The Memoirs of Irene Adler: The Irene Adler Trilogy (7 page)

We had, in the past, carried out three very profitable actions on Barnum and Mace of Piccadilly, the city’s most distinguished purveyors of gourmet food whose clients included royalty. As a result we were never short of the best caviar, lobster in aspic, Champagne, Armagnac, cold meats, smoked salmon, and similar délices to which we had become accustomed. Now suddenly we discover that our stocks were depleting fast. We need to replenish soon.

We operate in a way whereby every member has a say, and if need be we take a vote. Although all the eight members strive to attend on a pre-arranged night every week, on almost any night we have two or three of us round the table, drinking tea or coffee or Port and eating pastry, either home-baked by the nonesuch Armande or fetched from Tavernier et Bertrand of Edgware Road, often followed by an Armagnac or a Grand Marnier.

We had planned a break-in at Barnum and Mace for Sunday between midnight and three o’clock, but the conscience of the Club, Bartola, intervened. Her point was that it was not right to concentrate on one target when there were other businesses doing just as well. Why not, for a change, turn our sights on their competitors, Frostini Fratelli, recently installed in Chelsea, who, to judge by the size and luxury of their premises, must have made a substantial dent in the clientèle of their Piccadilly rivals? Bartola further explained that she had taken one look at Amedeo Frostini when she went into his shop to buy some Parmesan once, and had immediately recognised him for the prime rascal that he was. Her instincts were well-nigh infallible, as she had amply demonstrated in the past. Didn’t we agree? Our Italian friend makes her case with clarity and passion and wins us over. So the brothers it is.

We have developed foolproof methods for breaking and entering, at will, almost any shop, art gallery or house, even banks, but I have chosen not to give details of our mode of operation because we can never be sure whether our potential imitators would behave with the same restraint as us.

It is just gone half past midnight and the roads are empty. After a recent drizzle, the cobbled stones shine under the pale gaslight. The revellers have gone home, as have the ladies of the night. Only the regular
scrunch of the wheels of our hansom cab responding to the clip clop of the horse’s hoofs on the pavement breaks the eerie midnight silence. In the distance we hear a dog bark, another hansom wending its weary way home, followed by the shrill whistle of a train, perhaps a Sleeper from Victoria station going north.

Six of us are now inside the premises of the Italian merchants. Ivan Vissarionovich, the Bishop, Coleridge, and us the women, Bartola, Armande and I. We’re in men’s trousers, which afford greater comfort when carrying out our ventures.

We are shocked, on entering the store rooms, to find but a few forlorn cases of wine or champagne and six or seven cardboard boxes of ham. Last time we descended upon Barnum, the stores were so full one could hardly walk without knocking against stacks of comestibles. Disappointed, we think of satisfying ourselves with some money. We crack a big safe open, find seven pounds, documents and letters. Our first thought is that the money would come in handy, but we are unable to resist the temptation of reading the letters, diaries, bills and other documents. Most of them are in Italian, so Bartola has to work jolly hard for us. A sad story unfolds.

When the brothers arrived in London, they began by buying a small trattoria in the Soho with their modest savings and some money given to them by Zio Massimo. They made a flying start, their coffee and pastry quickly earning a reputation for excellence. The business flourished, and using their profits, they moved into the more ambitious business of purveying food and wines, mainly from Italy, and they went from strength to strength. Their competitors in Piccadilly did not look upon this with favour and made up their minds to ruin them. This information was contained in a letter to uncle Massimo in Montepulciano. They began by undercutting the Italians, undoubtedly at great cost to themselves. They saw this as an investment which would bear fruit once they had driven the brothers into the arms of the receivers. In any case they had strong reserves accumulated over the fifty years when they had a quasi monopoly of this lucrative trade. Another below-the-belt strategy was their demand that their traditional suppliers stopped trading with their rivals, or at the very least to charge extortionate prices if they wished to retain their custom. Them or us.

