Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Volume 15 Read online

  “No one seems to be in there, Watson, so you stand guard in the hallway and signal me if you hear footsteps coming,” Holmes ordered as we shed our outer garments and threw them on the squeaky bed.

  “It makes me nervous when you trespass, but I’ll position myself at the top of the stairs and rap twice on the door if I detect any sound of someone approaching,” I informed him.

  Holmes crossed the gloomy corridor and stealthily went into the opposite room, but he almost instantly came out and waved for me to return to Number 32.

  “One of them, the tall one, is asleep and there was no indication of where the other could be,” he announced quietly when we were safely out of sight. “I was in there long enough, however, to find a pack of Red Kamel cigarettes next to the basin on the wash stand.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It is the same brand as the crushed butt I discovered on the floor of the cabinet shop,” Holmes disclosed. “It is unavailable as an import here, and it is made from an expensive Turkish blend of tobacco with a cork tip. It is much preferred by the elite in Russia. Commoners can’t pay the price.”

  “So we are on the right track—the smoker must have come from Russia recently, and he was inside the cabinet shop,” I observed.

  “A brilliant and plausible deduction, Watson,” Holmes commended.

  We left our door slightly ajar and waited in the unlit room for almost three hours before we heard movement near Number 33. Holmes watched through the opening as the short, bespectacled hotel guest went into Number 33 carrying a large, brown envelope the size of the one Mrs Pavlovna brought with her to Baker Street the preceding night.

  “He has the manuscript,” Holmes whispered to me. “Mrs Pavlovna’s courier, or the one next in line, apparently is in league with this pair. Otherwise, if there was a chance of a fight before the contact was relieved of the package, not one but both operatives would have gone to intercept it.”

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “We wait even longer, and if they leave the room together, we shall follow them, for I believe if anything is about to happen to Mrs Pavlovna, tonight is the time.”

  There was no activity at Number 33 as the midnight hour came and went. While we were idle, I wondered to Holmes how he knew to come to Claridge’s Hotel.

  “On the floor of the cabinet shop was an empty box of wooden matches with the name of this place on the top,” he revealed. “I deduced that no one other than the killer or his accomplice could have discarded the box, because there was no scent of cigarette smoke in the Pavlovna household, meaning the husband didn’t indulge. The presence of the match box and the cigarette butt told me even more, though. The assailants spent more than enough time with their victim than was necessary to take his life. They obviously were interrogating him for a lengthy period, probably trying to coerce him into confessing that his wife was the writer in exile, and to reveal to them the location of her latest work. Terrified though he must have been, he never compromised her with information they were searching to gain. That is the reason they rifled his safe.” But Holmes said he needed more evidence than what he already had before reporting his findings to Scotland Yard. “Something more convincing to Inspector Hopkins to demonstrate he has been barking up the wrong tree,” Sherlock Holmes concluded.

  I was dozing in a chair at about two o’clock in the morning when Holmes placed his fingertips over my lips and roused me. “I detected some activity across the hallway, so be prepared to move out, Watson,” he said in a hushed tone.

  It wasn’t long before both occupants of Number 33 left the room and started down the stairs. We gave them about a half-minute head start while we donned our jackets and capes, then walked on tip-toes to the steps. We quietly went down, pausing before we reached the lobby until we heard the door to the outside close. Holmes and I both were armed, our .32 caliber revolvers loaded and secured in our right-hand jacket pockets. We trailed our two subjects at a moderately fast pace down Mincing Lane toward the vicinity of Mrs Pavlovna’s house. Holmes led the way, I at his heels. He ducked behind a tree now and then in case the two men looked back to see if they were followed. Once, they halted, as if to orient themselves, and turned in our direction, but we were hidden behind the corner of an apartment building.

  The men walked abreast with determination, finally turning onto Rochester Row, on which Mrs Pavlovna’s dwelling was located a couple of blocks farther up.

