As yet, the adventure I have called “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” had yet to appear in print, although some of the particulars had been reported in the press, and evidently contained sufficient interest to have been appropriated by foreign papers, or our comely visitor would have known nothing of the case.
Inspector Lestrade had enlisted Holmes’s aid in getting to the bottom of a series of bizarre crimes in which a number of inexpensive plaster busts of the French Emperor had been stolen and smashed to pieces. It developed that the infamous black pearl of the Borgias, missing for some time, had been secreted in one of the objets d’art before the plaster had set in order to avoid arrest, and the thief responsible had been forced to track them down to their purchasers and eliminate them one at a time. The last of the six had turned out to contain the item, which Holmes, with his passion for theatrics, had been privileged to extract himself before an appreciative audience.
One Beppo, a known associate of the Italian secret society known as the Mafia, was the culprit. He had slain the assassin Venucci in a struggle to obtain it, and for a time Lestrade had suggested closing the case as an example of an Old World vendetta.
Such had been our one-and-only brush with that sinister organisation. We’d thought it to be our last.
Holmes, needless to say, was elated. Here at last, it seemed, was a reprieve from the ennui that plagued him whenever his gifts were in idle, and to see him rub his hands, eyes bright, like an artist seized with sudden inspiration, quite heartened me.
Would that I had not been so naive; but to attempt to dissuade him in medias res would have been as futile as trying to stop a charging train by standing on the tracks with arms upraised.
“Watson, I think your patient has recovered to the point where we may treat her as a guest.”
“I agree.”
Presently, we had repaired to my sitting-room, contentedly arranged in my worn but comfortable old upholstered chairs, Holmes and I with whiskies-and-sodas. Miss Venucci, her colour restored by another draught of brandy, declined further refreshment.
“And now, young lady,” said Holmes, curled up like a cat with his legs crossed beneath him and his long fingers tented, “kindly proceed with your predicament.”
Her account was brevity itself. She had a better command of our language than she proclaimed, a mystery she herself explained almost at the start.
She had never known her father. Her mother, the daughter of the owner of a tiny vineyard outside Palermo, Sicily, had died giving her life, and in his grief and ignorance of child-rearing, her father had remanded her to the care of the local sisters of charity, who had included lessons in English, Spanish, and Greek in addition to her native tongue. Although they would tell her nothing of her father, some of the other girls in the orphanage were better versed in the ways of the world, and through them she learnt that Pietro, a local gravedigger, had fallen in with the Mafia when the local don had paid him handsomely to dig an extra few feet and bury some inconvenient corpses beneath the legitimate residents interred above.
Venucci, it developed, possessed the gift of discretion: “Omerta,” his daughter injected at this point. “You know this word?”
Holmes nodded. “The oath of silence. A sacred thing, in that culture—enforced, of course, by the threat of death to the transgressors. In its way, it’s the key to criminal success, as valuable as confession is to the Catholic, albeit it less conscionable. Do I interpret it correctly?”
“Sí,” said she, clearly impressed. (This was personal approbation; despite his disparagement, I had not exaggerated the detective’s phenomenal resources of memory in regard to the demimonde in which he was as comfortable as in our own respectable class. I forbore to point it out, in keeping with my pledge never to distract him in the course of interviewing a potential client.)
In time, this ability—and Venucci’s greed—led to his trial by fire: murder for hire. His first victim was a tailor who’d refused to share his profits with “the order” (for such it was euphemistically called; also la cosa—“this thing”—and various other terms of refinement designed to confuse the authorities). The details were unknown, but from the results, the gravedigger’s prowess with a stiletto matched his skills with a spade. He was thereupon promoted to that elite society comprised of thugees, hashashim, and Destroying Angels that has plagued mankind since Cain slew Abel.
Just how Venucci came to emigrate to England, she could not supply. Possibly one of his assignments had led to complications with the authorities, and it was deemed wise that he set sail for cooler climes.
“I can tell you nothing more of him,” his daughter concluded, “as I heard nothing until the circumstances of Il Seis Napoleoni appeared in the local journals. I was eighteen years old at the time, and the nuns encouraged me to take the vows. ‘It’s your calling,’ Sister Maria Immaculata insisted. I was cheeky—this is a word, sí?”
“It is a word, yes,” said Holmes. “I pray you not to bog down your interesting narrative with unnecessary asides.”
“Very well. I was cheeky enough to reply, ‘Tell them I’m out.’ She slapped my face, as you may well imagine, and locked me in my cell on a regimen of bread and water. But she overlooked the rotted wood in which the latch of the window was secured. I absconded, and—”
“—made your way in the world, through this means or that,” Holmes finished. “I am neither your judge nor your biographer, signorina. Tell me those circumstances that brought you into my sphere.”
