Victorian Villainy

REICHENBACH

You remember, I assume, the newspaper accounts of the accidental deaths of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes and the eminent mathematician Professor James Moriarty at Kessel Falls at the River Reichenbach in Switzerland. Or perhaps you’ve read Dr. Watson’s account of the confrontation at, as he called it, “Reichenbach Falls” between Holmes and the “master criminal” Moriarty. It seems that everyone in the English speaking world has read of, or at least heard of the incident. And then, you will recall, some three years later Holmes reappeared to Watson and explained his absence and supposed death in some detail. Well, I am here to tell you that almost every word of these accounts, including Holmes’s recantation, is false, and I should know. I am Professor James Moriarty.

It is not the fault of the newspapers, who published with no more than their usual disregard for the facts, nor of Dr. Watson, who believed everything told to him by his friend and companion Sherlock Holmes. There can be no greater friend than one who believes whatever he is told no matter how strongly it is belied by the evidence to the contrary. Is that not, after all, the basis of most religion?

This, then, is an account of the events that led up to the disappearance, and what transpired for a short time afterward. I was going to say a “true account,” but I refrained, because memory is faulty, and there were some facts that I was not privy to that might make a difference in the truth of what happened. It is, then, an account of the events as they appeared to me at the time.

It was on the evening of Wednesday, the 22 ^ nd of April, 1891, that Mr. Maws, my butler, ushered a man named Tippins into my study. A tall, thin, angular man wearing a black frock coat with red cuffs and pockets, and large brass buttons, he stood, top hat in hand, before my desk and peered at me through oversized gold spectacles. His nose, while not large enough to be truly grotesque, was the most prominent object on his face, possibly because of the web of red veins beneath the roseate skin. A brush mustache directly beneath the nose added character to the face, but it was not a character whose acquaintance I would have gone out of my way to make. “I have come to you from Mr. Holmes,” he began. “He requires your assistance, and has asked me to direct you to the secret location where he awaits you.”

I am not easily surprised. Indeed, I spend a good bit of time and effort making sure that I am not surprised. But I confess that, for a second, I was astounded. “Holmes wants to see me? Is this some sort of trick?” I demanded.

He considered. “Naw, I wouldn’t think so,” he said finally. “He’s much too stout to indulge in that sort of tomfoolery, I should think.”

“Ah!” I said. “Stout, is he? So it’s Mr. Mycroft Holmes who desires my assistance.”

“Indeed,” Tippins agreed. “Isn’t that what I said?”

“I thought perhaps his brother…”

Tippins snorted. “The consulting detective chap? What has he to do with foreign policy?”

“Foreign policy?” I inquired.

“Perhaps you’d best just go and find out for yourself,” Tippins suggested.

“To the Foreign Office?”

“Naw. Mr. Holmes don’t want it known that he’s meeting with you, so he has arranged for my services to get you to his, so-to-speak secret location.”

“Services?” I asked. “What sort of services?”

He tapped himself on the chest. “I’m a conniver,” he said.

“Interesting,” I allowed. “You scheme and plot for Her Majesty’s government?”

“I enable people to do necessary things in unusual ways, when the more usual ways are not available.” He smiled. “I occasionally perform services for Mr. Holmes, but few others in Her Majesty’s government have availed themselves of my services.”

“And what necessary service would you perform for me in your unorthodox fashion?” I asked him.

“Your house is being watched,” Tippins said.

I nodded. I had been aware of a steady watch being kept on my house for the past few weeks. “No doubt by that very consulting detective chap you were mentioning,” I said.

“Mr. Holmes did not want it known that he was to speak with you,” Tippins explained, “so he sent me.”

“I see,” I said. “How are you going to get me there unseen?”

“I have a carriage waiting outside,” Tippins said, unbuttoning his frock coat. “The driver knows where to go. You will leave here as me. I will await your return here, if you don’t mind. I have brought a book.” He took off the frock coat and handed it to me. “Put this on.”

“It is distinctive,” I said, examining the red pockets. “But I’m not sure we look alike enough, ah, facially, for the masquerade to work.”

“Ah! There we have the crux of the matter,” he told me. He reached for the gold frame of his glasses and carefully removed them from his face. With them came the red nose and the brush mustache. The face beneath was quite ordinary, and the nose was, if anything, rather small.

“Bless me!” I said, or perhaps it was a slightly stronger expression.

He smiled. “Simple but effective,” he said. “The watchers will see what they expect to see.”

I put on the glasses, with the accompanying nose and mustache, and shrugged into the coat.

“Here,” Tippins said, handing me his top hat. “It will complete the illusion.”

And indeed it did. Wrapped in Tippins’ frock coat and wearing much of what had been his face, I thrust the journal I had been reading into the coat pocket and left my house. I clambered into the waiting carriage, a sturdy but undistinguished hack, and the jarvey spoke to the horse, and we were on our way. I waited about ten minutes before removing the facial part of the disguise. Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken it off so soon, but I felt foolish enough in the coat of several colors without wearing that nose one moment longer than I had to. I kept a careful eye out the rear window, but as far as I could tell no one was following us or taking an undue interest in our passage.

After several turns designed to force anyone following us to come into view, the jarvey took a fairly straight course to Regent’s Park Road, turned off on a side street, and pulled to a stop in the middle of a block of flats. He hopped down from his perch and opened the carriage door for me. “That door there,” he said, indicating a brown door much like all the other brown doors along the street. “You’re expected.”

It crossed my mind that this might be a trap. There are people in London who would rather see me dead than steal a million pounds, and one of them might have been inside that door instead of the rotund Mr. Holmes. But I have an instinct for such things, and this was both too elaborate and too commonplace to be anything other than what it seemed. So I pulled up the collar of my borrowed coat against the chill wind, crossed the walk, and pulled the bell-pull at the indicated doorway.

No more than three seconds later the door opened and a short woman of immense girth dressed as a maid gestured me in. Whether she was actually a maid, or some employee of the Foreign Service in masquerade I cannot say. “This way, Professor Moriarty sir,” she said. “You’re expected.”

She showed me into a room that might have been the waiting room in some doctor’s surgery, or for that matter the outer office of the booking agent for a music hall. There was a wide, well-worn black leather couch, several large and sturdy chairs, a heavy table of some dark wood, ill-lit by three wall sconces with the gas turned low and a window with heavy light-green muslin curtains, which were drawn. A deep throbbing sound came faintly into the room; I could discern neither the location nor the function of its agent. Some sort of machinery? On the right-hand wall, leading to the back of the house, a pair of double doors were drawn closed. “Please wait,” she said. “ He will be with you shortly.” The timbre of her voice changed when she said “ He,” the added resonance giving the word importance, as though I were awaiting Aristotle or Charles Darwin himself. “Please don’t open the shades,” she added as she left the room.

I turned the gas light up in one of the wall sconces and settled into a chair beneath it, taking from my pocket the journal I had brought with me, Das Astrophysische Journal der Universitat Erlangen, and immersing myself in its pages. The Austrians Joffe and Shostak have advanced the theory that the nebulosities observed through the larger telescopes are not some sort of interstellar gas, but actually vast clouds of stars much like our own Milky Way galaxy, seen at tremendous distances. If so-but I digress.

After a while I heard the door open and close, and I looked up to find Sherlock Holmes standing in the doorway. “So!” he growled, looking down his thin, crooked nose at me. “It was one of your tricks after all!” He thrust his walking stick in front of him like a child playing at dueling. “I warn you that I am prepared for any eventuality.”

“How nice for you,” I said, folding my journal and putting it back into my pocket.

“Mr. Holmes,” said the broad maid from behind him. “Please be seated. Your brother will be down directly.”

Holmes stalked over to a chair in the far side of the room and dropped lightly into it. “We’ll see,” he said, never taking his eyes off me. He flexed his walking stick, describing a series of shapes in the air before him, and then laid it across his knees.

The door opened again, and the large shape of Mycroft Holmes loomed into the room. “Sherlock,” he said, “Professor Moriarty. Good of you to come. Join me in the next room, where we can talk.”

“You invited him? ” asked Sherlock, pointing a wavering walking stick in my direction. “What were you thinking?”

“All in good time,” said Mycroft. “Follow me.” He stomped through the waiting room and pulled open the double doors. The chamber thus revealed had once been the dining room of the house, but was now a conference room, with an oversized highly-polished mahogany table in the center, surrounded by heavy chairs of the same dark wood, upholstered in green leather. Around the periphery stood a row of filing cabinets, and a pair of small writing desks. A large chart cabinet stood against the far wall. The other walls were obscured by pinned-up maps, charts, graphs, diagrams and documents of all sorts and sizes, and one framed oil painting of a fox hunt which was covered with a dark patina of grime and neglect. The windows had heavy curtains over them, which were drawn closed. The room was brightly lit by three fixtures which depended from the ceiling. I observed them to be electrical lamps with great metallic filaments in evacuated bulbs. This explained the humming noise I had heard: this house had its own electrical generating plant.

Three men were waiting in the room as we entered: two seated at the table looking stern, and the third pacing about the room with his hands linked behind his back. One of the seated men, a slender, impeccably-dressed, greying man with mutton-chop whiskers, I recognized instantly as Lord Easthope, who holds the post of Foreign Minister in Her Majesty’s present Tory government.

“Come, sit down,” said Mycroft Holmes. “Here they are, gentlemen,” he added, addressing the three men in the room. “My brother, Sherlock, and Professor James Moriarty.”

The pacing man paused. “Have they agreed?” he asked.

“No, your lordship. I have not as yet explained the situation to them.”

The third man peered at us over the top of his tortoise shell glasses. “So these are the miracle men,” he said.

“Come now, sir,” Mycroft Holmes protested. “I never claimed that they were miracle men.”

“They’d better be,” the man said.

I took a seat on the right-hand side of the table. Holmes crossed over to the left side and sat where he could keep me in sight while speaking with our hosts.

Mycroft laced his hands behind his back and leaned forward. “Gentlemen,” he said, addressing Holmes and me, “may I present their lordships, Lord Easthope and Lord Famm.” (That’s the way the name is pronounced. I later learned that His Lordship was Evan Fotheringham, Earl of Stomshire.) “And His Excellency, Baron van Durm.”

Lord Fotheringham, the gentleman who was pacing the floor, was a tall man with an aristocratic nose and thinning hair. Baron van Durm was a great bear of a man, with heavy, black mutton chop whiskers and glowering dark eyes. He was impeccably dressed in a pearl-gray morning suit, with a diamond stickpin the size of a robin’s egg holding down his white silk cravat.

“I see you have recognized Lord Easthope,” Mycroft said to Holmes and me, reading more from a slight widening of our eyes than most people could from the twenty eight pages of their evening newspaper. “Lord Fotheringham is Chairman of the Royal Committee for the Defense of the Realm, and Baron van Durm is General Manager of the Amsterdam branch of the House of van Durm.

Although the name is not generally recognized outside of government or financial circles, the House of van Durm is one of the richest, most powerful, and most successful private banking houses in the world. With branches in every place you would imagine, and many that would not occur to you, the van Durms have supported governments in need, and brought about the ruin of governments whose policies offended them.

Van Durm nodded his massive head slightly in our direction. Lord Fotheringham paused in his pacing long enough to glower at Sherlock Holmes, Lord Easthope growled a soft monosyllabic growl.