  As we turned the corner, we came face-to-face with two other men, each brandishing a handgun pointing directly at us. They menaced us briefly until one of them spoke in Russian, so only Holmes could understand what the assailant was saying.

  “They want us to accompany them to that shed and go inside, Watson,” Holmes told me, nodding toward a tiny, dilapidated structure to the rear of a butcher shop. We complied. Inside was a bare table and four chairs, plus two cots. The more aggressive of the two motioned for us to sit, so we did as he indicated. Thoughts of our losing precious time to rescue Mrs Pavlovna raced through my brain, and I was certain of the same occurring in Holmes’s mind. Neither of the hostage-takers spoke again for several moments, until the one giving the orders glared at Holmes and demanded to know if we were the official police.

  Holmes told him no, but offered nothing more. It seemed to make the man angry and he sat down at the table with his weapon trained between Holmes’s eyes. Holmes slipped his left hand under the tabletop and casually dipped his right hand into his jacket pocket. With one motion, he heaved the table upward, knocking both men backwards and off balance. They fired rapid bursts in succession, indiscriminately, and missed us entirely. At the same instant Holmes squeezed off all of his five shots through his clothing and struck both men once, each squarely in the chest, killing the interrogator before he folded onto the dirt floor, and mortally wounding his partner.

  Holmes leaned over the man who was still conscious, but barely. “Okhrana?” Holmes bellowed.

  “Da,” the man gasped, and died.

  “Quickly, Watson!” Holmes yelled. “To the old woman’s house!”

  Holmes was peering through the bedroom window when I caught up with him, breathing hard. Mrs Pavlovna, flat on her back, was bound to the bed posts with babushkas around her wrists, and the suspect wearing spectacles stood at her side, clutching a straight razor. His accomplice was seated next to the headboard, smoking a cigarette. There was talking, but we could discern nothing.

  Holmes crept to the open front door and entered the kitchen. I removed the revolver from my pocket and lagged quietly and closely behind him.

  “They won’t realise my pistol is empty, so we shall both rush in on them at the same time with our weapons flashing,” he whispered.

  We filled the bedroom doorway side-by-side and ambushed the assailants, startling them sufficiently to cause them to freeze. Holmes ordered the short one to drop the razor, but instead he thrust it to Mrs Pavlovna’s throat.

  “Drop guns or I kill her,” he threatened in broken English.

  “Hurt her and you are a dead man,” Holmes warned.

  “He is a dead man nonetheless,” I added, taking aim and shooting. My bullet creased the reprobate’s skull, sending his derby flying and him hurtling across the room, shrieking and bleeding profusely. He cowered in a corner, holding his crimson forehead, weeping and begging for mercy. I had an urge to finish him off, but resisted it. Holmes grabbed the razor from the oval rug and began to free Mrs Pavlovna while I covered the two criminals, the muzzle of my revolver alternating between them. The one in the chair spoke broken English as well, adamantly proclaiming it was not his idea to murder the Pavlovnas, as if that mattered.

  “They were trying to get me to name all my cohorts in the movement, and give up the locations of their homes,” Mrs Pavlovna said forcefully. “The tall one said I would join my husband tonight if I didn’t cooperate, but the Okhrana don’t know I am a true patriot with a stubborn streak stronger than their devotion to the dictator.
”

  “Hand me your revolver, Watson,” Holmes instructed, “and see if you can roust that constable sleeping on the bench across the street. If all the commotion in here didn’t awaken him, it is possible he is among the dearly departed.”

  I left, Holmes keeping the miscreants at bay with four cartridges in the cylinder. On the way out, I hurriedly examined the wounded man’s injury and handed him my handkerchief, advising him to apply pressure to his gushing scalp. I returned about five minutes later with the drowsy policeman, to whom Holmes provided only sketchy details of what had transpired. Befuddled, the official stepped outside and blew his whistle to summon help.

