The Empty Birdcage Page 4
“Whereas you are a bedraggled wreck of forty-three—”
“And the point, which I have been struggling to make, is that you have fallen in love only twice. It shall transpire again, you know. And not only because there is divinity, to say nothing of good luck, in odd numbers, but because your ultimate happiness will be to have a family of your own.”
“My ultimate happiness…?” Mycroft repeated numbly.
He could not so much as whisper more than that. To do so would be to reveal the precarious state of his health, and what a wicked thing it would be to condemn any woman to suffer it, least of all one whom he claimed to love.
“The question remains,” Douglas reprised when no response was forthcoming. “Are you able to do what Deshi Hai Lin has requested?”
Lin had explained that his daughter Ai Lin had been promised in marriage to one Bingwen Shi, a thirty-year-old land investor whom she had met but once. It appeared that, on his way to a routine appointment with a client in London, Shi had disappeared. After searching for him for several days to no avail, his family and the Lins had assumed foul play.
“Even if he is dead, his family wishes his body returned to them,” Deshi Hai Lin had told them. “But if he is not, might you arrange to bring him home so that my daughter Ai Lin can fulfill her destiny and become his wife? I would pay you prodigiously for your trouble.”
Mycroft had made it clear to the anxious father that he did not need recompense. That, if he chose to take on the task, it would be as a favor to the Lin family, but that he would have to give it some thought.
“Mr. Holmes. I cannot tell you how dear Bingwen Shi is to me. From the first, he treated me like a father. And I too thought that he could be like a son to me; for, unlike my boy now at university, he was keen to learn my business. And he has already been missing one month…” Lin had pleaded.
“Then I am sorry to say, Mr. Lin, that the worst may have already transpired,” Mycroft had replied. “For surely by now a note of ransom or news of some sort would have materialized. As nothing has, I cannot believe that another few days will make much difference.”
Though Lin was barely fifty years old, he had walked away from them a much older man. Mycroft had almost called to him then and there, to say he would assist. Only Douglas’s arm on his shoulder had restrained him.
“It was you who prevented me from giving him an immediate answer,” Mycroft said as they proceeded through the large and ornate archway that led out of the World’s Fair. “Why?”
“You already resent the circumstances,” Douglas explained. “I would rather you not resent your decision as well. Your first impulse—to think on it—was sound, for it is a favor he asks of you, not an obligation.”
Mycroft nodded, disconsolate. “I do admit,” he added, “that one aspect of this mystery intrigues me. When I asked Lin if his prospective son-in-law had any enemies, he said no, but he added that he had had some business dealings with Vizily Zaharoff, who in fact was the ‘client’ he was going to meet when he was abducted.”
“Yes, I recall his mentioning it,” Douglas said. “But who is this Zaharoff?”
“A notorious dealer in weaponry, with offices in a half-dozen European capitals.”
“Notorious? In what way?”
“He might have the unfortunate habit of decapitating people with whom he is displeased. That is the rumor, in any event. If I do decide to take it on, might you join me in my quest? Your familiarity with Chinese culture cannot but help.”
“Tangling, however obliquely, with a man with a penchant for beheading his enemies? How could I refuse?”
When Mycroft said nothing but continued to look glum, Douglas reiterated that he need not take this on at all; that Ai Lin might not even be aware that her father was asking such a favor of him.
“Whether she knows or does not is immaterial,” Mycroft replied. “I ‘take this on’ because a person that I care for is suffering, and it is in my power to alleviate it.”
Douglas nodded. “Then if I agree to go along, we must do as we did in years past, with no secrets between us. For I function poorly under subterfuge. The motives for action must be obvious to me.”
“Of course,” Mycroft said.
“And though I would never violate your privacy by asking where you sequestered yourself the last several weeks, and why you began a row in the middle of the Prater—”
“Yes, that was thoughtless of me,” Mycroft interrupted, hoping that he sounded sincere, for in truth, the secrets that he was keeping from Douglas were beginning to weigh heavily on him.
