“It is now a race to escape this country with ourselves and the proof intact,” Sherlock Holmes informed Mrs. Walling and myself, while traveling at a crawl atop an ox-drawn hayrick as we struggled to make our way three hundred miles back to Odessa. Our present mode of transportation did not provide cause for optimism. Such conveyances were the norm in this backward part of the world, and our recourse to the phlegmatic peasant who negligently guided the animal and his wagon was by no means unusual. I had suggested sharing a barge on the River Bic as arguably faster, but Mrs. Walling cautioned that the river was where our pursuers would look first. Holmes deferred to her reasoning but reminded us, “We are booked aboard the Orient Express, departing the second of February from Varna. If we miss that connection we are stranded next door to Russia and exposed for the next ten days until the train’s return.”
“They will be scouring the country for us regardless,” I remarked gloomily.
“You said it yourself, Watson, it is a very big country, and I’m not so sure they will be immediately on the qui vive.”
“Why on earth not?”
“Because, my dear fellow, I think it possible that Pavel Krushenev may be reluctant to report our encounter to the authorities. It will almost certainly prove awkward for him.”
“The same may not be true of Vladimir,” I insisted. The look of pure fury with which the Cossack favored us as we stepped over his massive, trussed-up form during our flight was one I shall not soon forget. “Should that man lay eyes on us again, I would not wager a brass farthing on our odds of survival.”
“Vladimir will do as he’s told. Such men always do,” Holmes reasoned. “But assuming, with Falstaff, the better part of valor to be discretion, let us give your scenario the benefit of the doubt, Watson. They have unleashed the hounds. But for whom are they baying? Not Colonel Morcar. Nor Gideon Altmont. Not even for Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, but”—and here he could scarcely suppress a chortle of satisfaction—“for a Professor Moriarty. They are searching a haystack for a nonexistent needle.”
“A haystack is where we happen to be,” I reminded him.
Throughout this exchange, Mrs. Walling remained studiously silent, seemingly lost in her own thoughts. I could see that an alteration had taken place in her relations with the detective. It was clear to me that while she rejoiced in our success and indeed had contributed to it, she was deeply troubled by the methods he had employed to achieve it.
Presently, in an effort to narrow the gap between them, I attempted to make conversation.
“Holmes, where did the pepper come from?”
“In Ruminsky’s, while you were busily disposing of your vodka supply on the floor, I was helping myself to the contents of that ceramic pot on the table. Incidentally, I’ve revised my opinion of The Scarlet Pimpernel entirely.”
It seems Holmes hadn’t left the theatre that night but had witnessed the end of the play. I had to own I now agreed with him completely.
“And however did you learn about the girl?”
“The girl?” I knew by his expression he was thinking of Rivka Nussbaum, the wool merchant’s catatonic daughter, but as he understood my question, his physiognomy reassumed its accustomed configuration.
“Oh, that girl.” He cast a sideways look at Anna Walling. “The Jewess who broke Krushenev’s heart and turned him into a goader of rapists? That was a long shot, I confess. What you would call ‘a guess,’ Doctor. I merely took a leaf from our Viennese friend.”
“What Viennese friend?” Mrs. Walling abruptly demanded, joining our talk at last. Holmes and I exchanged glances. He was, I think, eager to reestablish a connection with her.
“A certain physician with whom I became acquainted some years ago in Austria. Beyond question a genius, though he holds some outlandish views, many of which, I suspect, may prove to be mistaken.”
The paradox drew her in.
“How can he lay claim to genius if his views are mistaken?”
Holmes lay back and stared at the sky, his hands clasped behind his head.
“He is by way of being a cartographer.”
“Cartographer?” I could not help repeating. I had not thought of our friend in this fashion and never heard Holmes so describe him.
My companion shrugged where he nestled on his bed of straw. “A mapmaker of sorts, yes. To my knowledge he is the first nonartist to discover and set foot on a hitherto unknown and unexplored continent.”
Mrs. Walling frowned. “Which continent?”
