Sherlock Holmes In America Page 7

  “There’s a deportment, a regality that sets the truly fine actor apart,” Sasanoff went on. “Goliath himself would have made a poor player if he lacked presence.”

  “Indeed!” I chimed in. “Just look how little David upstaged him!”

  My bon mot—and the quick change of subject to the weather I had planned—might have defused the situation if the doltish Mr. Tabor hadn’t relit the wick.

  “Well, son,” he said to the Whelp, “you just keep studying Mr. Sasanoff here, and I’m sure one day you’ll be a leading man just like him.”

  “Good heavens, I hope not,” the Whelp replied. And then sensing—correctly—that he’d gone too far this time, he chuckled and tried to explain away his effrontery. “I find I prefer the small parts, Mr. Tabor. Roles sized to human proportions. I was drawn to acting as a way of better understanding how and why people act—which is to say, behave—the way they do. I was searching for the reality behind the artifice. Unfortunately, I’ve found it’s almost impossible to see anything real when blinded by the limelight. So I’m happy to leave center stage to those who crave it. Truth, I believe, you’ll more often find lurking in the wings.”

  Though he’d started out trying to soften the sting of his words, the Whelp had instead packed salt upon the welt, and even he knew it.

  “Please forgive me,” he told the Tabors with another light, self-mocking laugh. “You’re not here to listen to the ramblings of a ‘junior utility player.’ My eminent associates here are the ones who should be sharing their wisdom. When it comes to acting and stagecraft, they’re full of it.”

  And with that he excused himself and fled to the refreshments table—which was certainly no refuge for a sane man to seek.

  [A five-hundred-word aside on the supposedly life-threatening inedibility of “hinterlands victuals” has been cut here.—S.B.H.]

  At any rate, with the dazed expressions a pair of sheep might wear at a performance of King Lear, the Tabors watched the Whelp go to his culinary doom. They could sense that something was happening before their very eyes yet lacked the powers of perception to understand what it was.

  There was nothing sheepish about the look on Sasanoff’s face, however. It was so wolfish, in fact, I feared the man would bare his teeth and growl.

  “So,” I said, “is it always so beastly cold this time of year? The scenery here is beautiful—beautiful—but one risks frostbite with each pause to admire it!”

  Predictably, the Tabors responded with a gushing rivulet of drivel about the incomparable splendors of a Colorado spring. And, as always at such moments, the actor’s craft served me well, for I managed to project rapt interest, though I heard not a word after the first few bleatings about streams of fresh-melted snow sparkling in the sunshine of a golden-bright May morn, etc., etc.

  Sasanoff’s performance, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly so convincing. He nodded and grunted out impatient Hmms and I sees more or less at random, all the while shooting dark scowls at the Whelp. At first opportunity, he found some pretext to extricate us from our hosts and drag me away to a quiet corner of the “ballroom” (which, in the interest of accuracy, I should report was hardly big enough for a pas de deux, let alone a proper ball).

  “I’ve endured that amateur’s slights for the last time.” Sasanoff nodded over at the Whelp, who’d not only struck up a conversation with a rough-looking fellow chipmunk-cheeked with half-masticated hors d’oeuvres—some sort of local constable, we’d been told—but actually seemed to be enjoying it. “It’s high time I taught him a lesson, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I not only would say, I’ve been saying it for weeks. So you’re going to cashier the overweening rogue at last?”

  Sasanoff’s expression turned sneeringly sly, and he fed me one of my own lines from Twelfth Night.

  “Wouldst thou not be glad to have the rascally sheep-biter come by some notable shame?”

  I replied as per the Bard.

  “I would exult, man.”

  “Then this is what we shall do.... ”

  And Sasanoff proceeded to lay out a plan of such diabolical ingenuity I hardly could believe he’d hatched it in a mere ten minutes. Yet I knew he’d done just that, for it had as its inspiration an anecdote Horace Tabor shared with us shortly before the Whelp arrived.

  I myself had but one concern, every actor’s first and foremost: the size of my role.

  “What part do I play in all this?”