Nothing to be done, he thought bitterly.
For a man like Douglas would never reconcile himself to the Necessary Inhumanity that seemed each day more essential to Mycroft’s own dealings.
6
SHERLOCK HAD SAT BACK DOWN TO HIS AGONY COLUMNS and was engrossed therein when a shadow fell over his only source of light. He glanced up at the hulking form of the barman, leaning over his table.
“That one’s a fair fighter when he don’t have a brick in his hat!” he said, indicating the younger Irishman. “You know his missus, do you?”
Sherlock shook his head. “I know neither him nor his… missus.”
“So, how’d you guess?” the barman insisted.
Sherlock sighed. No use alienating the man. “He wore a cheap tin ring,” he said. “His shirt is old, but clean and well mended, though the stitch is not nearly so good as to be professional. He is not the sort of a man who would pay the least bit attention to his grooming, were not a woman at home to suggest he do better. Beyond which, though he wished to fight he seemed reluctant to take the lead, as if he had been warned to cause no trouble. And the crescent-shaped scar on his temple can be made only by a copper pot, and men rarely wield cookware as weapons. If his wife had not laid down the law, I’d likely be digging a dart out of my pupil.”
The barman laughed. “You got a good head on you,” he declared. “You are welcome here.”
Just then, the front door opened, letting in a shaft of dim afternoon light, along with one of The Eagle’s regulars, for the barman called out “Smithy!” and moved to the taps. Indeed, the man seemed to be still black from the forge. Though he had attempted to clean himself, the color of his profession had become imbedded in his skin.
Just before he sat, he turned to the barman, waved his newspaper in the air and barked: “Oi William! You cannot believe this! Another four-eleven!”
At this, Sherlock all but leapt from his seat and hovered over man and print like a ravenous bird. The startled smithy looked up.
“Here, boy, what you up to?”
“Can you read?” Sherlock asked excitedly.
“How’s it your business if I can or I cannot?” the smithy replied, offended. “But if you must know, I have an acquaintance what does my reading and I don’t need another.”
“But I shall do it free of charge!” Sherlock declared, sitting beside him on the bench.
“What makes you think I pay a body to read for me?” the smithy demanded.
“Because William is drawing up two half ’n halfs,” Sherlock said, indicating the barman, “and unless you mean to drink them both at once…”
“For free, you say?” Smithy asked dubiously.
Sherlock nodded. “And I can read or summarize.”
“No need for your bag and baggage, boy, just summize!” the smithy replied sourly.
“Fine. So, to… ‘summize,’” Sherlock began. “On the outskirts of Chichester, at approximately eight-thirty this morning, a spinster by the name of Penny Montgomery was found askance—”
“Askance? Wot’s that?” William the barman asked, for he had returned, the two pints of stout and ale hovering precariously over the printed page.
“I’ll be needin’ but one today,” Smithy declared, a hint of menace in his voice.
“They’ve already got the stout in ’em,” William said. “I cannot extract it again, someone’s got to pay.”
“It’ll be I,” Sherlock offered with a sigh as he put his last coin on the table for a drink he would never touch, and pushed Smithy’s hand off the print.
“Askance,” he stated, “is not the proper word, but the paper used it, not I. As she had been pulling weeds in her garden when she was found, I am assuming it means that she fell sideways—though whether to the left or the right, it does not say.”
As the dart-playing rummies stumbled closer to hear, Sherlock continued: “Like most of the other victims, she was alone. No footprints leading away from her, and the only prints leading to her were her own.”
Smithy drew a shivering breath like a child being told a ghost story, but Michael, the older Irishman who had tried to blind Sherlock, was not enthralled.
“No footprints? Nah, you read it wrong, boy, that h’ain’t possible!” Michael proclaimed, which caused Smithy to protest that it was his paper, and who was anyone to say what was and was not possible?
