The Empress of India (36 page)

Moran shook his head. “Little Pook has his agents in London. I’ll turn the Lady over to them, thus completing the deal. I shall accompany them back to India, of course, but if anything happens to the Lady on the return trip it’ll be on their head, not mine.”

“Ah!” said Moriarty. “You are not without a certain subtleness of character yourself.”

“When it comes to collecting what’s mine,” Moran said, “I manage.”

Sherlock Holmes entered the smoking room and came over to their corner when he saw them. Somehow he no longer looked anything like the sinister Dr. Pin Dok Low. The cast of his face was subtly different:
the turn of his mouth, the leanness of his cheeks. His gaze, while still intense, was more direct and forthright than previously. “Do you mind?” he asked, gesturing toward an empty chair.

“Join us, by all means, Mr. Holmes,” Moriarty told him. “How are you feeling?”

“Rueful,” said Holmes, dropping into the chair and taking a cigarette from a silver case in his inner pocket. “And both relieved and confused. We seem to have been on the same side in the recent contretemps, and those blackguards were clearly not agents of yours.”

“On the other hand,” Moriarty commented dryly, “there seem to be a number of blackguards among your current acquaintances.”

“Yes,” Holmes admitted. “I’m not sure what to do about that. The two of them have realized that my scheme for getting the gold will not be realized, and as I never told them enough about it for them to carry it out on their own, they are a bit miffed at me at the moment. I think the Artful Codger suspects that my turning out to be Sherlock Holmes is some clever ruse on my part to make off with all the gold for myself. At any rate, both of them are currently avoiding me, which is probably all to the good.”

“Are you quite recovered from your, ah, experience as your alter ego?”

“I shall probably never be completely recovered,” said Holmes, striking a large safety match against the side of the box and lighting his cigarette. “My memory of the events, and of the thinking of Pin Dok Low, has left a bad taste in my mouth and it will take some time to cleanse my palate. I always thought I’d make a good criminal, but I never realized how close to the surface the impulse was.” He blew out the match. “Perhaps, in future, I shouldn’t be quite so harsh on you, Professor.”

“Oh, I’m sure that when you’ve quite recovered you will manage to be just the dogged bulldog you were before,” Moriarty said, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

A wreath of smoke circled Holmes’s face and drifted slowly toward
the ceiling. “I still can’t believe that your presence on this ship, in close proximity to a large store of gold, is purely serendipitous, Professor Moriarty. What are you doing here, if you’re not after the gold? Tell me that.”

“I don’t suppose you’d believe that I have been visiting old Indian astronomical observatories?” Moriarty asked.

“You don’t suppose correctly,” Holmes told him. “Even while I was immersed in the personality of Dr. Pin Dok Low, I did not lose sight of who you are, or what you might be up to.”

“And you attempted to have me killed several times, as I recall,” Moriarty reminded him wryly.

“Incapacitated, merely,” Holmes asserted. “Perhaps some of my agents—Pin Dok Low’s agents—were overly assertive in their interpretation of my orders. If so, I’m sorry.”

“I stand corrected,” Moriarty said. “Not dead, merely with a number of important bones broken.”

“Well . . .” Holmes smiled ruefully. “At the time we were both after the gold. Now only one of us is.”

Moriarty raised his hands in an appeal to absent gods. “I assure you, Holmes, that whatever business I had is complete, that nobody was hurt by it, that it has nothing to do with the gold in the vaults below us, and that I intend to spend the rest of the journey in pleasant contemplation of the vast ocean as we cross it.”

Holmes rose from his chair. “I’ve noticed that you seem to take a perverse pleasure in not lying to me,” he told Moriarty, “but trust to subtle indirection to keep me ignorant of your true goals. So I will parse your words at my leisure and see if I can discover what secrets lay within. In the meantime, I might as well make myself useful for the rest of the trip by keeping a close eye on you—and the gold.” And with that as his Parthian shot, he stubbed his cigarette out and stalked off.