Holmes continued to gaze with dreamy abstraction at the cerulean canopy above. All was silent save the creaking of cart wheels, punctuated now and again by gaggles of what I took to be Russian geese honking in formation overhead.
“The Land of the Unconscious.”
“The Un—?”
“—conscious. And if his subsequent maps of that strange place should subsequently be proved in error, does anyone still remember or care that Columbus thought he was in India? The error pales to insignificance compared to the discovery itself. At all events,” the detective resumed before his argument could be addressed, “our friend has altered the way in which I find myself thinking about people and their motives. Working backward from Krushenev’s hatred of Jews, I wondered if there mightn’t be some personal origin for his foaming animus. Yes, I grant you, a lucky guess.”
Mrs. Walling said nothing to this. Holmes stuck a piece of straw in his mouth and continued to study the sky as silence reigned. I had begun to suppose him asleep when he spoke again.
“We must change wagons and avoid inns and public places until we reach Odessa, where the population will absorb us. Sleeping in barns may be preferable to stopping at inns. Speaking of which, Doctor, your new hat is a sight and will attract notice. And what is worse, Mrs. Watson will never forgive you for so neglecting her gift. Give it here.”
I removed my grey homburg and handed it to my friend, who spent some minutes plucking off bits of hay and brushing the felt with his sleeve before returning it.
“Better,” he declared, and went back to gazing upwards.
“Anything else?” Mrs. Walling asked without regarding him.
“Yes. Traveling as a trio is conspicuous. We must separate.”
Now it was Mrs. Walling and I who exchanged glances.
“Separate?” she repeated.
“Before we reach Odessa. It’s much the safest course. You and Dr. Watson will journey together as man and—together,” he amended. “Two is far less remarkable than three, especially if one is a woman. I will continue alone, as I am carrying and must be responsible for Krushenev’s confession.” He tapped his breast pocket. “Our tickets have already been purchased; it only remains to specify and confirm dates. We will board the Orient Express at Varna on the second, but travel in separate cars. Once in Paris, it should be safe to reunite for the final portion of our journey.”
“You seem quite sure of yourself,” Mrs. Walling observed, still without looking at him.
Holmes had the decency to blush.
“I may seem sure,” was the best he could manage.
29 January. This indeed was the plan we followed. It cannot be said that spending three successive nights in as many barns was particularly edifying, but at least, as old campaigners, Holmes and I might claim to be accustomed to such experiences. The same could not be said for Mrs. Walling, who nevertheless endured the deprivation of proper shelter or comfort without a murmur of complaint.
31 January. In this fashion, festooned with straw bits and pieces clinging to our well-worn clothing, we entered Odessa. The last sight I had of Holmes was that of a rail-thin, unshaven individual, slinking off into a souk near the City Garden, carrying a small, battered valise. Odessa had begun to regain its laissez-faire character as life returned to normal in the weeks following the suppression of its ill-fated insurrection. Civil authority had been allowed to reassert itself. This was probably a pragmatic as well as strategic consideration on the government’s part, though I was not to learn the reason ’til Varna: with the latest Russian defeat at Mukden by the Japanese, and martial law still in effect in St. Petersburg itself, troops could not long be spared in provincial capitals.
Where Holmes stayed in Odessa, I had no way of knowing. Mrs. Walling and I registered under the names on our passports at the overcrowded Hotel Esplanade, where we were obliged to share a single room. The detective had been correct, foreseeing a couple would attract less notice than a trio. The management offered no demur. Assuming Holmes would make his own arrangements, I employed the services of the obliging concierge to confirm places for Colonel Morcar and Miss Sophie Hunter on the Orient Express from Varna to Paris on the second of February.