“Killer’s a phantasm,” the barman said, agreeing with Smithy, and that seemed to settle it.
“This Penny Montgomery was a recluse, so the neighbors said,” Sherlock went on. “Went out only to work in her garden.”
“How was she found, then?” challenged the older rummy.
“The vegetable plot was visible from the street,” Sherlock said.
“What of the note?” Smithy asked gleefully. “Was it there?” Sherlock nodded again. “Near her body.”
“And no footprints at all? Outside? In a garden? How can that be?” William wondered.
“Hah! You see?” Smithy offered, seemingly impressed with the murderer’s boldness, while the others nodded agreement.
The front door opened. Another ray of light was followed by a blast of air. From the expressions on his fellows’ faces, Sherlock knew this was Smithy’s reader, come to barter his few years of schooling for an arf-an-arf. Sherlock rose, walked past the newcomer and through the door before anyone had so much as a say-so about it.
Outdoors again, and fresh out of shag, he considered a tobacconist when he realized that he was also penniless, for he’d spent the last of it on the beer he had not drunk.
He turned towards the telegraph office to await Mycroft’s reply but thought better of it. Wiser to go back to Downing to pack the essentials, leave a brief message for his tutors, and use the last of his allowance—if he could recall where he had tucked it away—to purchase a ticket to London. For not even Mycroft could expect him to finish out his term at university, not with a murderer of this caliber on the loose!
7
BY THE TIME MYCROFT AND DOUGLAS RETURNED TO THE Hotel Imperial, an imposing palace with an Italian Neo-Renaissance façade overlooking Ring Boulevard, the weather had turned malevolent. The clouds were black, and the wind howled through every archway and crevice in the wide street, kicking up dust and an eerie sense of desolation in equal measures.
The Hotel Imperial had originally served as a palace for German prince Philipp, Duke of Württemberg, and his consort, Archduchess Maria-Thèrése of Austria. And because it had been conceived as a private home, however large, and not a hotel, to Douglas it seemed off kilter. The gargantuan front entrance, for example, had been designed to allow for a two-horse carriage, a convenience that tended to dwarf the mere mortals who dared to venture inside on foot, as he and Mycroft were doing at present.
“Majestic,” Douglas exclaimed as he stared straight up at the man-sized French chandeliers attached to a scrolled and ornate stucco ceiling. “And yet, it stirs in one a sense of—”
“Personal insignificance?” Mycroft filled in amiably.
Douglas smiled at the accuracy of the phrase.
From his years of friendship with Mycroft, he had learned a thing or two: he was not easily impressed, was not profligate with his money, and rarely did anything for show. No, they two were at this particular hotel for a reason, though he did not yet know what that might be. It vexed him that, after weeks of absolute silence, and promises to the contrary, another secret was being kept from him. He would need to clear the air at some point; and he hoped he could do so without rancor.
He and Mycroft climbed the large, ceremonial stairway between marbled walls that led to the belle étage, where a splendidly attired concierge met them with their room keys and a telegram, which he handed to Douglas with a mean little nod of his head. Douglas repressed a sigh and passed the telegram two inches to his left, for it was clearly addressed to ‘Mycroft Holmes.’ And he knew, from the expression on Mycroft’s face when he opened it, who the sender was.
“Sherlock?” Douglas ventured as the concierge pocketed Mycroft’s tip, clicked his heels, and walked away.
“He needs money,” Mycroft muttered. “He wrote ‘Dira necessitas’ twice. But what ‘dire necessity’ can he possibly have when everything is provided for him?”
“He must be desperate if he is quoting Horace,” Douglas teased, though inwardly his thought was: That torturous boy! For his first instinct was to be protective of Mycroft. On the other hand, Mycroft did himself no favors by alternately neglecting and spoiling his brother, not to mention having few conversations with him that did not involve lecturing, hectoring, recriminations, or that sort of one-upmanship peculiar to male siblings.