“They know who you are,” Mycroft told us, “and we, collectively, have something to, ah, discuss with you of the utmost importance, delicacy, and secrecy. Before we continue, I must have your word that nothing we say here will be repeated outside this room.”

I raised an eyebrow. Sherlock looked astonished. “You have my word,” I said.

“You would trust that-” Holmes began, pointing a quavering finger at me. Then he paused as Mycroft glared at him, dropped the finger and sighed deeply. “Oh, very well,” he said. “You have my word also.”

Mycroft sat down. Lord Fotheringham stopped pacing and stood facing us, arms behind his back. “Here is the situation, gentlemen,” said his lordship. “The enemies of Britain are hatching a devilish plot, and there is danger for the safety of this realm-perhaps of the entire world-lurking in every corner of Europe. Plainly put, there is a shadow growing over the British Empire.”

“What is this devilish plot?” I asked.

Lord Easthope focused his mild blue eyes on me. “There’s the heart of the problem,” he said, nodding approvingly, as though I’d said something clever. “We don’t know.”

“A shadow?” Holmes’s eyes narrowed. The three noblemen might have thought that he was concentrating his attention on this growing shadow, but I-and probably his brother-knew that he was considering whether Lord Fotheringham should be forcibly restrained. I had some such motion myself.

Holmes leaned back in his chair, his fingers laced over his waistcoat, his eyes almost closed. “You don’t know?”

“Perhaps I should explain,” said Baron van Durm. “There are signs, subtle but distinct signs, all over Europe, that something of great import is going to happen soon, that it concerns Great Britain, and that it portends no good. Taken by themselves, each of these incidents-these signs-could be a random happening, meaning nothing, but when one looks at them all together a pattern emerges.”

“We have a saying at the War Ministry, Lord Fotheringham interjected. “‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’”

Sherlock Holmes leaned forward and laced his hands together beneath his chin, his elbows resting on the table. “What sort of incidents?” he asked.

Lord Easthope began: “In various centers of Socialist and Anarchist thought throughout Europe; Paris, Vienna, Prague, speakers have begun warning against British imperialism and the ‘secret plans’ Britain has for world domination.”

“I see,” I said. “‘The Secret Protocols of the Elders of Downing Street,’ eh? There is, I grant you, a school of thought that believes that the English are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.”

“By itself it would be amusing, and hardly sinister,” Easthope said. “But if you consider these speakers to be part of a plan to pave the way for-something-then they deserve to be looked at more seriously.”

“Even so,” Lord Fotheringham agreed. “Most of those who listen to this nonsense now, even among the emigre Socialist communities must realize it to be nonsense, considering that Britain is one of the few countries that allows these groups freedom of movement and association without having to worry about police spies in their midst.”

“Unless, of course, they’re Irish,” Mycroft Holmes said bluntly, shifting his bulk forward in his chair. This was met with a complete silence, and he didn’t pursue the thought.

“What else?” asked Holmes.

“Newspapers,” said Lord Fotheringham.

“The editorial pages of newspapers in various European countries; France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, are printing the occasional scurrilous editorial accusing Her Majesty’s government of a secret plan of aggression against the continental powers,” Mycroft explained.

“How odd,” said Sherlock.

“We know of three different men in the governments of three different countries who are preparing anti-British legislation of one sort or another,” said Lord Easthope. “Preparing, you will notice, but not submitting. They are waiting for the proper moment. We must assume that they believe that there soon will be a proper moment. If we know of three, presumably there are more.”

“Do those three men know each other?” Holmes asked.

“Apparently not,” his brother told him.

“Then we must also assume there is, somewhere, a hand pulling the strings.”

“We do so assume,” Mycroft said.

“Is that all?” Holmes asked.

“Is that not enough?” asked Easthope.

“Actually,” said Baron van Durm, “there is one other thing. The House of van Durm, as you might surmise, has agents strategically placed all over Europe. Most of these conduct the bank’s business. Some merely collect information. The success of an international bank rises or falls on the quality of the information it gathers. One of these agents is highly placed in the government of, let us say, a foreign power that has not always been in the best of terms with Great Britain. In the course of his work for us he came across a document which might shed some light on these happenings. It was not addressed to him.”

“Ah!” said Sherlock Holmes.

“This is a copy of it, translated into English,” van Durm said, removing a sheet of paper from a folder on the table before him and passing it over to Holmes, who read it carefully twice before passing it on to me: Thirteen- Your concise and with information filled report was most welcome. We must continue and increase our efforts to discredit England and all things English. It is simpler to chop down a tree if you have poisoned the roots. Sixteen has failed us. Worse, he may have betrayed us. He was seen entering the embassy on Prinz Rupert Strasse. He stayed for an hour. He will not do so again. The day nears. The events unfold. Work and diligence carry great rewards. The Florida is now ours. Inform the brothers that the direction is up and the peak is in view. If we succeed, we will succeed together. Those who fail will fail alone. It is the time for cleverness and impudence. Stories must be told. Incidents must be arranged. The lion sleeps peacefully. Holmes and Moriarty are watched, as are Lamphier in Paris and Ettin in Berlin. They are not alert. Proceed to Lindau on the 16 ^ th. The company is assembling. The first place. Three white clothespins. Burn this. One

“What do you make of that?” asked van Durm.

“It was in German originally?” I asked.

“That is so,” van Durm said.

“The embassy on Prinz Rupert Strasse?”

“The British Embassy in Vienna is on Prinz Rupert Strasse,” Lord Easthope said.

Holmes leaned back in his chair. “Lindau is a German place-name?” He asked.

“A town on the Bodensee, on the German side of the Austrian border.” Easthope told him.

“Quite a distance from Florida,” Holmes remarked.

“That is so,” Easthope agreed. “We have not been able to come up with a plausible explanation of that line. Not even, if it comes to that, a fanciful one.”

“The whole missive has something of the fanciful about it,” I said. “Addressed to ‘Thirteen’ from ‘One.’ There’s something of the Lewis Carroll about it.”

“Why was it not burned?” asked Holmes.

“It was,” van Drum told him. “At least the attempt was made. The original was found in a fireplace grate, charred and singed. But it had been folded over several times, and so it was merely the edges that suffered the damage, and the whole message was retrieved intact.”

I smiled, reflecting on the image of a high government official crawling about in a fireplace.

Holmes glared at me. “I detect your hand in this,” he said.

I was not amused, and I’m afraid that I allowed an ill-considered expletive to pass my lips.

“Quite so,” said Lord easthope.

“His name is on the document,” Holmes insisted. “Can’t you see-”

“Enough!” cried Mycroft in a deceptively quiet bellow. “Your name is also on the document. Take my word for it, Sherlock, that whatever else Moriarty may be involved in, he has no hand in these events.”

Sherlock Holmes gave his brother a long glare, and then assumed an attitude of sulky acquiescence from the depths of his chair.

Baron van Durm looked from one to the other of us. “I thought you said they could work together,” he said to Mycroft.

“They can,” Mycroft assured him. “They just need a little time to get over their mutual spitting match.”

I resented that. I had done nothing to encourage Holmes in his asinine accusations. But I held my tongue.

“When we saw the references to you, we naturally checked,” Lord Easthope said, “and ascertained that you were, indeed, being watched. Had you noticed?”

“I assumed that it was at the behest of the younger Mr. Holmes,” I said.

“I thought Moriarty was up to more of his usual deviltry,” snarled Holmes.

“Well there, you see, you were both mistaken,” said Easthope. He turned to Mycroft. “Are you sure these are the men we want?”

“Yes,” said Mycroft.

“What of Lamphier and Ettin?” Holmes asked.

“Ah!” said van Durm.

“Would that be Alphonse Lamphier the noted French criminologist?” I asked.

“Yes, it would,” van Durm affirmed.

“How can you be sure that he is the Lamphier referred to?” Holmes asked.

“Because he was murdered yesterday.”

“Coincidence,” said Holmes.

“He was found in the ruins of a burned-out cottage outside the village of Lindau,” said Lord Easthope. “Pure accident that he was found. He-his body-could have stayed there for months. He was almost naked and had his hands tied together. He was already dead when the place was set on fire, but a section of interior wall collapsed and preserved his body from the fire.”

Holmes opened his mouth to say something, but Lord Easthope continued, “He had scratched some words on his inner thigh with a pin before he died. Ils se reunissent. Means ‘they meet,’ or ‘they assemble,’ or ‘they gather,’ depending.”

“I stand corrected,” said Holmes. “One can stretch coincidence too far. Does anyone know precisely what he was working on when he was killed?”

“Our agents in Paris are attempting to ascertain that even now,” van Durm said.

“What would you have us do?” I asked.

“As they-whoever they are-are watching you,” said Lord Easthope, “we infer that they have reason to fear you. Perhaps because of your known abilities, each of you in his own sphere, or perhaps because you possess some information that you might not even know you have, that would be of value.”

Holmes and I pondered this for a minute. Just as I was about to disagree with this diagnosis, Holmes anticipated me. “I think not,” he said.

“Baron van Durm looked startled. “Why not?” he asked.

“In Welsh coal mines the miners take a canary down into the pits with them,” Holmes said. “It is to give them early notice of bad air, as the canaries are more susceptible than the miners. We are these people’s canaries.”

“I fail to see the analogy,” said Lord Easthope.

“Our, ah, opponents watch us because they believe that, if Her Majesty’s government were to become aware of their machinations, it would send one of us to investigate. Either myself, for obvious reasons, or Professor Moriarty,” he paused for a second to glare at me, and then went on, “because of his known associations with the underworld of Europe. So much is undoubtedly so. But they no more fear us than the coal miner fears the canary.” Holmes punctuated his talk with restless motions of his slender hands. “If they believe we have knowledge of their doings, they will immediately and ruthlessly eliminate us.”

“How do you know this, if you know nothing about them?” Lord Fotheringham asked.

“Alphonse Lamphier told me,” Holmes replied.

“What? How could-oh, I see.”

“Perhaps I should have said attempt to eliminate us,” Holmes continued, “since others have tried, and none have yet succeeded.”

I was amused at Holmes’s inclusion of me in his statement, as he had so often accused me of trying to eliminate him. But I said nothing.

“So what are we to do?” asked Baron van Durm.

“Out of the myriad of possibilities,” said Mycroft, “there are three that appeal more than the others.”

“And they are?” asked Lord Easthope.

“One is to keep my brother and Professor Moriarty visibly at home, to reassure our antagonists, while using others to subvert their plans.”

“Who?” asked Lord Easthope.

“What others?” echoed Baron van Durm.

“I have no idea,” confessed Mycroft Holmes. “The second possibility is to spirit Holmes and Moriarty away without letting the watchers know.”

“How?” asked Lord Fotheringham.

“Perhaps with wax dummies of the two placed in their windows and moved about to achieve a verisimilitude of life.”

“Ridiculous!” said Baron van Durm.

“The third possibility,” said Mycroft, “is for them to leave openly, but in such a fashion as to cause those watching them to conclude that their interest are elsewhere.”

Sherlock looked at his brother. “Brilliant, Mycroft,” he said. “And just how are we to achieve that?”

The possibilities of the situation appealed to me. “I’d suggest, Holmes, that you chase me to the ends of the earth, as you’ve so often threatened to do,” I said, smiling.

Holmes glared at me.

“Perhaps,” Mycroft said, “with a little modification, that is indeed what we should do.” He rubbed his right forefinger along the side of his nose. “If the two of you were to kill each other, nobody who knew you would be surprised. And I think it safe to assume that the watchers would cease watching in that event.”

