The Seventh Bullet (25 page)

“’Necessity’? ‘International consequences’?” I threw his words back at him. “You sound more like
Mycroft
Holmes than his brother Sherlock!”

“Bravo again, Watson!” Holmes said. “I did indeed speak to Mycroft upon our return to England.”

“I thought as much,” I said, eyeing him with disapproval.

Rising from his chair, Holmes clasped his walking stick and pointed to the open French windows through which, despite the descending dusk, we could still see the ocean.

Grudgingly I joined Holmes on the gravel footpath as he ambled toward the chalky cliffs that overlook the sea. The small stones grated beneath our feet.

“You’re quite right, Watson,” he said. “Mycroft did indeed help me see the wisdom in keeping this story to our immediate selves.”

“No doubt,” I muttered.

“In point of fact, Mycroft tried to put us off this investigation from the very start when we met with him at the Diogenes Club in March.”

I greeted this information with silence. Besides the omnipresent pounding of the surf below, only the crunch of our boots on the path and the cries of a few sea birds rent the peaceful afternoon that was fast turning into evening.

“It seems, Watson, that much of what we learned from our investigations in America was already known at the highest levels of our own government.”

“Then why didn’t Mycroft inform us?”

“Apparently the government feared that an attempt to thwart Mrs. Frevert might possibly explode in their faces. Besides, one never knows just what might turn up in a new investigation. His Majesty’s Government did possess the barest outlines of the plot, but not the names of its perpetrators that we have now supplied through Mycroft and for which Downing Street is extremely grateful.”

“Most accommodating of us,” I said, unassuaged. It rankled me to think that we had been performing someone else’s service. “But just because Mycroft wants us to remain silent—”

“On the contrary,” Holmes interrupted. “It’s not ‘just Mycroft,’ as you so simply put it. Mycroft’s own instructions come from a higher authority in the government. In fact, the highest.”

It never failed to surprise me whenever Holmes’s and my activities caught the attention of the Crown; but here was obviously another such instance, and who was I to demur?

By way of answer I looked below me to the rocky white coastline that spread out in glistening stretches in either direction. My gaze
followed the receding waves that were painted a fiery orange by the setting sun.

“We learn from nature, old fellow,” my companion said as I stared contemplatively toward the horizon. “The water that blankets the
Titanic
and all her lost souls is like the mantle we human beings throw upon the Truth, neither one to be disturbed. How did Phillips describe the aftermath of that terrible naval disaster so long ago: ‘The sea smoothed out again and began to laugh.’”

In the darkness I doubted that Holmes could see me shrug.

“Why not leave the final words about the conspirators to Mrs. Frevert?” Holmes offered. “It was she, after all, who had written on the stone over her brother’s grave, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”

One need not have been Sherlock Holmes at that moment to detect the reluctance in my submission.

“I understand,” I murmured.

And so we stood on the chalky cliffs as darkness fell, blanketing us and the sea alike. Circling far above us, some lost solitary gull shrieked in the night.

I did not hear from my friend Sherlock Holmes for a number of months following that last conversation; and when I did just before Christmas, it was not a letter that arrived in the post, but rather a number of cuttings from American newspapers. Much of the information these stories contained had, of course, been published by the British press. I did not require notification from Sherlock Holmes, for instance, to inform me that Woodrow Wilson, the former head of David Graham Phillips’s
alma mater,
Princeton University, had defeated Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft for the American Presidency the previous month;
but some of the news appearing in the cuttings from Holmes had not made its way into our periodicals, and when the articles were viewed together, they seemed to form a fitting
dénouement
to the story that had begun earlier that same year with the arrival of Mrs. Frevert in my surgery.

Street singers who were entertaining Mrs. Watson and me with Christmas melodies had just reached our windows when I opened the large brown envelope from Holmes. Because of its size, I had to shake it several times over the dining-room table in order to be sure the packet was empty. In all, six small strips of yellowing paper fluttered out. As I slid them around on the oak table to secure their proper chronological order, I felt I was manipulating into place the final pieces of some intricate puzzle.

The first story reported the proposal made the previous May 13 by the American Congress for an amendment to the United States Constitution requiring the popular election of senators. Thus, some six years after Phillips’s 1906 attack on that body in his disputatious articles, reform seemed probable. Indeed, although I did not know it at the time, the people’s right to vote directly for their senators would become law the next year when on 8 April, 1913—almost twelve months to the day following the loss of the
Titanic–
the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified.

A cutting from August 1912 told of Theodore Roosevelt’s nomination for president by the Progressives’ uniquely and appropriately nicknamed Bull Moose party after the Republicans had rejected him in favour of President Taft. Giving the keynote address at this third party’s convention was none other than Albert Beveridge, who himself was standing for governor of Indiana as a Progressive.