“He has absolutely no notion of the value of money,” Mycroft despaired as he reread the text.
“He is very nearly done with his term, is he not?” Douglas queried mildly.
“One month to go,” Mycroft replied. “What in the world am I to do with him then, Douglas?”
“Please do not ask if he can volunteer at Nickolus House…!”
“I am not so big a fool as all of that. Once was enough for a lifetime. But he cannot remain at Cambridge for the summer, and I promised that I would never again force him to return to our mother and father in the country. Which means that he shall have to reside with me. Perhaps I can find him lodgings,” he added hopefully.
“Yes, I am certain that will go a long way towards teaching him the value of money,” Douglas said wryly.
“I do not intend a pied-a-terre. But a modest furnished room somewhere, though he will protest that my home has plenty of furnished rooms from which to choose.”
“Not to mention servants at his beck and call,” Douglas added just as a valet walking in the opposite direction sneered at him.
Mycroft did not always notice those sorts of slights, but this day he most certainly did.
“Why, how dare he?” he exclaimed. “I just might go and give him a piece of my mind!”
“No need,” Douglas said under his breath. “We are the ones who perpetrate the ruse that I am your valet. Your insistence on separate quarters rather than adjoining rooms has no doubt set the staff’s tongues to wagging about such pampered and spoiled help as I.”
“It has nothing to do with the color of your skin, then?”
“None whatsoever,” Douglas confirmed. “Now, as to Sherlock. For what does he require funds? He does passably well with the allowance you provide.”
“Oh, he is being insufferably vague,” Mycroft replied as they continued down the long corridor to their rooms, their footsteps muffled by a thick Persian carpet. “Some wild goose chase that has sprung from one of his agony columns, is my estimate. What has been in the local news, of late?”
“You mean you are not aware of the traveling murderer who has paralyzed all of England?”
“No, I… do not believe I have heard of it,” Mycroft replied.
Considering that Mycroft knew quite a bit about a great many subjects, this lack of awareness struck Douglas as odd, once again bringing to the fore his friend’s unexplained absence. Could Mycroft have been out of the country and only just returned? Even so, a murder of this caliber would surely have been reported abroad.
“It seems that this one kills without rhyme or reason,” Douglas explained. “And wit
h some frequency, and in various locales. And, he has not been good enough to leave a trace.”
“I see. And so Sherlock seeks funds to traipse throughout the isles, hoping to hunt down this enigmatic murderer…? Ah, well. Perhaps I should allow it. At the least, it would keep him busy for a time.”
“And at the most, he could become the next victim!” Douglas parried. “I hope you are in jest.”
“Yes,” Mycroft admitted with a sigh, “though it is awfully tempting. The most galling part is that he truly has no sense that his schooling would be of importance to me, or to society at large. ‘My books are portable,’ says he… as if rifling through pages on a train while his mind is thoroughly engaged elsewhere carries the same weight as a lecture, or research in a proper library. No. I shall not give in to his every whim!” Mycroft concluded, flicking the telegram absentmindedly with his finger, perhaps hoping it would disappear from out his hand like a card trick.
“I would be glad to accompany you downstairs,” Douglas said. “Play the servant, send Sherlock a telegram with your answer.”
“Not just now.”
“But is he not at the telegraph office?” Douglas asked. “Highly doubtful. I know how my brother’s mind works: he has inconvenienced himself to make the petition. I must now inconvenience myself to respond in a manner that will reach him immediately, if not sooner, wherever he might be. Ah, but I am no longer a half-daft terrier, ready to spring at his command! From here on, he shall wait until I am good and ready!”
Douglas looked at him doubtfully, and Mycroft raked a hand through his hair.
“Now. The Imperial Hotel wishes to become famous for their torte,” he said, “a brilliant chocolate and marzipan confection. What say we freshen up and go off for a decent lunch? My treat.”
“Someone is suddenly feeling better,” Douglas exclaimed.