The Italians had one trump card: they had a cousin working at Kastel van Laaken in some exalted position, and he had wangled a lucrative contract for them. King Leopold II of Belgium regularly visited London in his yacht
Alberta
, which usually arrived on a Friday afternoon and moored on the Thames, near Battersea. He regularly held lavish parties over the week-end for his travelling companions and his friends among the English aristocracy, lasting until the small hours of Monday morning. Obviously, for the richest man on earth money was not an issue. Unsurprisingly not only did the most expensive wines flow freely at those soirées, but more relevantly to the brothers, victuals of the finest quality were forced on the guests. Less relevantly these parties were also attended by the most ravishing ladies money could buy, including girls of eleven or twelve - not that the innocent Fratelli were party to this, or even aware of the scandal.

The Italian purveyors had received a telegram from the
Alberta
’s chief steward informing them of their impending arrival this Friday, with a long list of what they needed delivered. They frantically went to their reluctant suppliers, ready to spend money that they had borrowed, but found that either the price demanded had gone up even higher, or were told that they were out of just those very items on their lists. It dawned upon them that not only were they going to fail in fulfilling their contract, but worse, they ran the risk of imprisonment if they were forced to renege on the terms of their contract through no fault of their own. We obviously could not take their last two cases of champagne or the seven odd pounds we found in the till. We just left.

On the way home in our fiacre, Bartola suddenly seemed to be overcome by some ague or fever, so excited had she become. She was trying to speak, but only incoherent words came out of her mouth. She might have been expressing regret for having misguidedly damned Amedeo Frostini on insufficient grounds.

‘Calm down, Bartola,’ I said putting an arm round her shoulder and patting her on the back like a child who had hurt herself. ‘Take a deep breath and speak slowly.’

‘Those Barnum and Mace people need to be punished. How can they drive their competitors to ruin like this? Have they no heart?’

‘We’ll kill two birds with one stone,’ I said.

‘Kill
two
birds? Why kill even one bird,
cara
,’ said Bartola. ‘I love birds.’ You never knew with her, was she joking or had got the wrong end of the stick?

‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to go to Barnum and Mace, serve ourselves to our heart’s content, and move the stuff to the Fratelli?’

‘Irene, only you can come up with sterling ideas like that,’ chorused my companions.

The impish Vissarionovich turned the fiacre round abruptly, giving us all a scare, and we made our way to the seat of Barnum and Mace in Piccadilly. As we expected, their store room was filled to the rafters, and we served ourselves. Our technique was to burrow our way through the crates, take our share from behind and then close the breach so that the lacuna caused by our incursion would not be immediately discovered, giving us plenty of leeway. We were exhausted carrying cases of champagne, wines, cognac and whiskies, large hams, cheeses, smoked salmons, caviar to our fiacre. We then made our way back to Chelsea where we dropped those commodities in the depleted warehouse of the Fratelli, in an attempt at rescuing their profitable link with the Belgian monarch, and, I daresay, save them from jail.

There was a possibility that the Italians might be ill-advised enough to go to the police to report this strange phenomenon of merchandise appearing in their shop. This was not something we thought desirable. So I sat down and wrote a note, explaining the risk of such an action:

Please consider the risks, should you as honest folks, go to the police. No one will believe you. They will immediately draw the conclusion that you carried out the break-in yourselves—a belief that Barnum and Mace will do their best to foster—and you will be ruined. If as good Christians you do not wish to reap the benefit arising from stolen goods, you can give the proceeds to a Children’s Charity
.

This was unsigned, but I left our trademark card: an ace of diamonds (I always carry them in my handbag).

As an afterthought we took just one case for ourselves, and went back to Water Lane in time for a Champagne breakfast.

We had no idea then of what underage girls were being subjected to on King Leopold’s yacht, but we were pleased that we had saved the Fratelli from ruin and at the same time dealt a blow, albeit a weak one to the vicious Barnum and Mace. We were happy when we heard later that the brothers never looked back after their little contretemps. As was bound to happen, the Piccadilly purveyors discovered the subterfuge soon enough. Although they did everything in their power to incriminate the blameless Fratelli, even with the police on their side, there was little the latter could do.

This might well have been the end of the story, but in my previous accounts which the
Reynolds News
published as a series under the heading
The Case Book of Irene Adler
, I have recounted how, when I had incurred the mortal enmity of the King of Bohemia I had sought refuge at number 221B Baker Street, pulling the wool over Mr Holmes’ eyes and calling myself Mrs Hudson. It was there that I had the good fortune to witness, and indeed be given a part in the surprising dénouement of our heist.

