Chapter 8
All it took was a look between us, and without a word, Sherlock and I were running toward the door.
“Lupin’s father can’t be a murderer!” I said as we hurried down the red velvet stairs.
“I know,” he replied. “Mr. Lupin is not a saint, but he is most definitely not a murderer.”
Sherlock said those words like they were fact. That tone usually irritated me, but on this occasion, it made me feel reassured.
As soon as we got to the lobby, I stopped. I couldn’t leave like that, without telling my father or Mr. Nelson anything. My father, I thought. Is he already headed back to Paris, or is he leaving tomorrow morning?
Sherlock seemed to understand the reason for my hesitation and pointed at a waiter-filled hallway, which led to the back of the hotel. “Let’s go that way,” he suggested, grabbing my hand. “So no one will see us.”
I bit my lip. For a second, I stood my ground. But then I pictured the newspaper article featuring Théophraste Lupin’s name. If I was in shock from that news, I could only imagine how our good friend must have felt. And with that, I dropped all my hesitation. Lupin needed us — nothing else mattered.
“Let’s go!” I said, leading Sherlock through the back hallway and out onto the street.
“I guess you haven’t become too posh after all!” he said.
When we got to the main road, a voice made me jump.
“Miss Adler!”
It was Mr. Nelson. He was leaning against the Claridge’s entrance, chatting with the concierge, when he spotted me.
Sherlock immediately tried to disappear against a brick wall alongside the road. Mr. Nelson, with big steps that made his coattails snap, got to me in a matter of seconds.
“What are you doing here, Miss Adler?” asked Mr. Nelson, staring deep into my eyes. “Were you, perhaps, leaving the hotel without telling me?”
I tried not to look at him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Nelson, so sorry, but . . .” I waved my hands around as I tried to justify my behavior.
“Let me remind you that in your father’s absence, I’m the person responsible for you. And I don’t think I need to remind you that running around in alleys like a thief is not an activity fit for a young lady,” the butler continued, his tone serious.
“I wanted to tell you, believe me. It’s just that — it’s not my fault!” I objected, my mind completely muddled.
“If it’s not your fault,” replied Mr. Nelson, “whose fault is it?”
He looked behind me, inspecting the street. I tried to block his view of Sherlock, but I knew I could only delay the inevitable for so long. I decided to tell the truth.
“It’s Lupin,” I said. “He’s in trouble, and he needs his friends!”
Mr. Nelson pretended that he did not remember who Lupin was, but a sparkle in his eyes betrayed him.
“Do you have anything to add?” asked Mr. Nelson, peeking into the alley and walking over to stop in front of Sherlock.
My friend looked at me and shrugged. “I can tell you that I’m sorry,” he said. “Or that it was some type of game, but . . .”
“But?” Mr. Nelson invited him to continue.
“What I really want to say is that I would never put Miss Irene in danger.”
“Wandering around London alone isn’t risk enough for you, young man?”
“Even if it’s hard to believe, and I can understand why it might be, Mr. Nelson, London is a civilized city. So no — I don’t consider wandering around here more dangerous than anywhere else in this world.”
“Don’t play games with me, Mr. Holmes,” said Mr. Nelson. So he remembers my good friend’s name! I thought. It was details like these that convinced me that Mr. Horatio Nelson knew me ten thousand times better than my parents.
“I’m not playing games,” said Sherlock. “Irene and I just got bad news. It seems that our friend Arsène Lupin’s father is in trouble. Big trouble.”
“I swear that’s true, Mr. Nelson!” I hurried to confirm. “We have to get to Lupin as soon as possible. That’s why we tried to run away.”
“And I swear,” added Sherlock, “that I will take care of Miss Irene and make sure nothing bad happens to her.”
“Do you swear, Mr. Holmes? That seems like a big promise to make for a young man such as yourself,” Mr. Nelson said.
“I have nothing else to say to convince you, Mr. Nelson,” Sherlock answered, looking straight into his eyes. “But what we just told you — it’s the plain truth.”
After standing still for a while, Mr. Nelson simply stretched one hand out in front of him to shake my friend’s.
“All right, Mr. Holmes. Maybe I’m crazy, but I trust your word. I hope I won’t regret it,” he said.
Sherlock shook his hand, his face glowing. “You’re not crazy, Mr. Nelson, but you’re a man that holds friendship in quite high regard,” he said.
Mr. Nelson’s eyes widened, and he tilted his head back a little. His reaction seemed to reveal that he was impressed by my friend’s intelligence. Sherlock had grasped the essential point: friendship. Mr. Nelson looked as if he was wondering how that strange young man could have read his heart in that moment.
