Sherlock Holmes In America Page 8

“And how would we find this ill-gotten plunder of yours, assuming we lowered ourselves to look for it?” I asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t simply leave it under a leaf by the side of the road.”

  Goodfellow’s eyes lit up with excitement—even the squinty one, which was a neat trick, I’ll admit.

  “There’s a map,” Goodfellow intoned portentously. “Drew it from memory soon as I was out of me sickbed and away from pryin’ eyes. In case me memory went ’iggledy-piggledy. It’ll lead you straight to the spot.”

  The Whelp hadn’t said a word in minutes, and I turned to face him fully now. He was staring at Goodfellow like a man mesmerized.

  No—I should rephrase that. There was nothing dulled or sleepy about his look. He was more like a man enchanted.

  His eyes flashed with exhilaration, amusement, the thrill of danger. In all his slumming, he’d done little more than watch the riffraff flounder in the gutter. And now he’d been invited in for a wallow—and the idea excited him.

  “Surely,” I said to him, “you wouldn’t involve yourself in something so . . . so . . . ”

  “Sordid? Perilous? Foolhardy?” The Whelp dismissed any such concerns with a casual shrug. “My curiosity is piqued.”

  As was his greed, it seemed.

  “What would be my reward for helping you?” he asked.

  Goodfellow stroked his beard and rolled his eyes.

  “One bar,” he said. “And before you try any ’agglin’, just remember that’d be enough to get you back to England in style, and it’s me what’s paid the price for—”

  “Done,” the Whelp said. “Do you have the map with you now?”

  “Strewth! I did walk into the right saloon, di’n’t I?” Goodfellow gleefully groped beneath his grimy coat for a moment . . . then froze, his expression turning wary. “’Ang on a tick. ‘Ow do I know you ain’t gonna fiddle me out of me dosh?”

  The Whelp regarded him coolly.

  “You have my word, I have never fiddled with anyone’s dosh.”

  “‘’Is word,’ ’e says. Ha! I’ll need a lot more than that before I ’and over me map. Why, you could scarper with the whole boodle and leave me with nuffin’ but me bloody ’ump! No, no . . . a security, that’s what’s called for. To show your good faith.”

  “What sort of security are you talking about?” the Whelp asked.

  Goodfellow looked him up and down, then pointed a knobby finger at the watch fob looping from the Whelp’s vest pockets.

  “That watch, let’s say.”

  “My father gave me that.”

  “And I’ll give it back . . . when you give me the silver.”

  Slowly, reluctantly, the Whelp pulled out a gold pocket watch and placed it on the table.

  “Smart lad,” Goodfellow said. After furtive glances left and right, he produced a scroll of paper and unrolled it on the tabletop just long enough to show it was, indeed, a crudely sketched map.

  The Whelp swept the map off the table.

  Goodfellow slipped the watch into a coat pocket.

  “You stayin’ at the Clarendon?” he asked.

  The Whelp nodded.

  “Alright, then,” Goodfellow said, “I’ll meet you behind the ’otel at nine o’ clock tonight to do the divvy. Till then, I’d best keep out of sight.”

  He pushed away from the table, then paused before turning to go.

  “Pleasure doin’ business wiff you, guv,” he said, and he gave the Whelp a wink with his bulging-wide right eye.

  “I can’t believe even you would sink so low,” I said to the Whelp as the hunchback hobbled away.

  As usual, my disapproval seemed to amuse the insolent jackanapes no end.

  “Neither can I,” he said with a smile. “Well . . . I suppose I should go, too. I shan’t be leaving for another hour or so, but in the meantime I’ve preparations to make.” He tugged at the sleeve of his black frock coat. “I’m hardly dressed for an expedition. Shall we return to the Clarendon?”

  “You go ahead,” I said. “Suddenly, I find I actually prefer the company here.”

  My show of pique merely gratified the Whelp all the more, and he headed for the door with such a jaunty spring to his step I wouldn’t have been surprised had he started whistling.

  I sat there alone, pretending to drink my steam beer so as to keep the saloon keeper at bay and avoid the curious (and hostile) stares of the other patrons. After a few minutes, however, I had company again: a hunched figure appeared in the doorway and came sidling toward me.

  I greeted him with applause as he retook his seat.

  “Bravo. A masterful performance.”

  My companion shrugged modestly.

  “I had a receptive audience,” said Sasanoff—for, as you’ve surely long since guessed, he and Goodfellow were one and the same. “He’s so eager for adventure he would have believed me had I appeared to him as Admiral Lord Nelson. Now . . . what say we properly fortify ourselves for the cold?”