“Kill each other?” Holmes repeated incredulously.

“How do you propose they do that?” asked Baron van Durm.

Mycroft shrugged. “Somehow and someplace where there can be no suggestion that it was a sham,” he said. “Plunging over the side of a tall building together would suffice. Perhaps the Eiffel Tower.”

Now this was being carried a bit too far. “And how do you propose we survive the fall?” I asked.

Mycroft sighed. “I suppose it should be somewhere less public,” he said, “so you don’t really have to go over the edge.” He sounded honestly regretful. Which of us was he picturing leaping off a precipice, I wondered.

Baron van Durm snapped his fingers. “I know just the place!” he said. “Near the town of Meiringen in Switzerland there is a great waterfall on the Reichenbach river.”

“Reichenbach?” asked Holmes.

“A tributary of the Aar,” van Durm explained. “This spot has but one path leading out to it, and if you were said to have fallen, nobody would expect to find your remains. The river at that point is rapid, deep, and, er, punishing.”

“Why so far from home?” asked Lord Fotheringham.

“It has several advantages,” said Holmes thoughtfully. “Our trip there will give our opponents time to see that we are chasing each other rather than hunting for them, and it will leave us in Switzerland, and a lot closer to Germany and the village of Lindau.”

“Even so,” Mycroft agreed.

“Won’t that make them suspicious, your ending up in Switzerland?” Lord Easthope asked.

I ventured a reply. “They know nothing of our interest in Lindau, and if they believe us dead, it won’t matter anyway.”

“That is so,” Easthope agreed.

“So,” said Lord Fotheringham. “Do you two gentlemen believe that you can put your personal enmity aside long enough to serve your queen?”

I was about to answer with a polite guffaw, or perhaps even a mild snicker, when to my surprise Holmes stood up and drew his shoulders back. “For queen and country,” he said.

All eyes were at that instant on me. I shrugged. “I have nothing on for the next few weeks,” I said.

With a slight change in the original plan, the race across Europe was to be carried out with a verisimilitude designed to convince Watson, as well as any onlookers, that it was genuine. The change was that I was to pursue Holmes rather than the other way around. Mycroft decided that would be more convincing.

Two days later the great chase began. Holmes called upon Watson to tell him that I was trying to kill him (Holmes), and he must flee to Europe. The tale was that my “gang” was about to be rounded up by the police, but until that was accomplished Holmes was in great danger. Watson agreed to accompany him in his flight, and the next day joined Holmes in “the second first-class carriage from the front” of the Continental Express at Victoria Station. Holmes was disguised as a humble elderly prelate, but Watson wore no disguise, and so the watchers had no trouble watching. They saw Holmes and Watson flee in the Express, and watched me engage a Special Train to pursue them. Holmes and Watson appeared to elude me by abandoning their luggage and getting off the Express at Canterbury. They went cross-country to Newhaven, and thence by the paddle steamer Brittany to Dieppe.

Shaking my fist and murmuring “Curses, foiled again!” I went straight through to Paris and lingered about their luggage for several days, apparently waiting for them to come and claim it. When they didn’t show I put the word out among the European underworld that I would pay a substantial reward for information as to the whereabouts of two Englishmen who looked thus-and-so. Eventually word came to me, and I spent several days pursuing them about Europe, followed in turn by several gentlemen who did their best to stay just out of sight.

As planned, I caught up with Holmes and Watson in the village of Meiringen in Switzerland on May 6 ^ th. They had gone after lunch to look at the falls, about a two-hour hike away from the inn, and I sent a boy with a note to Watson designed to lure him back to the inn to care for a mythical sick woman. Holmes was then to write a letter to Watson, put it and some article of clothing on the ledge, and disappear; leaving it to be believed that he and I had gone over the edge in a mighty battle of good and evil. Humph! I would then fade away from the scene and meet Holmes in Lindau in four days.

But it was not to be. Even as the lad scurried off to carry the note to Watson, I was forced to change the plan. I followed and concealed myself behind a boulder when I saw the lad and Watson hurrying back. Then I rushed forward to the ledge, where Holmes had already put the note in his silver cigarette-box, placed it by his alpenstock at the side of a rock, and was enjoying one last pipe of that foul tobacco he smokes before disappearing.

“Aha!” he said, upon spying me approach. “I knew it was too good to be true! So it’s to be an all-out fight to the death, is it professor?” He sprang to his feet and grabbed for the alpenstock.

“Don’t speak nonsense, Holmes,” I growled. “One of the men following us reached the inn just as I sent the lad off with the note. If I didn’t come after you while he watched, he couldn’t possibly be convinced that we both plunged off the cliff.”

“So!” said Holmes. “It seems we must fight after all, or at least leave behind convincing marks of a scuffle, and perhaps a few bits of tattered clothing.”

“And then we must find some way to leave this ledge without going back the way we came. Two sets of footprints returning on the path would give the game away.” I walked over to the edge and looked down. The way was sheer, and steep, and in some places the rock face appeared to be undercut, so that it would be impossible to climb down without pitons and ropes and a variety of other mountaineering gear that we had neglected to bring. “We can’t go down,” I said.

“Well then,” Holmes said briskly, “we must go up.”

I examined the cliff face behind us. “Possible,” I concluded. “Difficult, but possible.”

“But first we must scuff up the ground by the cliff edge in a convincing manner,” said Holmes.

“Let us run through the third and fourth Baritsu katas,” I suggested. I took off my inverness and put it and my owl-headed walking stick and hat on a nearby outcropping and assumed the first, or “waiting crab” Baritsu defensive position.

Holmes responded by taking off his hat and coat. “We must be careful not to kill each other by accident,” he said. “I should hate to kill you by accident.”

“And I, you,” I assured him.

We ran through the martial exercises for about a quarter-hour, getting ourselves and the ground quite scuffed up in the process. “Enough!” Holmes said finally.

“I agree,” I said. “One last touch.” I took my stick from the rock and gave the handle a quarter turn, releasing the 8-inch blade concealed within. “I hate to do this,” I said, ‘but in the interest of verisimilitude…”

Holmes eyes me warily while I rolled up my right sleeve and carefully stabbed my arm with the sharp point of the blade. I smeared the last few inches of the blade liberally with my own blood, and then threw the weapon aside as though it had been lost in combat. The shaft of the stick I left by the rock. “For queen and country,” I said, wrapping my handkerchief around the cut and rolling down my sleeve.

“Left handed, are you?” Holmes asked. “I should have guessed.”

We retrieved the rest of our clothing and began climbing the almost-sheer face of the cliff above us. It was slow, tedious work, made more dangerous by the fact that it was already late afternoon, and the long shadows cast across the chasm made it difficult to see clearly.

After about twenty minutes, Holmes who, despite a constant stream of muttered complaints, had been clambering up the cliff side with great energy, and was about two body lengths above me, cried out, “Aha! Here is a shelf big enough to hold us! Perhaps we should rest here.”

I scrambled up beside him, and the two of us lay on the moss-covered rock shelf with just our heads showing over the edge as we peered down into the gathering dusk below. We were, I estimate, some two hundred feet above the ledge we had left.

I’m not sure how long we lay there, as it was too dark to read the face of my pocket watch and we dare not strike a light. But after some time we could make out somebody coming onto the ledge we had recently deserted. He was carrying a small lantern, in the light of which he proceeded to make a minute study of the earth, the surrounding rocks, and the cliff face both above and below the ledge, although he didn’t cast the beam high enough to see us where we were peering down at him. After a minute he found the cigarette box that Holmes had left for Watson, and he carefully opened it, read the note inside, then closed it again and replaced it on the rock. Another minute’s searching brought him to the bloodied blade, which he peered at closely, tested with his finger, and then secured under his coat. Then he slowly went back the way he had come, closely examining the footprints on the path as he went.

About ten minutes later we heard voices below, and four men approached the cliff edge: two Swiss men from the inn in their green lederhosen, carrying large bright lanterns; Dr. Watson, and the man who had recently left. “No,” the man was saying as they came into view, “I saw no one on the trail. I do not know what happened to your friend.”

Watson wandered about the cliff, looking here and there without really knowing what he was looking at, or for. “Holmes!” he cried. “My God, Holmes, where are you?”

Holmes stirred next to me and seemed about to say something, but he refrained.

One of the Swiss men spotted the silver cigarette box. “Is that a belonging of your friend?” he asked, pointing to it.

Watson rushed over to it. “Yes!” he said. “That is Holmes’s.” He turned it over in his hand. But why-” Opening the box, he pulled out the letter, tearing it halfway down the middle in the process. “Moriarty!” he said, reading the letter by the light of one of the lanterns. “Then it has happened. It is as I feared.” He folded the letter and put it in his pocket, and went over to the edge of the cliff to peer down into the inky blackness below. “Goodby, my friend,” he said, his voice choked with emotion. “The best and finest man I have ever known.” Then he turned to the others. “Come,” he said, “we can do no good here.”

As we were unable to safely climb down in the dark, Holmes and I spent the night on that rock shelf, our greatcoats offering what protection they could from the chill wind. Shortly before dawn a cold rain fell, and we were drenched and chilled before first light, when we were finally able to make our way back down to the ledge below. We traveled overland on foot, with an occasional ride on the ox cart of a friendly farmer, for the next two days until we reached Wurstheim, where we settled into the Wurstheimer Hof, bathed, slept for twelve hours, bought suitable clothing, and altered our appearance. The next morning I went down to a stationer’s and procured some drafting supplies, and then spent a few hours in my room creating a few useful documents. Leaving Wurstheim late that afternoon were a French officer of Artillery in mufti-Holmes speaks fluent French, having spent several years in Montpellier during his youth, and makes quite a dashing officer of Artillery-and a German Senior Inspector of Canals and Waterworks. I have no idea whether there actually is such a position, but the papers I drew up looked quite authentic. I also crafted one more document that I thought might be useful.

“The world lost a master forger when you decided to become a, ah, professor of mathematics, Moriarty,” Holmes told me, looking over the papers I had produced with a critical eye. “The watermarks would give the game away, if anyone is astute enough to examine them, but you’ve done a very creditable job.”

“Praise from the master is praise indeed,” I told him.

He looked at me suspiciously, but then folded up the laisser-passer I had created for him and thrust it into an inner pocket.

In the early afternoon of the 14 ^ th of May we arrived in Kreuzingen, a small town on the east shore of Lake Constance, or as the Germans call it, Bodensee-a great swelling in the river Rhine some forty miles long and, in places, ten miles wide. It is where Switzerland, Germany, and Austria meet, or would meet if there weren’t a lake in the way. We boarded the paddle steamer Konig Friedrich for the four-hour trip across to Lindau, a quiet resort town on the German side of the lake. Holmes, as Le Commandant Martin Vernet of the Corps d’Artillerie, had his hair parted in the middle and severely brushed down on both sides and sported a quite creditable brush mustache. He wore a severely-tailored grey suit with the miniature ribbon of a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in his button-hole, and cultivated a slight limp. He would effect a complete lack of knowledge of either German or English, and thus stood a good chance of overhearing things he was not meant to overhear.

I became Herr Inspektor Otto Stuhl of the Buro des Direktors der Kanale und des Wasserversorgung, and thus could be expected to take an interest in water and all things wet, which gave me a plausible reason to poke around in places where I had no business poking around.