  “Why, the most important of all,” Sasanoff said. “You will be the audience. For what good is a great performance—or a great humiliation—if no one is on hand to witness it?”

  I offered Sasanoff as deep a bow as my magnitude would allow.

  “It shall be my honor to serve, thou most excellent devil of wit.”

  “It’s settled, then. We must prove once and for all who the master actors are here.” Sasanoff grinned as he again quoted Twelfth Night. “We will fool him black and blue, shall we not?”

  The next midmorning, we attempted our first full dress rehearsal in the still-unfinished opera house, but it was a hopeless effort all around. [A lengthy account of the rehearsal—including critiques of various company members’ performances and personal foibles, complaints about the “drafty cow barn about to be passed off as a theatre,” and a condemnation of the “loutish workmen” who made concentration impossible by “hammering away at Art more successfully than their nails”—has been removed here.—S.B.H.]

  Eventually, Sasanoff saw the futility of it all and released us for the day. He’d seemed remote and distracted anyhow—and only I knew why.

  The Whelp disappeared almost immediately, and I braved another outing into the town to seek him out. I found him in a little den of iniquity that was, difficult as this was to believe, even more iniquitous than the one I’d seen him in the day before. Instead of rotten boards for a floor, this one had only dirt liberally garnished with sawdust, and puddles I made it a point not to study at length. The clientele were of a sort to inspire the same policy, and between avoiding their surly, suspicious gazes and ignoring the repellent plashes at my feet, I practically had to navigate the place staring at the ceiling. That I made it to the Whelp’s side without bumping into some thug’s beer and sparking a “shootout” I count as a miracle.

  “May I join you?” I said.

  The Whelp was at a table in the corner, alone, his back to the rickety, warped-wooded wall. There were empty seats to either side of him, but given relations between us in the past, there was no guarantee he’d allow me to make use of one.

  “If you wish,” he said with more curiosity than cordiality. “But first, I would advise you to see Mr. Lonnegan there about a drink.” He nodded at a grimacing old villain behind the bar, then down at an untasted beer on the table before him. “The price of admission, as it were.”

  I did as the Whelp suggested, purchasing a glass of frothy beer (I didn’t think it wise to inquire about port) before returning to his table and taking a seat. My chair—constructed, it appeared, from pasteboard and old kindling—squealed alarmingly beneath me, but after a moment’s protest, it seemed to accept my ampleness.

  I celebrated with a sip of beer . . . the celebration grinding to a halt the second the taste of it reached my brain. It took immense effort not only to swallow the stuff but to keep it swallowed.

  “‘Steam beer,’ it’s called,” the Whelp said. “Vile, isn’t it?”

  I put the glass on the table and pushed it away to the edge furthest from my nose, for I’d noticed too late the swill’s sour-milk aroma.

  “You could have warned me,” I said.

  “And deny them their fun?”

  I looked up to find the dive’s other denizens chuckling gleefully at my distress. Seeing a gentleman’s dignity assaulted obviously was, to them, the very apex of entertainment.

  “Why do you keep coming to these filthy places?” I asked the Whelp in a whisper.

  “The same reason I took up acting—a simple de
sire to better understand my fellow man. And I daresay I usually learn more in one saloon than any dozen theatres.”

  “Really? I wouldn’t think such people as these would be so eager to advance your education. In fact, I’m surprised some ruffian hasn’t thrashed you by now.”

  The Whelp picked up his beer and peered down into it, squinting at the stagnant yellow brine as if it were some laboratory experiment gone awry.

  “Oh, several have tried,” he said blandly. “I did go to a real college, you know. And the most valuable thing I learned there was boxing.”

  Several of the brutes around the saloon were still staring, and the Whelp raised his beer, saluted them with it, then took a long, glugging pull. When he’d managed to gulp it all down without retching, our grubby audience guffawed and turned back to their own, no-doubt sinister, business.

  “So,” the Whelp said, setting his now-empty glass beside mine, “you wished to speak with me?”

