Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

Professor Diggs and I had taken two adjoining
rooms with a sitting-room the size of Mrs. Hudson’s dining-table
between them; as we ascended the stair, Diggs sighed, and shook his
head. “It’s a bad business, Watson,” he said, “a bad business. When
I left this country, forty years ago, we were in the midst of a war
to make an end of slavery: to make an end, many of us dared hope,
to injustice as well. And in the years I spent away – organizing
the realm and building a city of emeralds, and trying to convince
the real witches that ruled that country that I was not only a real
wizard but more powerful than they – I often dreamed of my own
land, and of what it had become and was becoming in my absence…
Something beautiful, I hoped. Something shining and filled with
promise, better even than the magic realm where I ruled. And coming
home I have found…”

His brow clouded and he shook his head.

I reflected on the men I’d seen gathered
outside the jail – on what I knew would happen, should the poor
child be found dead on the morrow - and had to admit that in
recovering his sanity (for so I interpreted his “return” from years
in his private world), he had perhaps not had the best of the
bargain. But I said, “We go where we are sent, Oz, that we may
fight the battles we find there. It is all men can do.”

“I suppose,” said the wizard. “And all we can
do is our best. But on nights like this, I do sorely miss the City
of Emeralds. Good-night, Watson. And thank you.”

*

Professor Diggs and I returned to Berkeley
mid-morning, and that same afternoon Sherlock Holmes arrived,
driving a rented buggy behind a fast-stepping team and clothed –
improbably if extremely convincingly – as a Methodist preacher, an
outfit which he quickly changed (with the critical assistance of
half of Mrs. Carey’s boardinghouse) for the calico dress and gray
wig of an elderly practical nurse. He gave a few instructions to
Diggs as to the contents of the carpet-bag he should bring along,
and within forty-five minutes the three of us were on the road
again, bound for the small communities of wine-growers and ranchers
on the hills above Point Richmond.

“I have found the man, and I have found the
girl,” he informed us shortly as he drove. “I can keep him busy for
perhaps twenty minutes, but certainly no more than that, as his
suspicions may have been aroused by my visit earlier today in the
guise of the Reverend Cleaver. There’s a small waste-space at the
peak of the house, above the second floor; its only ventilation is
a screened and louvered opening at the gable end, half-concealed
behind the exposed roof-trusses. The gable end of the house faces
the loft of the stable.”

“Hence,” said Diggs grimly, “your request for
a rope and my air-gun.” And he opened the carpet-bag to show me an
air-rifle which had been modified to fire a spring-activated
grappling-hook – “The secret of my version of the Indian
rope-trick,” he added ruefully. “It’s quite amazing what people
don’t see, if you convince them to look the other way.”

“Precisely,” responded Holmes, “what the
three of us shall be doing this evening.”

“But how did you find the man?” I asked. “Was
it indeed a madman who had somehow become obsessed with the little
girl?”

“It is a madman,” said Holmes, and his gray
eyes glinted coldly behind the fussy spectacles of his latest
disguise. “Yet not in the way that you think, Watson. A coldly
calculating and monstrously vain madman – ah,” he added with
satisfaction. “Here we are. We shall walk from here: the vine-rows
will give us cover, almost to the stable itself.”

I was taken aback at the wealth and comfort
implied by the property to which we had come, a handsome ranch not
far from the village of San Pablo. Like many wealthy Californians,
its owner had planted several acres in vines, and, as Holmes had
predicted, he, Diggs, and I were able to crouch between them and
traverse the ground from the back-lane where we left the buggy,
almost to the rear wall of the stable which backed the house.
Twilight had come by this time, and the staff had gone to their
dinners in the bunk-house; “We are just in time,” whispered Holmes.
“He knows we are on his track; he waits only for darkness himself,
to get the girl away from the house. You must be swift, for he has
a certain amount of wealth and power, and all depends upon catching
him red-handed.”

So saying he left us, and I saw him – as he
walked toward the lane that led to the house from the main road –
shrink his tall form into that of a formidable old lady, as he
tottered, leaning on his stick, toward the door. Meanwhile Diggs
and I scrambled up the ladder to the loft-room, Diggs assembling
his air-gun and grappling-hook as we crossed to the loft-window
that overlooked the house.