We amused ourselves on the trip across by discerning the professions of our fellow passengers. The Swiss, like the Germans, make the task simpler by dressing strictly according to their class, status and occupation. We disagreed over a pair of gentlemen with ruffled shirts and double rows of brass buttons going down their overly-decorated lederhosen. I guessed them to be buskers of some sort, while Holmes thought them hotel tour guides. On overhearing their conversation, we determined them to be journeymen plumbers. Holmes glared at me as though it were somehow my fault.

We took rooms at the Hotel Athenes, carefully not knowing each other as we checked in. There would have been some advantage in taking rooms in separate hotels, but the difficulty in sharing information without being noticed would have been too great. Holmes, or rather Vernet, was to go around to the inns and spas in the area and discover which ones had public rooms where a group might gather, or more probably large private rooms for rent, and listen to the conversation of the guests. Stuhl would speak to various town officials about the very important subject of water, and partake of such gossip as they might offer. Town officials love to pass on tit-bits of important sounding gossip to passing government bureaucrats; it reaffirms their authority.

“Three white clothespins,” Holmes mused, staring out the window at one of the great snow-capped mountains that glowered down at the town. It was the morning of the 15 ^ th, and we had just come up from our separate breakfasts and were meeting in my room on the third floor of the hotel. Holmes’s room was down the hall and across the way, and had a view across the town square to the police station, and then the lake beyond. My window overlooked only mountains.

“The last line of that letter,” I remembered. “‘Proceed to Lindau on the Sixteenth. The company is assembling. The first place. Three white clothespins. Burn this.’ Very terse.”

“The first place implies there was a second place,” Holmes mused. “So it would seem they have met here before.”

“More than that,” I offered, “one of their leaders probably lives around here.”

“Perhaps,” Holmes agreed. “Consider: If the company is ‘assembling,’ then they are gathering in order to do whatever it is they are preparing to do. If they were merely coming together to discuss matters, or to receive instructions, then they would be meeting, not assembling. The study of language and its connotations holds great value for the serious investigator.”

“Even so,” I agreed.

Holmes-Vernet-went out that day and passed from inn to cafe to public house, and drank cassis and coffee and ate pastries. The man has an amazing ability to eat and eat without gaining weight and, conversely, to go without food for days at a time when on the track of a miscreant. I spent the morning studying a map of the town, to get a sense of where things were. After lunch I went to the town hall to see Herr Burgermeister Pindl, a large man in many directions with a massive mustache and a smile that spread broadly across his face and radiated good cheer. We sat in his office and he poured us each a small glass of schnapps, and we discussed matters of water supply and public health. He seemed quite pleased that the great bureaucracy in far-off Berlin would even know of the existence of little Lindau.

If you would impress a man with your insight, tell him that you sense that he is worried about a relationship, about his finances, or about his health. Better, tell him that he fears-justly-that he is often misunderstood, and that his work is not appreciated. If you would impress a civic official, tell him that you share his concern about the town’s water supply, its sewage, or its garbage. Within the first ten minutes of our conversation, Herr Pindl and I had been friends for years. But the smiling giant was not as simple as he appeared. “Tell me,” he said, holding his schnapps daintily in two chubby fingers, “what does the ministry really want to know? You’re not just here to see if the water is coming out of the faucets.”

I beamed at him as a professor beams at his best pupil. “You’re very astute,” I said, leaning toward him. “And you look like a man who can keep a secret…”

“Oh, I am,” he assured me, his nose twitching like that of a stout bird dog on the scent of a blutwurst sausage.

Extracting my very special document from an inner pocket, I unfolded it before him. Crowded with official-looking seals and imperial eagles, the paper identified Otto Stuhl as an officer in the Nachrichtendienst, the Kaiser’s Military Intelligence Service, holding the rank of Oberst, and further declared:

His Imperial Most-High Excellency Kaiser Wilhelm II requests and demands all loyal German subjects to give the bearer of this document whatever assistance he requires at all times.

“Ah!” said Burgermeister Pindl, nodding ponderously. “I have heard of such things.”

Thank God, I thought, that you’ve never seen one before, since I have no idea what a real one looks like.

“Well, Herr Oberst Stuhl,” Pindl asked, “what can the Burgermeister of Lindau do for you?”

I took a sip of schnapps. It had a strong, peppery taste. “Word has come,” I said, “of certain unusual activities in this area. I have been sent to investigate.”

“Unusual?”

I nodded. “Out of the ordinary.”

A look of panic came into his eyes. “I assure you, Herr Oberst, that we have done nothing-”

“No, no,” I assured him, wondering what illicit activity he and his kameraden had been indulging in. Another time it might have been interesting to find out. “We of the Nachrichtendienst, care not what petty offenses local officials may be indulging in-short of treason.” I chuckled. “You don’t indulge in treason, do you?”

We shared a good laugh together about that, although the worried look did not completely vanish from his eyes.

“No, it’s strangers I’m concerned with” I told him. “Outsiders.”

“Outsiders.”

“Just so. We have received reports from our agents that suspicious activities have been happening in this area.”

“What sort of suspicious activities?”

“Ah!” I waggled my finger at him. “That’s what I was hoping you would tell me.”

He got up and went over to the window. “It must be those verdammter Englanders,” he said, slapping his large hand against his even larger thigh.

“English?” I asked. “You are, perhaps, infested with Englishmen?”

“We have people coming from all the world,” he told me. “We are a resort. We are on the Bodensee. But recently a group of Englanders has attracted our attention.”

“How?”

“By trying not to attract our attention, if you see what I mean. First, they come separately and pretend not to know each other. But they are seen talking-whispering-together by the twos and threes.”

“Ah!” I said. “Whispering. That is most interesting.”

“And then they all go boating,” the Burgermeister said.

“Boating?”

“Yes. Separately, by ones and twos, they rent or borrow boats and row, paddle, or sail out onto the Bodensee. Sometimes they come home in the evening, sometimes they don’t.”

“Where do they go?”

“I don’t know,” Pindl said. “We haven’t followed them.”

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

“Off and on, for about a year,” he said. “They go away for a while, and then they come back. Which is another reason we noticed them. The same collection of Englanders who don’t know each other appearing at the same time every few months. Really!”

“How many of them would you say there were?” I asked.

“Perhaps two dozen,” he said. “Perhaps more.”

I thought this over for a minute. “Is there anything else you can tell me about them?” I asked.

He shrugged. “All ages, all sizes,” he said. “All men, as far as I know. Some of them speak perfect German. Some, I’ve been told, speak fluent French. They all speak English.”

I stood up. “Thank you,” I said. “The Nachrichtendienst will not forget the help you have been.”

I had dinner at a small waterfront restaurant, and watched the shadows grow across the lake as the sun sank behind the mountains. After dinner I returned to my room, where Holmes joined me about an hour later.

I related my experiences of the day, and he nodded thoughtfully and went “hmmm” twice. “Englanders,” he said. “Interesting. I think the game’s afoot.”

“What game are we stalking, Holmes?” I asked.

“I have seen some of your ‘Englanders,’” he told me. “In the Ludwig Hof shortly after lunch. I was enjoying a cassis and being expansively French when three men walked in and sat near me. They tried to engage me in conversation in English and German and, when I effected not to understand, bad French. We exchanged a few pleasantries and they tipped their hats and began speaking among themselves in English, which, incidently, is not as good as their German.”

“Ah!” I said.

“They insulted me several times in English, commenting with little imagination on my appearance and my probable parentage, and when I didn’t respond they became convinced that I couldn’t understand and thereafter spoke freely.”

“Saying?”

“Well, one thing that will interest you, is that Holmes and Moriarty are dead.”

“Really? And how did they die?”

“There was this great fight at Reichenbach Falls, and they both plunged in. Their correspondent saw it happen himself. There could be no mistake.”

I stared out the window at the snow covering a distant mountain peak. “Oscar Wilde says that people who are said to be dead often turn up later in San Francisco,” I said. “I’ve never been to San Francisco.”

Holmes stared intently down his long nose at me. “I don’t know what to make of you,” he said. “I never have.”

“So, now that we’re officially dead,” I said, “what do we do next?”

“When the faux Englishmen left the room,” Holmes continued. “I followed them. They went to the waterfront.”

“I trust you were not seen,” I said.

Holmes fastened a withering glare on the painting of an alpine meadow on the far wall. “When I don’t wish to be seen,” he stated, ‘I am not seen.”

“Silly of me,” I said. “What did you observe?”

“They entered a large warehouse next to a pier jutting into the lake. Attached to a short line by the warehouse door-”

“Three clothespins,” I ventured.

“Three white clothespins,” he corrected.

“Well,” I said. “Now we know where.”

“Not quite,” Holmes said. “I observed several more people entering the warehouse over the next hour. And then a door opened on the water side of the building, and the men boarded a steam launch named the Isolde, which was tied up to the pier next to the building. It then chuffed out onto the lake and away. I investigated and discovered that now there was only one man, an old caretaker, left in the warehouse.”

“Ah!” I said.

“The boat returned about an hour ago. Some men got off. A few of them were the same men who had boarded earlier, but not all.” he tapped his long, thin forefinger on the table. “They’re doing something out there somewhere on the lake. But it’s a big lake.”

“That presents an interesting problem,” I said. “How do we follow them over open water?”

Holmes stared out the window. “A two-pipe problem,” he said, pulling out his ancient brier and stuffing it with tobacco. “Perhaps three.”

Having smelled the foul mixture he prefers to smoke, I excused myself and went downstairs, where I indulged in a kaffee mit schlag. Mit, as it happens, extra schlag. About an hour later Holmes came downstairs, gave a slight nod in my direction and went out the front door. After a suitable time I followed. Night had fallen, and the streetlights were sparse and dim. A chill wind was blowing in off the lake.

Holmes was standing in the shadow of an old stable a block away. I smelled the foul tobacco odor emanating from his clothing before I actually saw him.

“Commandant Vernet,” I said.

“Herr Stuhl.”

“Have your three pipes shown the way?”

“If we had time we could build a large observation balloon and watch them from high aloft,” Holmes said. “But we have no time. I think one of us will have to stow away on that steam launch and see where she goes.”

“If nominated I shall not run,” I told him firmly, “and if elected I shall not serve.”

“What’s that?”

“The American General Sherman. I am taking his excellent advice.”

Holmes looked at me with distaste. “With all your faults,” he said, “I didn’t picture you as a coward.”

“And neither am I foolhardy,” I told him. “There is little point in indulging in a foredoomed course of action when it will accomplish nothing and merely succeed in getting one killed. Remember Alphonse Lamphier.”

Holmes stared glumly into the dark. “I have nothing better to offer,” he said. “In large parts of the ocean ships leave a phosphorescent wake that lasts for some time, I understand, but not in lakes, however large.”

“What an excellent idea!” I said.

“A phosphorescent wake?”

“A wake of some sort. The craft will go wherever it is to go, and we shall follow in its wake.”

“How?”

“A moment,” I said, staring into space. “Why not oil? Some light oil dyed red should do it.”

“Brilliant!” said Holmes. “And who shall we get to sprinkle this oil on the water as the boat progresses?”

“We, my doubting Sherlock, shall construct a mechanism to do the task,” I said.