Mr. Nelson shook his head as if trying to chase his emotion away and, smiling, stepped forward to pat Sherlock on his back. I think I also may have seen him whisper something in Sherlock’s ear.
“What did he tell you?” I asked my friend as we walked toward the Old Bell Hotel, where Lupin was staying.
“Nothing,” Sherlock lied.
* * *
After walking for half an hour, we arrived at the hotel. We immediately asked the concierge to tell the Lupins we were there. After consulting some notes, he told us that the Lupin family was not in their room. The man wore a pompous double-breasted crimson jacket and talked to us like he was annoyed. That, combined with his heavy Welsh accent, seemed to bother Sherlock.
We looked around, not sure what to do. Finally, Sherlock went and sat on a couch in the lobby, where another person was waiting.
I sat down beside Sherlock and tried to ask him a few questions. He kept giving me vague answers.
It wasn’t until later I learned the reason he wouldn’t answer me properly. “I think that man in the lobby is a journalist!” he explained later, whispering in my ear. “God forbid that the press takes advantage of our research!”
After almost an hour of waiting, a young boy came to replace the concierge on duty. The person who was waiting with us began to pace around the lobby. Finally, the man went to the desk to ask the new concierge if the Lupin family was still staying at the hotel. He received an unclear answer — it seemed that the boy had no idea how to read the guest list.
The man cursed, paced in front of us a couple of times, and introduced himself. He was a journalist for the Globe, a famous London newspaper, and he was there for the same reason as us. The Lupin affair.
“If I’m not mistaken, you kids asked about them, too,” he said, touching his mustache. He was a ruddy type — his cheeks were tormented by what looked like a rash left over from scarlet fever, and his stomach indicated he was a heavy drinker. “Do you know them?”
“Not at all,” Sherlock answered before I could open my mouth. Then he gave me a look and pulled my guide to London out of his pocket.
“My sister and I are waiting for our parents to go sightsee,” Sherlock went on. “We asked about the Lupin family just as a bet between us. We read about them in the paper, and my sister wouldn’t believe they were staying at our hotel. Now she owes me a penny!” he concluded with a grin.
I nodded with a dumb laugh, pretending Sherlock was telling the truth. All of a sudden, a cold wind touched my ankles and made me shiver.
The man kept looking at us, as if to determine whether we were being honest. Suddenly, Sherlock stood up from the couch and grabbed my hand, as if he was eager to get moving. “Mama and Papa are taking too long! Always late! Let’s go wait for them in our room, where we’ll be more comfortable.”
I followed him down the hallway in complete silence. But as soon as we got to the stairs and I knew we were alone, I began to ask him something. “Where did —” I started.
“Shh . . .” Sherlock interrupted, pointing a finger at me to make me shut up. But because of the absolute darkness in which we were standing, he miscalculated, and his finger landed on my lips.
We both stopped, as if a magic spell suddenly turned us to stone. That sudden physical contact caught us both by surprise. Just for a moment, my eyes met Sherlock’s in dim light.
“Come on, let’s go,” said Sherlock, like he wanted to wake both of us up from that strange dream.
In just a few steps, we reached a crooked door that opened to the back of the hotel, and we felt the afternoon breeze coming in. We heard a few steps on the stairs.
“I think it’s Lupin,” said Sherlock. “I assumed, from the cold breeze in the lobby, that he, or someone else wishing to avoid the journalist, had decided to go in the back entrance.”
I nodded. “Now — what room do you think he’s in?”
“Seventy-seven, I’d say,” Sherlock Holmes said very seriously. “Seventy-seven is the room on the top floor, so it’s likely to be accessible to the roof — the perfect spot for an acrobat like Théophraste. I imagine that Lupin left in a hurry, as soon as he heard that his father got arrested, but I’ll bet he’s back there by now.”
I could tell from the abrupt way he spoke that my good friend was just as embarrassed as I was about what had happened a few minutes earlier. We quickly and silently made our way to room 77.
“It’s us,” I said, as we arrived at the door. “Lupin? Are you there?”
I heard a couple of steps. Then the door opened, and Arsène Lupin appeared in front of me.
“Irene!” he exclaimed.
I barely recognized him. The handsome, tanned young man I had met in Saint-Malo that summer was now pale and skinny. He looked so fragile.
He welcomed me with a tiny smile. He hugged me, and the firmness of that embrace made me feel that what we had read in the paper was true.