  “More than that,” I said. “I wanted to warn you. About Sasanoff, and the way you keep antagonizing him. I don’t think you realize how close he is to dismissing you.”

  The Whelp shrugged, face impassive.

  “I don’t think you realize how close I am to giving notice.”

  “You don’t fear being stranded in this godforsaken wilderness?”

  “Do I look fearful?” The Whelp answered his own question with a carefree smile. “Leaving England, exploring a new land, a new people—and yes, new dangers. It’s forced me to look at everything differently. I’m like an actor who steps down from the stage so as to finally see the play from the other side of the proscenium. Before, all I knew were my own little entrances and exits, my own marks. But now I see so much more. The whole stage, the whole theatre. The whole world.”

  I nodded as the Whelp babbled, all the while thinking him a fool. All the world’s a stage, it goes without saying, but the opposite should be true for any real thespian: the stage is all the world. And upstage center—that’s the only place to be in it.

  “Yes, yes . . . I see your point,” I lied. “But don’t you understand that—?”

  “You’re Englishmen?” a croaky voice cut in.

  Somehow, without my noticing, a troll had materialized beside our table. He was hunchbacked and wild-haired, with a scar running down one sallow cheek to disappear into a black briar patch of a beard. What one could see of his face was dark-tanned and deeply lined, and his left eye was narrowed in a perpetual squint while the right protuberated obscenely. His clothes were equally askew—baggy pants held up with frayed rope, a worn-elbowed coat that would have been skin-tight on a consumptive child, and a broad hat so floppy and stained and formless it could have been sewn together from a charwoman’s old scouring rags.

  “Yes,” I said to It. “We are English.”

  “Cor blimey!” the wretched creature crowed in an accent that was unmistakably Cockney. “This must be me lucky day! New ’round ’ere, are you?”

  “That is correct,” I said. “We’re actors—members of Michael Sasanoff’s company. We’ll be opening the Tabor Opera House . . . assuming the blasted thing ever does open.”

  “And you?” the Whelp asked. “You’re from London, I presume?”

  “I’m from all over, guv.” The lumpy little man placed a gnarled claw on the table’s only empty chair. “May I?”

  “Well . . . ” I began.

  The gnome planted himself in the seat beside me.

  “You can call me ‘Goodfellow,’” he said, throwing shifty-eyed glances this way and that. “It ain’t the name I was born wiff, but it’ll do for now.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Goodfellow,” the Whelp said, and he looked over at the bar and held up a single finger.

  Goodfellow hopped to his feet again, raging.

  “Givin’ the man the ’igh sign, are you? A trap, is it? Damn an’ blast! I should’ve known this was too good to be—”

  “I think you misunderstand, Mr. Goodfellow,” the Whelp said soothingly. “I was ordering you a drink.”

  Goodfellow turned to stare at Lonnegan—who was indeed contaminating a glass with the fulvous suds of steam beer.

  “Oh. Sorry, guv.” Goodfellow sat down again. “I’m a bit jumpy, bein’ ’ere. An’ I got reason to be.”

  Goodfellow fell silent as Lonnegan stalked over and slapped the glass down before him, sloshing half its contents on the table. (And no better use can I think of for steam beer than cleaning furniture.) Then, as the tavern keeper stomped away, he leaned in toward us and went on in a low, hoarse murmur.

  “I need ’elp, gents . . . an’ it’ll be worff your while to give it.”

  “Perhaps you didn’t hear me,” I said stiffly. “We’re actors. If it’s a poor box you’re looking for, I suggest you try a church.”

  “I ain’t no bleedin’ charity case!” Goodfellow snapped back. “Fact is, there’s a right wodge o’ wonga in this for you—a bloody fortune—if you play your cards right.”

  “You’ll have to excuse my skepticism,” I sniffed, “but you don’t very much look like a man with access to ‘a right wodge of wonga.’”

  “That’s ’cause I can’t get at it, mate.” Goodfellow leaned even further over the table, the looming hump of his hunched back giving him the appearance of an immense, bearded mushroom. “But you can.”