And so we did. The next morning I procured a five gallon drum of fish oil, which seemed appropriate, and took it down to a deserted jetty which Holmes had observed yesterday in his wanderings. I then went back to the main street and returned with a pair of iron exercise dumbbells, purchased from a junk shop. Holmes joined me shortly after, bringing a coil of quarter-inch marine line and a small bottle of red dye; some sort of pastry dye I believe, which we added to the oil. It seemed to mix satisfactorily, so we busied ourselves affixing some handles on the drum with metal screws. The screw holes would leak slightly, but that didn’t matter.

We changed into recently purchased bathing costumes and rented a two-man rowboat, wrapping our clothing and other items we might need in oilcloth and stowing them on the bottom of the small craft. After about twenty minutes rowing along the shore we came in sight of the pier in question. The steam launch Isolde was tied up alongside.

There appeared to be no one on watch in the launch, so we came up as quietly as possible to the opposite side of the pier and tied our boat to a convenient hook. Slipping into the chill water, we towed the drum of oil under the pier to the starboard side of the Isolde. We could hear the deep chugging of the steam engine as we approached the boat, which suggested that there would shortly be another journey.

I screwed two four-inch wood screws into the hull near the stern, and fastened one end of a twelve-foot length of marine line to them. The other end Holmes fastened to the oil drum. My calculations indicated that it would take the weight of both of the iron dumbbells to keep the drum submerged, so the two of them were tied firmly onto the sides of the drum. All that remained was to put a screw into the cork plugging the drum’s bunghole and attach it by a short line to the pier. That way as the steam launch left the pier, the cork would be pulled and the drum would begin leaking colored oil.

As we were completing this last task we heard footsteps above us on the pier, and the voices of the pseudo Englanders as they began boarding the launch. They all spoke English, those who spoke, and their accents were slight. Yet of all the myriad of home-grown accents which pepper the British Isles, allowing one man to despise another who grew up twenty miles to his north, these were none.

After about ten minutes the boarding was completed, the chugging of the steam engine grew louder and deeper, and the Isolde puled away from the pier. There was a slight but satisfying pop as the cork was pulled from the oil drum, and it began its journey bobbing out of sight behind the steam launch, spilling red oil as it went.

“We’d better get out of the water,” said Holmes, “I’ m losing sensation in my hands and feet.”

“Cold baths are much over-rated,” I agreed, shivering uncontrollably as I threw myself back into the rowboat. I held it steady for Holmes to climb aboard, and then we were both occupied for some time in toweling ourselves off and putting our garments back on.

“Let’s get going,” Holmes said after a few minutes. “They’re getting further ahead by the moment, and besides the exercise of rowing will warm us up.”

I took up one pair of oars, and Holmes the other, and we maneuvered our small craft out onto the lake. The sun was overhead, and a slight but clearly visible red stain was slowly widening as it led off in the direction of the departing steam launch, which was already distant enough for its image to be covered by my thumb with my arm extended.

We rowed energetically after the Isolde, cutting easily through the gentle swells left by her wake. If she was barely visible to us, surely our small craft was no more than a speck to any of her company who should chance to be peering back toward shore. Soon she was out of sight entirely, and we followed by keeping in sight the slight red smear visible under the bright sun.

It was perhaps half an hour later when the tenuous watery red trail brought us in sight of the steam launch. She was headed back toward us, pulling away from a large black barge which had a curious superstructure, and seemed to have been outfitted with some sort of engine at the rear. At any rate, the barge was moving slowly under its own power even as the Isolde pulled away. The deck of the Isolde was crowded with men and, as it seemed probable that there were even more men inside the cabin, it looked as though the crew of the black barge were going home for the night.

We altered our course slightly to make it appear that we were headed for the opposite shore, and tried to look like two middle aged gentlemen who were passionate about rowing, perhaps recapturing their youth. As the Isolde approached us we waved in a friendly but disinterested manner, and two of the men on deck replied with similar salutations. Who, I wondered, was fooling whom? I hoped it was us, them, or our story might have quite a different ending than we had intended.

“What now?” Holmes asked me, when it was clear that the steam launch was not going to turn around and investigate us more closely.

“The black barge,” I said.

“Of course,” Holmes told me. “I repeat, what now?”

“As it’s still under power, although making slight headway, there are still men aboard,” I said. “So just pulling alongside and clambering on deck is probably not a wise option.”

Holmes lifted his oars out of the water and turned to glare at me. “Astute observation,” he said. “I repeat, what now?”

“We could swim over to it underwater if the water wasn’t so cold; if we could swim that far under water. We could come alongside and flail about, claiming to be in distress, and see whether those aboard choose to rescue us.”

“Or just shoot us and toss us overboard,” Holmes commented.

“Yes, there’s always that possibility,” I agreed.

Holmes sighed deeply. “I guess there’s nothing for it then,” he said, shipping the oars and laying back in his seat to stare at the cloud-filled sky. “We float about here until dark and spend our time praying for it not to rain.”

Which is what we did. Our prayers were almost answered, in that a light, but extremely cold drizzle fell for a while, but then went away to be replaced by a chill wind.

One thing I must say about Holmes is that, barring his periodic fixation on me as the fount of all that is evil, he is a good companion: dependable and steadfast in adversity, intelligent and quick-thinking in a fix; a loyal ally and, as I have had occasion to discover in the past, a formidable foe. I found myself thinking about Holmes and our past history as we waited. What Holmes thought about I cannot say.

Dark fell with admirable speed that evening. By ten past eight I couldn’t read my pocket watch without striking a match-the light well shielded from view, of course. There were no lights visible from the black barge either. If lamps were lit in the cabins, the windows and portholes must have been well shielded. We waited a while longer-how long I cannot say as I didn’t want to strike another match-and then, dipping our oars as silently as possible, headed in the direction of the barge. The moon was a slender crescent, the light was scant, and the barge proved as difficult to find as you might imagine a black barge on an almost moonless night would do. For a while we could hear the painfully slow throb of the barge’s motor, but it was impossible to tell from just what direction it was coming. And the sound carried so well over the water that it did not seem to increase or lessen in whatever direction we rowed. And then it stopped. It wasn’t until a man came on deck carrying a lantern, heading from the aft deckhouse to the forward deckhouse, that we were able to be sure of our heading. In another five minutes we were under the stern overhang of the barge, where we tied the rowboat up to the port side and paused to consider.

“Up onto the deck, find a blunt object or two to use as weapons, and get below, or at least inside, as quickly as possible,” Holmes said.

“Forward or aft?” I asked.

“We are aft,” Holmes said, “so let us not waste time by going forward.”

I agreed. We moved the rowboat around to the side of the barge as far as we could without untying it and I felt about for a hand hold. “Well!” I whispered. “Piety and good works are indeed rewarded in this life.”

“What?” Holmes murmured.

“There’s a ladder fixed to the side here,” I told him. I took hold with both hands and started up, with Holmes right behind me. Once on deck we moved toward the rear cabin, feeling our way along the railing. I reached some impediment; a large metal object covered with a canvas and gutta-percha weather shield, and paused to feel my way around it and to determine what it was-like the blind man trying to describe an elephant. But after a few moments of grasping and groping the outline of the elephant became clear.

“Well I’ll be!” I said, or perhaps it was something stronger.

“What is it?” asked Holmes, who was right behind me.

“It is a three-inch naval gun, probably a Hoskins and Reed. It will fire a nine-pound projectile something over three miles accurately. It’s the latest thing in gunnery. Royal Navy destroyers are being outfitted with them even now.”

“I didn’t know you were so well acquainted with naval ballistics,” Holmes said. His voice sounded vaguely accusatory, but then it often does when he speaks to me.

“I am well acquainted with a wide range of things,” I told him.

We continued our progress toward the aft deckhouse. I was hoping to come across a belaying pin, or a length of iron pipe, or anything that could be worked loose and used as a weapon, but nothing came to hand.

We reached the deckhouse door and Holmes pulled it open. It was as dark inside as out. We entered. By creeping ahead silently and feeling along the wall we were able to ascertain that we were in a corridor of unknown length, with doors on each side.

Light suddenly cascaded into the corridor as a door further down was opened. A man stood in the doorway talking to someone inside the room, but in another second he would surely come into the corridor. I tugged at Holmes’s sleeve and pointed to what the light had just revealed: a stairs, or as they call anything with steps on a ship a ladder, going up. By mounting quickly we could avoid being seen. We did so. There was a door at the head of the ladder, which I opened and we went through. The door made a loud “click” on closing, and we paused, waiting to see whether this would alert those below. Holmes assumed the “Standing Locust” Baritsu posture to the left of the door, ready in mind and body for whoever might come through. I grabbed a spanner from a nearby shelf and stood, poised, on the right side.

There were no hurried footsteps up the ladder, no whispered voices from downstairs, so after a few moments we relaxed and looked around. An oil lamp on gimbals mounted to the ceiling cast a dull light around the room. It appeared to be the wheelhouse of a large vessel, with the forward windows covered with heavy drapes. There was an oversized ship’s wheel in the center, with calling pipes, and a ship’s telegraph, a chart cabinet and chart table to the rear, and various bits of nautical equipment affixed here and there throughout the room. A captain’s chair was bolted to the deck on the left, excuse me, port side, and a ship’s compass squatted alongside. A metal-strapped leather chest big enough to hold a fair sized man doubled over sat on the other side of the chair.

“A wheelhouse for a barge,” Holmes whispered. “How odd.”

“It does have an engine,” I said.

“Yes, but I doubt if it can attain a speed of greater than three or four knots. One would think that a tiller would suffice.” He took the oil lamp off its mount and began a slow inspection of the room, bending, sniffing, peering and probing at the walls, floor, and bits of apparatus scattered about. The chest was securely locked, and there seemed to be nothing else of interest in the room. After a few minutes he stood erect and put the lantern on the chart table. “This is very peculiar,” he said.

“It is indeed,” I agreed. “This is not the wheelhouse of a scow-this is the command bridge of a naval ship.”

“Say, rather, a mockup or model of it,” Holmes said. “The chart cabinet is devoid of charts, and the chart that’s pinned to this table is a Royal Navy chart of the Bay of Naples.

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “we have found the fabled Swiss navy.”

“I think not,” Holmes said. “I found this.” He held out a blue cap for my perusal. It was a British Navy seaman’s cap, and on the side the words “ H.M.S. Royal Edgar ” were embroidered in gold thread.

“The Royal Edgar is a destroyer,” I told Holmes. “ Royal Henry class. Four funnels. Six torpedo tubes. Two four-inch and eight two-inch guns. Top speed a hair under thirty knots.”

“How do you happen to know that?” Holmes asked, an undercurrent of suspicion creeping into his voice.

“I have recently done some work for the admiralty,” I explained. “I, of course, made it a point to learn the names and ratings of all of Her Majesty’s ships currently in service.”

He shook the cap in my face. “You mean they trust you to-” he paused and took a deep breath. “Never mind,” he finished. He pointed across the room. “That chest may hold something of import, but the rest of the room is devoid of interest.

“Except for the hat,” I said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “That is very interesting.”

“I didn’t bring my lockpicks,” I said, “and if we break the chest open, we will be announcing our presence.”

“Interesting conundrum,” Holmes allowed.

It was one we never got the chance to resolve. There was a rumbling and a thudding and a screeching and the sound of voices from below. No-from the deck outside. Holmes closed the lantern and we pulled one of the curtains aside to see what was happening.

The steam launch had returned and was now tied up alongside. If the men now embarking from it saw our rowboat tied up at the stern life would get interesting over the next few minutes. But the rowboat had swung back around out of sight, and it would be an unlucky accident if they were to see it.

