The Sherlockian

CHAPTER 42 The Sherlock Holmes Museum

January 17, 2010

From the base of the mountain, below the Reichenbach Falls, Harold stared across the Hauptstrasse at the Sherlock Holmes Museum. He shivered and pulled his thin coat tighter against the Swiss air. At just after six in the evening, the final spots of orange sunlight were disappearing to the west, behind the museum. The unlit streets were getting darker, and with every passing minute they were getting darker faster. From his perch on the other side of the wide road, Harold could see two museum guards locking up for the night. It would only be a few more minutes now. He clenched his fists in his pocket. He could not remember the last time he’d been so cold.

As he watched the two guards mill around the entrance to the museum, laughing at a joke that Harold couldn’t hear, he turned and looked behind him to the east. The Swiss Alps broke clear of the earth not fifty yards from where he was standing. Snow blanketed the top third of the range like a white silk shawl.

Harold shifted his weight, feeling the bulky bag slung across his shoulder. The steel tire iron inside pressed against his back. The guards laughed again and began a slow wander in the direction of the parking lot. The museum was dark. Empty. The last morsel of the sun vanished into the distance, and Harold stepped from the shadows into the nighttime.

There was nothing left for him to lose anymore. He had no life he wanted to return to, and the life he knew he wanted, the life of these weeks in which he’d for the first time come truly alive, had been revealed as a fraud. And not even a complicated fraud at that. The twist had come so easily, and bowled him over with such self-evident obviousness, that Harold couldn’t even muster up anger at Sarah, or at Sebastian. He’d known he shouldn’t have trusted her from the beginning, hadn’t he? Her whole story had been just as improbable then as it was now. Harold knew enough to blame himself.

At first he couldn’t believe that she’d gotten away with her lie. Sebastian Conan Doyle’s wife-or soon-to-be-ex-wife-had walked into the world’s largest Sherlockian convention under a fake identity, and no one had known who she was? But of course they hadn’t, Harold realized. Most of the attendees spent their days pretending that Sherlock Holmes was real and that Arthur Conan Doyle was just Watson’s literary agent. They didn’t care about Conan Doyle or his descendants. Harold was even aware, when he searched the recesses of his memory, that Sebastian Conan Doyle was married, and he might even have known that his wife’s name was Sarah, though it was hard to remember now. But of course he hadn’t made the connection. She’d lied so obviously, so plainly, that no one would ever have thought to question her. “You’re really, really smart,” she’d said to him when she left.

Harold couldn’t understand why she had deceived him. What were she and Sebastian planning? Were they actually getting a divorce? The lawyer she’d called was real, but had the story she’d told him been utterly fake? And who the hell had been chasing them in London? Was that all for show? Harold had realized, over the past day, that he simply didn’t care. He didn’t care who the men with the guns were, he didn’t care what Sebastian was after, and he didn’t care who Sarah Lindsay, or Sarah Conan Doyle, really was. Alex Cale’s “murder” had been solved, his trail of clues followed to perfection. But the pursuit gave Harold no joy anymore; it granted him no peace. All he wanted now, all he craved, like a drowning man’s last gasp of oxygen, was the diary.

But he knew that the diary wouldn’t make him happy either. When he put his sweaty palms on its cover and peeled open its parched pages, he would hear no choir of angels in his head. There would be no swelling of his heart; no sense of contentment would fill his panting lungs. He understood that in just a few minutes, when he laid his hands on the leather-bound book and learned its secrets, things would only get worse. But that would not stop him. He would see this through to its awful conclusion, because he had to. Because he had to know.

His footsteps felt quick and firm as he marched through the snow. He came through the blackness to the front of the museum. The building had once been a church, and a humble spire still poked up from the angled roof of the simple two-story. Even in the dark, Harold could make out the reddish hues of the bricks and the beautiful glasswork in the windows.

There were many ways that Harold could have snuck into the museum. He could have entered during the day and hidden in some forgotten storage closet. He could have learned to disengage the alarm system. He could have learned to pick locks. But even if those methods worked, they would take an impossibly long time to accomplish. He didn’t have the heart. He couldn’t bear this anymore. He was going to know now.

Harold was home, at the base of the Reichenbach Falls. The place where everything ended.

He removed the tire iron from his bag and stared at the antique stained glass in a low-hanging window. The image was of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. A golden halo surrounded Lazarus’s head as he stepped from his cave, toward the beckoning hand of Jesus. A legion of apostles and followers stood behind, marveling at Christ’s divinity and soaking up the comfort of his presence.

