The Confidential Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (11 page)

BY
K
ATHLEEN
B
RADY

O
n the third morning of October the disaster Holmes had prophesied occurred. A bomb exploded in a Paris police station with such force and brutality that part of the body of one of the unfortunate victims was found dangling from a gas fixture in the shattered room.

Until then, most Parisians thought the danger had passed. The anarchists who terrorized the city in the late spring had been silent for months. Raw fear had faded to a general wariness that year of
1894. Most inhabitants of that marvelous capital had lived so long with feelings of dread that they could no longer identify their own anxiety. It was as if they had a chronic ache that seemed to fade because they simply learned to accommodate it.

Holmes and I came to be in Paris on that fateful day because a few weeks before, over breakfast in London, he made a decision. I was buttering the toast that the excellent Mrs. Hudson served on her little silver rack and Holmes was sitting with his right leg at an angle to the table reading the weather reports in
The Times
. He let the newspaper fall to the floor and turned his full attention to his rashers.

“The calm is about to end,” he said. “The anarchists will come out of their holes with the approach of winter, Watson. They could not handle explosives safely during the hot months of summer because even the slightest rise in temperature can provoke a sudden detonation that will explode the operator into a score of pieces.” He poured himself a second cup of tea. “We shall assist the Paris police whether they want it or not. On second thought, I shall set things in motion so that the Palais de Justice shall actually invite our help.”

And so it came to be. Holmes's diplomatic contacts were such that he quickly received an official invitation. French officials were fairly frantic with eagerness to have Holmes come help them.

The task, to be fair, was impossible. Not even the esteemed Sherlock Holmes could tear out anarchism by its root. It had no root, no organized plan. It was an idea, a belief, a cause. There was no central conspiracy, only individual anarchists who believed in absolute freedom of the individual. They opposed every restraint, and believed as their social philosopher Proudhon did that “property is theft.”

Building by building, anarchists tried to claim private property for the common ownership of all by blowing it to bits. In the process they murdered, as if by accident, people in the streets. First they dynamited a department store, then a bank, and finally one of their number assassinated the president of France. Over the steamy
summer, the violent acts ceased as the wretched malcontents stewed in the torrid heat and made their plans.

Holmes and I settled into a hotel near the Palais de Justice on that fatal morning. We finished our croissants and café au lait and were longing for Mrs. Hudson's bacon and tea when we received an American journalist who came to interview Holmes for a new magazine. Normally, Holmes would not have considered granting an interview but this person represented a new type that Holmes thought he should become familiar with. She was an American spinster living in Paris on her own and supporting herself, God knew how, as a free-lance writer.

Her name was Ida Tarbell and she was from Titusville, Pennsylvania, the capital of America's oil industry. Holmes assaulted her with questions that she answered, hoping, I suppose, that eventually he would get around to answering hers.

She was intelligent, and not outwardly a blue-stocking. In fact, she tried to ask her questions in an intelligent manner in that flat, uninflected way Americans have of speaking. Holmes was not at all surprised to learn that Miss Tarbell had studied biology and chemistry and had a sound grasp of scientific methods of investigation. She was about thirty-five years of age, uncommonly tall and uncommonly thin, with dark hair and a complexion browned by riding in the open air atop Parisian omnibuses. She tried to ingratiate Holmes for the sake of her story, and she had a nice open smile. I wondered why she had never married. In short, I liked her. Having been the butt of some of Holmes's inquiries myself, I had some sympathy for her. When she insisted that The Great Detective figure her out for himself, Holmes did the usual trick of deducing where in Paris she lived—Rue Sommerard on the Left Bank—and the type of person she sat next to on the omnibus that morning.

“Yes, but what can you tell about
me
, Mr. Holmes?” she inquired.

I knew she had made a blunder that would rebound on her. “You have few funds, madame. Probably your editors are not paying
what they owe you. Obviously, they like your work because interviewing me is a coveted assignment. Normally, that would go only to a reliable, and possibly gifted, journalist. I see you are low on money because your serviceable black dress is fading at the seams. The cut of your clothes shows that you are a woman of taste and would surely go to a dressmaker if you could. You have tried to make this dress seem less worn by colouring its frayed seams with ink.”

“Holmes!” I cried, astonished that even he could behave in such an ungentlemanly manner. I was embarrassed to be privy to such rudeness and to her humiliation, but Miss Tarbell, to her credit, smiled a tight, rueful little smile and confirmed that his deductions were correct. She took notes of his deduction for her readers and regained her composure as she carefully incised every shaming word he had said in her notebook. As Holmes's official biographer, I know enough about writing to know she knew she was getting a terrific story, even if it was all at her own expense.

Perhaps the authorities rapped, but I cannot be sure. I know the three of us jumped as the door to the suite flew open and a policeman burst in. The concierge trailed just behind to act as interpreter. Holmes and Miss Tarbell spoke fluent French, but even I could interpret what the policeman said. “There has been another explosion. This time in the police station at the Boulevard des Italiens. You are wanted, Mr. Holmes. Please follow me.”

I do not remember if we spoke during our ride there, although it went very quickly because we travelled in a carriage identified as that of the police. Never had I witnessed such devastation as we found at the scene. In Afghanistan there was much torn flesh and I myself was wounded, but I had never seen a building so destroyed, with an impossible section of its skeleton structure revealed where the stony muscle of the wall had been blown off.