There was a barking of orders-in German, I noted-and the eight or ten men who had come aboard scurried about to do whatever they had come aboard to do. Three of them headed to the door in the aft deckhouse below us, and the two men inside had opened the door to greet them.

“If they come up here…,” Holmes said.

“Yes,” I said, remembering the layout of the darkened room. “There is no place to conceal ourselves.”

“Behind these curtains is the only possibility,” Holmes whispered. “And that’s not a good one.”

“Well,” I said, hearing the tramp of boots on the ladder,” it will have to do.”

We retreated to the far side of the curtains and twitched them closed scant seconds before I heard the door being opened and two-no, three-sets of footsteps entering the room.

“The lamp must have gone out,” one of them said in German. “I’ll light it.”

“No need,” another replied in the same language, the sound of authority in his voice. “All we need from here is the chest. Shine your light over there-there. Yes, there it is. You two, pick it up.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Take it down and onto the launch right away,” the imperious voice said. “This must accompany us on the train to Trieste.”

“Right away, Your Grace.” And, with a minor cacophony of thumps, bumps and groans, the chest was lifted and carried out the door. After a few seconds it was clear that His Grace had left with the chest, and we were once again alone in the room.

“Well,” I said, stepping out from behind the curtain. “Trieste. Now if we only knew-”

Holmes held his hand up to silence me. He was peering out of the window with a concentrated fury, glaring down at our recent guests as they went on deck through the downstairs door.

“What is it?” I asked.

“One moment,” he said.

For a second “his grace” turned his head, and his profile was illuminated by the lantern carried by one of the crew. Holmes staggered backward and clapped his hand to his forehead. “I was not wrong!” he said. “I knew I recognized that voice!”

“Who, His Grace?” I asked.

“He!” he said. “It is he!”

“Whom?”

“His name is Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein,” Holmes told me. “Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and Hereditary King of Bohemia.”

“Is he indeed?” I asked. “And how do you know His Grace?”

“He employed me once,” Holmes said. “I will not speak of it further.”

“The case had nothing to do with our current, er, problem?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he assured me.

“Then I, also, shall not speak of it again.” Whatever it was, it must have affected Holmes greatly, but now was not the time to pick at old wounds. “I take it he has little use for the English?” I asked.

“He has little regard for anything British,” Holmes affirmed. “And I believe that he has no fondness for anyone except himself, and possibly members of his immediate family.”

“Truly a prince,” I said.

The last of our visitors boarded the steam launch, and it cast off and pulled away from the barge. “I wonder what prompted the midnight visit,” I said.

“Nothing good,” Holmes opined.

There was a crumping sound, as of a distant belching beneath the water, and then another, and the barge listed toward the starboard side with a great creaking and a series of snaps.

“There’s your answer,” Holmes said, as we both grabbed for the nearest support in order to remain upright. “Those were explosions. They’re scuttling this craft. She’ll be under in ten minutes, unless she breaks apart first, and then it will be faster. Much faster.”

“Perhaps we should make our exit,” I suggested.

“Perhaps,” he agreed.

We hurried down the ladder and onto the deck.

“Hilfe! Hilfen sie mir, bitte!”

The faint cry for help came from somewhere forward. “We’re coming!” I called into the dark. “Wir kommen! Wo sind Sie?”

“Ich weiss nicht. In einem dunklen Raum,” came the reply.

“‘In a dark room’ doesn’t help,” Holmes groused. “It couldn’t be any darker than it is out here.”

The barge picked that moment to lurch and sag further to starboard.

“Hilfe!”

We struggled our way to the forward deckhouse. The cry for help was coming from somewhere to the left of the door. I felt my way along the wall until I came to a porthole. “Hello!” I called inside, knocking on the glass.

“Oh, thank God,” cried the man in German. “You have found me! You must, for the love of God, untie me before this wretched vessel sinks.”

Holmes and I went in through the door and down a short length of corridor until we came to a left-hand turn.

“Ow!” said Holmes.

“What?”

I heard a scraping sound. “Wait a second,” Holmes said. “I’ve just banged my head.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“No need,” he told me. “I’ve just banged my head on a lantern hanging from the ceiling. Give me a second and I’ll have it lit.”

He took a small waterproof case of wax matches from his pocket, and in a few seconds had the lantern glowing. “Onward!” he said.

Opening the third door along the corridor revealed a short, portly man in a white shirt and dark, striped trousers and vest, tied to a large wooden chair. His exertions in trying to escape had covered his face with bands of sweat and pulled much of his shirt loose from his waistband, but his thin black tie was still properly and severely in place. “Light!” the man said. “Oh, bless you my friends, whoever you are.”

We worked at untying him as quickly as possible as the barge gave a series of alarming jerks and kicks under us and tilted ever more drastically. Now, in addition to its list to the starboard, there was a decided tilt aft.

“Thank you, thank you,” said the plump man as the rope came off his legs. “They left me here to die. And for what?”

“For what, indeed?” I replied.

“It all started…”

“Let’s wait until we’re off this vessel,” Holmes interjected, “or in a very few moments we’ll be talking under water.”

We helped our rotund comrade up, although our feet were not much steadier than his, and with much slipping and sliding we made our way along the deck. An alarming shudder ran through the vessel as we reached the stern, and we quickly lowered our new friend into the rowboat and followed him down. Holmes and I manned the oars and energetically propelled ourselves away from the sinking barge, but we had gone no more than fifteen or twenty yards when the craft gave a mighty gurgle and descended beneath the water, creating a wave that pulled us back to the center of a great vortex, and then threw us up into the air like a chip of wood in a waterfall. In a trice we were drenched and our flimsy craft was waterlogged, but by some miracle we were still in the rowboat and it was still afloat. Holmes began bailing with his cap, and our guest with his right shoe, while I continued the effort to propel us away from the area.

I oriented myself by the ever-dependable North Star, and headed toward the south east. In a little while Holmes added his efforts to my own, and we were rowing across the dark waters with reasonable speed despite our craft still being half-full of water. Our plump shipmate kept bailing until he was exhausted, then spent a few minutes panting, and commenced bailing again.

It was perhaps half an hour before we spied lights in the distance indicating that the shore was somewhere ahead of us. Half an hour more and we had nosed into a beach. A small, steep, rocky beach, but nonetheless a bit of dry land, and we were grateful. The three of us climbed out of the rowboat and fell as one onto the rough sand, where we lay exhausted and immobile. I must have slept, but I have no idea of how long. When next I opened my eyes dawn had risen, and Holmes was up and doing exercises by the water’s edge.

“Come, arise my friend,” he said-he must have been drunk with exercise to address me thus-“we must make our preparations and be on our way.”

I sat up. “Where are we off to?” I asked.

“Surely it should be obvious,” Holmes replied.

“Humor me,” I said.

“Trieste,” said Holmes. “Wherever Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein goes, there we shall go. For whatever is happening, he is the leader or one of the leaders.”

“Is it your dislike of him that speaks?” I asked. “For you have often said the same of me, and seldom was it so.”

“Ah, but on occasion…,” Holmes said. “But in this case it is my knowledge of the man. He would not be a member of any organization that did not let him be its leader, or at least believe that he is the leader, for he is vain and would be easily led himself.”

Our rotund friend sat up. “Is that English which you speak?” he asked in German.

“ Ja,” I said, switching to that language. “It is of no importance.”

“That is what those swine that abducted me spoke when they did not want me to understand,” he said, laboriously raising himself to his knees and then to his feet. “But they kept forgetting-and I understood much.”

“Good!” I said. “We will all find dry clothing for ourselves, and you shall tell us all about it.”

He stood up and offered me his hand. “I am Herr Paulus Hansel, and I thank you and your companion for saving my life.”

“On behalf of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself, Professor James Moriarty, I accept your thanks,” I told him, taking the offered hand and giving it a firm shake.

“I have clothing at my-oh-I don’t dare go back to my hotel.” our friend’s hands flew to his mouth. “Supposing they are there waiting for me?”

“Come now,” Holmes said. “They believe you are dead.”

“I would not disabuse them of this notion,” he said.

We walked the three or so miles back to our hotel, booked a room for Herr Hansel, and set about our ablutions and a change of clothes. We gave the concierge the task of supplying suitable garb for our rotund friend, and he treated it as though guests of the Hotel Athenes returned water soaked and bedraggled every day of the year. Perhaps they did.

It was a little after 8:00 when we met at the hotel’s restaurant for breakfast. “Now,” Holmes said, spreading orange marmalade on his croissant and turning to Herr Hansel, “I have restrained my curiosity long enough, and you may well be possessed of information useful to us. Start with what you were doing on that barge, if you don’t mind.”

Herr Hansel drained his oversized cup of hot chocolate, put the cup down with a satisfied sigh, and wiped his mustache. “That is simple,” he said, refilling the cup from the large pitcher on the table. “I was preparing to die. And were you gentlemen not on board, I most assuredly would have done so.”

“What caused your companions to treat you in so unfriendly a manner?” I asked.

“They were no companions of mine,” he replied. “I am the proprietor of the Hansel and Hansel Costume Company.” he tapped himself on the chest. “I am the second Hansel, you understand. The first Hansel, my father, retired from the business some years ago and devotes himself to apiculture.”

“Really?” asked Holmes. “I would like to meet him.”

“Certainly,” Hansel agreed. “I am sure he would like to thank the man who saved his son’s life.”

“Yes, there is that,” Holmes agreed. “Go on with your story.”

“Yes. I delivered yesterday a large order of costumes to a certain Count von Kramm at the Adlerhof.”

“Hah!” Holmes interjected. We looked at him, but he merely leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed across his chest and murmured, “continue!”

“Yes,” said Hansel. “Well, they were naval costumes. Officers and ordinary seamen’s uniforms. From shoes to caps, with insignia and ribbons and everything.”

“Fascinating,” I said. “British Royal Navy uniforms, no doubt.”

“Why, yes,” Hansel agreed. “And quite enough of them to have costumed the full cast of that Gilbert and Sullivan show- Pinafore.”

“And the name you stitched on the caps,” Holmes interjected, “could it have been the Royal Edgar?”

“Indeed it was,” Hansel said, looking startled. “How did you…”

“Much like this one?” Holmes asked, pulling the cap we had found out of his pocket and placing it on the table.

Hansel picked it up, examined it carefully, crumpled the cloth in his hands and sniffed at it. “Why, yes,” he agreed, “this is one of ours.”

“Go on,” I said. “How did you get yourself tied up in that cabin?”

“It was when I asked about the undergarments,” Hansel said. “Count von Kramm seemed to take offense.

“Undergarments?”

Hansel nodded and took a large bite of sausage. “We were asked to supply authentic undergarments, and I went to considerable trouble to comply with his request.”

“Whatever for?” asked Holmes.

Hansel shrugged a wide, expressive shrug. “I did not ask,” he said. “I assumed it was for whatever production he was planning to put on. I acquired the requested undergarments from the Naval Stores at Portsmouth, so their authenticity was assured.”

“You thought it was for a play?” I asked. “Doesn’t that sound like excessive realism?”

Another shrug. “I have heard that when Untermeyer produces a show at the Konigliche Theater he puts loose change in the corners of the couches and stuffed chairs, and all the doors and windows on the set must open and close even if they are not to be used during the performance.”