The third cutting, and by far the longest, recounted a story that, had it not been for our own personal experiences with the homicidal factor in American politics, we would have found unbelievable. It reported the attempted assassination of Roosevelt on October 14 in Milwaukee. Wounded by a gunman, the former president was miraculously saved only because the bullet’s velocity was slowed by passing through his spectacles case and the manuscript of a speech, both of which were tucked into an inside coat pocket. True to his spirit, the indomitable Roosevelt went on to deliver his scheduled address before allowing himself to be taken to hospital.

A fourth article told of Roosevelt’s recovery; a fifth recorded not only his political defeat but that of Beveridge as well.

The last cutting in the little row of stories I had laid out on the table was the shortest of them all, a snippet from a social column reporting the entrance to a sanitarium the previous summer of Mrs. Carolyn Frevert. She was suffering from fatigue.

That there was no message from Holmes himself was not surprising. He knew that these final clippings would help me round out my account of the case, and so I concluded that he approved of my composing this narrative; but I also know that he, like myself, still regards it as an explosive story whose full details must continue to be withheld from public scrutiny for several more years. Thus, I shall add these last details only to complete the record and then hide it away until its telling no longer threatens so many actors still performing on the political stage.

It is now the fifth Christmas since the end of the Great War. Listening to this year’s carollers, I sit with Mrs. Watson at my side before the glowing hearth, a light snow falling gently beyond our
windows on Queen Anne Street. Like the recurrence of the seasons, it is an unending story, I think—that of concealing and uncovering and concealing once more. It is a drama bound to be acted again and again as long as Authority must convince the populace of Government’s ability to control. I understand the necessity, but necessity can lead to expediency, and expediency in the political world can expose the most dreadful of human frailties. With murder and deceit as accomplices, it was just such expediency that so obviously resulted in falsely identifying for the historical record the murky role of one Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough as the lone assassin of David Graham Phillips.

London
23 December, 1922

The following books and periodicals will further elucidate many of the events referred to by Dr. Watson in his narrative:

Baring-Gould, William S., ed.
The Annotated Sherlock Holmes.
New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967.

Churchill, Allen.
Park Row.
New York: Rinehart and Company, 1958.

Filler, Louis.
Voice of the Democracy: A Critical Biography of David Graham Phillips.
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania and State University Press, 1978.

Garmey, Stephen.
Gramercy Park: An Illustrated History of a New York Neighborhood.
Routledge Books, 1984.

Hagedorn, Hermann.
The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill.
New York: Macmillan Company, 1954.

Highsmith, Carol M., and Ted Landphair.
Union Station: A Decorative History of Washington’s Grand Terminal.
Washington, D.C.: Chelsea Publishing, 1988.

Los Angeles Times.
January 24, 1911. “Author Shot Six Times.”
The New York Times:

January 24, 1911. “Author Phillips Shot Six Times, May Recover.”

January 25, 1911. “Phillips Dies of his Wounds.”

January 26, 1911. “Phillips Funeral Set for To-morrow.”

January 28, 1911. “Throng at Phillips Funeral.”

March 4, 1911. “David Graham Phillip’s Will Filed.”

June 23, 1911. “Mrs. Phillips Dies on Train.”

January 6, 1954. “Algernon Lee, 80, Educator, Is Dead.”

Phillips, David Graham.
The Cost.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill
Company, 1904.

_____.
The Plum Tree.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1904.

_____.
The Treason of the Senate.
Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1964.

Ravitz, Abe C.
David Graham Phillips.
New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966.

Rodgers, Paul C., Jr. “David Graham Phillips: A Critical Study.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1955.

Tracy, Jack.
The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana.
New York: Avon Books, 1979.

Victor, Daniel D. “The Muckraker and the Dandy: The Conflicting Personae of David Graham Phillips.” Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1976.

Viereck, George Sylvestre.
The House of the Vampire.
New York: Arno Press, 1976.

The further Adventures of

O
f course I can tell you the tale. But you should understand at the start that there are points where the telling may cause me to become rather emotional. Because I—even I, Prince Dracula—find the whole matter disturbing, even at this late date. It brought me as near to the true death as I have ever been, before or since—and in such an unexpected way! No, this affair you wish to hear about, the one involving the séances and the vampires, was not the commonplace stuff of day-to-day life. Hardly routine even in the terms of my existence, which for more than five hundred years has been—how shall I say it?—has not been dull.

It is difficult to find the words with which to characterize this chain of events. It was more than grotesque, it was fantastic. Parts of it almost unbelievable. You’ll see. Pirates, mesmerism, executions by hanging. Stolen treasure, murder, kidnapping, revenge and seduction. Women taken by force, attempts to materialize the spirits of the dead...

I know what you are going to say. Everything in the above list is a bit out of the ordinary, but still the daily newspapers, those
of any century you like, abound in examples. But in this case the combination was unique. And soon you will see that I am not exaggerating about the fantasy. Some of my hearers may not even believe in the existence of vampires, may find that elementary starting point quite beyond credibility.

Never mind. Let those who have such difficulty turn back here, before we really start; they have no imaginations and no souls.