Good Night, Mr. Holmes (35 page)

At Cologne we were forced to pause; no connecting train to Brussels left till late the following morning. Nightfall abetted Irene’s disguise as she managed the perilous interrogation of the ticketmaster, purchase of the tickets and inquiries after a hotel near the station. She left three of the carpetbags on being convinced that they would be locked up.

I confess I slept not a wink that night, though the lodgings were spotless and a featherbed as high as whipped cream promised sweet dreams. I knew that Irene chafed at every moment we hesitated along the way;
she
spent the night vigilant at the window.

Once I heard a sinister click as she took the small revolver from her pocket and examined it. I had forgotten the weapon she carried in London; somehow I’d assumed she had dispensed with such habits once her life had changed.

In the morning Irene drew me aside as we neared the station. “Nell, you must enter the station alone. Here are the baggage chit and some German coins.”

“But I don’t speak any German!”

“You will need none to reclaim the bags—and your coins will speak
for
you in convincing a porter to fetch them aboard. It is best to separate; they hunt for two. I have my ticket, here’s yours. I will board just as the train leaves.”

With that Irene vanished into the crowd pouring into the vast stone station building. I clutched the baggage claim and a fistful of foreign money, feeling quite as though I had been stranded by an ungentlemanly escort! At least she had undertaken to carry the heavy carpetbag, bearer of our money and the photograph and thus never out of her presence.

I entered the eddy of travelers and found myself harried along as a woodchip that is seized by a current I wasn’t used to managing such details as I had been assigned: Godfrey had kindly arranged my previous travel.

I stuttered at the baggage man, but eventually was handed all three carpetbags. Then I scanned the bustling strangers for a capped porter.

Though I had seen dozens earlier, porters were scarce as dodos now. At last I attracted the eye of a slight fellow who looked as if he could carry a tea packet on a good day. He nevertheless managed to stagger the long way to our train and see me into a compartment, at which time I showered him with all the coins in my possession. He left clucking like a contented German hen; I settled by the window to scan the crowd for Irene’s figure in its unfamiliar guise.

My heart was racing and my brow was veiled in an unladylike dampness. Steam from the stoking engine drifted past the window like an airy muffler. My lapel watch showed departure looming in less than two minutes, and German trains ran on punctuality as much as steam. Why had I ever allowed us to separate? I admonished myself, imagining an increasingly gruesome chain of possibilities.

The creak of the compartment door made me turn. A man’s silhouette filled the stingy corridor; this time it was not Irene’s.

“I fear this compartment is occupied,” I told the intruder.

He grinned like an idiot and entered.

“No, no!” I waved toward the space. “I expect a traveling companion.”

He stepped to the brass rack above me and—instead of adding his baggage to mine, for he had none—he reached for a carpetbag.

“Sir, that is mine!” I stood to defend my property, dismayed by what a burly fellow I contested. His thick-knuckled hairy hands already clutched the handles. I snatched a corner. My hat lurched onto my forehead, blinding me, as my shoulder seams sang of their imminent separation.

The bone-hard rap of a cane descending on knuckles came before my seams could scream their final dissolution. I pushed hat and hair from my eyes. The intruder’s mouth was nursing a clenched fist. Irene stood in the doorway, her cane still raised.

She uttered a string of German words as harsh as the Cockney she had used on the last person to lay hand upon a carpetbag of mine—the London guttersnipe of years ago.

The man kept sullen silence, eyeing not the cane but the metallic glint of the revolver Irene lifted from her pocket.

The train jerked into a shudder of departure.

“Perhaps he made a mistake,” I said.

“He did,” she responded tightly in English, so in character that even I almost feared her, but perhaps that was her intention.

More hiccoughs of motion signaled our immediate departure. I was jolted back into my seat, but Irene and our visitor kept upright on braced feet, his narrowed eyes alert for any weakening in her position.

Outside on the platform people’s faces oozed past, blurring. The crowds thinned. We chugged through the shadow of the roofed station-yard, only tracks and distant trains accompanying us. I pictured Irene holding the man hostage all the way to Brussels. Instead she slung her carpetbag onto the seat opposite and stepped into the corridor, nodding for him to precede her to the carriage exit. “Wait here,” she instructed me.