“Who are we to question theatrical genius?” Holmes agreed. “If Count Kramm’s theatrical sailors are to wear sailors’ undergarments, why then so be it.”

“Indeed,” said Hansel. “But why only five sets?”

Holmes carefully put down his coffee cup. “Five sets only?”

“That’s right.”

“And how many sets of, ah, outer garments?”

“Thirty five complete uniforms. Twelve officers and the rest common sailors.”

“How strange,” I said.

Hansel nodded. “That’s what I said. That’s why I ended up tied up on that chair, or so I suppose.”

Holmes looked at me. “Count von Kramm,” he said, “or as I know him better, Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein and Hereditary King of Bohemia, dislikes being questioned.”

“I see,” I said.

“Von Kramm is one of his favorite aliases.”

“That man is a king?” Hansel asked, a note of alarm in his voice. “There is no place where one can hide from a king.”

“Do not be alarmed,” Holmes told him. “By now he has forgotten that you ever existed.”

“Ah, yes,” Hansel said. “There is that about kings.”

Holmes stood. “I think we must go to Trieste,” he said. “There is devil’s work afoot.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “I need to send a telegram. I’ll have the reply sent to Trieste.”

“I, I think, must go home,” said Hansel.

“Yes, of course,” Holmes agreed. He took Hansel’s hand. “You have earned the thanks of another royal person, and I shall see that, in the fullness of time, you are suitably rewarded.”

“You are g-going to r-r-reward me?” Hansel stammered. “But your grace, your kingship, I had no idea. I mean…”

Holmes barked out a short laugh. “No, my good man,” he said. “Not I. A gracious lady on whose shoulders rest the weight of the greatest empire in the world.”

“Oh,” said Hansel. “Her.”

The city of Trieste rests on the Gulf of Trieste, which is the northern tip of the Adriatic Sea, and is surrounded by mountains where it isn’t fronting water. The city dates back to Roman times, and its architecture is a potpourri of every period from then to the present. Although it is putatively a part of the Austrian Empire, its citizens mostly speak Italian, and are more concerned with the happenings in Rome and Venice than those in Vienna and Budapest.

The journey took us two days by the most direct route we could find. But we reconciled ourselves with the thought that von Ormstein and his band of pseudo-English sailors couldn’t have arrived much ahead of us.

During the journey we discussed what we had found out and worked out a course of action. It was necessarily vague, as although we now had a pretty good idea of what von Ormstein was planning, we didn’t know what resources we would find available to us to stop him from carrying out his dastardly scheme.

Before we left Lindau Holmes and I had sent a telegram to Mycroft:

SEND NAMES AND LOCATIONS OF ALL DESTROYERS OF ROYAL HENRY CLASS REPLY GENERAL PO TRIESTE SHERLOCK

A reply awaited us when we arrived. We retired to a nearby coffee house and perused it over steaming glasses of espresso:

EIGHT SHIPS IN CLASS ROYAL HENRY ROYAL ELIZABETH AND ROYAL ROBERT WITH ATLANTIC FLEET AT PORTSMOUTH ROYAL STEPHEN IN DRYDOCK BEING REFITTED ROYAL WILLIAM IN BAY OF BENGAL ROYAL EDWARD AND ROYAL EDGAR ON WAY TO AUSTRALIA ROYAL MARY DECOMMISSIONED SOLD TO URUGUAY PRESUMABLY CROSSING ATLANTIC TO MONTEVIDEO WHAT NEWS MYCROFT

I slapped my hand down on the coffee table. “Uruguay!”

Holmes looked at me.

“Uruguay is divided into nineteen departments,” I told him.

“That is the sort of trivia with which I refuse to burden my mind,” he said. “The study of crime and criminals provides enough intellectual…”

“Of which one,” I interrupted, “is Florida.”

He stopped, his mouth open. “Florida?”

“Just so.”

“The letter… ‘The Florida is now ours.’”

“It is common practice to name warships after counties, states, departments, or other subdivisions of a country,” I said. “The British Navy has an Essex, a Sussex, a Kent, and several others, I believe.”

Holmes thought this over. “The conclusion in inescapable,” he said. “The Florida…”

“And the undergarments,” I said.

Holmes nodded. “When you have eliminated the impossible,” he said, “whatever remains, however improbable, stands a good chance of being the truth.”

I shook my head. “And you have called me the Napoleon of crime,” I said. “Compared to this…”

“Ah!” said Holmes. “But this isn’t crime, this is politics. International intrigue. A much rougher game. There is no honor among politicians.”

We walked hurriedly to the British consulate on Avenue San Lucia and identified ourselves to the Consul, a white-haired, impeccably dressed statesman named Aubrey, requesting that he send a coded message to Whitehall.

He looked at us quizzically over his wire-rim glasses. “Certainly, gentlemen,” he said. “To what effect?”

“We are going to ask Her Majesty’s government to supply us with a battleship,” Holmes said, and paused, waiting for the reaction.

It was not what one might have expected. “There are no British battleships visiting the port right now,” Aubrey said, folding his hands over his ample stomach and leaning back in his chair. “Will a cruiser do?”

Holmes leaned over the desk. “We are in earnest,” he said, his intense eyes glowering over his thin, ascetic nose, “and this is not a jest. To the contrairy, it is of the utmost importance and urgency.”

“I have no doubt,” replied Aubrey, looking up mildly. “My offer was sincere. If a cruiser will suffice, I am ready to put one at your disposal. It’s all that’s available. There are some four or five Royal Navy torpedo gunboats working with the Italian Navy engaged in the suppression of smugglers and pirates in the Mediterranean, but I can’t predict when one of them will come to port.”

“But you’re prepared to put a cruiser at, er, our disposal?” I asked

“I am,” said Aubrey, nodding. “That is, I have no direct authority to do so, but the authority has been passed on to me from Whitehall. I received a cable this morning directing me to do all I could to assist you, were you to show up. I must say I’ve never been given an instruction like that before in eighteen years in the Foreign Service. From the P.M. himself, don’t you know. Along with a screed from the Admiralty”

Holmes straightened up. “Mycroft!” he said.

“Undoubtedly,” I agreed.

“Her Majesty’s Ship Agamemnon is in port,” said Aubrey, “and I have passed on the request of the Admiralty to Captain Preisner that he keep steam up and to await further instructions. Now, if you could tell me what this is all about, perhaps I could be of some further assistance.”

“Let us head to the docks immediately,” Holmes said. “We will explain on the way.”

Aubrey reached for the bell pull behind his desk. “Call up my carriage,” he told the man who appeared in answer to his summons. “And fetch my greatcoat, there’s a chill in the air.”

Consul Aubrey gave instructions, and soon we were racing through the streets of Trieste heading toward the municipal docks, where a waiting launch would take us to the Agamemnon. “In case something goes wrong,” Holmes told the Consul, “and there’s every chance it will, you’ll have to prepare.”

“Prepare for what?” Aubrey asked. “In what way?”

Holmes and I took it in turns to tell him what we knew and what we surmised. “We may not have all the details correct,” I said, “but if events do not unfold much as we have described, I will be greatly surprised.”

“But this is incredible!” Aubrey said. “How did you figure all this out?”

“No time now,” Holmes declared as the carriage pulled to a stop. “We must hurry.”

“Good luck,” Aubrey said. “I shall return to the consulate and prepare for your success or failure, whichever comes from this madness.”

“It must sound mad,” I agreed. “But it is not our madness, but that of our antagonist.”

“Come,” said Holmes. “Let us board the launch.”

We leapt aboard the steam launch. The boatswain saluted us as we raced past him down the gangway and then blew on his whistle twice, and we were off. The harbor was thick with shipping, and we weaved and dodged between vessels of all sorts and sizes, making our way to the great, looming bulk of the three-stack cruiser of modern design that was our destination.

When we reached the Agamemnon a ladder was lowered from the deck of the cruiser to receive us. The sea was calm in the harbor, but transferring from the rolling deck of the steam launch to the pitching ladder at the cruiser’s side, even in those gentle swells, was more of an effort than a sedate unadventuresome man of my years found enjoyable.

Captain Preisner’s flag officer met us as we stepped onto the deck, and led he way to the bridge of the Agammenon, where Preisner, a thin man with a bony face and a short, pointed gray beard, greeted us warily. “Mr. Holmes, he said, with a stiff nod of his head, “Professor Moriarty. Welcome, I think, to the Agamemnon.”

“Captain,” I acknowledged.

Preisner flapped a sheet of yellow paper at us. “I am requested and required by the Admiralty to give you whatever assistance you require, without asking questions. Or, at least, without demanding answers. Which, I must say are the oddest instructions I have ever received.”

“This may be the oddest mission you will ever engage in,” Holmes told him.

Captain Preisner sighed. “And somehow I have the feeling that it will not bring accolades to me or my crew,” he said.

“You will probably be requested not to mention it in your official report,” I told him. “And, were I you, I would not enter the details in my log until I had time to think deeply on it.”

“It was ever thus,” Preisner said. “What am I to do?”

I pointed to the south. “Somewhere out there, not too far away, is a destroyer flying the Union Jack, or possibly the Red Ensign. We have to stop it and board it. Or, if that proves impossible, sink it.”

Preisner looked at me, speechless. And then he looked at Holmes, who nodded. “Sink a British warship?” he asked incredulously.

“Ah,” Holmes said, “but it isn’t. And if we do not succeed in stopping it, some major outrage will be committed in the harbor of Trieste or some nearby coastal city, and it will be blamed on the British Navy.”

“A ruse of war?” Preisner asked. “But we aren’t at war, that I know of.”

“We’d better consider it a ‘ruse of peace,’ then,” Holmes said. “Although the ultimate purpose of the exercise might well be to provoke a state of war between Britain and several continental powers.”

“A Royal Navy destroyer,” Preisner mused, “that isn’t a Royal Navy destroyer.”

“The name on her side will be Royal Edgar, I told him. “In reality she is the decommissioned Royal Mary, which has been sold to Uruguay. The Uruguayan government, we believe, renamed her the Florida.”

“We’re going to war with Uruguay?”

“She is now in the hands of a group of rogue European, ah, gentlemen, who plan to use her to provoke animosity and, perhaps, active hostilities against Great Britain. How the transfer was made from the Uruguayan authorities to the plotters remains to be seen. It could well be that the government of Uruguay knows nothing of the supposed sale.”

“My god! How did you-never mind that now!” Preisner swung around and barked out a series of orders which got the great ship underway.

While the Agamemnon made her way out into the Gulf of Trieste and headed down the Adriatic Sea, Captain Preisner concerned himself with the handling of his ship, but once we were in open water he turned the helm over to Lieutenant Willits, his bulldog-jawed, taciturn first officer, and called us to his side. “Now tell me what you know,” he said, “and what you surmise, so that we can plan a course of action.”

As rapidly as possible, but leaving out nothing of consequence, we told him our story. Holmes took the lead, and in that nasal, high-pitched voice of his outlined what we knew and how we had learned it.

Preisner rested his elbows on the ledge running around the front of the bridge, directly below the large glass windscreens, and stared out at the choppy blue-green sea. “And on these meager facts you have commandeered one of Her Majesty’s battle cruisers and set out in search of a destroyer that may or may not exist, and that, if it does exist, may or may not be planning some harm to British interests? And the Lords of the Admiralty have agreed with this, ah, unlikely interpretation?” he shook his head. “I will obey orders, even if it means obeying your orders and racing up and down the Adriatic, but frankly I don’t see it.”