Harold raised the tire iron above his head and smashed it down on the glass. The sound of the window shattering was much louder than he’d anticipated, and yet he didn’t flinch at the noise. Tiny shards of glass sprinkled back at him from the broken window, covering his coat sleeves and muddy shoes. He flicked the tire iron around the open window a few times, knocking out the remaining hunks of sharp glass. He dropped the iron back into his bag and placed both gloved hands on the windowsill, pressing himself up and through the window. In a moment he was inside.

Harold heard no alarm but assumed that one must have been activated. He didn’t have much time, but he didn’t think he needed it. And if the Swiss police found him smashing a priceless gasogene in the private museum? Well, then they could tell the New York police they’d found him, and the various authorities could figure out which jail they’d want him in. Harold didn’t care. All he wanted was the diary.

He walked quickly through the museum, and as it was small and Harold’s destination was its main attraction, he found what he was looking for in no time at all. He entered the carefully prepared study of Sherlock Holmes, flicked on the lights, and looked around. Of all the places to end, this one made as much sense as any.

The room was cramped with objects. The fireplace was adorned with sharp pokers and a long singlestick, with which Holmes had stalked Moriarty in “The Final Problem.” Drawings of various Holmes adventures littered every available surface. On a small table lay Watson’s stethoscope, as well as Holmes’s violin. Another table held Holmes’s chemical kit, with which he would test bloodstains, tobacco, and the other assorted residues of murder. A deerstalker hat, just like Harold’s, rested on a hook. First editions of all of the Holmes stories covered the bookshelves. A tea set was laid out on a breakfast table, spoons and knives set in their places as if Holmes and Watson were midmeal. Newspapers of the period sat beside the cups and saucers. And along the far wall, in what Harold couldn’t help but notice was the darkest corner of the darkened room, a small desk held an antique gasogene up to his gaze.

Without hesitation Harold walked to the gasogene and raised it from the table. He shook it. The base was easily wide enough to hold a diary, and, for a piece of hollow glass, the gasogene felt quite heavy. He twisted at one of the screws on the base, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried the other, with no better luck. It occurred to him that besides a steel tire iron something along the lines of a screwdriver would have been a pretty smart addition to his collection of break-in tools.

He set the gasogene back down on the table, went to the fireplace, and lifted the poker. It was heavier than the tire iron. Longer. It was perfect. Harold gripped it with both hands and could see his knuckles whitening around the hilt. He raised the poker over his head. Was he sure that the diary was in the gasogene? Yes. No. It honestly no longer mattered. He’d smash it to pieces, or he’d smash something else to pieces, or he’d break every heirloom in this entire museum if that’s what it would take.

He kept his eyes open wide as he squeezed the poker in his palms, arched his back, and drew the poker down on the gasogene with every bit of strength he possessed. Glass shattered, the steel poker clanged violently against the metal base, and the force of the contact sent Harold stumbling back across the study. His wrists hurt.

“Harold White.” When he heard the voice behind him, his mind went instantly blank. The words themselves sounded foreign. Harold? White? Oh, yes, Harold realized, as the color drained from his face. That would be me. He prepared himself for jail, placating his natural terror with the thought that it wouldn’t be for more than a few years. It’s not as if he’d killed anybody, after all. It was only as he was turning around to face the voice addressing him that he realized that whoever was calling his name knew his name. And that was when Harold became scared.

He completed his turn to see the Goateed Man staring back at him across the study. The man held a gun in front of him. Harold’s vision danced between the top of the pistol and the goatee on the man’s face. The gun looked like the same one he’d seen in London. And the goatee was no more attractive than he’d first thought.

Despite the fear that squeezed on his muscles and contracted his breath, Harold realized that the man in front of him hadn’t yet pulled the trigger. Harold could handle this. He stepped forward, right foot and then left, toward the Goateed Man.

“Stop there,” said the man.

“No,” said Harold. He stepped forward again. He couldn’t be more than six feet from the man now. The man drew the gun higher, aligning its barrel directly across from Harold’s scalp.

“Take another step and I’ll bloody kill you,” said the man.

“No,” said Harold as he took another small step. “You won’t.” He stepped again. Four feet separated them now. “Because you want the diary. And you know you need me to get it.”

The man gave Harold a strange look.

“You mean that?” he said, glancing ever so quickly to the floor behind Harold’s feet. Harold turned his head, shifting his eyes down to the floor. A few feet behind him, amid a pile of broken glass and poking out from the metal base of the gasogene, sat a two-inch-thick, leather-bound diary.