He hugged Sherlock as well, but not the same way he hugged me. Then he invited us into the room that, like Sherlock had guessed, was just below the roof. I could hear pigeons landing on the gutter.
There was plenty of light coming in from two rounded dormer windows, one of them overlooking the city and the other one overlooking a street that circled the hotel.
We didn’t waste much time chatting and catching up, even though Lupin tried to serve us tea, which Sherlock and I both refused. We were there to hear what had happened to Théophraste.
“It must be a mistake,” Lupin started. “A big mistake. Nothing more — I’m positive! Don’t trust what the paper says.”
“Of course,” I answered.
“They arrested him while he was on a gutter. It was near the hotel where that man got murdered . . . Alfred Santi,” Lupin explained.
“Have you talked to him?” I asked.
Lupin shook his head. “They wouldn’t allow it. But Mr. Aronofsky — the owner of the circus — and I spoke with a lawyer . . . someone called . . . uh . . .”
He dug into his pockets and found a business card, which he showed to us: Archibald J. Nisbett, Lawyer.
“And what did Nisbett tell you?” Sherlock asked.
“Nothing,” Lupin said, sighing as he lay back on the bed. “I have a meeting with him in less than an hour to gather some information . . .”
“What a mess!” I said, looking at Sherlock. He did not seem worried, just focused — like he was thinking about many things at once.
“I have to ask you something, Lupin,” he said in a firm voice.
“My father didn’t do anything,” Lupin told him.
“I don’t doubt it, but . . . your father was arrested while he was on a gutter by the Hotel Albion,” Sherlock said matter-of-factly.
Lupin closed his eyes, still lying on the bed.
“So the question is, what was your father doing there on the gutter?” Sherlock asked.
A long silence followed, interrupted only by the ticking of a clock. When Lupin finally started talking, his voice was so quiet that Sherlock and I could not hear him. Another silence followed, and then he said, “Fine! I’ll tell you the truth. You’re my friends, right? But you both have to promise . . .” Lupin hesitated, then sat up to look at us. “You have to promise you won’t tell anyone for any reason.”
We promised. I felt so many emotions then — pity, rage, shock — all of them bubbling up inside of me as tears threatened to fall from my eyes.
“I believe my father is a thief,” confessed Lupin. Since neither Sherlock nor I said a word, he added, “I’ve known this for a while. It’s the only explanation for the fact that we can afford this lifestyle.” He gestured to the room around us as he got up from the bed. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s nothing like your homes, after all. But when you’re living on the road in a circus . . . this is pure luxury.”
Lupin stood up and began pacing the room. “At first I thought it was my mother who took care of all this. She’s rich, you know. And she’s doing great wherever she is.” He laughed nervously and shook his head. “Her family never accepted my father — they never forgave her for falling in love with a man who worked in a circus. Someone who lives on the road, someone not good or proper . . . a thief!”
He turned his back to us. The more he talked, the more he demonstrated the anger I had known him to have during the summer.
“That’s how I grew up with my father and the circus. If I had to describe my mother, well, my memory fails me! But my father is more than just a father. You can’t understand what it means to grow up and wander around with him and the others from the circus. You create a bond that’s deeper than blood. My father taught me everything, and made sure I had everything I ever wanted. We followed the circus, but we always traveled on our own — first class, good hotels, first-rate locations.” Lupin shook his head. “I’ve always tried to ignore where the money came from, even if I knew the truth.”
I shivered, thinking about our walk on the roofs of Saint-Malo during the summer, and I started to think about what types of skills Théophraste might be teaching his son.
“Yes, my father is a thief. Now I’ve told you. And now you can leave this room and never come back. I can’t blame you if you don’t want to deal with a thief. But . . . even if it is true that my father is a thief . . . he is not a murderer. No way!”
I walked across the room and stood in front of one of the dormer windows so my friends wouldn’t see the tears that were streaming from my eyes.
As I rested my forehead against the window, I noticed some of the hotel staff talking on the street below, and then I saw the journalist we met in the lobby taking notes.
I sniffed. Who knew what they had just made up about the arrest of the man in room 77. And everyone would believe it to be the truth.
There was silence in the room again, thick as the fog outside.
I could not take it anymore. “We must go to the Hotel Albion!” I said. I turned to my friends, drying the tears from my eyes. “Even down there, people are talking about Santi’s murder.”
Sherlock and Lupin looked at me.
“While you’re meeting with this lawyer, Lupin,” I continued, “Sherlock and I will try to figure out a way to help your father. What do you say?”
Neither of them said a word. That was the way it worked with us. Sometimes all we needed was one look to say everything we held in our hearts.