“Be my guest, Holmes,” Moriarty called to Holmes’s retreating back. “But do try to get some rest and recapture you old, ah, joie de vivre.”

“So that’s Sherlock Holmes,” Colonel Moran said, watching through a cloud of cigar smoke as Holmes, stiff-backed, pushed through the smoking room door and departed. “The phrase ‘unpleasant chap’ leaps unbidden to my mind.”

“He doesn’t go out of his way to make friends,” Moriarty observed. “Never has.”

“Really?” Moran tapped his cigar against the side of the ashtray. “I hadn’t noticed. What is it, exactly, that he suspects you of, Professor?”

“Everything,” Moriarty explained. “Everything.”

The Empress of India
reached Port Suez three days later and had a oneday stay in port before she could commence the fifty-two-hour passage through the canal early the morning after. Guards were posted at every gangway, entrance port, and periodically along the deck, with orders to look fierce, growl at anyone trying to board, and stomp on fingers or toes if necessary to keep intruders off the deck. “It won’t work,” Captain Iskansen said, “but we might as well try.”

“Who are these relentless boarders that we must repel?” General St. Yves asked, after seeing to the disposition of his men.

“Native shopkeepers,” Iskansen told him.

“Shop . . .”

“Even so. And they will set up shop in any nook or cranny of the deck they can reach: under cover or out in the open, beside the lifeboats, under the lifeboats, in the ladderways; as long as they’re underfoot and in the way.”

“Ah!” said St. Yves. “I remember them from the trip out. Insistent little beggars. But I thought they were invited on board to sell trinkets to the passengers.”

“Inviting them would be quite redundant and unnecessary,” the captain told him. “We arrive in port, they arrive on board. It’s quite miraculous and damned annoying.”

“There is that about miracles of all sorts,” St. Yves murmured. “They do tend to be quite annoying.”

The gold vault was of course closed, both inner and outer doors, and closely guarded while the
Empress
was in port, as it would be for the entire transverse of the canal. As it happened, some of the ubiquitous “shopkeepers” did manage to come aboard and spread their wares on various parts of the deck, giving the passengers a last chance to buy scarves, hats, dresses, shoes, and various gewgaws of an Oriental flavor until they reached London, where much the same articles could be bought in the East End for much the same price. Captain Iskansen did manage to keep them all from going below, or even inside, and the last of them scurried off into the waiting skiffs as the
Empress
prepared to enter the canal.

The Artful Codger and Cooley the Pup confronted Sherlock Holmes in his cabin the morning the ship entered the Suez Canal. “Well, I haven’t seen you two around for the last few days,” Holmes said, sitting on the edge of his bed, wrapped in his Pin Dok Low red silk dressing gown with the embroidered dragons snapping at each other across the front. “Cigarette?” he extended his silver cigarette case toward them.

“That’s a start,” said the Artful Codger, selecting one and bringing it up to his nose to sniff it. “Cheap tobacco,” he opined.

“Strong tobacco,” Holmes told him. “Egyptian. Not particularly cheap.”

“If you say so,” said the Codger, “but it ain’t the sort of tobacco I’d be buying if I had my share of that gold down below. I suppose there’s no chance of that now.”

Cooley the Pup straddled the hard-back wooden chair in front of the tiny desk and waved away the offered cigarette case. “What I want is words,” he said. “I want you to explain to me what I don’t understand.”

“That would take years,” Holmes told him, a muscle in the corner of
Holmes’s mouth twitching as he spoke. “What particular bit of explanation would you like right now?”

“So you’re really Sherlock Holmes?” the Pup demanded. “What happened to Pin?”

“Is there a Pin Dok Low?” asked the Codger. “Was there ever a Pin Dok Low?”

“As far as I know there was only the one I created,” Holmes told them. “I created Pin Dok Low, I became Pin Dok Low, and now I am no longer Pin Dok Low. Sorry about that.”

“Some people we both know are going to do their best to make you very sorry,” the Codger said mildly. “Now, me, I take the cruel reverses of life with a smattering of equa-bloody-nimity, but there are those who don’t share my inconsequential attitude toward life. And a couple of them are awaiting our arrival in London even now.”