“I don’t think I need your help anymore to find the diary,” said the man, grinning.

So much for that. Harold had accomplished everything he’d been asked, and then some. He was done now. So much for being just a little bit smarter than everyone else. Being clever had gotten him far, but now it didn’t seem like it would get him any further.

“Not yet,” said Harold. Only now was he truly scared. But it wasn’t the gun that terrified him-it was the thought that the gun would kill him before he could hold the diary in his hands and peel open its dusty pages.

“I wasn’t supposed to kill you,” said the man. “But now I don’t have a bloody choice. I just need the diary, but I can’t have anybody knowing where it came from. And if you’re alive when the Swiss police get here…”

“Fine,” said Harold. “Kill me. I don’t care anymore. But please. Five minutes. Give me five minutes to read the diary. I can read really fast. Really, really fast.”

“Step back and kick the diary toward me.”

“No, please. Three minutes. That’s it. You can’t let it…” Harold was pleading now, begging. He was mere feet away from the diary. He imagined that he could smell its must, that he could taste a century’s grime on the back of his tongue. “You can’t let it end like this. I just need to read it.”

Staring into the man’s eyes, Harold saw something he thought was pity.

“Look,” said the man, “I didn’t sign on to kill nobody. I’d rather not. I’ll make you a deal, all right? You get out of here, and you never tell a word of this, and I say I found my way here on my own. But you need to leave. Now.”

“No,” said Harold. He wanted to explain his desperation, to somehow make clear to this man why he couldn’t walk away. But he couldn’t explain this.

“Are you bloody crazy? Go away. Leave me the book and go.”

Harold wanted to cry, but he didn’t. He tried to speak, but all that came was a soft panting. He looked with wide, begging eyes at the man, and he stepped forward again. If he could not leave here with the diary, then he could not let himself leave here at all.

“Right then,” said the man. “You win.” His finger curled around the trigger. Harold did not close his eyes but held them open. He felt no need to shield himself from this.

“POLIZIA!” came a loud cry from elsewhere in the building. The sound snapped both Harold and the man loose from their diabolical pact. They heard footsteps and the noises of a body shifting around. Harold thought he heard the crunch of broken glass under a boot.

The man kept his gun aimed at Harold, and for his own part Harold didn’t move.

“POLIZIA!” came another shout. The voice was Italian-speaking Swiss, and female.

“Please,” said Harold to the man. “Shoot me, take the diary, and run. Or give it to me. But I’m not leaving.”

The man continued staring at Harold, gauging his seriousness. The man’s face grew tight, as if acknowledging that Harold would not bend. As the footsteps approached the study, the man turned his body toward the door. That was all the time Harold needed.

He swung the poker through the air, aiming for the man’s head but landing it across his left arm. There was a crunch, and Harold felt the recoil of contact through his own arm. The man doubled over to his left side, instinctively protecting his wounded forearm with his right hand. He still held the gun, but it wasn’t pointing at Harold anymore.

Harold swung again with the poker, ramming it into the man’s shoulder. He howled in pain. As Harold stepped back for another swing- would he aim for the man’s head? Would he kill him?-Harold saw a figure in the doorway. It was the woman who’d yelled “polizia” from the hallway, but she was not, so far as Harold knew, a member of the Swiss police.

It was Sarah.

He dropped the poker and was only vaguely aware of the clank it made against the floor. Sarah held a small gun in her hand, and she was aiming it at Harold. The man, given a moment to catch his breath, used the opportunity to lash out with his own gun, punching it into Harold’s belly. Harold felt all the air leave his body. He dropped to his knees, holding himself up from the floor only by pressing both hands into the floor. He had moments ago prepared himself for death, but now he felt like he was actually dying. It was more horrible than he’d imagined. He opened his mouth for air, but none entered. His mouth hung open as if in a silent scream.

The man didn’t waste an instant. He pistol-whipped Harold about his brow, swinging the arm that held the gun against his temple. Harold felt the hard steel batter into his head, once and then again. Everything went blurry.

Harold lost the next few seconds to shock. When he finally became aware of the world around him, he was on the floor, staring up at the Goateed Man. He felt something wet on his forehead. Blood, most likely, trickling between his eyes toward his nose. The man raised his gun to Harold’s face. Strangely, Harold felt some small measure of instantaneous joy at the thought that when he died, Sarah would watch. If a bullet was about to enter his brain, blowing gray matter and bone particulates into the floor of Sherlock Holmes’s study, he wanted her to see it.