Sharing a room with Mrs. Walling cannot be described as less than awkward. We stood silent in the tiny lift as the bellman, carrying what remained of our luggage, escorted us to something like a garret on the fourth floor with not even an ocean view to commend it. We did our best to preserve decorum, but, having spent three nights in as many barns, we had by this time few secrets from one another. Mrs. Walling’s first order of business was a hot soak, procured by means of a procession of bellmen pouring the contents of steaming kettles into a large copper hipbath located improbably in the middle of our room. I stood with my back to this procedure for what seemed the longest time, listening to a succession of sensuous sighs as Mrs. Walling took her well-deserved ease. Later, all too aware of her proximity, I gave myself a clumsy sponge wash. Poor Juliet! Pork sandwiches were then brought up to the room as a collation, but we both declined the offer of a vodka accompaniment. Afterwards I insisted Mrs. Walling take the bed and undertook to sleep on the settee. She more sensibly pointed out that her smaller frame was better suited to that place, insisting I occupy the bed, as my bulk would never fit comfortably anywhere else. Considerably embarrassed by these mechanical considerations and the circumstances which prompted them, we confined our conversation to perfunctory monosyllables and averted eyes until we were both decently under the covers (I using the coverlet and she the bedding), and the lights extinguished. In the darkness, each knew the other was awake.
“You have been with Sherlock Holmes for a very long time.” Her voice came softly in the gloom. We were situated across the room from each other, but in the dark she sounded close by. Her sentence was neither a statement nor a question.
“You make it sound as though I were his factotum,” I responded more tartly than I’d intended.
“Sorry. I only meant that you know each other very well,” she said in the same quiet voice.
“That is so.”
There was another silence. But I knew the conversation wasn’t over.
“Do you approve of what he did?”
“To what are you ref—?”
“You know perfectly well. I’m speaking of Kishinev. He tortured that man.”
“I wouldn’t call it that.”
“What would you call it?”
To my consternation, I found myself unable to answer. Holmes’s actions had shocked us both.
“My friend is the best and wisest man I have ever known,” I replied at length. “But every man has his limits, and our encounter with Rivka Nussbaum surpassed them. If he did what he did, it was because he couldn’t think of anything else. It was imperative we obtain that confession.”
“What confession obtained under duress can be relied upon?” she demanded. “People will say anything in fear of their lives.”
Again, I had no answer for that line of reasoning and fell back on what I knew instead of addressing it. “So much depends upon the hoax of the Protocols being exposed. Many, many lives may hang in the balance. You better than I know what took place two years ago in Kishinev. Nussbaum and his family were but one example.” And though I knew better than to mention it, Manya Lippman was another.
In the darkness, I sensed her considering my logic.
“So,” said she at length, “the ends justify the means.”
Like many of her sentences this night, it was hard to tell if it was a statement or a question.
“If the ends don’t justify the means,” was all I could think to reply, “what the devil does? Can you truly state with confidence Holmes did the wrong thing?”
She could not. Once more silence descended like a curtain between us. What next popped out of my mouth I cannot explain, but neither can I deny I said it.
“What happened between you and Sherlock Holmes?”
I heard something like a sharp intake of breath that was in turn succeeded by another pause before she responded quietly:
“Nothing, really.”
2 February. Following the bone-crushing journey on the desiccated milk train from Odessa, I heaved a sigh of relief when we alighted at Varna, having crossed into Romania with little interest and no impediment at the frontier. Whether Krushenev had or had not sounded the alarm, the Okhrana was nowhere in evidence.
“Don’t be overconfident,” Anna Walling cautioned me. “Borders and customs of all kinds are permeable hereabouts, and we’ve already established that agents of the Russian secret police operate freely in other countries. We are not yet out of harm’s way. I wonder if we ever will be,” I heard her add under her breath.
At the telegraph we both sent wires couched in euphemisms, mine to London, hers to New York. “All’s well that ends well,” ran mine. How I longed to see my own dear girl again.
And with what joy that afternoon did we reboard the sumptuous Orient Express, relishing every inch of her polished Italian walnut paneling, her inlaid marquetry, her gleaming Sheffield cutlery, Waterford tableware, and smartly uniformed attendants, all poised to cater to our every whim! It is a routine trip the train makes every ten days, an ordinary undertaking perhaps from her point of view, but from ours, nothing less than a luxurious voyage to freedom.