He regarded the fourth carpetbag as if it were a meal and he a starving Irishman, but moved along, his admonished knuckles still red. They disappeared. I rose to look, but saw only an empty passage.

Unsteady, I elected to sit again, eyeing my watch face. A minute ticked by, then two. An incoming train thundered past on a nearby track, doubling the sense of speed and my heartbeat at the same long instant. In another minute, the curtain of charging steel had vanished as quickly as it had appeared. No Irene.

Then she was back, sitting opposite me and slipping her cane through the compartment handles so no one could enter unwanted. Nothing was said as a lucifer struck the sole of her boot and the familiar haze of smoke veiled her pale features.

“Well?” I finally asked.

“He’s off the train; that’s what I wanted to ensure.”

“How? We were already moving.”

“So was he, when last I saw him. I wanted to make sure that the train was going fast enough that he couldn’t leap back on again.”

“He... could have been killed.”

“So could have I.” Irene shuddered for the first time in our acquaintance. “Not a pretty fellow, no court intriguer. Just a bully with an assignment. I was forced to hold him at revolver point by the car door: had the train’s motion dislodged my balance, I would have gone out instead, I assure you. Besides, he landed with all the grace of a grizzly bear and shambled off. He’ll merely have a long walk back to the station.”

She finished her cigarette and lowered the window to dispose of it, angling her neck to see if our tormentor was still visible.

“Gone, I hope,” she said, “as I hope something else is not gone.” Irene pulled down the three carpetbags and began examining our things.

“Irene, you suspect our baggage ...?”

“Of being searched. Ah, one has been disarranged, but not the other two. Was there a delay when you claimed the bags?”

“Of course there was a delay! I do not speak German and the man was slow to understand me.”

“Doubtless paid to be slower. So they had caught up with us just before our departure. Pursuit is always exponential, my dear Nell. In Brussels they will be waiting for us.”

She sat again, drawing the fourth carpetbag against her hip like a child. “Our soon-to-be footsore friend had a good long look at this rather appalling and thus easily identifiable Hindustan print. I must reconsider.”

I nodded, too worn to speak. The recent excitement and my sleepless night combined to induce an odd state of detachment. I watched the outlying residences of Cologne slip behind us as countryside again commanded the view. Limpid spring green swirled past in a mist of steam and fatigue. I slept.

Shadows were long and the setting sun was burnishing the horizon when I awoke. Irene still sat where she had, her face looking drawn in the light of the compartment oil lamps.

“Brussels?” said I with a start.

“Soon.”

“What shall we do?”

“Change trains as quickly as possible. It would be good if we could change our guises, but we have no time for that.” She gave me a quick smile. “I’m glad you slept, Nell; you will be fresher for the last leg of our flight. Be of good cheer; there is always a way out of a trap; observe the humble mouse.”

“I have observed the humble mouse—decapitated!—many a time.”

“Only the dull ones, Nell. Only the dull.” Irene stiffened as the train slowed. Shadowy buildings slipped past us in the twilight. “All we do must be swiftly done. I will take this case; you the tapestry one. We must abandon the other two.”

I nodded. In moments the train sat panting in the station. Irene and I darted off and through a maze of passages and stairs to the main station. At the ticketseller’s window her German again sufficed. She turned well pleased from the bronze grating.

“Our boat-train leaves in forty-five minutes. We have only to keep out of plain sight and get aboard, which we will do just at the eleventh hour. Once our train reaches Ostend, it will go directly onto the pier where the passengers board the packet steamers. When our boat lands at Dover we shall be on English soil and better able to elude our pursuers.”

English soil. Those two blessed words. I never wanted to leave my native island again. We ambled through the station, attaching ourselves to knots of strangers like a thin, trailing fringe stitched to the security of the greater shawl.

“A telegraph office, Irene! May I?” The notion of sending Godfrey a cablegram seemed like a line of sanity thrown to a sinking cause, as did the thought of those blessed modern submarine cable lines leading across the English Channel to aboveground telegraph wires stretching all the way to London and home. England and Godfrey—and, by all that’s dear, that miserable, profane Casanova—seemed like visions of heaven at that moment.