“You don’t agree that it is likely that this cabal has gotten possession of the Royal Mary and intends harm to Britain?” Holmes asked.

Of what possible profit to them could such an action be?” Preisner asked. “I grant you your conclusion that these people were training a crew to operate a British warship, and the Royal Mary might well be the one. And if they were planning to come to Trieste, then they were probably picking up the ship somewhere around here. But is it not more likely that, having obtained the ship, they will take it to some distant port to commit their outrage, if indeed an outrage is planned?”

“There are several reasons to believe that, whatever sort of attack they are planning, it will be nearby and soon,” I said.

“For one thing,” said Holmes, “their men cannot be all that well trained in the handling of a modern destroyer.”

“For another,” I added, “every extra hour they spend will increase the likelihood that they will be intercepted by some ship of Her Majesty’s Mediterranean Fleet. And one attempt to exchange signals would brand her as an imposter.”

“For maximum effect,” Holmes said, ‘the outrage should be conducted close to a city or large town, so that it will be observed by as many people as possible.”

“That makes sense,” Preisner agreed.

“And then there are the undergarments,” I said.

“Yes,” Holmes agreed. “That gives the whole game away.”

“Captain Preisner looked from one to the other of us. “It does?” he asked.

A mess steward came by with steaming mugs of tea for those on bridge, and he had thoughtfully included two for Holmes and me.

I took the tea gratefully and sipped at it. Neither Holmes nor I were dressed for chill breeze that whipped through the open doors of the bridge. “The men in the Royal Navy uniforms are to be visible on deck during the event,” I told Captain Preisner, “so that watchers on shore will believe the masquerade. But why undergarments?”

“And why only five?” Holmes added.

Preisner looked thoughtful. “A good question,” he said.

“The only reasonable answer is that those five men must pass close inspection when their bodies are examined.”

“Their bodies?”

“Consider,” said Holmes. “The undergarments only make sense if it is expected that the men will be examined.”

“Yes, I see that,” Preisner agreed.

“But if they are alive when they are examined, any discrepancies will become quickly evident,” said Holmes.

“As, for instance, their not speaking fluent English,” I added.

“So you think they are dressing corpses in British naval uniforms?” Preisner asked.

Holmes looked away. “Perhaps,” he said.

“Sail ho to the port!” a seaman outside the bridge relayed a call from the lookout on the top mast. We turned to look, but it was indeed a sail, the topsail of a three-masted barque, and not the four funnels of a British destroyer, that slowly came into sight on our port side.

We saw a variety of ships during the rest of that day, but it was dusk before we found the ship we were seeking. A four-masted destroyer appeared in the distance a few points off the starboard bow. Lieutenant Willits grabbed for the chart of identification silhouettes and ran his finger down the side while peering closely at the illustrations. “I don’t believe there would be any other four-masted destroyer in the area,” he said, “but it would not do to make a mistake.”

Captain Preisner examined the distant ship through his binoculars and, even before Willits had confirmed the identification, turned to the duty seaman and said quietly, “Signal all hands-battle stations.”

The seaman whistled down the communications tube and relayed the command and, almost immediately, an ordered bedlam descended on the boat as the members of the crew raced to their assigned positions.

“She’s flying no flags or pennants,” announced Willits, who was staring at the approaching ship through his own binoculars. “But she’s making no attempt to avoid us. There appears to be a small black ship of some sort to her rear.”

“It would look suspicious were she to turn aside,” said Preisner. “She doesn’t know that we’re stalking her. Hoist our own flag and the recognition code flag for today. And see if you can identify the ship to her rear.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Willits relayed the command, and in a few seconds several flags were fluttering at the top of the Agamemnon’s forward mast.

“No response,” said Willits after a minute. “Wait-she’s turning to port, trying to evade us. If she complete’s the turn, she’ll be able to show us her heels. She must have three or four knots better speed.”

“Probably less with an untrained engine crew,” commented Preisner. “But nonetheless-”

“I can make out her name now,” said Willits, peering through his binoculars. “She’s the Royal Edgar, right enough. Or claims she is. The other ship is keeping on her far side, but it appears to be some sort of large yacht, painted black.”

“A smuggler, no doubt,” said Preisner.

“I believe you’re right, sir.”

“Put a warning shot across her bow and run up the signal for ‘Come to a complete stop’,” directed the captain. “Helmsman, turn twenty degrees to the starboard.”

One of the Agamemnon ’s four-inch guns barked once, and a fountain of water appeared off the bow of the Royal Edgar.

The destroyer continuing turning, ignoring the warning. The Agamemnon fired another shot, which plunged into the water close enough to have soaked anyone standing by the bow of the Royal Edgar. A few seconds later one of the Royal Edgar ’s two-inch guns coughed a burst of flame, and an explosion sounded somewhere forward on the cruiser. A few seconds later, another burst, and a sound like the banging together of a hundred large iron pots came from amidships.

“They’re firing at us!” yelled Lieutenant Willits.”

“More fools they,” said Captain Preisner grimly, and he gave the order to return fire.

The universe became filled with awesome roaring sounds as the eight-inch guns of the Agamemnon hurled their hundred and twenty pound explosive missiles into the air. In two minutes the firing from the Royal Edgar had stopped, and Captain Preisner gave the order for our own ship to cease fire. A total of no more than a dozen rounds had been fired by the big guns of the cruiser, but the damage done to the destroyer gave one faith in the might of modern science. She was dead in the water and already starting to list to one side. Billows of smoke were coming from amidships, and a tongue of flame was growing toward the bow.

The black yacht had pulled up alongside the Royal Edgar now, and people were transferring over. Others were attempting to lower a lifeboat aft of the bridge.

“We should board her, Captain,” Holmes said.

“Why?” asked Preisner.

“There may be documents.”

“There may be wounded,” added Lieutenant Willits.

“I’ll have a boat lowered and ask for volunteers to row you over,” Preisner told us. “But I’m not bringing the Agamemnon anywhere near that vessel. And I warn you, she’s either going to blow up or go under quite soon, and quite suddenly.”

Volunteers were found-the human race never ceases to astound me-and the captain’s gig was lowered. We armed ourselves with revolvers and knives from a locker on the bridge, and we were shortly being rowed over to the Royal Edgar, which was not any lower in the water, although the fire was still burning. As we approached, the black yacht roared past us headed off toward the south. A portly man in a Royal Navy officer’s uniform standing rigidly in the rear of the yacht shook his fist at us as he passed.

“Would that be the king?” I asked Holmes.

“I believe it is,” Holmes told me. “Yes, I believe it is.”

We instructed our oarsmen to remain in the gig and to row rapidly away at the first sign that something untoward was about to happen.

“But what about yourselves, governor?” asked the bo’s’n in charge of the rowing party.

“We shall dive off the ship and swim rapidly toward the Agamemnon,” I told him.

“We’ll probably be there before you are,” Holmes added.

“Very good, sir,” responded the bo’s’n, but he was not convinced.

A couple of ropes were visible dangling over the side of the destroyer, and I grabbed one of them and pulled myself up. Holmes waited until I was on deck to follow me up the rope. There was very little damage evident on deck. Were it not for the smoke behind us and the fire ahead of us, it would look like there was nothing amiss.

“Why do you suppose they fled,” Holmes asked, “instead of attempting to fight the fire?”

“Perhaps they were not trained to do so,” I responded. “Perhaps they didn’t have the equipment.”

“Perhaps,” Holmes agreed.

We had boarded amidships. By some unspoken agreement, we both turned and went forward. “If there are any useful documents,” I said, “they’re probably in the bridge.”

“If there were any,” Holmes replied, “Wilhelm Gottsreich most assuredly took them with him.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

We reached the ladder leading up to the bridge, and Holmes went up ahead of me. He stopped, frozen, in the doorway, and I could not get by. “What is it, Holmes,” I asked, trying to peer around his shoulder.

“As I feared,” he said, “but could not bring myself to believe…” He moved into the room, and I entered behind him.

There, lined up against the back wall, were four men in the uniforms of ordinary seamen in the Royal Navy. Their hands and feet were tied, and their mouths were covered with sticking plaster. One of them seemed to have fainted; he was slumped over, only held up by the rope around his chest which was affixed to a metal hook in the wall. The other three were conscious: one trembling uncontrollably, one rigidly staring out the windscreen, his face frozen with shock, and the third fighting like a trapped beast against his bonds; his wrists raw, and blood streaming from his forehead.

A fifth man, his hands still tied behind him, lay prone on the floor, his face immersed in a large pan of water. He did not move. Holmes ran over to him, pulled up his head and rolled him over. After a few seconds he got up from the still body. “Too late,” he said.

We used our knives to free the other men and, grabbing what papers we could find without bothering to look through them, led the men back down the ladder and out to the gig. Twenty minutes later we were aboard the Agamemnon, and the Royal Edgar was still burning, but was no lower in the water and her list seemed not to have increased.

“We can’t leave her like this,” Captain Preisner said, “and I can’t tow her in; too many questions would be asked.”

“You’ll have to sink her,” Holmes said.

Captain Preisner nodded. “Order the main batteries to fire ten rounds each, controlled fire, at the destroyer,” he told the bridge duty officer.

About ten minutes after the last round was fired the destroyer gave a tremendous belch, and sunk prow first into the sea. The entire crew of the Agamemnon, having been informed that it was a sister ship they were forced to sink, stood silently at attention as she went down. Captain Preisner held a salute until the one-time Royal Mary was out of sight beneath the waves, as did all the officers on the bridge.

Captain Preisner sighed and relaxed. “I hope I never have to do anything like that again,” he said.

Later that evening Captain Preisner called us into his cabin. “I have a berth for you,” he said. “We won’t be back in port again until late tomorrow.”

“That’s fine, Captain,” I said. “We still have to compose our report to send back to Whitehall.”

Preisner looked at us. “Those men you brought aboard-you spoke to them?”

“We did.”

“And?”

“The five suits of undergarments,” Holmes said.

“But you only brought four men along.”

“True,” Holmes said. “Our antagonist had begun preparing for his assault. One of the men was already drowned. The others would have joined him shortly had we not come upon the ship when we did. The plan was to chase the black yacht in to the Trieste harbor, getting as close to the city as possible. Then fire some shots at the fleeing craft, which would miss and hit at random in the city. Then the destroyer would, itself, flee back out to sea. A small explosion, presumably caused by the yacht firing back, would cause the five drowned men to be flung into the water, there to be found in their Royal Navy uniforms by the locals.”

Captain Preisner stared at him speechless for a long moment. “And all this,” he said finally, “to discredit England?” he asked. “What good would it do?”

“Major conflagrations are started by small sparks,” Holmes said. “Who can say where this might have led?”

Preisner shook his head. “Madmen,” he said.

“Even so,” Holmes agreed. “There are an abundance of them.”

Later in our cabin Holmes turned to me and asked, “what are you planning to do after we send our report?”

I shrugged. “The world thinks I am dead,” I said. “Perhaps I shall take advantage of that and remain away from public ken.”

“I, also, had thought of doing something of the sort,” Holmes told me. “I’ve always wanted to travel to Tibet, perhaps speak with the Dali Lama.”

“A very interesting man,” I told him. “I’m sure you’d find such a conversation fruitful.”

Holmes stared at me for a long time, and then said “Good night, Professor,” and turned down the light.

“Good night, Holmes,” I replied.