“I shall; although I must tell you there was nothing disgraceful in the life I led. Degrading, perhaps; demeaning, certainly. But I would not follow my father’s example into a life my mother would find repugnant. She was by all accounts a decent woman, who had she the opportunity might have directed my father into a life far more noble than the one he fell into. I acknowledge that he was a weak man. Such men may be evil or noble, given the fates that befall them.”
“I’m unpersuaded; but I may be prejudiced, based upon my observation of human nature at its most inhumane and unnatural. Now that I know the sum total of your father’s travels, I would know yours.”
Her dark eyes flashed fire. I can think of no more original way to describe what happens when Mediterranean features register rebellion. I envy the tropical races their range of emotion. A British woman of breeding might have distended her nostrils a tenth of a centimetre, and there’s little romance in it.
“I seek the restoration of my family,” she said. “I want to remove my father’s remains from the depths of degradation and return them to his homeland, the last place that offered him a chance at redemption.
“I know not, had my mother survived, whether he would have continued to lead a decent life. Our opportunities are limited, compared to yours; just as your own class system is constrained by the standards of American liberty and equality, you must admit. We shall never know now. But I believe, as strongly as I have faith in anything, that if I am to make something of myself in this new century, I must begin by returning my father’s remains to hallowed ground.”
She sat back, her hands gripping the arms of her chair; and in that moment I recalled, in a flash, the same attitude assumed by my dear departed Mary, challenging Holmes to make right her own paternal legacy. Codger that I was, entering the final phase of an adventurous existence, I wondered if there might perhaps be someone out there yet who could rescue me from a lonely old age.
Holmes, I could tell, was moved. His heavy lids flickered. He untented his hands and folded them across his stomach, still spare after all these years (I envied him his wizard metabolism).
“It’s a simple matter, after all,” he said. “Petition Scotland Yard for an order of disinterment, suffer a season of hemming and hawing, and sign the document when it arrives. Semplicità.”
“Not so simple, Signor Holmes. Your own country has refused directly to surrender the body.”
“Bureaucratic incompetence.”
“I have written Scotland Yard three times. Each time they have given me a different excuse.”
“One hand knows not what the other is about.”
“I wrote your Home Secretary. An assistant-to-an-assistant assured me my request was in the files and would be attended to.”
“Passing it on.”
“A man who identified himself as an inspector with Scotland Yard advised me not to pursue the matter, for reasons of international relations.”
“Xenophobia. What was the inspector’s name?”
“Lestrade.”
The detective smiled thinly. “Dear me. If the world grows any smaller we’ll be drawing lots to stay aboard.”
“Holmes,” I said, “that hardly sounds like Lestrade. He’s obstinate and barely competent, but I’ve never known him to be deliberately obstructive.”
“Perhaps his recent promotion has him flying too close to politics. Well, if his motives were to pique my interest, he’s succeeded. I haven’t had a good match with authority since that Dreyfuss business. I shall look into the matter, Signorina Venucci.”
“Splendid!” Then she looked troubled. “I can pay but little. I saved enough for passage both ways, lodging, victuals, and the cost of disinterment, but—”
“Prego.” He held up a hand. “I no longer hide from my creditors. I shall ask no more compensation than to see your father’s coffin loaded aboard—The Mother Cabrini, is it not? No matter; my passion for the shipping columns is hardly unique. I await that day with pleasure.”
She rose. When he returned her parasol, her hand touched his. “Molto grazie, Signor Holmes.” She gave him the address of the rooming house where she was staying in Poplar. We saw her to the door, and soon there was nothing of her left in the room but her exotic scent.
“Amazing young woman,” said Holmes. “To brave the North Sea in February, leave behind the only home one has ever known, and plunge into the heart of wicked London at such a tender age is either the height of valor or the depth of folly.”
“Rather more of the latter, I should think. I would allow no daughter of mine to take shelter in a place like Poplar.”
“And with the West End so very accommodating to the penniless refugee,” he replied, with some asperity. “The time has come, my dear fellow, to rescue you from the clutches of the middle class.”
“I resent that. I voted for Churchill.”
“My mistake; you’re positively an anarchist. How is your schedule?”
“I’m free as air.”
“Excellent! Meet me at our old digs first thing in the morning.”
“How shall I dress?”
“Respectably, as we’ll be calling upon Scotland Yard. Sturdily, as we may be in for a bit of grave-robbing later.”