Martin Greenberg: Sherlock Holmes In America

Her strength was gone, and I knew the end was near. Somehow, she found the power to extract something from the folds of her dress and press it into my hand. It was the letter from Mycroft, now stained with her blood.

I put my ear to her sweet lips. “Promise me, Jim, you’ll never waiver. Never despair. Never falter.”

“I promise, Maddie.”

“Tell me you love me,” she said, the fierce light in her eyes subsiding.

“As no other.” It was just moments now. “And forever.”

“Then sing to me. One last time. The song at twilight.” She gasped and shuddered.

I sang: “Still to us at twilight / comes Love’s old song / comes Love’s old sweet song… ”

I never stopped singing to her, even after she lay quite still and silent in my arms.

The rest of my story is quickly told. I chased Morey across the sea, to Ireland and Skibbereen. He had gone to ground, seeking shelter with the IRA, but of course it was child’s play for Jim McKenna, a fellow Irish-American, to find him. As I had done so often in London, where young Irish boys had been legion among my Baker Street Irregulars, I quickly organized a flying column of street Arabs, which fanned out across all the public houses of the town. In less than a day I had my answer: “The Wild Geese.”

I slipped in incognito: cap tugged down low, hunched over, a tremor in the hand that held my walking-stick. Morey, on the other hand, was his usual loud, vulgar, and expansive self. I spotted him at a table in the corner, gesticulating wildly at a Prussian gentleman whose monocle and dueling scar proclaimed both his ancestry and his attitude.

As I edged closer, I heard him say, “… von Herling. Now a deal’s a deal and if you’ve even half a mind to double-cross me well, buster, you had better watch your step.”

The German sneered across his beer. “Do you think you can impress me with this belligerence?” he asked with a deprecatory laugh. “Look around this room; there are twenty men I could hire to work for us. Why do I need you?”

I noticed there were four empty pint glasses in front of Morey. Two went flying as he gestured wildly. “Damn you, I thought we were on the same side!” he shouted.

“Simply because the enemy of my enemy can be my friend does not mean that you and I have to like each other,” replied the German. “Quite the contrary.”

Morey’s face flushed and he started to rise. I could not let him do anything rash, not with my revenge so near to hand. I needed a diversion and the pint of Guinness in my left hand would do nicely.

The stout splashed him from head to toe. Enraged, he leapt up, the Prussian temporarily forgotten. Feigning unawareness in my senility, I passed through the side door, the one the urchins used to nip in and out of as they dragged foaming growlers back to their drunken fathers at home.

“You there! Old man!” he screamed, but pretending deafness, I ignored him. The room jeered as he struggled to his feet.

I was in the alley and waiting for him when he burst through the door. Cap off, upright and cold as death was I. “McKenna!” he said, staggering back against the door. This was just the effect I had hoped to produce, for our confrontation needed to be quick and final; the intrusion of strangers would have been most unhelpful at this point.

“Go for it,” I said.

He went for it.

I fired two shots to his one. Both mine found their mark. His did not.

Morey’s body sagged, then sat heavily as his life’s blood ebbed away. I could hear pounding on the other side of the door as the pub’s denizens were roused by the commotion. I waited just long enough to watch the light in his eyes flicker out and then into the rubbish went the elderly McKenna’s hat, stick, coat, and as much else as I could strip off in the few moments allotted to me, revealing the oil-stained, motor-car tradesman’s garb beneath.

I walked round to the front of the pub and entered just as a few men had managed to push the body aside and force open the door. As the hue and cry for the police went up, I took a seat near the German and tugged ever so slightly on my goatee. He looked at me and gave me a small nod of acknowledgement, but not of betrayal.

“What’ll it be, sir?” asked the barmaid.

“Nothin’,” I replied, my Irish-American accent plain. “I’ve changed me mind.” I nodded in the direction of the German: “Good evening to you, fine sir,” and took my leave.

For a short while, the local constabulary were very much mystified, especially when they discovered the old clothes and the American revolver, but they were used to drunken Irishmen murdering each other, and quickly lost interest in the case, and so I made my way across the Irish Sea and on to London without further incident. The next day, I was back on the South Downs, among my bees, making some observations upon the segregation of the queen.

Sussex, July 1914

It did not surprise me when Martha announced Mr. Mycroft Holmes. By rights, I ought not to have received him. That such a conniving mind could comfortably reside within such a portly and indolent exterior… I realized that, not for the first time, I had underestimated my own brother.

It had been, I had to admit, sheer genius on his part to insinuate me into the Irish-American underworld of Birdy Edwards’s own hometown, and send me to the one person who could have successfully infiltrated me into the mob. But how did he know she would? I took the letter, stained with her blood, from my billfold and, smoothing it out, laid it flat upon my study table. “Show Mr. Holmes in,” I said.

“Sherlock!” he exclaimed, as if he had half-expected never to see me again. He extended his hand, but I let it dangle, as we said in Chicago.

“I brought this back to you,” I said, gesturing toward the letter. “Full circle.”

For a moment, my brother was something he almost never was: nonplussed. The sight of the blood-her blood-on the letter, I believe, unnerved him. But he quickly regained his composure.

“We had had our eye on the girl for some time,” he began. Was there a hint of apology in his manner? “Ever since the tragedy of Birlstone, in fact. After the death of her father, we sent her small anonymous remittances and made sure our agents looked in on her from time to time. In fact, it was we who suggested the alias, McParland, to protect her from the Moriarty gang’s American henchmen. A most conflicted, troubled young woman. A tragedy.”

I said nothing. My silence was remonstrance enough.

“Damn it, Sherlock, what could I do? If I had told you what His Majesty’s Government was about, you would have refused outright, Asquith or no Asquith; after all, you’d already turned Grey down. And I knew that your love of a mystery would keep you in the Great Game, as it were. And you have done brilliantly. I am very proud of you.”

At last, I found my tongue, and it was all I could to tame it. “All of this-for what? For me to ‘keep tabs’ on a few Fenians? And at what cost?” I felt myself growing hot under the collar. “If His Majesty’s government cannot watch a few sad-sack revolutionaries in Dublin, then what hope is there for it?”

Mycroft looked me up and down, as if I were still his younger brother, playing with tin soldiers and hobbyhorses in our bedroom so many years ago. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he said at last.

At this point I must confess that I lost my temper. “What is there to understand?” I cried, clutching at the letter. “Your own words condemn you!”

His eyes shuttled back and forth inside his head, and not for the first time was I reminded of the very strong affinity, intellectually speaking, between Mycroft Holmes and the late Professor Moriarty. Both of whom now had the blood of the McParland family on their hands. I looked down at the letter, her red bloodstains fading, the paper already taking on the appearance of parchment, receding into history along with what was left of my heart.