  What I said was “yes,” of course, and soon we were stoking up warmth with a surprisingly serviceable whiskey Mr. Lonnegan had on hand. Eventually, however, Sasanoff drained his glass and stood up.

  “Come,” he said. “All must be in readiness for the denouement.”

  I followed him out of the tavern with no little reluctance. Certainly, I wanted to see him deliver the coup de grâce with my own eyes. Yet by necessity he’d be doing it out of doors, while I very much wished to remain safely behind closed ones . . . preferably beside a roaring fire with a glass of port close at hand.

  I knew better than to deny Sasanoff his audience, however, and soon we were hustling up the road toward the mine. Quite a sight I’m sure we made: Richard III and Falstaff side by side, both of them huffing and puffing in the thin, frigid air of the mountains. Though Sasanoff had given us plenty of time to beat the Whelp—the reason for his warning about the “afternoon shipments”—he still insisted on a forced march so swift it soon had my back slick with perspiration that would turn to icicles the second we stopped.

  And worse was yet to come, for Sasanoff had selected a hiding place that required us to crawl on all fours into a dense copse of prickly bramble. Of course, frames such as mine are not proportioned for easy concealment, so we had to wriggle our way into the thickest of the thicket, briers tearing at my topcoat (and my pride). Sasanoff nearly lost his false beard in one particularly dense tangle, but after some struggling he managed to free himself, whiskers intact. I’d suggested he relieve himself of his disguise, but he accused me of lacking panache. (A charge that had never before been leveled against me!) A dramatic unveiling, he insisted, was key to the whole thing.

  Once we were finally in place, I could see why Sasanoff had picked the spot he had, trying though it had been to reach. We may as well have been in box seats, for we had a perfect view down into the rocky basin in which the final act of the farce would soon play out.

  Perhaps forty feet from us was a mound of loose stones piled up that morning by Sasanoff himself. Beneath it was a shallow hole just deep enough for the battered locker that had, not long before, housed my own little treasure: my clippings. I’d volunteered it when Sasanoff outlined his plan. Now it held but a single slip of paper, upon which had been scrawled these words:

  YOU’RE SACKED!

  —M.S.

  The plan was this: We would wait for the Whelp; we would watch him unearth the box; we would witness his dismay upon discovering its contents; we would stand and announce our presence; we would reveal the true identity of “Mr. Goodfellow”; we would gloat; we would leave.

  Curtain.

  As it was, however, the first scene of our little production—the waiting—ran long. Every quarter hour or so, Sasanoff would pull out a watch and glumly mutter, “Any minute now . . . any minute, I’m sure.” It heartened him considerably when I pointed out that the watch he kept consulting was the Whelp’s own.

  Just as my fingers and toes were going numb with the cold, we heard something moving tow
ard 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 hunchbuttock: 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 ch
ange 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.”

  He spread out his hands, inviting us to appreciate his makeshift disguise. Seeing him without his false whiskers, his legs no longer bowed, floppy-brimmed hat no longer drooping over his prominent brow, I was amazed that we’d ever been duped. The makeup hadn’t been that heavy, really. He’d made little effort to conceal his features. No, much as it pains me to admit—and I’m sorely tempted to strike these lines out—it was the man’s superior acting that had carried the day.

  [The above paragraph was, in fact, inked out with a heavy hand, and the content of the expurgated section was only discovered after painstaking X-ray analysis of the original manuscript.—S.B.H.]

  “I assume Mr. Tabor told you about the lost silver map swindle at the reception last night,” the Whelp said. “It certainly couldn’t have been one of the other guests, as you took such pains not to converse with them. I myself heard of the scheme in an altogether more direct fashion: in the course of my explorations of Leadville, I was approached by not one but three ‘confidence men’ plying variations on the tale. They were all most admirable thespians in their own way, and more convincing than many an Iago or Shylock I’ve seen. In fact, for all your successes in the theatre, Mr. Sasanoff, I daresay you wouldn’t last a second as a buttoner in a public house. Your ‘Mr. Goodfellow’ had about him far too much of the actor’s West End and not nearly enough of the Cockney’s East.”

  This slap was, at last, too much for Sasanoff, and his surprise boiled away with the searing heat of rage.

  “You arrogant pup!” he thundered. “I’ll see to it you never appear on the stage again!”

  The Whelp shrugged mildly.

  “As you like it.” He turned to go, then stopped and glanced back over his shoulder. “Oh, and by the way—you may keep the watch. I bought it in Indianapolis for a dollar.”

  And with that, his long legs carried him up the brushy incline slanting down from the road.

  I never saw him again. Nor did I hear him spoken of until years afterward, and then in an entirely different (and eternally irritating) context.