It is a fact known to soldiers that during the crisis we hold ourselves together. Duty prompts us to feats of endurance, heroism even, of which we might normally prove incapable. It is only when the crisis has passed, when we have risen above and stretched ourselves beyond what we would have believed possible, that we feel free to collapse. I am no longer a young man, and the time spent on the run on foreign soil, in imminent danger of capture under circumstances where my own people would not deign to lift a finger on my behalf (not to mention other complications I had witnessed), and the continued deprivation of a uxorious existence to which habit and inclination now disposed me—all these, I say, combined to exhaust me. Even the confined space of our compartment—(and the urbane staff of the Orient Express did not lift an eyebrow at our joint occupation of same)—failed to trouble either of us.
Though still daylight, we requested Jean-Claude (the porter whom I remembered from our previous trip and who gratifyingly recalled me in return) to convert our cushions into sleeping berths. Mrs. Walling, having long since perceived my leg injury, offered me the more accessible lower berth, but I now gallantly insisted on allotting her the more comfortable place. It was a decision I would come to regret.*
“I shall nap ’til supper, if you’ve no objection,” I told her, contriving to hoist myself aloft.
“Nyet. Perhaps I do same, but not sure I sleep.” Her thick Slavic accent was returning. I suspected it was some sort of instinctive camouflage.
As the sun set before us, turning the sky rose-pink through our window, I clambered between those sweet-smelling, crisp, ironed white sheets and slept like a dead man. My last conscious thought was wondering where on the train Holmes was. Even a distant thudding failed to rouse me.
When I awakened, Anna Strunsky Walling was nowhere to be seen.
At first I had no idea where I was and looked stupidly around trying to remember, startled to find a ceiling so close above my head. In my hazy state I was tempted simply to drift back to sleep, but it was slowly borne in upon me that I was on a train and that we were slowing. Craning my neck, I peered out the window, blinking at the dim light—for all I knew it was dawn and I’d slept the night through. I thought abruptly to consult my watch, according to which I realized, with some relief, we must be pulling into Bucharest, having traveled less than a hundred and fifty miles from Varna. I had been asleep little more than two hours and did not yet realize anything amiss.
“Mrs. Walling?”
There was no response from the lower berth, which, when I craned down to look, proved to be empty, as were the lavatory and shower, when I knocked on and then tried the swinging open door. The colourful woolen shawl my traveling companion had worn since purchasing it in the souk at Odessa was nowhere in evidence. Perplexed but not yet alarmed, I splashed some water on my face from the pewter basin, then brushed and adjusted my clothing, with the intention of making my way to the nearest dining car. Perhaps she was taking tea. And perhaps I’d see her there with Holmes, though we had agreed to ignore one another.
I found the porter at the end of the car, head down, having presumably nodded off.
“Jean-Claude, have you seen Miss Hunter?”
The man who looked up was not Jean-Claude.
“Jean-Claude is off duty,” the unfamiliar porter explained. The name “Miss Hunter” and my description meant nothing to him. He had not seen any woman since coming on duty over an hour ago.
“Perhaps she’s having supper,” I said.
He considered this.
“The dining cars do not open ’til after Bucharest.”
Frowning, I grunted something by way of reply and continued backward to the next car, where one compartment, whose shades were drawn, proved to be occupied by an amorous honeymoon couple. At least I assumed they were honeymooners.
In another, whose shades were raised, I saw a lone gentleman of perhaps forty absorbed in a game of patience. He, too, shook his head when I slid open his door and inquired about Sophie Hunter.
“Nope,” was the distinctly American reply. “Can’t say I have, ’cause I haven’t.” With which he resumed his game and I my inventory.
Many of the compartments I passed were as yet unoccupied. Varna, where the train originated, was not the most popular destination. I knew the train would accumulate passengers as we headed west, just as we had shed them during our earlier transit in the opposite direction.
The business car held four typists busily at work, but was otherwise underused at this hour. None of the clacking typists had seen the woman I described.
As I lurched rearward, the train squealed into Bucharest’s palatial Filaret terminus, with the customary wheezing of smoke and steam, as if to demonstrate to all and sundry the enormous effort involved in the task.