  When two more constables came in with him, Holmes introduced us to them, along with criminals Leonid Gutnik and Vladimir Prost: “These two gentlemen are purported to be agents of the Okhrana, the secret police in Russia. Mr Gutnik has admitted they murdered Mrs Buk’s husband last week, and they still carry the bloodstains on their coats. They were on the verge of killing Mrs Buk tonight until Dr Watson and I disrupted their devious plans. Inspector Hopkins is investigating the murder of Mr Buk. Please arrange for the inspector to meet us here as soon as he can.”

  “We’ll bring him in his nightshirt if we must, Mr Holmes,” said one of the constables, a sergeant. “I’ve read about you in the periodicals, you know, and two things are certain—you always get your man, and what you say is gospel.”

  “I’m pleased you believe that,” Holmes replied, “for there is something else I’m compelled to tell you now. There are two dead bodies in the shed attached to the butcher shop up the street. I shot them while they held Dr Watson and me at gunpoint to prevent us from saving the life of Mrs Buk. They definitely were agents of the secret police, a fact one of them confirmed before he expired. I’m sure Inspector Hopkins will have no difficulty ironing all this out before it becomes an international incident.”

  “Two corpses, eh? Inspector Hopkins will have a full day ahead of him,” remarked the sergeant. “I’d better see to it that he gets an early start. I’ll leave one of my officers here with you to help guard the prisoners.”

  After the sergeant had gone off to fulfill his duties, Holmes questioned the taller, younger of the two culprits about how they came into possession of Mrs Pavlovna’s manuscript.

  “From a party loyal to Tsar,” he related, but refused to name their confederate. “I wish to stay England, like him; death for me if I go back Russia after failing mission.”

  “Death awaits you here, too, on the gallows,” Holmes stated grimly.

  It was almost sunrise when Inspector Hopkins arrived to sort out the events with a humbled attitude and an open mind. “I don’t know yet how to express these circumstances to the reporters without embarrassing the Yard,” he lamented as the assassins were escorted away in shackles.

  Holmes and I returned to the hotel to retrieve Mrs Pavlovna’s manuscript from room Number 33 and, later, delivered it to her. It came as no shock to the old woman that one of her couriers was part of the Okhrana network.

  “I have always been suspicious about one of them, Anatoly Breznikop, because his roots are in the aristocracy and he can travel to and from Russia without interference,” she said. As we conversed, she sliced us each an ample portion of rhubarb pie that she said she had baked the afternoon before. “I bake every day, but not today—I am still too nervous about what has happened,” she allowed.

  “Place your trust only in those who have earned it, my sweet lady, and always make a carbon copy of your manuscripts to send through other channels, just in case the originals fall into the hands of a traitor,” Holmes recommended to her while we ate our treat.

  And thus ended the affair of the old Russian woman, but for this epilogue.

  * * * *

  About a month had gone by without mention of her when Holmes called my attention to an item in the Evening Standard about the unexpected death of one Anatoly Breznikop, which appeared to be the result of a heart attack until relatives demanded an autopsy.

  “It says here that Scotland Yard regards it as a homicide, Holmes,” I commented, “because the autopsy revealed an overdose of codeine in his bloodstream. Do you intend to involve yourself in the matter?”

  “So far, only to the point where we should visit Mrs Pavlovna and find out what she knows of it,” he informed me.

  The following afternoon, we were seated at her kitchen table watching her dish up pieces of warm apple pie that she earlier had placed on the window sill to cool.

  “Anatoly sent me a message the day before he died,” she recalled, “and said he would stop by on the morrow in the event I had a new book prepared. He lied to me then, insisting that two men accosted him and stole my manuscript, though he bravely tried to fend them off. He ate pie and drank coffee, then went on his way. He reached Lark Hall Lane, just a short distance away, and collapsed, grasping at his chest. That is all I know.”

  She gave us a half smile.

  “Eat up, men. Yours is not poisoned like the pies I feed to the rats,” she assured us.

  LONDON 1890, by Mackenzie Clarkes

  Horse hooves,

  Pounding,

  The streets,

  Tires,

  Splashing,

  On curbs,

  Hansom cabs

  And rolling,

  Through fog

  At night.

