Castle Rouge (7 page)

“I’ve a bit of cold kidney pie left over from dinner. He was out for it, of course. You know how to make yourself at home.”

“Indeed I do.” I turned from my quick perusal of the room to usher the kindhearted soul back down to her kitchen.

I sighed relief as the door closed, understanding for a moment Holmes’s fondness for solitude. Everything here was just as it had been. Oh, not precisely, but close enough.

I wandered to the mantel and the Persian slipper. The same fragrant wad of shag plugged its up-curling toe. Where on earth was its mate? Now there was a mystery.

On the table in the corner, the clutter of chemical experiments winked glassily at me in the lamplight. I could smell sulphur
…hmmm
, kerosene, of course, and…ginger?

I felt like an actor visiting the beloved stage set for a play in which I was no longer employed. Each homely item in the chamber had the dear familiarity of an old friend, yet I felt somehow removed from these things, this place, perhaps even from the role I was here to reprise.

And yet, despite my distance, I still felt a flutter of stage fright. “The gravest case of my career.” Did Holmes choose that word “grave” not merely in the sense of seriousness, but because of its additional freight of meaning? For its proximity to death and decay? I feared so. He was nothing if not exact.

The heel of my hand touched the crosshatched wooden butt of the pistol in my pocket, my forefinger caressing the cold silky steel of the trigger guard. Would I need this weapon before the night was out?

A scrabbling sound in the stairwell sent me to the door. For once I would not allow Holmes to burst onstage and put me in the role of mere audience to my own drama.

I pulled the door wide…

…and found an ancient rabbi in long, rusty black coat and hat fumbling to lift his cane high enough to knock on the door, only my face had replaced the sturdy wood.

“Now, Holmes,” I chided, perhaps inspired by the earlier liberties of Mrs. Hudson. “You can’t expect to fool me in that getup.”

“Fool you, young man? I have no need to fool you. You look a fellow fully capable of doing it to yourself, as most of these young idiots are these days. This is 221B Baker Street?”

“Yes.”

“Then invite me in, Mr. Holmes, since I am here at your invitation. Nay, command.”

“I am Dr. Watson.”

“I could use a doctor, I admit, for my rheumatism, but did not need to be called out on such a damp night with no Mr. Holmes present.”

“He will be.” I caught myself entering into the charade, so much in stooped character was Holmes. “I mean,
you
will be.”

“I will be present if you step aside and allow me to enter the chamber.”

At this pointed remark, I did as requested. In this way I was able to take an unobserved survey of Holmes’s “visitor.”

What an ideal disguise this one was! The high-crowned black hat, from which side curls hung before each ear, the stooped back and shoulders held so stiffly, elbows jacked out, the shuffling gait accentuated by the rhythmic thump of the cane, all were perfection.

I expected Holmes to straighten and turn with twinkling eyes as soon as he had fully entered the room, but he did not.

“A long journey for nothing,” the slightly accented voice noted, no quaver about it.

A small mistake, that, which I would be only too happy to point out to Holmes when he had finally doffed the guise that had never deceived me from the first. Quaver was definitely required for this impersonation.

The old fellow stamped his cane on the carpet so hard I worried for Mrs. Hudson’s peace of mind.

It was echoed, however, by a furious thumping from beyond our door: feet taking the steps two at a time.

I whirled to see what visitor was so impatient to arrive.

“Holmes!”

He paused in the doorway, the same tall, lean figure I had often seen stepping through just that frame like a painting come to life, wearing city top hat and a suit of modest but gentlemanly cut.

“Ah, Watson. You have introduced yourself to Rabbi Barshevich,” he said. “Excellent. Pray be seated,” he suggested to the old man with a bow. “Watson, you as well. But first shut the door, if you please. We will not wish to be disturbed.”

“Er, Mrs. Hudson—”

“Yes, yes, I know the lady.”

“She’s returning with kidney pie.”

“Kidney pie?”

His tone made it sound like raw entrails. “Very well, we will let it stay. A pity I don’t keep some creature around the place that could eat it for us. Now, Rabbi, I require a summary of the International Working Men’s Educational Club at number forty, Berner Street. I am assured that Baron Rothschild’s emissaries have acquainted you with my needs and mission.”

“Quite above themselves they were, and eager to smack the dust of Whitechapel from their smart city shoes. I received only your name and address and the instructions to visit you.”

“I must apologize. I have just returned from abroad and am most eager to lay these Whitechapel matters to rest.”

“If you can find and lay Jack the Ripper to rest, that will be all that is needed,” the old man said robustly, thumping his cane on the carpet again.

“Surely you do not expect further depredations?”

“The monster seems to have vanished with the fog that hid his vile ways, but the suspicion his foul acts cast on my people still lingers.”

“Tell me,” Holmes said, suddenly drawing his feet up on the cushion of the basket chair like some swami. “That phrase, ‘The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’ What does that mean to you?”

“Nonsense. They are always scrawling vile phrases about Jews in Whitechapel. Children!”

“You think children wrote that chalked phrase?”

“Not real children.” The old man tapped his temple with one horny forefinger. “Grown children who love to jeer and call names, and throw refuse when I pass. Then the young ones, too. They see and repeat, like monkeys. We Jews have always been blamed for much.”

“No one is exempt from suspicion in this case,” Holmes said. “Not even myself.”

That last qualification forestalled the old man’s forthcoming speech of protest.

“Besides several Jewish individuals,” Holmes went on, “a number of Russians and Poles are suspected.”

“Even gentiles, and even the high and mighty,” the rabbi put in tartly, with some personal relish at the idea.

“Even those considered high and mighty,” Holmes agreed, expressing his customary disdain for the twin social advantages of wealth and station.

