“The curtain, Watson!”
I’d started towards Holmes; the look of alarm upon his face halted me. I flung the curtain crosswise of the window, obscuring any outside view of the room, and raced to him. In a trice I tore his sleeve from its seam and examined the wound. With a contrite glance towards weeping Jesus, I saw that it was but a graze. The bullet—for I was sure of the instrument—had slashed through flesh only; but the cut was deep. I leapt to my medical bag, which I’d had the ingrained good sense to keep separate from my trunks. It was the work of a few moments to disinfect the wound with alcohol and staunch the bleeding with gauze long enough to bind it.
I’d helped him to a chair, but it took all my strength to keep him from springing up from his seat. “I’m the master here,” I told him sternly. “If you won’t take rest, I’ll have Mrs. L’Azour call for an ambulance, and you can impress the doctors with your deductions.”
“You’re a tyrant. I don’t envy your patients. However, our man is long gone, if I give him the compliment due someone who can ambush me. Find the bullet, Watson.”
If I may boast, I’d spent enough time in close proximity with death to have learnt the procedure. In short order, calculating Holmes’s position at the time of the shooting, I found the rupture in the plaster of the wall a few centimetres from the spot where he’d been standing. It was the work of a minute to extract the lump of lead with my pocket-knife and place it in my patient’s outstretched hand. He held it up.
“Thirty-eight caliber, I should judge. The copper jacket suggests it was fired by one of the new semi-automatics, such as the Spanish used in Cuba. Gas-fired, Watson; as if the agents of death weren’t fast enough by way of the dependable old bolt-action rifle. A sniper’s weapon. You’ll remember Colonel Sebastian Moran, and his speciality in delivering death at long range.”
“You can rule him out, at least,” said I. “He’s buried in Stranger’s Field, with a broken neck his last trophy.”
“I saw a telephone in the foyer. Be good enough to call Lieutenant Petrosino and inform him of this latest event.”
“After I call the local hospital.”
“Posh. I did worse to myself vaulting a barbed-wire fence in Wyoming Territory.”
“When were you in Wyoming?”
He looked rueful. “I’m guilty of not giving you a complete account of my travels after the Reichenbach business. Tibet wears on one after a season. I found the range wars in the American West more interesting than the wisdom of Asia; for one thing, I learnt how to braid a lasso from horsehair, which may come in handy someday, although I know not how. Come, come! This bears no comparison to your wounding in Afghanistan.”
“You’ll promise me to remain quiet whilst I place the call? No working up a disguise from the bedspread and the coconut mat outside the door and gallivanting through Greenwich?”
He smiled abashedly. “I confess I took notice of that mat, with something of the order in mind, should the need arise. However, I’m allergic to coconut. Call our friend. I’ll be here when you return, fortifying myself with the medicinal brandy in your medical bag.”
“However did you know—?” I started. But I knew better than to press the point. I went downstairs, cranked the instrument in the foyer, and asked the operator to connect me with the Italian Squad.
• • •
Lieutenant Petrosino appeared within the hour, looking equal parts concerned and vindicated. “Did I not warn you, Mr. Holmes?”
“About the vicissitudes of the local geography,” said my friend, stretched out in his dressing gown upon one of the brass beds; my trunks and his carpetbag had arrived in the interim. “You said nothing about opening a window; although I concur that was careless, given our situation. But let us not waste time assigning blame. You have the bullet; can you, with your ingenious American methods, trace it to its source?”
“Alas, I cannot, although my instincts tell me that a projectile should be traced as certainly to its source as a type-written letter to the typewriter.” He smiled at Holmes’s raised brows. “Yes, I have read your monograph upon that subject, along with many more. I have a standing order with all the publishers upon our two continents for anything new regarding criminal science. I have men searching the upper stories and rooftops of buildings opposite this one. Our bird will have flown, but someone may have seen something.”
“Surely you can narrow down the list of assassins who elect to dispatch their victims at long range. I noted immediately upon taking possession of this room that the nearest point of vantage is two hundred metres.”
“There are three.” Petrosino seated himself in an armchair, placing his cap on the floor. He had a splendid head of black hair, streaked here and there with grey; as I judged him years shy of forty, I thought them earned through experience rather than time. “One, a veteran of the war in Cuba, is in a prison infirmary, dying of malaria contracted during his service in Santiago; he was an anarchist, who shot at an alderman and hit a dentist by mistake. The second, a lunatic with an inbred talent for marksmanship, died of a heart attack before he could carry out his threat to slay his estranged wife and her lover. His wild threats were discovered in a diary he kept. He shut down the shooting range in the carnival on Coney Island. The third—ah, Dio! He may be but a myth.”