  JUGGLING WITH SHERLOCK’S FRIEND, by Mark Levy, BSI

  Sherlock Holmes, Dr John Watson, and I were doing whisky shots with Guinness beer chasers at Moriarty’s Tavern, a cool, but still damp bar on Second Avenue in Manhattan in the middle of a hot weekday afternoon. Actually, Watson was out-drinking his friend and me.

  The bar was one of my favorites, big enough to have six beers on tap and every kind of booze known to man, while retaining its neighborhood flavor. It included an adult floor show that began when the joint opened every day at noon. It was 3:00 p.m. when the two Victorian dudes appeared and Moriarty’s was already half full. Executives can lack the patience to wait for happy hour to get a buzz.

  I still don’t completely understand how Watson and Holmes got to my favorite New York bar a hundred years after they had retired, but here they were, solid as Mazarin stones, beryl coronets, or blue carbuncles. Watson wore a thick, Victorian hound’s-tooth suit and carried a walking cane and a crocodile doctor’s bag. Holmes wore, well, what Holmes wears when he’s not in disguise.

  The great detective wrapped his slender fingers around his beer glass, attempting to warm it.

  “Cellar temperature of about 50º F., Watson,” Holmes said. “As you know, it’s the civilized way to drink Guinness.”

  But I noticed the cooler temperature of the brewski didn’t seem to slow old Dr Watson down at all.

  “An extraordinary pub,” Holmes said, studying the neon lighting and overhead electric fan. “The colonies are quite advanced now.”

  He pulled out a pipe from his inverness and began to fill it with tobacco.

  “Sorry, Mr Holmes,” I said. “No smoking is permitted in here.”

  Holmes looked perturbed. “I withdraw my laudable observation about this establishment,” he said. “More restrictive laws then we are accustomed to. One would have thought it impossible for a society to be more restrictive than our own. Curious.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The Surgeon General has taken the fun out of a lot of things, but we still have sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.”

  “Are you all ruled by military men?”

  “No, but the Surgeon General is the head of the Pubic Health Service. And it’s not a man, by the way. I recently Googled her. She’s a medical doctor, an African-American woman named Regina Benjamin.”

  Both Holmes and Watson were dumbfounded. Watson actually sputtered his beer back into his glass. Holmes recovered his composure first. “Do you mean to say a girl, and an African one at that, forbids you Yanks to smoke? That is most astonishing.”

  “Surely you must be mistaken, sir,” Watson said
. “The gentler sex would hardly survive the rigors of a medical education or be exposed to the less savory aspects of the human body, especially beneath the skin. And in any event, she would be unwelcome to practice at hospital.”

  “Under the circumstances, gentlemen, it might be best not to tell you about the President of the United States.”

  Just then the lights dimmed and a surgically-enhanced, well-endowed exotic dancer walked out onto the bar before us, wearing nothing but her stiletto heels and cheap toilet water. She executed a slow motion split directly in front of Watson.

  I thought the old doc was going to have a cardiac arrest. He held his breath for thirty seconds and his eyes just about popped out of his head. His face turned from pasty white to red to blue.

  Holmes observed that the young, top-heavy girl bit her fingernails, that she had been pregnant at least once, that she cared for a very young child and an aging, white-haired woman, that she had recently removed a wedding ring, and that her natural hair color was darker than the hairpiece she wore. With all modesty, I should mention that I could have made that last observation myself. But who, I ask you, would notice fingernails on a stripper?

  While my new acquaintances were absorbing Miss Anti-Gravity Mammaries’ performance and digesting the shocking information about women physicians, I thought it best to change the subject.

  “What brings you so far in time and geography?” I asked.

  “A curious structure that appears to have been produced in your time, not ours.”

  Holmes reached into his pocket and withdrew a flat, black article the size of a thumbnail. Along one side, a number of parallel metallic lines extended to the periphery. On the flat surface appeared the characters