The Empress of India (2 page)

We, in our turn, entertained the Honorable Bergarot with tales of Holmes’s exploits. I told the tales, actually, and Holmes corrected me when I strayed too far from the truth, or drifted too far from the strict, almost scientific narrative into the romantic. Holmes still fails to understand that most people want to hear about the human aspects of his cases and not about what he deduced from two specks of green wool on a brown coverlet or a smear of liver sausage on the cheek of the portrait of a seventeenth-century baronet. I told Bergarot of a couple of cases I intend to write up someday that I believe show the human side of Holmes’s work. In my notes I call them “The Case of the Alabaster Skull,” and “The Case of the Myopic Magician.”

After the dinner dishes were cleared away, Bergarot, as predicted, produced a decanter of brandy from the tantalus on the sideboard and a box of cigars from a drawer in the same sideboard, and reflected on the security aspects of running the world’s most important bank. He told us, for example, of an incident in the 1830s when the directors of the bank received a letter from a man who offered to meet them in the bullion vaults at a time of their choosing. They didn’t believe the letter, but took the anonymous author up on his challenge, assembling in the vault one night. At the appointed time there was a scraping sound, two of the floorboards were pushed aside, and a man in dirty white coveralls pulled himself up out of the hole thus revealed.

The man worked in the London sewers, and he had discovered, quite by accident, an ancient drain running directly under the bank and connecting to the vault. For his honesty in not making off with the millions of pounds’ worth of bullion within easy grasp, the bank rewarded him £800. Which was a small fortune for a sewerman, but still one wonders how the figure was arrived at.

After perhaps half an hour of brandy, cigars, and stories, Bergarot
leaned forward. “Now, if you have no objection,” he said, “a brief spot of business.” He put his hands flat on the table. “Mr. Holmes, on behalf of the Bank of England, I would like to employ you.”

“So I surmised,” Holmes said. “To do what?”

Bergarot considered. “I’m not sure how to put it,” he confessed. “Perhaps it would be nearer to the mark to say that the bank would like to place you on retainer for the next few months. We would like you to, as the barristers say, hold a watching brief.”

Holmes nodded. “And for what am I to be watching, burglars rising out of the drains?”

“Ah, yes, well, the answer to that is difficult. We don’t know exactly. There is—now, this is strictly confidential, you understand—there is a large quantity of gold bullion even now being gathered in Calcutta for shipment to London, specifically for storage in our vaults. It is gold reserve that we are to hold for several Indian princes and maharajas and the like—people who rule over immensely wealthy provinces of India.”

“I see,” Holmes said. “The Raj is making sure that the underling princes behave by holding their wealth in protective custody.”

“Even though it’s a great aggregate of gold, it’s only a small part of their collective wealth, Mr. Holmes,” Bergarot said. “And, as many of these princes are now sending their children to public school or university here in England, I think we hold even more effective assurances of their good behavior. The gold is being sent by a group of the more, ah, progressive maharajas, who intend to use it to modernize their kingdoms and provide services for their subjects. Also part of the reserve is to be used to back a new paper currency that will be used throughout the subcontinent. Or such is my understanding. Besides, the Bank of England is a privately held company, and we do not make government policy.”

“True,” Holmes admitted. “But I don’t know what you need my services for. I assume that this hoard will be adequately guarded. Surely you must take no chances with such a responsibility.”

“It is precisely with the idea of taking no chances that we wish to hire you,” Bergarot explained. “As you must know, shipments like this are best conducted in complete secrecy. Well, somehow word of this shipment has leaked out. Rumors have spread through the upper classes, and I must assume they have filtered down to the lower orders. Why, only last weekend at a dinner party the Duchess of Denver asked me whether we were going to have to enlarge our vaults to hold all this new gold.”

“Ah!” Holmes said. “And are you?”

“No,” Bergarot said. “Our vault space is adequate to the occasion. But we are worried that, as word seems to have gotten out, criminal gangs might be planning to make an assault on the gold.”