The nearest dining car, a cherrywood-paneled affair, was indeed empty when I reached it, unless one counted two Greek Orthodox monks seated side by side, hands on their open missals, eyes closed in either sleep or mute prayer, just as I had marveled at them in St. Basil’s.
“Meditation,” one of the stewards informed me in a confidential tone over my shoulder. “They never speak,” the other added with a shrug.
The stewards were meticulously inserting fresh roses and sprigs of white baby’s breath into the Lalique vase on every table, each table in turn draped in gleaming, starched damask linen with napkins of matching purity.
I was now fully awake and distinctly uneasy. As the train idled, I stepped onto the platform for the benefit of an unobstructed view, but saw nothing to arouse my suspicions. As the left side of the train faced a high wall of brick, I did not worry about disembarkations from that side. Abruptly mindful of Mycroft’s warning regarding Bucharest, I clapped my hands over my pockets even though I saw no sign of the street urchins he had mentioned.
I had no idea what I was looking for, only a vague concern that for whatever reason, and from whatever place of concealment, Mrs. Walling might choose to disembark without my knowing it.
Or had she done so while I was quizzing our dining car? This struck me as improbable. But when I slept? This thought made still less sense. I may have been sound asleep, but had we stopped, I surely would have waked. Merely slackening our speed had served to rouse me.
The fact that I had not found Holmes either set off a disquieting train of thought,* one that I tried to banish as it arose, namely, that the two might be somewhere together. Had both somehow contrived to leave the train? I realized that after our encounter with Rivka Nussbaum and her father in the hovel in Kishinev, Holmes was no longer the man I had known for almost twenty years. The episode with my Webley had shown me I could no longer be confident of his actions.
And then I recalled the thudding I had ignored as I slept. On the heels of that recollection a still more disturbing idea occurred, one that involved a struggle right beneath my berth.
Don’t be overconfident, Mrs. Walling had warned me.
She and Holmes had gone nowhere. Rather, I had slept through her abduction.
It then followed, I told myself, that if Anna Walling had been abducted, surely the next order of business would be to spirit her off the train—and Bucharest was the first plausible opportunity to do so.
In fact I saw no one leaving the train, but several individuals and couples now climbed aboard as friends and relatives clamored their adieux. Behind the second-class carriages were the baggage and mail cars, and it was here that I observed an unnerving sight: two oblong pine boxes were being wheeled up and loaded with some little difficulty onto the train. They were evidently heavy, for the porters were obliged to struggle with them. As I drew nearer I suddenly understood: the boxes were coffins.
I spied the conductor, also unfamiliar to me, about to blow his whistle and caught him by the sleeve.
“What are those coffins doing aboard the train?”
He looked at me, stroking the bottom of his large grey moustache suspiciously with his knuckles. “You are the family?”
“No. What has happened?”
He shook his head. “Tragedy. Hungarian couple. Holiday in Carpathia.” He made a swift downward swipe with his hand. “Avalanche. Now they go home to Pest.”
“Pest?” What irritant was he referring to?
“Two cities as one—Buda and Pest. Since thirty years now. The river separates them.”
I had forgotten or never learned this fact.
Shaking his head once more, the fellow again made to blow his whistle and bellow tidings of our imminent departure.
“One moment, please. How many miles to Budapest?”
“Eight hundred and twenty-five kilometers, monsieur. All aboard!!” He brushed past, blowing his shrill whistle. There was nothing for it but to climb back on the train.
As the engine gathered speed, commencing its corkscrew route through the Transylvanian Alps, I resolved to continue my search to the rear of our dining car, where second-class passengers enjoyed less luxurious accommodations. With some hasty calculations scratched on my shirt cuff, I understood the conductor to say we had roughly four hundred miles before us. Given the speed at which we were moving, I estimated a journey of approximately seven hours that would put us in the Hungarian capital by dawn. This being the case, it was plausible to assume both Holmes and Anna Walling, wherever each of them might be, must both remain on the train ’til Budapest.