“Then you rule no one out?”

“No one, no nationality, no race, no religion, no sex, fair or not.”

“Do I take it, young man, that you wish to reassure me that you will be just?”

“I will be better than just. I will be logical.”

“Logic.” The old man chuckled. “That is one remedy that has not yet been applied to the Whitechapel Horrors.”

When Mrs. Hudson had delivered her offering and left, when the rabbi had given Holmes the particulars he required and left, my friend turned his attentions to me.

“What, Dr. Watson, still waxing plump with prosperity and the married life in Paddington?”

He surprised me by sitting at the round table and tucking into the kidney pie like a sailor.

“Apparently you intend to put me on a fast immediately, Dr. Holmes.”

He gave that sharp bark of laughter that seemed a social convention rather than real mirth, and pushed the platter toward my side of the table.

“Dig in, Watson. It is chill and damp out despite the season.”

I sat, if I did not import any kidney pie to my plate. “Then this is an expedition of sorts.”

“Or a sortie.” Holmes grinned as he dashed some Tokay into the empty wine glasses.

“You have made progress since you sent me the telegram. Was it something the rabbi said?”

“I have made progress indeed, if crawling to the end of the most noxious sewer in England is to be considered an achievement.”

“Surely not in that garb.”

“No. I had to report to my betters just previously.”

As always, Holmes gave a twist to the word “betters” that could only come from a man who considered himself on a higher plane entirely.

I had to agree with his cheerful self-esteem. I had never known a man who could so accurately pierce to the core truth of a situation or a character. From the smallest motes of physical evidence he could extrapolate to the largest conclusions about the good and evil rubbing shoulders in the human soul. This facility made him remote to the myopic concerns of ordinary mortals, but it did indeed lay open the way certain of us live our lives and die our deaths. He was very like a master surgeon, cutting through the skin and gristle and muscle and bone of the carapace of ordinary life to what lay beneath: to the extraordinary and complex systems of motive and passion and seven deadly sins that race like rampaging corpuscles through every vein of our beings and often erupt in paroxysms of crime and evildoing.

“Your betters,” I repeated after my reverie had faded. “Not the police surely.”

“Especially not in this case!” he snorted, his restless gray eyes pouncing on the Persian slipper on the mantel. A cat spotting a mouse in its hole across the room could not have looked more intent.

He leaped upon his prey in the next moment, and shortly after the familiar perfume of tobacco masked the chemical odors that filled the chambers like noxious potpourri.

Scheherazade had her veils and her thousand-and-one tales to beguile. Holmes had his veils of smoke to add dazzle to his chronicles of crime.

“The police have been thicker than usual,” he rumbled over the pipe. “The real crime is the vast numbers of footprints they have left all over the area.”

“Then this is a case of paramount importance, if so many police are employed.”

“Oh, indeed,” he said airily. “Of such paramount importance that they did not bother to call me in on it. No matter. Their ‘betters’ have beat them to it.”

He had resumed his seat over the crumbles of pie crust on his plate and now placed his elbows on the table. “I confess that the police outflank me in only one respect.”

“You confess?”

He shrugged. “I am, as you know, able to slip into the foulest pits of London. Opium or thieves’ den, I can don a suitably low disguise and pass among them as their own.”

“Nothing to envy,” I said with a shudder, for well I knew the diseases physical as well as spiritual that thrive in such ratholes of human commerce and depravity.

“There is, however, one sinkhole of sin into which I am less easy about inserting myself.”

“Really.”

“No doubt you have already discerned it, Watson, given your superior experience in certain hidden corners of life.”

“Well, I—” I had certainly not discerned where Holmes was leading me and was not eager to claim residence in his “hidden corners of life” without knowing to what he referred.

“Tut. Modesty does not become you, Watson, a stout-hearted, hale, and handsome fellow like you. In one area your expertise far exceeds my own, and no doubt that of most men. And I do not refer to the practice of medicine.”

“I know my field, certainly, and something of human nature, as any good physician must.”

Holmes held up a quelling hand. “I will hear no demurs from you on this topic, Watson. When it comes to women you are a Daniel come to judgment.”

“Women! This case is about women?”

“Indeed. And what men do with them. As you know, I have always been somewhat mystified on that subject. Oh, I know the ways of the world, I simply do not understand why they are that way. Nor do I really care to.”

“A man with no use for his fellow man is called a misanthrope. A man with no use for women is called—”

“A misogynist. I know the term, Watson. And I am not sure that having no ‘use’ for women makes me a misogynist when I see evidence of the ‘use’ most men put women to.”

I sipped the excellent Tokay while I floundered for words. Though I had often twitted Holmes about his indifference to what certain coy writers call the fair sex, we had never really plumbed the vast chasm between myself as a married man and Holmes as the quintessential bachelor. Moreover, Holmes was a bachelor who did not use his freedom to ‘play the field’ with the ladies, but instead indulged his solitary, almost monkish, celibate bent.

There. I had used the word, even if only to myself, about the one condition in my friend I had never approached or explored. Celibate. Had he been religious, that would have explained much. But Holmes was a logician, and as indifferent to organized religion as he was to women. He was an ascetic esthete, an undebauched Bohemian, if such a contradiction in condition exists. Holmes was unique, and exulted in that fact. So did I, when I was not being irritated by it.

“Can you not guess,” Holmes asked quietly, “what case I pursue?”

“No, I cannot!”

“It is the Ripper.”

“The Ripper! You mentioned the case to the rabbi, but I thought those were comments in passing. You swore to me in this very room that you were not involved. ‘Mere butchery, Watson,’ you said. I have made notes. Besides, there has not been a Ripper slaying in several months. Surely the matter is dead.”