“Even at a moment like this,” I sighed – more
in bemusement than exasperation, after all the years of our
partnership – “he cannot bear to speak a word of what is going
on…”

“My dear Watson,” replied Diggs, “he would
not be Sherlock Holmes, if he were not a showman in his soul.
Certainly he would never be able to convince our culprit that he is
a garrulous old lady who must be dealt with, were he other than he
is. What a prestidigitator he would be!” So saying, the wizard
braced his feet, took aim at the sideways K of trusses that lay
just under the overhang of the gable-end roof, and fired, the
grappling-hook – with some thirty feet of light rope attached –
whipping soundlessly across the distance and engaging itself in the
woodwork with barely a clank.

“Now, listen,” said Oz, as he wrapped our end
of the rope twice around a rafter, and put the end in my hands.
“Once I cross over, I’m going to free the grapple and re-tie the
rope onto the beams. When I give the rope a shake, you’re to pull
hard – you must keep constant tension on the knot, or it will give
way. I should be back—” He slipped a pulley-mount over the rope,
“—in five minutes—”

“But have you the slighest idea whose house
this is?” I asked. “Or why he would have kidnapped a child – or
how
he would have done so, for that matter?”

“Not the slighest,” replied the wizard
cheerfully. “Does it matter? I’m sure Holmes will explain it all,
after our exclamations of delight. And even did he not—” He slung a
loop of strapping beneath the pulley, and slipped his head and
shoulders through it, “—so long as the child is recovered, and
justice is served, is he not free to serve Justice in whatever
fashion he chooses? Alley-oop!”

And with me hanging hard onto the end of the
rope, Oz crossed the line like an acrobat, hanging from the pulley,
to the truss-beams of the house. The slow settling of the twilight
prevented me from seeing clearly, but I assumed he had chisels and
a screwdriver in his pockets, for a few moments later I saw the
louvered screen beyond the truss-beams change to a gaping black
square, perhaps eighteen inches in width. The rope was shaken, and
I leaned upon it with all my strength, and within moments I felt
again the weight of the man as he re-emerged and hung from the
harness again, the child clinging to his back.

For all the horrors of her experience, Emily
Redwalls must indeed have been, as the Celestial Li had described
her, a bright and outward-looking little girl – game and not cowed
– for she clung to Oz’s back as they crossed on the spider-thread
of the line over the stable-yard, thirty feet across and a good
twenty-five feet above the dirt. When they reached the loft window
in safety and I slacked my hold on the line, Oz knelt so that Emily
could reach the ground, then turned back to give a vigorous shake
to the line on which his own life and the child’s had depended –
and, hair-raisingly, it promptly released the knot that held it to
the beams on the other end. He gathered it in as I knelt before
Emily.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded: even in the near-dark of the loft
she was a pretty child, her blond curls disheveled and the
light-colored calico of her dress rumpled and dirtied from the
attic where she had been kept. She shed not a tear, only clung
around my neck as the Great Oz and I hastened down the ladder and
through the vine-rows back to the buggy, where Holmes was already
waiting for us, once more in shirt and trousers and stripping off
his wig even as we came up.

“Is this she? Good girl!” he cried, as Emily
settled on the buggy-seat between us.

“And not a sound,” said Oz approvingly.
“You’d think she’d been being rescued from dungeons all her life,
eh, Emily?”

“I know how to make a getaway,” replied the
girl with dignity. “Can I go home now?” And she clung for a moment
to the wizard’s hand.

“We need to make one stop,” he promised, as
Holmes lashed the team into a canter. “At the sheriff’s office in
San Pablo, to arrest the man who kidnapped you—What was his name,
Holmes?”

“Prince,” said Holmes grimly. “Marshall
Prince.”

*

In fact, we made two stops before returning
Emily Redwalls to her parents, for the San Pablo sheriff – even
before Holmes could suggest it – immediately returned with us to
the ranch-house, to find Diana Prince’s father shouting at his
stable-hands to hurry as they harnessed his buggy and loaded his
carpet-bags into it. “Prince,” said the sheriff wryly, “I’m pleased
to see you on your feet – I hear tell as you’ve been ill this past
month.”