Our dining car was now open, and I spoke with Benoit, the maître d’hôtel. He had not seen Miss Hunter, though he claimed to remember her from our journey east. Kissing the tips of his fingers, he said, “One does not soon forget such a woman,” but otherwise could offer no information or guidance.
The car had by now filled with diners, and he pointed them out, one by one. Like any good hotelier, Benoit made it his business to know his passengers.
“That one is Professor Cherniss of Heidelberg, yes, he knows the ancient Greek. Also his wife, italienne, je crois. Across from them by herself, Miss Fram. Elle est mignonne, mais non? Those blue eyes! A governess, I think she goes back to England. Traveling unaccompanied, mon Dieu. That one, Colonel Esterhazy, he calls himself. Prends garde—he is a professional gambler.” He pantomimed gestures with cards dealt from the bottom of the deck and made a comme çi, comme ça gesture typical of his race.
“And the couple by the window?”
“Countess Agneska de Maio and her husband, his name I forget. Then the American, MacDonald, who sells the guns…”
“Yes, I spoke with him. What guns?”
Benoit scowled briefly. “Colt,” he remembered, then gestured, tossing his head behind us. “Mr. and Mrs. Spottiswoode, just married…”
“So I heard.” It seemed tactful not to elaborate. “And that one?”
I indicated a devilishly handsome youth who didn’t care who knew it. Muscular and not yet twenty-five, he looked more a trapeze artiste than anything else—slicked dark hair, flashing Latin eyes, and dusky skin set off by his white twill suit, from whose confines his massive chest threatened to burst.
“You don’t know? Everybody knows. Erik von Hentzau! Argentine. He plays the polo. We have eight of his ponies with the luggage.”
“With the coffins?”
“Coffins?” He shot me a brief look of incomprehension before his countenance cleared. “Ah, les cercueils! Dommage. Si jeune.”
“I see the monks have gone.”
“Les frères? Ah, yes. They never speak.” He raised an eyebrow. “But they eat toujours cordon bleu.”
“Which compartment?”
He scowled again, consulting his encyclopedic memory. “Numero quinze, wagon-lit Ione.”
There being nothing for it, I chose to continue my inspection, beginning with the other two dining cars, then knocking on every compartment door, regardless of whether the green aisle shades were invitingly raised or forbiddingly lowered. Our mountainous route had now so many curves I was continually obliged to clutch at walls and bulkheads for balance.
The honeymoon couple was presently engaged in acrimonious argument as furious as their earlier encounter had been amicable. They ignored me entirely. In the bar car, the arms dealer, MacDonald, appeared to be in his cups and had resumed his patience with a bottle of Glenfiddich single malt for company; across the aisle, Colonel Esterhazy invited me to sit in on a game of faro, which included von Hentzau, the Argentine polo player. I politely declined. In compartment fifteen in the car dubbed Ione, the two monks were engaged, as always, in mute recitations, paying no attention either to me or to one another. Countess de Maio and her husband with the forgettable name regarded me with silent condescension, she over the tops of her reading glasses, he in the act of trimming his beard, catching a piece of my reflection in the mirror above twin wood-paneled wash basins.
A score of times my gambit was repeated:
“Forgive the intrusion, but”—stealing a look at their surroundings—“I’m searching for a young lady…”
The business car now boasted only one typist, at work on a German machine. Intent on her task, she shook her head without looking up when I asked yet again if she had seen anyone matching Anna Walling’s description.
Sometimes my search was humoured by folk doing their best to be helpful while at others doors were slid in my face. Passengers smiled or shouted at me. Once I was pushed.
Miss Fram, with wide blue eyes, seemed moved by my dilemma and heard me out, but had seen nothing of the woman I described. “I’m so sorry. I do hope you manage to find her.”
“Fram. Do I have your name right?”
“Yes. Rhymes with jam,” she added, still smiling.
One compartment with its shades lowered refused to respond at all. My calls and knocks were resolutely ignored, and when, desperate, I tried the door, I found it locked.
“What can I do?” the conductor protested when I explained the situation. “I have no authority to authorize the forced entry of one of our première classe passengers, mon colonel.”