We mounted a narrow, spiral staircase, made of ironwork. In the hallway on the second floor between two large windows, the body of a young clerk sat on a bench. He had no head. Where it had rested, his neck was a bloody, frothing pulp. We entered what had been until half an hour before the Inspector's office. That official was found still
living in the corner, but there was nothing I could do to save him. Flesh had been ripped from his skull and his eyes were blasted from his head. Later, when his pockets were turned out, splinters from the metal casing of the bomb would be found embedded in the coins.

I surmised that the tiny islands of flesh in the pools of blood on the floor were his. The intestine that dripped blood from a gas bracket seemed to have come from the charred black body in the corner. What was left of the man's uniform indicated he had been a sergeant. Across from him was yet another corpse. His torso was a red crater and his trousers were grey like those of someone from the world of commerce.

To my amazement, I noted Miss Tarbell was with us still. Her face was drained white and if she had eaten anything that morning, she would have given it up in the carnage around us. However, she looked no worse than Holmes, who bolted from the ravaged room. I knew him too well to think he was being sick. I was stunned, and indeed too winded, to move as quickly as he, but I saw where he went and followed him to the sidewalk.

Holmes abandoned the body of one policeman as useless to his inquiry and stretched out to a second man in time to hear the dying man murmur “Darmaux.” That word was his last. I was kneeling on the pavement, feeling his pulse, and when I turned my head from the dead man I saw that the hem of Miss Tarbell's faded black skirt was darkened now with blood. It was a dark day, stone-coloured with approaching rain. Were I to paint one of those nonsense modern paintings they turn out nowadays, I would do it in leaden, smoky tones with splashes of crimson, for it seems to me everything that day was hopeless grey except for taunting splashes of red.

Miss Tarbell saw she was standing in a puddle of that dead man's blood and jumped back. “Those poor men. God help their families,” she said and covered her mouth as if to cut off further emotionalism.

By now the frantic policemen had stopped scurrying and stood in small groups. The chain of command in the station had
been permanently broken, and surviving officers did not seem to know how to proceed. Anger is more comfortable than grief, so two officers argued over which station would take over jurisdiction of the scene. “Who saw what happened?” Holmes demanded of anyone who could respond.
“Qui a vu ce qui est arrivé?”

“I saw them coming in when I was going out,” a young policeman told Holmes miserably. He was whole and healthy, unharmed except by the horror of what he had seen. “Luc—his body is upstairs—was leading in a policeman and a clerk who was holding a large canister out in front of him. The man was carrying it like a waiter bearing a large fowl, and they put me in mind of a holiday dinner.” The witness wiped his eyes.

“I was down the street when I heard the terrible sound. It was like the cracking of an iron bell—as if it were the day of judgement.”

“What is Darmaux?” Holmes asked.

“A city in Lorraine,” he replied, as if he were answering a headmaster's geography drill.

I would not have thought it possible, but Miss Tarbell was taking notes with her pen and pad. She said, “The Compagnie de Darmaux is a big industrial firm with interests in iron ore, Mr. Holmes. Its miners have been out on strike for some time. I have been following it in the papers.”

“Where is its office?” Holmes demanded. A well-dressed man, whom we later learned was Monsieur Henri Troutout, who had been sent to the scene from someone in the Palais de Justice, gave Holmes an address a few blocks away on the Avenue de “I'Opéra”.

Troutout was a slight man with dark hair under a top hat. He wore the formal cutaway of the French civil servant of top rank. He could not have been more than forty, and when he spoke the corners of his mouth turned up slightly to reveal his teeth.

There was little time for conversation, however. Holmes, Miss Tarbell, Troutout and myself raced there, surely looking like what we were in truth—emissaries from the carnage of hell. But news of the disaster rippled out in waves to every part of the quarter. It was the calm person and not the agitated one who was out of place.

When we reached the building that houses the offices of the Compagnie de Darmaux, Troutout flashed his credentials and demanded to see the man in charge. One of the attendants led us to the president of the company. We mounted the marble staircase carpeted in deep, thick red. At the board room doors Holmes, wide-eyed and disheveled, banged his fist on one of the carved oaken panels and pushed his way in. The five directors, who had been safe and oblivious to everything but their deliberations, jumped in fear and outrage. The eldest of them, thin, frail and fast, cried “Anarchists!” in a strangled voice and dove below the table. The two youngest hurled themselves at Holmes, who was obviously our leader, but his knowledge of martial arts stood him in good stead. From the floor, the brave but hasty pair looked up at the rest of us and decided Troutout, Miss Tarbell and I posed no physical threat. The taller of Holmes's assailants, whose face was either marred or distinguished by a deep frown line permanently between his brows, was winded, but the younger, rounder one seemed not quite ready to give up the fight. Both brushed the lines of jackets back in place as Troutout introduced himself and Holmes.

Holmes's taller antagonist, whose name was Martin Kaspi, said in almost unaccented English, “My dear Mr. Holmes, I do beg your pardon. You can imagine—“But Holmes cut off his apologies with a nod of his head and began the story of the morning's events. “We are here because you may have been the target of an anarchist's bomb,” The Great Detective said. “A dying man's last word was ‘Darmaux,' which may have referred to your firm and the area you mine.”