The Fratelli, having saved their business without detection, began by making a large donation to the Hackney Orphanage, as we had suggested. However, much intrigued by the miraculous event, they sought Mr Holmes’ help to clarify the mystery of the break-in in reverse.

One morning I opened the door to two Italian gentlemen who struck me as being among the most courteous men that I have ever met. Why Bartola had taken a dislike to the affable Amedeo initially, I do not understand. I ushered the pair into Mr Holmes’s study, and left. In the unlikely case that the reader is unfamiliar with my eavesdropping habit, I will repeat what Mr Holmes himself had enjoined: Mrs Hudson, we owe it to ourselves to pierce the mysteries of the world around us. If you see a piece of paper and no one is watching you, make a mental note of its position, pick it up, read it, it might well be instructive. When you’ve finished, put it back exactly where it was. If there is a conversation going on behind a wall, bring your ear to it. You come across a new word, check its meaning in Mr Johnson’s erudite tome.

I made as if to close the door behind me but left it slightly ajar to enable the sound waves to gain unimpeded access to my curious ears. My strong suspicion concerning the identity of the Italian pair was soon confirmed. They began by obtaining Mr Holmes’ guarantee that as clients, whatever they were going to tell him was entirely confidential, to which the detective gave a slight but convincing nod. Then taking turns, the brothers told Mr Holmes the strangest story he must have heard in his long career as a fighter against crime.

‘No,’ said Amedeo, ‘no crime was committed against us.’

‘Nor did we do anything unlawful.’

‘But clearly a crime had been committed,’ pursued Enrico Frostini.

‘Imagine our surprise,’ said Amedeo.

‘Shock,’ corrected Enrico.

‘One minute we were facing ruin—’

‘Bankruptcy.’

‘Quite... losing our biggest customer—’

‘But how were we going to pay back what we owe—’

‘Five hundred and ten pounds we had to borrow.’

I wished they would come to the point of their visit, and so indeed must have Mr Holmes. He listened to them without interrupting. The brothers finally revealed that they would be greatly relieved to find out who were their mysterious benefactors, stressing that they had never asked anybody to come to their rescue in that manner.

‘We are God-fearing Catholics, we are.’

‘We are related to the—’

‘Distantly...’

‘The holy father in the Vatican.’

‘As such we would never do anything likely to taint his exalted image.’

‘Of course,’ Holmes said with not one hint of impatience. They then gave my employer the note that I had written and the Ace of diamonds. Mr Holmes promised to look into the matter after which they left.

Later, Mr Homes will claim that he had known my true identity soon after I arrived at Number 221B under the guise of Mrs Hudson. As I know him to be scrupulously honest, I will offer a conjecture based on what Professor Sigmund Freud calls the conscious and the subconscious.
My arguments rests on the fact that in the short period when he comes out of his cocaine torpor, in a state between slumber and waking, he often call me Miss Adler. In fact he talks to me, not as to Mrs Hudson the lowly housekeeper, but to someone he respects, or might even be in awe of. I am not making this up. When he is fully awake (recovered?), he seems completely unaware of whatever had passed between the two of us. He could have been a dissimulator, but I rather doubt that.

After the Italians had left, he sat at his desk for upward of three hours, pumping heavily on his pipe, his eyes glazed over, refusing to even acknowledge my offer of a pot of Darjeeling, in a pose I recognised as indicative of deep concentration. I would espy him occasionally picking up the note I had written in one hand and peering at it through the large magnifying glass that he keeps in the right hand drawer of his large desk. I saw him squeeze his face as one in pain and shake his head wearily once or twice. Once he picked the ace and after hardly glancing at it he put it down. It held no interest for him.

Obviously I did not wish his findings to lead to me, but I knew that he would not rest until he had solved the riddle. After just over three hours he stood up and as I feared he directed his steps towards the small triangular cabinet fixed in one corner between two adjacent walls at the height of an average adult. With the one key he always keeps in his waistcoat pocket, he opened its glass door. The torment he was experiencing was manifest. I so abhorred his indulgence in the white powder that I found it hard to resist running over to him and making a clean breast of my part in the affair. Helplessly I watched him injecting himself and then collapsing in his large chair, blinking, at first furiously, but with a surprising deceleration until his eyes became fully closed and his eyelids stationary.