“Devil take it!” I expostulated. “A woman has been abducted aboard this train—”
“A woman only you have seen, monsieur,” the cheeky fellow saw fit to remind me.
“Jean-Claude saw her!”
“Jean-Claude left the train in Bucharest. He was feeling unwell.”
“Damn it, man! Take me to the baggage cars! Take me or I shall make a scene! Would your precious passengers care for that? I doubt it!”
With something between a sigh and a shrug, the conductor led me to the rear of the train. In one car were strapped two motorcars—a Mercedes and a Daimler—and several crates of homing pigeons, cooing raucously. The second baggage car proved likewise unexceptional unless one counted Erik von Hentzau’s string of eight polo ponies. The flooring, deliberately slanted so it could be hosed clean, didn’t make matters easy for the poor animals struggling for purchase as the train twisted to and fro. There were several sacks of mail. Though locked at the necks, they appeared to contain nothing but paper that crinkled and crunched when I prodded them. There were various trunks and crates of food and merchandise, one of which I insisted on prying open with a crowbar (kept in the car for use by customs officials), only to find it filled with Biedermeier chairs.
“That is enough!” the conductor commanded, scandalized by my temerity. “Touch one more item and I shall have you removed from the train. I shall deposit you in the middle of nowhere by the locomotive cistern! And”—following my gaze—“do not dream of committing sacrilege!” Meaning the two coffins.
I knew enough of human nature to understand the man had reached his limits. Reclaiming my coat, which I had doffed when working the crowbar, I followed him forward. He deposited me back at my compartment, where I repeated a fruitless inspection of the lower berth, but achieved little except to confirm my impression that a struggle had taken place there. I then realized that in addition to her shawl, all Mrs. Walling’s clothes and her suitcase had also been removed, doubtless while I slept my hideous sleep. With a jolt to my stomach, I realized that, as the conductor had pointed out, there was now no evidence the woman had ever existed.
Pacing within the confined space availed nothing, and staying put was impossible. I returned to our now half-full dining car, where I sat and ordered a cognac neat.
“You might prefer to enjoy it in the parlour car,” Benoit offered. He was, I knew, concealing his impatience to clear the supper detritus so as to set up for breakfast in the morning, but I was in no mood to accommodate him, or indeed anyone else. Other diners were dawdling over their puddings and brandies; why should I not enjoy the same privilege?
“Cognac, neat,” I repeated, and sat sullenly staring at the tablecloth as I sipped the honey-coloured liqueur.
“May I join you?”
Before I could respond, the tall stranger of military bearing had answered his own question and seated himself opposite me. There was something familiar about him that I was for the moment unable to place.
“Colonel Morcar, is it?” His English was embellished by traces of a foreign accent.
“I don’t believe I’ve had the—”
“Or perhaps I should say, Dr. Baskerville?” His slate eyes glittered like ice chips.
With a chill to match their temperature, I now recognized him, but he cut me off.
“Or is it not rather Dr. John H. Watson, M.D., late of the army medical department, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, and chronicler of the doings of Sherlock Holmes?”
“Cedric West!”
The man opposite me offered a smile that manifested neither mirth nor warmth.
“Ah, yes,” he said, like one fondly reminiscing. “Cedric West. I’ll have the same,” he ordered the garçon, jutting a confident forefinger in the direction of my snifter, never taking his eyes from mine.
“But that’s not who you are, is it?” I countered, as the waiter departed, gathering my wits in a lightning flash of comprehension.
“No?” His tone was silkily mocking, like a cat toying at its leisure with a mouse.
“No. You are in fact General Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky—”
“Director General Rachkovsky.”
“Director General Rachkovsky,” I amended, “of the Okhrana.”
“Very good, Doctor.”
He regarded me, motionless as a cobra poised to strike, so very unlike the amiable stockbroker who had offered jovially to share his taxi outside the British Museum. I returned his look with a steadfast regard of my own. In this fashion we passed the better half of a minute, each gauging the measure of the other. I was right to have set him down from the first as erstwhile military; I had merely picked the wrong army.
