Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (8 page)

“Incidentally,” he went on, “what are your accents? I can distinguish forty-two London dialects, but I confess that many here in America are as yet beyond me—and yours, Mr. Clemens, is unique.”

I told him it was Missouri at base, Pike County with some Negro dialects tossed in, and overlayered with a sight of traveling. “And
yours, Holmes?” I considered myself no slouch either when it came to sounding out a man’s pedigree. “I reckon you’ve spent some years in rural territory yourself—more so than in London.” I waited while he smiled with an attitude of
not bad
, then I sprang my capper on him. “Reared in Lincolnshire, were you? Among the squire set?”

“Why, close by!” he exclaimed. “Near the Yorkshire Wolds, actually, not far distant from Lincolnshire. Splendid work, Clemens!” He couldn’t have looked more surprised if I was a monkey busting out with gospel hymns. He confessed that he’d spent his growing-up years in the countryside before attending university, which he’d recently left. Before returning to settle in London, he’d taken it on himself to see parts of the world. “You enjoyed your time in England, you said?”

The crowd’s rumble became anticipatory as the players took up their positions again.

“I had the bulliest stays.” I held back from saying I was hailed in London as “the greatest satirist since Swift and Voltaire” but I did recount how I’d come by my fine umbrella: namely, when a London reporter asked why I carried a cheap cotton model, I said it was the only kind Englishmen wouldn’t steal—and it was reprinted to nationwide laughter. At a banquet soon after, I was presented the one I carried today.

“My brother sent me a clipping at university about it,” Holmes said. “I imagine it’s in my files, under
Americans
.”

It didn’t sound wholly complimentary but I let it pass, and presented the umbrella for his inspection. After a short look he handed it back.

“Well, what do you think of it?”

“Perfectly satisfactory.”

Hurrying boys pushed through the cramped space behind us. Knots of them had sped here and there throughout the afternoon, taking new routes to evade pursuing cops. I realized that I’d had a feeling of being watched again, and made sure my billfold was safe. Holmes stared after the boys in apparent fascination.

“Satisfactory?” I said with some spirit. “Not a champion model?”

Seeing that he’d ruffled my feathers, he extended a bony hand for the umbrella and gave it closer inspection. “Manufactured by James Smith & Sons. Very good. They are top-drawer in the field. I’m familiar with their New Oxford Street establishment—indeed, I made a study there.” He hefted the umbrella. “Fine silk canopy. Not the alpaca or oiled canvas used by lesser makers.” His hand slid along the shank and extended the spreaders. “But note here, Clemens, how these steel ribs are of recent Hanway design. Not handcrafted whalebone.” He touched a fingernail to one of the amber tips with a dismissive click, closed the spreaders, and extended the handle to me. “Pistol grip design, most common now, this one plain bone. No carved ivory or ebony figure as on Smith & Son’s finest models.”

I boiled with resentment. The nerve of him branding my trophy second-class!

“Sorry,” he said, “but you
did
ask.” Then, as if to divert me, he brought up the topic of the new typing machines and inquired if I knew of them. My spirits lifting a notch, I told him I
owned
one, and that with regular practice on two fingers, I’d boosted myself up to beating out “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck” at eighteen words per minute. Why was he interested?

His thick brows drew together. “I perceive possibilities in their use for crime.”

I looked at him; his face was perfectly sober and intent. Was the man gripped by a lunatic vision of wrongdoers everywhere? “You said you ‘made a study’ at Smith & Sons,” I reminded him. “Toward what enterprise? Do you plan to enter the umbrella trade?”

That brought a short laugh. “Not quite.”

“What, then?”

“Consulting detective.”

I chewed on it for some moments, letting it hang there in the air between us, thinking how he’d wanted to know my home dialect, been eager to get my cigar’s ashes. “You scout out clues?” I said. “In
advance
of crimes?” I’d read Poe, of course, even enjoyed some of him, and extracted an inkling of how the deductive mind could work. Not that I had one. Nor, as far as I could fathom, did the tin-plated heroes in illustrated magazines packed with farfetched feats of city detectives, railway detectives, prairie detectives—maybe even squirrel detectives. Seeing how rich a vein it was, I’d done some prospecting on a detective yarn of my own, calling back my old jumping-frog character and titling the yarn
Simon Wheeler, Amateur Detective
. Tried it as a story and a play, and in each it was a thundering failure, which did not render my heart fonder of the detective species.

