“Better and better.” Holmes moved to clap his hands, then forbore when his sling impeded the gesture. “They paraphrase Bacon. If I am to follow this advice, it would be worth it to be slain by a literary man.”
“There are times when your sinister sense of humour wears upon one,” I said, handing him the paper.
He turned up the lamp on the night-table and studied the item at close hand. He sniffed. “Hum. The singular smell of lampblack, the chief agent in the manufacture of India ink. If I thought Mrs. L’Azour untrustworthy, I’d suspect eavesdropping upon our conversation with the lieutenant. I refer to our friend the Bengalese hunter.”
“A stretch, certainly. I assume the compound is hardly more in short supply here than back home. It need have nothing to do with the villain’s old hunting grounds. I begin to think you’ve transferred your obsession to Sebastian Moran from—”
“Tut! If you expect me to honour my resolution, you must refrain from taunting me. However, the name is a misnomer. The ink is a product of China and Japan. The paper, interestingly, is a rice derivative. I spent some time in India after Reichenbach, directly I left Lhasa. It’s as common there as foolscap, and nowhere else.”
“Tiger Jack is dead, Holmes. We saw him cut down from the scaffold, and heard the physician’s declaration.”
“And yet these hands itch for a spade, to settle the thing in toto. But we needn’t book passage yet, when Gabriele Medusa is so convenient.”
“It’s a worthy supposition,” I said. “Petrosino said he knows his English-language classics.”
“Well, we shall give him his orals tomorrow. Meanwhile, we must disturb our landlady once more. Fetch her, will you?”
I won’t belabour the reader’s patience with a detailed account of our interview with Mrs. L’Azour. She knew nothing of the note, swearing upon the crucifix she wore, and she was believable. The café proprietor who provided the vichyssoise, one Monsieur Blanc, was a compatriot, a “pious man” whose enterprise was extremely successful: Greenwich’s bohemian population queued up into the street regularly to enjoy his simple but tasty country fare. He was assisted by his widowed daughter-in-law, who had lost her husband in the late war with Spain; she, too, was described as above reproach.
“I accept this prima facie, for the time being,” said Holmes. “Monsieur Blanc seems impregnable. As to the daughter, our dangerous friends are patriarchal, disinclined to trust the fair sex in such matters. Merci, ma bon femme. We shan’t disturb you again this night.”
“Ne pensez pas, monsieur.” She curtsied and took herself out.
“You are wide awake?” Holmes asked me.
“I always am, after receiving a death threat.”
“Indeed. I have the opposite reaction. This breed has a distorted concept of my life’s value. Redundancy and warm bland milk are the same to me. Look sharp, Watson. Your fate is infinitely more important in my view.”
Within five minutes, he was asleep, leaving me to sit up with my revolver at my elbow and every sound in that slumbering household increased tenfold.
We were undisturbed, however, during my vigil and then Holmes’s, Eley in his lap. He insisted I douse the lamp, but I slept fitfully, and whenever I awoke I saw the strong planes of his face reflected in the minimal light leaking round the curtains, eyes aglow, like a cat’s in the shaft from a lantern.
In the morning, he was as fresh as if he’d been the one resting, whilst I felt old and used. He made quite the dashing figure with his overcoat slung over his shoulders cloak-fashion, his arm in its sling, and the brim of his soft hat tugged rakishly down above one eye. Mrs. L’Azour could manage eggs and coffee; after breakfast we set out for Little Italy.
As Petrosino had promised, we found Medusa’s lair without difficulty. The whole neighborhood knew of La Perla, a spacious shop with a spotless plate-glass window through which the winter sun shone strongly, with black-and-white tiles spotless and all the instruments of the barber’s trade a-glitter: ranks of razors, clippers, brushes, personalized mugs in wooden racks, and three white porcelain chairs raised, lowered, and tilted by means of chrome handles. It was early. No customers occupied the corner where stacks of Italian periodicals stood within reach of the oaken bench and only one chair in use, by an absolutely stout man who set aside his newspaper and got up as we entered. He wore striped shirtsleeves, a boiled collar, braces supporting woolen trousers, and yellow gaiters on gleaming black shoes.
“Buongiorno, signores!” he greeted heartily, in a booming voice that seemed to be regulated by the counterweight of an enormous pair of black moustaches. His cheeks were red and round as apples and his hair slicked back and parted exactly in the centre. “My first customers of the day! Gabriele Medusa at your service. Who will be first?”
Holmes looked amused. “Are we so obviously not paisan, that you should speak to us so confidently in English?”
“No. There are Northern Italians here, some whiter than you; but they do not dress like Englishmen, and I know everyone in the neighborhood besides. By the process of elimination, I shall greet you as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, distinguished visitors to this shore.”
“Good Lord!” said I. “I’m in the presence of two detectives.”
“Elementare!” His eyes were as black and shiny as his shoes. “Ours is a small village surrounded by mountains of brick and steel. There are no secrets here, and when famous men from across the sea enter it—well, what use is there of newspapers? I myself read them only to improve my English.”