“I have,” snapped the rancher, a tallish man
with the swarthy sunburned skin of an outdoorsman, and a thick
shock of white hair. “And I’ll thank you—” He looked past the
sheriff at Emily, sitting in the buggy between me and Oz, even as
Holmes, coming up on his other side, reached over and with a quick
tweak pulled the white wig from Prince’s head. The transformation
was startling. With the black hair underneath – even given the bad
lighting of the stableyard, and Prince’s white mustache – the face
of Antonio Rosales seemed to leap into being.

“No, you don’t,” added Holmes, catching
Prince’s wrist as the rancher grabbed for something on the
buggy-seat, and the sheriff whipped his sidearm (this was America,
after all) from its openly-worn holster, and held a revolver on
Prince while Holmes removed the pistol from the buggy-seat.

“I’ll have your job for this!” Prince yelled
at the sheriff, as he was taken away. “I got you elected, and I can
have you broken!”

*

“My attention was first drawn to Antonio
Rosales,” said Holmes, much later that evening, in the cozy parlor
of Mrs. Carey’s with perhaps the most appreciative audience of his
life gathered around on the worn couches and pouffes, “by the
circumstance of his hair having been dyed. This I saw the moment
Diggs provided decent lighting for my search with Count
Paracelcus’s flash-powder: that Rosales’ hair was, in fact, white
at the roots. The man might simply have been vain of his
appearance, but coupled with the fact that he was clearly familiar
with the techniques of stage magicians suggested a direction in
which to look. My suspicion increased when I found no fewer than
four cigarette-ends crushed out on the backstage floor –
commercially manufactured cigarettes: Old Judge, in fact, when the
local Mexican workingman invariably smokes hand-rolled Bull Durham
such as I saw distending Mr. Diaz’s shirt-pocket.”

“And Diaz swept the backstage floor before
going off-work every night!” cried Gino Moretti triumphantly. “So
they got to have been Rosales’s!”

“Precisely,” said Holmes, much pleased.

“Where did he put her?” asked Oz. “I’d have
thought in a false-bottomed stage-trunk, but they searched all of
Li’s—”

“What they didn’t search,” replied Holmes,
“was the trunks in the dressing-rooms – and the fresh scratches on
the floor showed clearly that a trunk had been dragged into the
backstage from the alley door that evening, dragged from there into
one of the dressing-rooms, and dragged out again, probably much
later that evening when everyone was gone…”

“My father had several,” said Diana Prince
quietly. “He was a magician before he went into banking – he never
would tell us, my poor mother and I, where his money had come
from.” Her hand closed around that of Julian Li, sitting beside her
on the overstuffed chesterfield, as if she could not believe that
he had actually been released in safety. “He used to lock me into
one of them, when I was little, as punishment.”

“The sheriff found such a trunk in your
father’s basement,” said Holmes, “the lining still reeking of the
chloroform he used to render his victim unconscious. He’s lucky,”
he added, with the coldness that was always a danger-sign with
Holmes, “that the poor child was still alive when he finally
brought her out of it.”

“Is she all right?” asked Li, and Holmes
nodded.

“I think you underestimated your father’s
power, Miss Prince,” he said. “And his vindictiveness, when it came
to his ears that his daughter had become secretly engaged to a
Chinese – and a vaudevillian at that. As a banker and a wealthy
rancher, he could have used his influence to hush the matter up,
but that was not good enough. He had to end the matter – to make
sure nothing came of it, by whatever means came to hand.”

“Would he actually have killed the girl?”
asked Rozanov the dog-trainer. “It is inconceivable—”

“Unfortunately,” said Holmes, “it isn’t. And
yes, I believe that after Professor Diggs, and police-captain
O’Day, managed to disperse the first mob that approached the jail
the night of Li’s arrest, Prince’s next step would have been to
have the girl’s body found – in whatever shocking circumstances he
could devise – to make certain that the jail was mobbed, and his
unwanted prospective son-in-law lynched.”

“It’s why he threw her shoe into the second
cabinet,” said Diana Prince quietly. “That was just like Father –
that showmanship, that
melodrama
. Yes,” she said, turning to
Rozanov, “he would have killed her, with no more thought about her
being a human being than he had about Julian being a man like
himself. Like me, they were only
things
that got in his
way.”