We hired a carriage, and within the hour we were aboard the Dolley Madison, which despite its gracious namesake was altogether a less lavish affair than the vessel that had brought us to the shores of liberty. It had begun life as a tramp steamer, and such improvements that had been made to upgrade its status were little more than cosmetic. A rat the size of a bull pup greeted us in the corridor outside our stateroom, a chamber scarcely more spacious than a monk’s cell, with upper and lower berths bolted to the bulkhead and the pervasive odour of coal oil and fish. It lacked even a porthole.
“We should have sent ourselves with the luggage,” I said. “The cargo hold can’t be much worse.”
Holmes was sanguine. He stretched out in the lower berth with his hands behind his head, the sling discarded as no longer necessary. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t join you in your plaint. I earned my first passage to this country stoking coal. Did you mark our fellow passengers?”
“I didn’t see anyone carrying a rifle case, if that’s what you mean.”
“I should be disappointed if you had. Apply my methods.”
“The mysterious party in the sun hat and smoked glasses caught my eye. I thought, ‘There’s a man with something to hide.’”
“I gave the purser a pound note in return for the information that the gentleman owns a tin mine in Bolivia that yields some one hundred thousand dollars monthly. He prefers to travel incognito, which explains the outlandish disguise. Evidently he’s an admirer of Poe. Anyone else?”
“The East Indian princess or something, dusky-skinned, in expensive furs and pumps as fashionable as any I saw in New York.”
“No one seems to know anything about her, but her bags are calfskin, with gold fittings. Anyone can obtain fine clothing, but luggage is another matter. I wouldn’t assign much to her nationality. The Mafia uses women only to procreate and keep house. Next.”
The hoarse whistle blew. I clambered into the top berth before the movement of the ship could defeat me. “Your turn.”
“The middle western farmer and his wife interest me, if only because I cannot conceive of anything less oceanic.”
“I must have missed them.”
“You were at my side when they passed us outside, looking for their cabin. Such types rarely wear overalls and flour sacking when they travel. His callosities were consistent with steering a plough, and a wheat stalk gifted with the power of speech could not sound more like Kansas.
“The invalided U.S. Marine has possibilities. I won’t belabour your patience with how I arrived at the simple conclusion of his past occupation and injury. That branch of the service employs more sharpshooters than any other. He’s Nordic, but the Black Hand has been known to import its specialists, based upon merit and anonymity.”
“He sounds like our man.”
“There are three hundred forty-two passengers aboard this ship, excluding ourselves. Until I have eliminated three hundred forty-one from suspicion, he’s only a wounded veteran with wanderlust.” He took his hands from behind his head and tipped his hat forward over his eyes. “Wake me at eight bells, will you, Watson? When I said food is the enemy of sleep, I had yet to encounter Nonna Petrosino’s pasta and sauce.”
“And when is eight bells?” I asked; but his even breathing told me he was deep in the arms of Morpheus.
• • •
Although he had not mentioned it, I knew the importance of staying alert whilst he slept. Ships and skullduggery went hand-in-hand. It was a simple thing to move about without attracting suspicion, catch one’s victim alone in a dimly lit gangway or a tiny cabin such as ours, dispatch him, and dispose of the remains by way of the nearest porthole, or simply shove him over the railing on deck and let the sea do the rest. I sat on the edge of my berth with feet dangling, pistol within reach, endeavoring to subtract the churning of the engines and the wash of the waves from a stealthy tread, the doorknob turning by way of an unseen hand, and to stave off sleep; I, too, had eaten a heavy meal, and the sway of the lantern depending from a steel hook in the ceiling, slinging shadows up and down the bulkhead, was hypnotic.
I dozed more than once, but lightly. A squeak (rat? the door hinge?), a groan (the flexing of the hull? a breath held, then expelled?), and I woke with a start, the revolver already in my hand as by magic. When at last eight bells rang (eight o’clock, by my watch; nautical time is seldom so rational), warped by distance and the motion of the vessel, I was never so glad to hear such a sound.
As before, my companion took the second watch, which in the morning he pronounced uneventful. There were several seatings for each meal, the tiny dining room accommodating but ten tables. The food was edible, the coffee bitter. We observed our fellow passengers at table and on deck. To my overexcited imagination, at least one out of five qualified for inclusion in Holmes’s planned photographic rogues’ gallery. But by the second day out, my friend had eliminated the Bolivian millionaire, the Kansas farmer and his wife, and (to my disappointment) the invalided U.S. Marine. The first wagered sparingly in the little casino (“Only the rich are so close with a dollar,” said Holmes. “Had he sprayed the bank notes about like water, I should have closed in”); the middle western couple were on their way to visit a nephew studying at Eton, and showed anyone who paused long enough a thick sheaf of Kodak portraits of a young man whose ears and nose were identical to the farmer’s; and the detective’s casual conversation with the retired soldier uncovered a plethora of information on how to prepare salmon steaks for a hundred men. He’d been a company cook, too busy frying potatoes to practise his marksmanship.
“Ruses are of course possible,” was the learnt conclusion. “However, such evidence as we have seen requires many months to manufacture, and if Petrosino is right about the slayer of the Macedonian presidential candidate, our Lungo was in the Mediterranean at the time, in possession of bona fides more germane to that region.”
We were in our stateroom, which we’d deemed the most secure place to share intelligence. The close quarters, and my mounting suspicion that either our enemy had chosen not to follow us home or had boarded a different boat, made me restless. I went out for fresh air.
The air on deck was bracing, stiffening my face and frosting my nose. I stood gripping the tarnished brass railing, gazing out at the choppy steel-coloured waves and remembered crossing a very different sea, weak from the lingering effects of enteric fever and promenading on the arm of an army nurse; thinking, then, that my adventurous days were over.
Smiling at my old naivety, I slid the silver case from my pocket and took out a cigar just as the wind changed, hurling spray over the railing and snatching the case from my hand. Instinctively I lunged to catch it before it fell into the ocean.
I heard a report, bent by the elements, but to an old campaigner a report just the same. There are no backfires at sea, and the noise that accompanied it, once heard, is never forgotten: the ear-splitting whistle of a bullet passing through the space where my head had been an instant before.
My soldier’s reflexes, thank the Lord, remained intact. I threw myself to the deck and rolled, upsetting a wooden lounge chair and coming to rest with my back against the deck cabin, my hand groping for my revolver. My gaze swept the deck from stem to stern, the roof of the cabin, every porthole. The last were all shut, and I saw no one. The air was too icy for casual strollers. There had been just us two: myself and my would-be murderer.