrate, and, after watching his tall, slender form stride briskly down Pall Mall, I flagged a taxi. The driver was just going off duty, but I prevailed upon him. Once within, physically spent from the long day, emotionally drained from the vituperative encounter I had just witnessed, and dreading the possibility of another when I reached home, I fell into a restless slumber. It was as if I were again in the field hospital at Maiwand and had been all day in the operating theatre as they gouged for the bullet in my leg. I had passed out from the pain and was tempted to do so again now.

  “Clarendon Street,” the cabbie announced over his shoulder. He was obliged to repeat this several times before I started awake and paid him. He wasted no time driving off, barely allowing me to shut the door after I’d stepped heavily onto the curb. I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the beveled glass by my door. My cravat was askew, I was in want of a razor, and the bags beneath my eyes proclaimed I was yet in need of sleep.

  I fumbled for my latchkey and dropped it before letting myself into the darkened entryway. The house was still save for the distant chime of a grandfather clock at the top of the stair. The girl, I knew, had long since retired.

  I removed my hat, coat, and muffler, draping them ineffectually on the hall cloak stand before entering the sitting room, which was likewise dark save for the remains of the fire.

  Rubbing my hands gratefully before it, I was startled by my wife’s voice.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “Juliet?”

  She was seated behind me in one of the wing chairs.

  “I’ve saved you supper. Come.”

  She rose and, taking my hand in one of hers—hers reassuringly warm and firm—led me to the kitchen, where cutlery and plate awaited me on the table. Silently, I sat while she opened the larder and extracted the remains of a roast chicken and new potatoes.

  “Wine?”

  I shook my head. “Water, please.”

  Without comment she ran the tap above the big basin and set a glass before me before seating herself opposite.

  “John, you look a sight.”

  “I know.”

  “Mustard?”

  I nodded dumbly, and she added water to the powder, setting the paste before me.

  She sat silent, watching while I ate. I did so waiting for the blow to fall.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said she at last.

  I looked up.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been thinking that I owe you an apology, John.”

  I could not have been more surprised had she informed me she was Chinese.

  “Whatever for? Dearest, it is I who must—”

  “Please let me finish.” She twisted her hands together in what almost appeared a pantomime of washing them as she searched for the right words.

  “Yesterday I reproached you for having broken a vow you made me before we married,” she began. “I understand now it was unfair of me to exact that promise.”

  “My dear—”

  “I believe you made it in good faith, honestly believing that your days of … collaboration with Sherlock Holmes were at an end. Nevertheless, I think neither of us understood what we were about at the time, me in exacting that promise and you providing it. More water?”

  “Please.” The mustard was strong.

  She took my glass and replenished it, resuming her train of thought as she did so.

  “What you and Mr. Holmes share is not something that can be turned on and off, like a tap.” She gestured to the one she’d just been using as the analogy struck her. “It is, I suppose, innate, an unstoppable reflex on both your parts, which I cannot and ought not attempt to interrupt or interfere with.”

  “Juliet, you must believe me when I say that it is only because the circumstances are un
iquely pressing that I—”

  “I was coming to that, John,” she said, now offering me a tender smile. “You see, I’ve had a long time to think these past twenty-four hours, and I realized, as you say, that were the problem not as urgent as you find it, you would not have behaved in the manner you did.”

  “I would not!” I exclaimed passionately. I knew then I did not deserve such a wife.

  “Therefore, rather than assume the role of millstone around your neck, or ball and chain at your feet, at such a time,” she concluded, “I hope you will let me help rather than scold you. You may be sure whatever you tell me will go no further. And remember”—she favored me with a broad smile—“a wife cannot be compelled to give testimony against her husband!”

  “Why, Mrs. Macbeth!”

  “Tell me your secrets.” Her smile deepened. “I’ll not disclose ’em.”

  She came over to where I sat then and stood beside me, clasping my head to her waist, and peace was made between us, to our mutual relief. In two years of marriage such a rupture had never occurred before.

  Later, sitting again before the restored fire, I told her everything.

  “How dreadful,” she exclaimed, when I had described the toxic contretemps between the brothers at the Diogenes.

  “I expect they’ll patch it up,” I allowed with more assurance in my voice than I actually felt, finally informing her of the compromise they had reached. “Holmes will unearth someone else who attended those conferences, and what he learns will or won’t send him on to Russia.”

  “And would you accompany him if he goes?” She gave a little yelp. “No! I didn’t say that! If he goes to Russia, you will do what you will do, and that’s an end of it.”

  “It may not come to that. If we can talk to someone in England who attended any of those Swiss—”

  “I think I might know someone,” Juliet said thoughtfully.

  “You?”

  “Well, not directly, but I am friends with his wife. Do you remember Edith Ayrton?”

  “The suffragette?”

  “John.” She smiled. “John, I, too, am a suffragette.”

  “Hmm,” was the best I could muster. Throughout our courtship and marriage we had playfully agreed to disagree about this topic, and now that I recalled, the name Edith Ayrton had cropped up more than once in our lively discussions.