“Enlighten me,” said Holmes. “There is no story more true than the apocryphal.”
Petrosino shrugged; a purely southern Continental gesture, not to be duplicated by one of any other origin.
“I should not waste your time. Lungo is the name he’s been given; it is the Italian for ‘length.’ It’s said he shot to death the favourite candidate for the presidency of Macedonia whilst he was delivering a speech upon a platform, at a range of six hundred metres. Certainly the fellow died, and of gunshot; but the local authorities believe it was delivered at close range by a revolver in the hand of one of his own adherents, upon discovering he’d been denied a position that had been promised to him upon victory. The fellow was found guilty and hanged within a fortnight. The rest is rumor, undoubtedly encouraged by the defendant’s attorney. Six hundred metres! Impossibile!”
“I find the impossible impossible. Watson and I were just discussing a man who shot a Bengal tiger square through the eyes at that very range, in front of a British general and his staff, who took the measurement afterwards.”
“Then he is your man!”
“He’s dead, unfortunately.”
“If all who were thought dead were dead, the cemeteries would run out of space.”
“Witnesses, again; among them the hangman, a Scotland Yard chief inspector, and the doctor who recorded the moment his heart stopped beating.”
“He should have stuck to tigers.” Petrosino scowled. “I consider this my fault. Directly Dr. Watson called, I placed Sergeant Fantonetti on suspension. He was the man who knocked at my door whilst we were conferring. Clearly he lingered outside, with an ear pressed to the panel. But for him, only we three knew you were stopping here instead of at the Brevoort. Unless you were followed?” His face showed a ray of hope.
“Those who have tried have found themselves followed, and by me. You will pardon me if I suggest your Italian Squad requires maintenance.”
“I had hoped, by making it small, that I should be in a position to keep an eye upon its members; but as I said, this spawn’s pockets are deep. Fantonetti has a wife and children. Perhaps he was not corrupted, but cooperated in return for his family’s safety. My original intention was to ban married men from the squad, but it’s the nature of my people to marry young and take comfort in old age from their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Most of the single men I interviewed were either incompetent or easily compromised.” He placed a finger alongside his Roman nose. “One develops a sense for these things.”
“I can smell out a traitor myself or I wouldn’t be here.” Holmes groped inside the sling on his shoulder, which I had fashioned from a towel borrowed from Mrs. L’Azour, and withdrew his brier and travelling pouch. “Now that you’re here, we may as well have our meeting. I gave you the particulars of the Venucci affair in my cable. What can you tell me about the Black Hand in England?”
“My acquaintances with the Italian language newspapers in London assure me that it hasn’t the foothold there it has in America. Much as I would admire to credit the excellence of your law enforcement, Il Mano Negro scarcely bothered with England. Some one hundred sixty thousand Italians enter this country annually, bringing with them a healthy respect for Il Mano Negro from the old country: Little training is necessary, you see. A barbershop is fire-bombed, a tailor’s is broken into and acid poured on the inventory, and the lesson is understood. Sometimes no demonstration is necessary, just that friendly little note with a childlike drawing of a hand and the directive, ‘Pay or die.’ You have received no such communication?”
“None.”
“That is unusual. Can it be our Cousin Giovanni—for want of another name—jumped the gun, so to speak?”
“A contractor’s eagerness speaks volumes. Either these fellows suspect I know more than I do, or wish to keep me in the dark. At all events, someone considered the problem important enough for our Uncle Umberto to send a cable.”
“Imbecille!” Petrosino slapped his forehead. “All this talk of cables, and I forget. This awaited you at the hotel.” He drew a yellow envelope from his sleeve and began to rise. Holmes, yawning, signaled him to be still.
“Read it, will you, Watson? I’m not the inexhaustible traveller you are.”
“I begin to wonder.” I took the envelope from our guest and opened it:
HAVE ARRESTED STRIPED SUIT PAOLO ROSSI STOP NOT TALKING STOP CANNOT HOLD LONG LEST PAST REPEAT ITSELF
G LESTRADE
“Good old Lestrade,” said Holmes. “He never passes up an opportunity to pour salt into an open wound. But with the billiards player accounted for I can endeavor to place a face upon this new enemy.”
“We have a name, at least,” I said. “Lungo.”