“It bears little improvement,” Holmes said. “I understand you learnt at the feet of its masters.”
“I have been pleased to include Dr. Watson among them. His accounts of your exploits—”
Holmes produced the grim message we’d received during the night.
Medusa’s jovial façade vanished, as if it had been painted on a canvas curtain jerked up into the flies by a zealous stagehand. He strode to the door, turned the key in the lock, drew the shade down over the glass, and beckoned us to follow him through a curtained doorway at the back of the shop.
This room was an office, banked with wooden file drawers, a solid desk with a green baize top, a tufted leather chair on a swivel, and lower chairs, leather also.
“Sigaros?” He twisted a fat palm toward a great humidor on the desk.
We declined. When we were seated, Medusa selected a pontoon-shaped cigar, bit off the end, spat it into a cuspidor, and set fire to it with a square wooden match. Wreaths of aromatic smoke filled the room. “‘Bequeath your soul to God.’ A travesty, to misquote a great writer deliberately.”
“You deny any knowledge of it?” Holmes asked.
“Understand, I make no apologies for the life I live. In the village where I was born, a man without a title was a beast of burden, to be discarded the moment he was no longer useful. There were only two ways he could prosper, as a prizefighter or a criminal, and then only in America. I am no good with my fists, signores.”
“Do you deny you sent someone to fire a bullet into our room in Greenwich Village?”
“I have heard of this intolerable thing. Yes, I deny it. There is no percentage in victimizing white men. Here, a peasant, a greasy wop, brings upon his death through arrogance or ignorance or stupidity; an investigation follows, another peasant is arrested, or perhaps the man to blame is never found: Either way, the police lose interest and apply themselves to the next case of arrogance or ignorance or stupidity. ‘They come transfigured back, secure from change in their high-hearted ways.’”
“‘Beautiful evermore, and with the rays of morn on their white shields of expectation.’ Odd to cite Lowell on the subject of such creatures.”
Medusa beamed, his garrulity restored. “You cannot know what it means to have this kind of conversation. I have pockets filled with pearls, and I live among swine; hence La Perla, the name of my establishment.”
“Petrosino warned me you’d try to turn away my questions with cant. What do you know of a man called Lungo?”
“A fiction, invented by local housewives to frighten their children into bed. The Tenente is grasping at straws if he mentioned this chimera.”
“As a matter of fact he adheres to your view on the subject. This is no fiction.” Holmes put two fingers in a pocket of his waistcoat and dropped a small misshapen object onto the green baize.
The barber studied the spent bullet without touching it. “No evidence was necessary. If I doubted the rumor, your testimony confirmed it. I do not possess a firearm, Signor Holmes. If I found that any man I employ possesses one, he is fired. Some of these wretches have spent time in jail; petty offences all, caused by poverty and desperation, I make no judgment. To be searched by the police with such a weapon on one’s person would mean further imprisonment, and a stain upon my reputation.”
“‘The stiletto, la pistola, the garrote.’” The detective quoted Luigi Pizarro. “The first and third are permitted?”
A pair of meaty shoulders rolled. “The streets are dangerous. Whilst a blameless tubercular is turned away at Ellis Island, a cutthroat may pass through the eye of the needle. One must protect oneself and one’s family.”
“I submit that strangling one’s attacker with a length of wire requires something other than defence of self and home.”
“You do not know our community. In London, the entire foreign quarter would fit inside Battery Park. There are some twenty millions of Italians here alone.”
“That is one of the reasons Dr. Watson and I made this voyage: to see the enemy in its natural habitat.”
“Sicily was much closer.”
“Geographically correct. However, on that island, one Medusa is indistinguishable from all the others. When you truly wish to know how a man made his fortune, and upon how many backs, you must come to the place where the streets are paved with gold.”
“I cannot help you, sir.”
“Your grammar is faulty. The phrase you’re looking for is ‘will not.’”
He smiled, this time without warmth. “I can see I must go to an Englishman when my English needs improving.”
“Thank you for the refresher course in the classics, Signor.” Holmes reclaimed the bullet and stood. Medusa kept his seat.
“Parla Italiano?”
“Un po,” replied the detective.
The barber crooked his finger. Holmes hesitated, then leaned close to the desk. My hand tightened upon my pocketed revolver unbidden; all this talk of knives and strangling had set my nerves on end.
However, our host made no motion other than to place his thick lips close to Holmes’s ear. His voice rustled in an unintelligible whisper.
The interview was ended. Medusa saw us to the door and unlocked it. When we were on the street, the shade he’d drawn flapped back up onto its roller.
“What did he say?” I asked when we were back on the street.
“Il mondo e antiquato, y voi e anche immaturo per lo.”
“What does it mean?”
“My usage is no doubt atrocious, and I can provide but a rough approximation: ‘The world is old, and you are too young for it.’”