Irene glanced from me to the telegraph office to the station interior. She nodded, her eyes urging speed. I rushed to the desk inside. The man there spoke English, thank God. Brussels was near the Channel coast and Ostend, for generations a major embarkation point for Dover.

My pen paused over the message: “We arrive at Victoria at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Require discreet lodging, utter secrecy.” I hesitated to sign my name, remembering Irene’s caution that telegraphed messages leave trails. I thought, then smiled triumphantly, and signed, “Casanova.”

The man plucked the proper Belgian coins from my multinational collection and I dashed to rejoin Irene. She was smiling tightly. “I wonder what Godfrey Norton will make of our adventures.”

“I wonder if we will make it safely home to have the luxury of wondering what Godfrey will make of anything!”

“Quite right, Nell. At the moment we must loiter in a professional manner. We are supernumeraries now, who make fading into a background an art. We must neither notice our surroundings too sharply, nor ignore them for a moment. We must do that which is most difficult to simulate. We must appear normal; in short, we must render a performance worthy of the great Ellen Terry.”

“Oh, dear.”

“In other words, be yourself.”

“You are not being yourself,” I replied a bit testily as we strolled through the vast station.

Her tone grew pensive. “Apparently I have not been myself for some time.”

By ten minutes before our scheduled departure, we had idled our way to the gate leading to the great, tracked expanse of the rail yard. Our train trembled beyond it. A
Daily Telegraph
was now folded under Irene’s arm. She carried both carpetbags and the cane, balancing all these items by some prestidigitation I couldn’t quite analyze. My fingers went often to my lapel watch but I forbore to check its fateful dial. I could almost feel it ticking atop the rapid beating of my heart.

Someone brushed into Irene, almost knocking her aside.

“I say, sir!” she protested in masculine indignity.

Another someone bumped, then steadied me with a firm hand. We were abruptly surrounded by someones, hemmed in at the wall.

Irene had no opportunity to drop her baggage and appeal to her revolver. Two men bracketed her, her arms in their firm custody. A third man had taken me by the elbow while  a fourth confronted Irene with an expression of utter satisfaction.

German words exploded into her face. I frantically tried to translate, recognizing only the form of masculine address, “Mein Herr.” Then an oft-repeated phrase began to come clear. They had recognized
me,
accepted her disguise and were asking Irene where Irene was!

She answered in rapid German, shaking her head. She seemed to be saying that she didn’t know, for the surrounding faces grew grimmer and the men’s color rose like a bloody tide. I felt fingers tighten cruelly on my arm, but said nothing, being mesmerized by Irene’s awful predicament.

The men were large and needed shaving. I smelled damp woolens and stale beer. They were like a forest, those four, and we were lost within the circle of their force.

The fourth man kept asking, Irene kept denying. Without warning, his arm jerked back and he punched a fist into her mid-section. I would have screamed, but a salty, sardine-scented hand clamped my mouth. I bit a leathery finger and was rewarded with its withdrawal.

Irene had gasped and contracted at the blow, but was still standing. The attacker pulled back his fist with a respectful look at her slight masculine form. He shook his stinging fingers, crumpled them into a fist again and held it before her face.

I couldn’t watch. He was going to strike her, not open-handed, as a villain strikes a woman in a melodrama, but with his fist, man to man. And I knew enough of how Irene submersed herself in her characters to know that she would endure it, like a man.

The German words flooded my ears, a brutal and ugly tongue threatening brutal and ugly things. I almost began to understand the refrain, “Where has she gone?”

I saw the brute’s arm draw back. Irene braced for the blow.

“Paris, you fool!” I shouted in English. “She’s gone to Paris with the trunks of all her best clothes. Do you think she would leave her wardrobe behind?”

The man lowered his arm, taking my desperation for truth torn from my weaker self. I recalled Irene’s ironic acting advice: “You must appear normal, Nell; that is, be yourself.” Certainly I could not have feigned my horror of what was occurring, my desire to stop it somehow.