“How can one recognize and evaluate clues without systematic knowledge?” Holmes was saying. “And so, yes, a crucial element might be discovered in the intricacies of umbrella manufacture.” He waggled a forefinger like a schoolmaster. “And in subjects more arcane.”

A Boston hitter rocketed a ball into center field, and the
4
vanished from Boston’s peg on the green telegraphic board beyond
the left-field foul flag, and was replaced by a
5
. Beneath it, Hartford’s
0
hung sadly.

“Do you truly believe,” I said, “that crimes can be solved mainly by applying brainpower?”

“I
know
it,” he said with exasperating smugness. “When all other possibilities are eliminated through a process of keenly applied deduction, the one remaining must be the truth, however improbable.” It came rattling out of him like a Sunday-school verse.

“
Could
be the truth,” I amended. “Could be pure bunkum, too. Look, if this was as simple as you claim, Holmes, every sneak thief and back-alley mugger would be snared in no time—the big crooks, too. Didn’t the Pinkertons take a stab at the James gang just this past winter?” I jabbed a finger of my own, sure I had him in a corner. “The papers told how they tossed a bomb into his mother’s house and blew off her hand—but they didn’t get Jesse.”

“I would venture to remind you that it all depends on who is employing the deduction,” he said. “Police may
see
but as a general rule they fail to
observe
. And deduction in criminal cases is rarely simple—in fact, it is complex and demanding, but ultimately it is reliable.” He’d gotten excited—at least for him—his nostrils flaring slightly the way I’d once seen an Arabian gelding’s. “As Flaubert said,
‘L’homme c’est rien—l’oeuvre c’est tout.’
The man is nothing, the work is everything.”

“Yes, he wrote that to George Sand.” I felt considerable glee at Holmes’s look of startlement. Now I set myself to trump him to flinders, having taken to memory some of Flaubert’s phrases reprinted in London papers. “I believe it goes,
‘L’homme
N’EST
rien, l’oeuvre tout.”

His frown at my drawling French deepened into a scowl as he perceived my accuracy. Again I’d astonished him, and this time he was not charmed. It didn’t take a gallery of scholars to see that he wasn’t used to being corrected—and that it suited him about like a case of hives.

“But despite
you
being a mere man,” I added for spice, “I gather you claim this singular capacity to observe and deduce?”

“Now you fault me for immodesty,” he retorted. “I do not count modesty as a virtue. To the logician things should be seen exactly as they are. To underestimate oneself is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s powers.”

“In my line of wares,” I told him, “truth is often a laughing matter, and things rarely form up in anything like a straight logical chain. Won’t you agree that life doesn’t operate according to—”

Fittingly,
my
logic was lost in an explosion of yells as the Hartfords finally began to show their mettle. A Dark Blue hitter smacked a long ball that sent two runners home. Rattled, the Boston pitcher called time-out.

“See?” I pointed to the diamond and proceeded to float new arguments. Who’d have predicted—putting cash on logical deduction alone—this shift in fortune? Wasn’t the human lot precisely like that? At the mercy of unforeseen, chaotic bursts of providence? How could uncovering “clues” restore order when there wasn’t any particular order to
start
with?

He gave me a withering look, as if my propositions were too ignorant to consider. Undaunted, I piled on more. Detective stories had tidy resolutions, I pointed out, everything tucked in and pat by the end. But this sporting contest testified as much as anything
to the folly of taking such an approach seriously. How could “logic” be applied in order to produce “truth” here, when most of base ball defied rationality?

Holmes nodded absently, and I judged he was showing the white flag. His eyes had an introspective, faraway look. He seemed intent not on me nor on the players but on the movements of itinerant boys. Was his single-rut mind fixated on child outlaws?

Several batters later, a Hartford sailed the ball into an apple tree just inside the fence, knotting the score, 5–5. How we loved it! “Hurrah!” I yelled, subordinating my rebel-yell instincts to local custom. “HooRAW!” Ashcroft whooped and pounded my shoulder with beefy fists. I couldn’t recollect such giddy spirits at a ball game since that long-distant day when Tom Blankenship, my model for Huck Finn, clubbed a ball through Widow Holliday’s kitchen window and smashed a bottle of painkiller on her sill. The widow’s old yellow cat, Last Judgment, sampled the stuff and lit out to settle grudges with every dog in the township.