“You’re not threatening me, are you, Codger?” asked Holmes, an anticipatory smile on his face.

“Not me,” the Codger said, raising his hands in mock horror at the suggestion. “Just reminding you of what’s what.”

Holmes stood up and glowered at his two former henchmen. “If you behave yourselves,” he told them, “and cease thinking in terms of impossible crimes, I had it in mind that perhaps I could do something for you.”

“What sort of something?” the Codger asked suspiciously.

“On the other hand, if you’re determined to threaten me and otherwise show signs of malcontent, why, then you’re on your own and the devil take you.”

“Easy for you to say, Pin—Mr. Holmes,” said the Pup, “but you’re the one as got us on this here boat, don’t say you’re not. Were it not for you and your assurances—”

“Pin Dok Low’s assurances,” Holmes interrupted him.

“Now, there’s a distinction without a ha’penny’s worth of difference,” sneered the Artful Codger. “It was you and your blandishments
what got us here,” he said, “and it’s up to you to make honest villains of us, as I see it.”

“As I see it,” Holmes told them, stepping closer until he loomed over them like a gaunt oracle, “the pair of you have hopped over to the other side of the fence, and you might consider staying there for a bit.”

“How’s that?” asked the Artful Codger.

“What fence?” the Pup asked, moving his head slightly back as though afraid that Holmes intended to bite him on the nose.

“Why, you’re both heroes,” Holmes told them. “You’ve helped save the gold. You’ve even been wounded in the cause, Codger,” he added, indicating the Codger’s bandaged hand.

“And what of it?” asked the Pup.

“Why, I would think there would be a reward,” Holmes told them. “Yes, I’m sure of it. The Bank of England itself will certainly pay a reward to those who helped fight off the Thuggees.”

“Well, I’ll be . . .” the Pup said, as the enormity of the idea sank in.

“Now, wouldn’t that be amusing,” said the Artful Codger.

We cannot kindle when we will
The fire that in the heart resides,
The spirit bloweth and is still,
In mystery our soul abides.
—Matthew Arnold

C
aptain Iskansen stood and raised his glass to his guests at the captain’s table. It took a few seconds for the hubbub at the table to cease, and the quiet rippled slowly across the room as people turned to hear what the captain had to say. “An ocean voyage is a time for companionship, and for shared adventure,” he told the assembled diners, holding his glass high above the pea soup. “Well, we have had our share of both. Indeed, this voyage of
The Empress of India
will be long remembered by all who are aboard her. I am well pleased to have had this—this—throng of heroes aboard, for both crew and passengers have behaved like heroes on this trip, and I thank you one and all.”

“Hip-hip,” called someone in the room, and the dining room reverberated
with a series of cheers. And the toast was drunk and, at some tables, drunk again.

“Eat, drink, and be merry,” Captain Iskansen bellowed. “For tomorrow we dock!”

A smattering of applause grew into a fusillade of earnest clapping. The trip down the length of the Mediterranean had been blissfully uneventful. The
Empress
had rounded Gibraltar and was plowing her way north through rain just heavy enough and a sea just choppy enough for the passengers to feel as though it were a part of their continuing adventure without being truly uncomfortable. They had their sea legs, most of them. They could dine without discomfort despite the rolling motion under their seats.

Cool breezes wisped around the ship. This evening had been cool enough for woolen trousers and tweed skirts to replace the light cotton or linen garments for promenades around the deck. The dreadful attack was in the past, and all signs of it had been removed. The passengers were now feeling exceptionally jolly, and good companionship abounded.

Margaret St. Yves turned to her father after the captain resumed his seat and spoke to him earnestly and in an intense undertone, causing General St. Yves to fidget and look ill at ease. “But dear,” he said, interrupting her flow of words, “you want me to agree to let this Peter fellow marry you? Just like that? I’m to give you away to this fellow who thinks wearing an army uniform is some sort of joke? Really?”