Harold heard the gunshot. It was the loudest sound he’d ever heard, and his ears screamed from the volume. It sounded more like static than like any of the gunshots he’d heard on television or in movies, but it still sounded like a gunshot. And Harold heard it. Which meant, he quickly realized, that he wasn’t dead. Dead people didn’t hear the bullet as it entered their brain, he was pretty sure of that. So he hadn’t been shot. Who had?

“Step back,” Sarah said. Her tone was insistent but calm. Harold looked over at her and at the gun she held before her. She’d fired the shot. But as he turned his head to the Goateed Man, he saw that neither of them had been hurt. The man obeyed Sarah, stepping back away from Harold. When he moved, Harold could make out the hole that had been ripped by her bullet in the wall behind him. She hadn’t been trying to kill anyone, Harold realized. Just to make a point.

If the bullet hadn’t done the job, the look on Sarah’s face certainly did. The man stepped back farther, and he even lowered his gun without being asked to.

“The bleeding hell are you doing?” the man said to Sarah.

“I’d ask you the same thing,” she responded. “No one was supposed to die.”

“I don’t see how it’s your problem whether I kill this bastard or not.”

“It is my problem,” Sarah said. “And it’s yours, too. ’Cause if you kill him, how much longer do you think I’ll let you live?”

Harold had no doubt whatsoever that she was serious. He felt himself growing light-headed. He was coughing, choking, trying to get some air into his lungs but finding himself unable to take a breath. He was suffocating-and growing panicked.

Sarah glanced at him quickly.

“Breathe slowly, Harold,” she said. “Calmly. Slow, deep breaths. You just had the wind knocked out of you. That’s right. Very slow. Don’t try to take in too much air at once or you’ll choke more. There you go. There you go.”

Harold did as she suggested and felt the oxygen warming his lungs. He tried to press himself up to his feet but stumbled. He was still lightheaded, and he doubted that the wound on his head was helping. He looked down and saw a line of blood that had dribbled to the floor. He raised his hand to his head and, bringing it back down in front of his face, saw that it came back stained with red. The sight of his bloody hand made Harold nauseous.

The man held the gun to his side but didn’t drop it. Sarah tensed herself, preparing to fire again. This time she would not aim for the wall.

“Please drop the gun, Eric,” she said. “Or I’m going to shoot you.”

Harold looked up at the Goateed Man. Eric. It seemed odd for him to have a name, a real name, a normal name. He didn’t look like an Eric.

Between the wooziness in Harold’s head and the blurriness of his vision, he was never clear about the exact order of the events that unfolded next. Everything moved very fast, and the actions taken by Sarah, Eric, and even himself seemed not so much to happen in response to one another as all at once. At the very same instant Eric raised his gun toward Sarah, Sarah lowered hers and pulled the trigger. Two more violent gunshots blared across the study, rattling Harold’s senses.

The next sound he heard was far off-sirens. The actual Swiss police were finally on their way.

Screaming. Male screaming. Eric was alive, and screaming. Cursing.

Harold could see nothing. Thanks to the deafness he was temporarily experiencing due to the gunshots, all he could hear nearby was some sort of scuffling. He felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him up. A voice said something to him, but he had no idea whose it was or what message it conveyed.

He struggled to his feet. He was in no position to fight back at anyone right now, whoever happened to be pulling at him.

There was more screaming, but Harold couldn’t make any of it out. And a moan. The hand on his shoulder pulled him across the room, and he went as it directed. He felt himself tripping over things, stumbling, but he managed, somehow, to put one foot in front of the other as he tumbled through the museum. The hand was pulling him faster now, yanking more insistently. Whether he was headed toward salvation or summary execution, he didn’t know. He was not sure which outcome he’d prefer.

It wasn’t until he felt the freezing Swiss air on his cheeks that he looked up. It was darker now than when he’d broken in. The street they were on, whichever one it was, was lit only by stars and the sliding, shifting red-blue of distant police lights. Harold felt the air stab at his head and became aware of the cold nipping at his open wound. There was no way to know how much blood he’d lost. The hand kept pulling at him, however, and for the first time Harold brushed it aside. He used a sleeve of his coat to wipe the blood from his forehead. The owner of the hand, still a blurry shape, paused for an instant and turned back to face him.

“Come on,” she said. It was Sarah.

“The man… Eric… Is he…?” Harold had only the faintest idea of what he was saying.

“No, he’s alive,” she said quickly. “Bleeding, but alive. Which is about where you’re at right now. Time to run away. We have what we need.”

Harold looked down, wiping the blood from his eyes.

Under the crook of Sarah’s left arm, she held the diary.