Martin Greenberg - Sherlock Holmes In America

Just as my fingers and toes were going numb with the cold, we heard something moving toward us from the road.

“At last,” Sasanoff whispered. “The fly enters the web.”

And then someone finally stepped into the clearing below us… a mustachioed, bow-legged someone wearing a droopy, round-brimmed hat and rough clothes and mud-splattered boots.

In his hands was the map Sasanoff himself had drawn that morning-the one he’d given to the Whelp.

Hanging from the holster at his side was a revolver the approximate size of a small cannon.

“Who in God’s name-?” I murmured.

Sasanoff shushed me.

The man moved slowly at first, glancing down and up, down and up, from the map to the glade before him. But when he spied the pile of stones (marked, but of course, with a thick-inked X on the map) he charged forward, cackling. When he reached the rocks, he began tossing them wildly aside.

Sasanoff ’s web, it seemed, had snared the wrong fly. And now it was about to snare two more.

As the man tore at the stacked stones, he glanced up, eyes darting this way and that. He was grinning madly, giggling, yet he seemed anxious, almost frantic, as well.

And then his giggles stopped, his grin wilted.

The man was staring directly at us.

Surely, he couldn’t see us, I told myself. We were crouched low amidst a thick layer of shadow-eaved brush, and the afternoon sun had long since given way to the gray of approaching dusk.

Yet his gaze didn’t waver. We might as well have been caught in the blinding light of a follow spot.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

We said nothing.

“I know you’re there, dammit!” the man bellowed. “I can see your breath!”

His right hand hovered over the butt of his gun.

“The better part of valour is discretion,” I’d often said onstage as Falstaff. And I believed it and even lived by it, for “Run away!” I’d often said offstage as myself.

There would be no screwing of courage to the sticking place. I possessed no courage to screw.

I stood up with my hands held high.

Or tried to, at any rate. The thorns and vines clawed at me as I arose. When I was finally standing straight, I found Sasanoff on his feet beside me, face scratched, beard pocked with clinging thistles.

“Ummm… could you point us back to the road?” he said. “We appear to be lost.”

“So lost you end up creepin’ around the bushes?” the man spat back in an American accent as coarse and thick as his handlebar moustache and muttonchops. “Ha!”

“Oh, we were just looking for my… poodle,” I said. “He slipped his leash when we were walking him, and-”

“Get down here,” the man snapped. “ Now .”

Sasanoff and I scrambled down the steep embankment side by side, kicking up dirt and stumbling over rocks and rotting logs.

“So,” the man said when we were finally lined up before him, “who are you two workin’ for? Tabor or yourselves?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Sasanoff said. He was not so much a hunchback now as a hunch buttock : his hump had slipped down so low it looked as though he had a third cheek at the base of his spine.

The American took an angry step toward him.

“Are you mine police or bandits?” he demanded.

He was a tall man, obviously well built despite his bandy legs, and Sasanoff and I shrank back from him as one.

“N-n-neither,” I said. “We’re actors.”

The American barked out a bitter laugh.

“Actors? Oh, I’ll say you are! Bad ones, too, ’cuz I see right through you.” He jutted a lantern jaw at me. “Judgin’ by them lavender duds of yours-” he jerked his head at Sasanoff, “-and the rags on you? And you both talkin’ all hoity-toity? I’ll bet you’re Pinkertons set after the missin’ silver. Well, congratulations, boys. You done found it. You just ain’t leavin’ with it. I am.”

“I assure you I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sasanoff said with as much stiff-spined dignity as a man with a false beard and an extra rump can muster.

“Sir… if I may,” I began, a whole new wave of sickly dread churning to life in the pit of my stomach. “How did you come to have that map?”

The American flashed me a smile sour enough for a Malvolio.

“You may not… but I’ll tell you anyhow. I took it off a feller I followed outta Leadville. Word around town was he’d got his hands on an honest-to-God treasure map. So I caught up with him along the trail and, well… ” He patted the butt of his gun. “I persuaded him to hand it over.”

I could see Sasanoff go pale even beneath his grease paint. His performance back at the saloon had been too good, it appeared. It wasn’t just the Whelp he’d convinced-it was all the eavesdroppers, too.

“Was your persuasion… fatal?” he asked.

The American shrugged.

“I didn’t wait around to find out. Now, unless you want some of the same persuasion-” He backed off a few steps and nodded down at the mound of rocks nearby. “Get to diggin’.”

“But-” I began.

“ Dig! ” the American finished for me.

So dig we did, rolling aside the last of the stones covering the low hole in which my little trunk rested. I briefly considered turning and telling the brigand behind us that there was no stolen silver; it was all just a ruse we’d concocted to teach a much-needed lesson to a prattling malapert. I had the distinct feeling the man wouldn’t see the humor in it, though. Best to feign ignorance and hope he’d take disappointment well.

Of course, I had the feeling he wouldn’t do that either.

“By God,” the American mumbled to himself as Sasanoff and I lifted the chest up out of the ground. “It was true. I’m rich!”

“Not necessarily,” I said, trying to soften the blow before it fell. “Who knows what’s inside?”

“Quite right,” Sasanoff threw in. “Someone might have beaten you to it, then reburied the strongbox.”

“Like who?” the American growled. “You, maybe?”

“Oh, no! I just meant-”

“Open it.”

“But-”

“ Open it! ”

I let Sasanoff kneel down and do the honors. I wanted to keep my distance from that box both literally and figuratively.

Sasanoff reluctantly lifted the creaky-hinged lid-then stared down into the chest in stunned befuddlement.

“I-I-I don’t understand,” he stammered.

I leaned in close enough to peek over his shoulder, yet I couldn’t see what had astonished him so.

There were the rocks he’d put in to give the box weight. There was the note he’d put in to give the Whelp his comeuppance.

But then I wasn’t just glancing at the note to confirm its presence. I was reading it. And that’s when my own eyes nearly popped from their sockets.

Instead of this:

YOU’RE SACKED!

– M.S.

I saw this:

I QUIT!

– S.H.

We both turned to measure the American’s reaction to all this-and found the man gone. In his place was the Whelp.

In his clothes, too. The Whelp had simply stripped away moustache and muttonchops, and there he was, the transformation complete.

The Whelp swept off his hat and bowed deeply, as if our shock was an ovation for him to accept from the stage.

“But… how?” I said.

“Acting, of course,” the Whelp replied blithely as he straightened up again. “Aided by the sort of quick change one must master as a utility player with four different costumes in the first act alone.”

When this explanation did little to lift our dangling jaws, the Whelp went on.

“Instead of going to the hotel after leaving the saloon, I followed the map straight here to see what sort of burlesque you had planned for me. Once I’d made my own little alteration to the script, I returned to town, facilitated the necessary wardrobe change with the help of a local pawn shop-the same that supplied you with your costume, Mr. Sasanoff-then stopped by the opera house to avail myself of our makeup box. Et voilà .”