It was when we settled again after the last out and I checked for the umbrella that I found it was gone. I bounced up again as if visited by angry hornets and stared at the plank bench.

“Something amiss?” said Ashcroft.

“Could you get up?”

“Beg pardon?”

I tried to peer around his outsized hips. “Obliged if you’d elevate yourself.”

When he grudgingly accommodated me, I concluded with sinking heart that the umbrella had not lodged beneath him but must be somewhere in the gloom below the Pavilion benches. How to descend? I surveyed the slope below me: jammed so tight that no
hint of aisles existed. Getting to the bottom would be pure hell—and perish all thought of returning.

Holmes tapped my elbow. “I should inform you that one of those ragged lads barged through here again just as you were involved in—” he paused to find the word—“cheering.”

“The boy snatched it?”

“I would have stopped him in that event,” Holmes said. “I turned and saw him after he had pushed past. His hands were empty but I would stake a guinea that he dislodged the umbrella—and I’d venture it was deliberately done.”

I labored to puzzle through it. The Englishman’s penchant for finding felons at every turn was suspect, but he’d offered a plausible explanation for the umbrella’s disappearance. If true, the culprit himself or a confederate would be retrieving it at that moment. What to do?

“Here, could you . . .” I dropped to my knees and folded nearly double, working to get my face beneath the bench. Ashcroft grumbled and resisted my efforts with his ham-pillar legs. Seated beyond him, Mrs. Ashcroft, whose panniered dress took up a good three feet of bench and fit her like a circus tent—she couldn’t have gone within eight points of the wind in it—began expressing herself in a voice carrying all the honeyed sweetness of a #6 bastard file. Added note:
Give Aunt Polly steel spectacles, nigh-crippling rheumatism, and pinch her face!

From a torturous corkscrew position I was rewarded with a narrow view of the Pavilion’s netherworld. Squinting down at bottles, cartons, tins, wrappers and heaven knew what, I thought I saw a handle protruding from a heap of sodden newspapers half-submerged in a puddle. Rainwater, I hoped, not tobacco juice—
or worse. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that it was only a broken-off buggy whip.

I angled my head sidewise for a wider view. Two dark figures lurked near the frontward seats. They lacked collars and proper headwear—the smaller of the two wore a jockey’s cap of the style affected by ballists—and they lacked tickets, certainly. I might have admired their pluck if not for the fact of the smaller one clutching my umbrella under his arm.

“You, boys!” I called.

They spun and stared at my sidewise countenance suspended below the benches like a holiday bulb. The smaller looked down guiltily at the umbrella, spoke urgently to the other, tugged the jockey cap lower to hide his face, and poised for flight.

“I ain’t the cops,” I said assuringly. “Come over here.”

The larger boy yanked the umbrella from the smaller, and with wary steps moved a bit closer.

“That’s mine,” I told him. “I’m obliged to you for rescuing it.” We studied each other. I could see that he was a gap-toothed, freckled, filthy specimen. After some deliberation, he seemed to reach a conclusion about me and thumbed his grubby nose.

“Why, pickle your devilish hide!” It came out louder than I’d intended, and I heard Mrs. Ashcroft’s shocked gasp. With a motion worthy of Barnum’s India Rubber Man, I reached back and fished out my billfold, jostling Ashcroft as I did so. “Boys?” My voice oozing with trust, I said, “That umbrella you’re holding? It’s a paying proposition to bring it up to me.”

“How much?”

I waved a banknote. “A whole dollar.”

“Let’s see yer bill,” the boy said. “Drop it down.”

“
That
old cat won’t fight.” I snorted at his impertinence. “Hurry that umbrella up here, and the cash is yours.”

The boy consulted his smaller mate, who shook his head; they seemed to argue. “How can we know you’ll pay?” demanded the bigger one, twisting the umbrella in his grimy hands. The other hung back, his face shadowed.

“I
told
you so.”

“
He sed, she sed
,” the boy intoned mockingly.

“It’s a keepsake!” I took a long breath to quell my anger. “It’s valuable—but only to me. I’m square as a dry-goods box. I’ll give you the money.”