“Why are you here?” I demanded after I judged we had enjoyed sufficient silent communion.
“Come, come, Doctor.” His head cocked to one side in a gesture I took to be one of impatience. “You have something we want; I have something you want.”
“Your English is excellent,” I noted, in a bid to buy time.
“I read history at Camford,”* he assured me, looking around. “Where is Sherlock Holmes?”
“I have not the slightest idea. Where is Sophie Hunter?”
“Anna Strunsky,” he corrected me, carefully enunciating her Russian maiden name. “Ah yes, that is what you wish to know.”
“Anna Walling,” I persisted, “is an American citizen. She is married to—”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” he bluntly interrupted.
“Then you do have her.”
“Do I?”
“Let us not play games, Director General.”
“She is no longer on the train.”
“The train has not stopped. There have been no stations.”
“The train pauses occasionally to take on coal and water. We did so at Teregova.”
I remembered the irate conductor threatening to put me off the train at one such “cistern.” I tried not to let the scoundrel across the table see any change in my expression.
“What do you want with her?”
His meticulously trimmed eyebrows arched in surprise. “With her? Nothing at all. She is merely what you would call a bargaining chip.”
Reaching into his breast pocket, he withdrew a newspaper, spreading it on the table between our snifters. I recognized the language in the typeface as German, as well as words in the headline that caused the blood to stand still in my veins.
“Behold the first German-language edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Doctor.”
“No reputable paper has printed this trash.”
Rachkovsky employed his own silver toothpick with evident satisfaction.
“It makes no difference. The Protocols are now spreading like a virus. And a virus must spread,” he added with what doubtless was intended as clinical detachment, as if conferring with another physician. “Or it dies.”
“The Protocols are fake,” I responded.
He smiled. “Fake is in the eye of the beholder, Doctor.”
“Holmes has the full confession of their creator. Once it is revealed, your hoax collapses.”
The scoundrel slid his toothpick into an ivory scabbard, meditatively swirling the cognac in his snifter with deft wrist movements before swallowing some. His favorable expression informed me he was a connoisseur.
“Ah. So now we come to the nub of the matter. You want what we have; we want what you have.”
It took several seconds for his meaning to sink in.
“Krushenev’s confession.”
“Nothing escapes you, Doctor.”
“Or else?”
“Anna Strunsky’s—”
“Walling—”
He shrugged to indicate a distinction without a difference. “Under any name, her body will never be found. You perceive the transaction is a simple one.”
I stared at the man in amazement. “The confession will do you no good. We have copies.”
“That is untrue,” he responded without rancor. “But even if it were, copies are unpersuasive. It could always be argued they were forgeries, and a carbon signature, I hazard, would be viewed as inadmissible in most courts. No, Doctor, only the signed original will suffice.”
For some reason, I found myself thinking of Holmes’s shattered Stradivarius.
“Why is it so important to you? Why is it worth a woman’s life to preserve this nauseating falsehood? Two women’s lives,” I now felt compelled to add. “For you have already taken Manya Lippman’s. It was you, wasn’t it?”
He regarded me thoughtfully with a blank expression before snapping back the last of his drink.
“Alas, Doctor, soon we will be in Budapest, and I don’t have time to explain the intricacies of Russian politics or the machinations of Count Witte,* who is trying to turn our beloved Tsar into a progressive. This we cannot allow.”
“Cannot allow? Do you work for Nicholas Romanov, or does he work for you?”
This was greeted with a cynical shrug.
“There are many ways to express loyalty. His Imperial Majesty tends to be swayed by the last voice in his ear. It is necessary—for his own good, you understand—for us, patriotic Russians, to be that last and loudest voice. Russia is losing the war with those little Nips. Someone must take the blame. You understand.”
He stood. “I am in the closed compartment you banged on earlier and found to be locked. Anna Strunsky is not inside it. You have until Budapest, Doctor.”
“I tell you I’ve no idea where Sherlock Holmes is!”
“Then I suggest you find him, Doctor. Find him at once. Or Anna Strunsky will share Manya Lippman’s fate.”