  “Mr. Goodfellow obviously has a story to tell,” the Whelp said to me. “I suggest we let him tell it.”

  I harrumphed and settled back in my seat—which squeaked and creaked so piercingly I almost thought it about to explode into splinters. Fortunately, the chair held as Goodfellow held forth.

  After a lifetime spent “knockin’ about God’s green earff,” the man told us in a conspiratorial whisper, he’d ended up in Colorado trying to make a go of it as a prospector. His prospects, however, were more black than gold, and he soon went broke. But he did end up sitting on a pile of silver eventually—albeit another man’s silver—as a guard for Horace Tabor’s Matchless Mine. One day, he and three of his fellow guards were escorting a load of freshly milled silver down the mountain to town when they were attacked by bandits. It was a slaughter on both sides, and when the battle ended, only Goodfellow was still alive—and he just barely.

  As he slumped against the wagon awaiting rescue, a bullet in his back, his face slashed, he pondered what future he had in even so humble a profession as the one that had brought him to this. The answer being none. Though he might survive his wounds a cripple, his nerves, he knew, were shattered beyond any mending at all. As gunman or laborer, he was through. Which left no future for him save starvation—a bitter irony, with so much silver so close at hand. He’d given his all for a treasure Horace Tabor wouldn’t even miss, he was already so rich.

  And that’s when Goodfellow saw providence in his situation. No one but he knew how many men really had been in the gang. If he exaggerated their numbers—and said a surviving “desperado” made off with a packload of silver while he lay bleeding, feigning death—who could dispute it? Battered and bleeding though he was, Goodfellow’s prospects were looking up.

  He managed to dig a hole just big enough for a single small crate. In it he placed half a dozen bars of pure silver, and with his last ounce of strength he covered it with earth and rock. He finished in the nick of time, collapsing into a faint not twenty steps from his buried booty.

  He awoke the next day to learn his party had been ambushed by the infamous Whelan brothers, Mike, Ike, Spike, and Dudley. The bodies of all four had been found, and they weren’t known to ride with other bandits in the past. What, he was asked, had become of the missing silver?

  Goodfellow had no choice but to stick to his plan, concocting a fifth member of the gang—a mysterious Indian who’d loaded his horse with silver before fleeing. The mine officials and law officers to whom he told this seemed skeptical, and eventually Horace Tabor himself came to his bedside to hear the story . . . and plainly didn’t believe it.

&nbs
p; Goodfellow’s recovery was slow and painful and not entirely successful. (Here in the telling, he patted his hunched back.) And when it was through, he’d lost more than his youthful vigor. He’d lost his job, as well. The Matchless Mine dismissed him, and there were hints that he shouldn’t linger long in Leadville. He wasn’t trusted. He would be watched.

  For six long months he’d been away, scraping by as best he could while growing his beard and weathering his features and dreaming of his silver. He’d returned just that morning, intending to hire a mule and set off up the trail disguised as an old prospector. But there was no disguise, he quickly learned, that could hide disfigurements such as his. He’d been spotted and accosted by a pair of mine guards. Their ultimatum: leave town by sundown or they’d fix his hump for him . . . with clubs.

  So here he’d come, bereft, thinking to drown his sorrows in drink before abandoning his little hoard forever and slinking off to quietly die. And what should he overhear but two countrymen talking. Newcomers to Leadville. Men with the freedom to act.

  “Us?” I scoffed. “What would you have us do?”

  “Get your’ands on the swag, of course,” Goodfellow hissed. “It’s just off the road to the mine, barely a mile from ’ere. But a mile’s more than I’d make before bein’ caught. The second I’m seen anywhere near that road . . . ” He gave his shaggy head a slow, grim shake. “A gentleman tourist out for a constitutional, though? Nobody’d give that a second thought. Mind you, I wouldn’t set off right away—the afternoon shipments’ll be comin’ through, and the guards’ll be itchy-fingered no matter who it is they’re passin’ on the road. But as of, ooooh . . . four o’clock, say? Why, you’d ’ave nuffin’ to worry about.”