“They might indeed,” Holmes agreed. “There is one man in particular—but that is merely surmise.”

“We would like you to surmise, Mr. Holmes,” Bergarot told him. “We would like you to use your knowledge of the criminal classes to tell us what we must guard against. Also we would like you to use your contacts in the criminal underworld to discover any plots against the shipment so that we can foil them before they have a chance to mature.”

“How is the bullion being shipped?” Holmes asked.

“In the steamship
The Empress of India
. A special vault is even now being constructed in the cargo hold. The ship leaves for Calcutta at the end of the week. It will be used to take the currency to India, and to bring the gold back. The return journey should begin in about two months.”

“Ah! The paper money is being printed here.”

“Yes. The Tainsburn and Belaugh Mint here in London is printing the paper currency. We are not too concerned with protecting that on its way to Calcutta, as the currency is of a new design, and thus it is useless to anyone until after it has been introduced. We are concerned with safeguarding the gold on its journey from Calcutta to our vault.”

Holmes shook his head. “That is not merely a watching brief you require
of me, Mr. Bergarot; an assignment of that nature would occupy me full time until the shipment is secure in your vaults.”

“Yes, of course,” Bergarot agreed. “And we will pay you commensurately.”

“I wasn’t thinking of the money, sir,” Holmes said. “I have other commitments at the moment.”

“Surely none as important as this?”

“They are as important to the people involved,” Holmes said. “But I’ll see what I can do. I’ll give you as much of my time as possible, and we’ll have to hope that it will be enough. In the meantime, ask Scotland Yard to send along either Inspector Gregson or Inspector Lestrade; I’ve found them to be the most alert and capable of the men of the detective division.”

“I’ll do that. Thank you, Mr. Holmes,” Bergarot said, reaching over and shaking his hand.

When we arrived back at Baker Street, Holmes suggested that I stay the night. “You can have your old room,” he said, “and leave for your hospital rounds tomorrow after breakfast.”

“Gladly, and thank you,” I told him. “And I have no rounds tomorrow.”

“All the better. You can assist me in a little direct research. We’ll let the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street pay your wages for the day.”

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“Merely eliminating a few improbabilities,” he told me. And, in his usual infuriatingly taciturn manner, he offered no further information.

Holmes stayed up long after I had retired, poring over ancient maps and charts of London that he took from his vast collection of such things, or so I surmised from the clutter of such documents on the table and the empty coffee urn on the sideboard when I arose the next morning. After Mrs. Hudson served up her usual overabundance of good,
wholesome British food, we strode out into the chill fog in search of, so Holmes informed me, a specific manhole cover. “There are several possibilities according to the old maps,” he told me. “We have to see which one still exists. If one man can come in through the drains, possibly another can follow where he led.”

“But Holmes,” I protested, “that was over fifty years ago. Surely that access has been thoroughly sealed by now.”

“Probably,” Holmes admitted, “but it’s best to be sure.”

It was close onto noon when Holmes found a suitable manhole in an alley by the side of an old brick office building on King William Street, so we paused for lunch at a nearby chophouse. By this I could tell that Holmes wasn’t taking the current investigation too seriously. When he was truly on the scent of a criminal, or gathering information in a case, he would often forget meals entirely, sometimes for several days. It was this sort of single-mindedness, combined with his high intelligence and his great font of specialized knowledge, that made him the indefatigable crime-solver that he was.

After lunch we returned to King William Street and Holmes artfully removed the manhole cover with the aid of a small pry bar he had concealed under his inverness. My instructions were to wait on the sidewalk by the cover while Holmes dropped down into the sewer tunnel and investigated. “I don’t really expect to run into a gang of desperate gold thieves down here,” he told me, “but in case there is any trouble I leave it to you to give a few short blasts on your police whistle—you do have your police whistle with you?—and then come to my rescue with such reinforcements as you can gather.”

“How will I know if you need me?” I asked him. “You’ll be somewhere out of sight down there.”

“True,” Holmes said, reaching into his fob pocket and pulling out his own police whistle at the end of a short silver chain. “In those closed tunnels a blast on this should travel for quite a distance. I’ll sound the alarm and you follow through.”

“Right, Holmes,” I agreed.

Holmes nodded and did up the belt on his inverness. “I shouldn’t be too long,” he said. He swung his feet over to the ladder on one side of the hole and clambered down. I watched him leave and followed his progress until he disappeared from view down the tunnel. For a while I could hear his footsteps on the brick walkway that ran along the side of the tunnel, and then they faded away.

I turned up my collar against the gusts of chill wind which blew down King William Street as I stood by the side of the manhole, stamping my feet for warmth, and waited. I occupied myself with reminiscing about my relationship with Holmes and our adventures together. If it wasn’t for Holmes my life would have been—what?—an endless series of sore throats, upset stomachs, and broken bones, with the occasional incurable disease thrown in to remind me of how little we doctors actually know. My wife taught me to love, and Holmes gave me relief from boredom and tried to teach me how to think; it is not for me to say how well he succeeded. There is much I owe both of them.

Perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes after Holmes had disappeared down the hole, there was a rushing sound, and a torrent of water passed in the tunnel beneath me. It was only brief moments later when I heard the shrill blast of a police whistle reverberating below. Holmes was in trouble! I immediately blew on my own whistle and, when a constable came running up, explained the situation to him as best I could, urged him to get help, and plunged down into the tunnel below.

I was soon joined by several uniformed constables and then by Inspector Giles Lestrade of Scotland Yard and several of his men. We searched well into the night, but found nothing, no trace of Holmes’s presence, no hint of what might have happened to him, except that after several hours one of the constables found, on a ledge some distance down a side tunnel, a police whistle attached to a short silver chain.

_______

There has been no further sign of him, no word from him, and no hint of what might have happened to him until yesterday, when a constable noticed a beggar wearing an inverness coat several sizes too large for him. On inspection, it was shown to be Holmes’s own coat, and the sack coat and trousers the man had on beneath the Inverness were those Holmes had been wearing when we left the house that day. The man claimed he had found the garments this past Saturday in a dustbin on Newgate Street, some considerable distance away from the spot where Holmes disappeared.

So Holmes did not drown in that underground torrent. Which is on one hand a relief, and on the other a great mystery. Why did he not return home? Who removed his clothes, and why? If one of his enemies caught up with him and did away with him, where is his body? If he is still alive, where is he being held, and again why?

I have been unable to sleep pondering these questions. It is now six in the morning of Monday, the tenth of February, and I am about to dress and await the arrival of Holmes’s brother Mycroft, who sent me a message yesterday that he would come by this morning with two Scotland Yard detectives.

I try to be hopeful. I can only hope that time will provide an answer, and I can only pray that the time is brief.

A thousand tymes have I herd men telle
That ther ys joy in hevene and peyne in helle,
And I acorde wel that it ys so;
But, natheless, yet wot I wel also
That ther nis noon dwellyng in this contree,
That eyther hath in hevene or helle ybe . . .
—Geoffrey Chaucer

E
ast is East, strange and mysterious and slow to change, and West is most definitely West, and during the closing years of the nineteenth century there was little chance of their meeting. Bumping shoulders, crossing swords, shouting epithets, ruling and submitting, perhaps, but they made no pretense of understanding each other, and they seldom sat down anywhere as equals. Yet they mixed and mingled in almost unseemly intimacy throughout the vast, febrile reaches of the Indian subcontinent; mainly in the great cities, where the British Raj ruled, administered, taught, and imposed its will on Her Majesty’s teeming multitude of Hindu, Muhammadan, Jainist, Christian,
Buddhist, Parsi, Animist, Zoroastrian, and other assorted subjects. And the greatest of these cities was Calcutta. Some visitors found it the richest city they had ever seen, and wrote glowingly of its riches, its magnificence, and its multifarious wonders. Some found it the poorest place on earth, and wrote angrily of overcrowding, poverty, filth, and ignorance.