“Where do ideas come from?” Sherlock Holmes wondered, as our train for Vienna wound out of Keleti station with the three of us seated in rudimentary third class, carrying only the clothes on our backs. Holmes had stubbornly put off all our questions until we were under way. Finally he deigned to address them.
“There I was in Watson’s upper berth, seemingly at my wits’ end, torn between Scylla and Charybdis—”
“Which one am I?” Anna Walling inquired mildly.
“Between a rock and a hard place,” the detective translated, without answering her question. It was obvious he was intent on relating her rescue in his own way. “Surrendering Krushenev’s confession and allowing the hoax of the Protocols to flourish was unthinkable. I had seen the mischief they enable.”
“‘Mischief’ doesn’t seem to quite cover Rivka Nussbaum and her family,” I remarked sourly. “Nor does it do justice to—”
“Granted, Watson, granted,” Holmes allowed hastily. “On the other hand, neither could I allow anything to happen to Mrs. Walling. And yet, my mind refused to function. I lay there, staring at the ceiling eight inches from my nose, when out of nowhere I remembered something. As I said, where do ideas come from?”
“What did you remember?” Mrs. Walling and I demanded as one. I knew Holmes savored his dramatic touches, but we were exhausted and at the end of our patience.
“I remembered the business car.”
“What are you talking about?” Anna Walling demanded with more than a touch of asperity. Her manner seemed strange, given that it was only thanks to Sherlock Holmes she was alive at all, but I began to sense what the detective was getting at.
Realizing we occupied a carriage with open (albeit cushioned) seating, I lowered my voice. “Ah yes, the business car on the Orient Express with all the typists—”
“What typists?” Mrs. Walling began, her impatience mounting.
“Precisely, Watson! In desperation, it occurred to me there was likely a Russian typist and typewriter aboard the train. I told you I was going for some air, then raced to that selfsame business car, which, as you might expect, was virtually unoccupied at that hour, save for an Italian typist with a stack of material awaiting attention and her reddened eyes barely open, poor woman. I am not sure whether you observed, Watson, but the typewriter used by Krushenev in his office was in fact of German manufacture, a Blickensderfer. Examining the machines on the train, each keyboard calibrated in a different language, you may imagine how overjoyed I was to find a Cyrillic Blickensderfer. I rang for the porter and explained I had urgent need of the Russian typist. The man went casually off on my errand and, after what seemed an eternity, returned with Miss Ludmilla Ogareff, as she introduced herself, blinking sleep from her eyes but doing her best to appear cheerful, as advertised. I presented her with the confession and asked her to retype it, word for word. She slipped on a pince-nez and went to work. I worried the text might arouse her suspicions, but I imagine by now these ladies are accustomed to every sort of document, and at this hour Miss Ogareff was not disposed to do anything but get the job over with and go back to sleep.
“I peered over her shoulder as she worked. Though, as you know, I can neither read nor speak Russian, yet I was perfectly capable of comparing the original to what she typed and ensuring that each letter was identical to its source. Several times she made mistakes, and I was obliged to ask her to begin again, which she did, though shaking her head and allowing me to crumple and pocket her previous attempt. At other times, she instinctively corrected typographical errors made by Krushenev and appeared more than a little put out when I insisted these be replicated. Certainly the hour did nothing to encourage precision on either of our parts, so I was careful to proceed at a glacial pace, my pockets slowly bulging with rejected efforts.
“When at last the two pages were complete, I thanked her and pressed a gratuity into her hand, which I think surprised her and sent her off to dreamland in restored good humor. I now had a complete and identical—”
“But the signature!” I exclaimed. “You didn’t have Krushenev’s signature!”
“Quite right, old chap. That indeed I lacked. But I’d already worked that part of the problem out in my mind. The business car being empty save for the Italian typist, who took no notice of me, I held Krushenev’s pages against the window, where the coming daylight easily illumined the man’s signature. I had then only to place my copies on top and trace his name on them with my own pen. It was tricky,” the detective added with evident satisfaction, “as the unsteady motion of the car made the work more difficult, but again I resolved to take my time. In addition, I have always found when forging signatures that copying the originals upside down makes for a freer, more spontaneous-appearing result. In this case, I also had the advantage of knowing that when Rachkovsky scrutinized the writing, he would remember Krushenev had appended his name under terrifying circumstances. I am certain that in attempting to exonerate his role in the business when relating our encounter, the editor had surely emphasized the duress under which he’d produced the document. Any shakiness in the signature might well be the result. Afterwards, I tore the rejected pages to bits and flung them off the train, where the elements will make short work of whatever is left.”
The detective sat back with the evident intention of lighting a cigarette, only to find his case empty. “Rats,” he mumbled.
There did not appear to be much more to say, but my admiration for my singular friend at that moment knew no bounds. He was clearly functioning at the height of his powers.
“They will realize mistake,” Anna Walling predicted in the silence. Holmes shrugged.
“Perhaps. Maybe the difference in paper will call attention to itself—that is certainly a possibility—but we are far from Russia now. In less than two hours, we will be in Vienna, farther still. The Emperor Franz Josef and the Tsar are not, as I understand it, presently working in harness. After that”—he sighed—“we’ll be off to Munich, then Paris, then the boat train to London. From there Romeo Watson will rapturously rejoin his Clarendon Street Juliet, and at long last Mrs. Walling, with our undying gratitude for all the hardships she has undergone, will travel to Southampton, thence to follow her husband’s footsteps to New York.”
I was sure I saw Anna Walling wince at this.
“If you will excuse me,” was all she said. We rose automatically as she left the compartment.
After a moment, Holmes rose again without comment and followed her.
I sat where I was, trying not to let my imagination run off in all directions.
Some minutes later, Holmes returned, resumed his seat by the window, and stared at the countryside, still without a word. I thought it wiser not to speak.
6 February. The rest of our journey continued in this vein. While we scoured the Vienna bahnhof for another train heading west, Holmes drew funds from Rothschild’s and purchased sandwiches, as well as cigarettes and such necessaries as he could procure for Mrs. Walling. These included a blue muffler obtained from a shop across the road.
“Thank you” was Mrs. Walling’s only murmur when he offered it to her.
While our improvised trains and accommodations were not on a par with the Orient Express, neither were they as problematic as the unforgiving benches on the “Odessa Flyer.” We took turns sleeping against the window, Holmes proffering his coat for Mrs. Walling’s use as a pillow. I don’t believe she acknowledged this kindness on his part.
“I don’t understand this gloom,” I said as we later left Munich, finally in a compartment of our own, bound for Paris. “We should be celebrating. Holmes, you have pulled off what will prove the triumph of your career!”
“You will write about this?” Anna Walling inquired dully.
“Of course he will not,” the detective hastily replied.
I saw no reason to make mention of these notes.
10 February. It all fell out as Holmes prophesied. Four days later, my own best beloved met me on the platform at Victoria, where I stumbled into her arms like a drowning man grasping at a life raft. As such, I did not witness the parting of Sherlock Holmes and Anna Strunsky Walling. Perhaps it would be more truthful to say I did not dare to witness it. What passed between them on that occasion I have no way of knowing.
“John!”
“Juliet!”
We stood there motionless for I don’t know how long and then, arm in arm, floated from the place and hailed a taxi from the rank.
“You must tell me everything. John, I was so worried.”
I promised her I would but explained there was a meeting I had to attend first.
“A meeting? So soon? At the hospital? You’ve only just got back. John!”
“Not the hospital, dearest. It can’t wait.” I patted her hand, and she understood.
The Diogenes was much the same as on my last visit. Harcourt, the blue-liveried steward, ushered me into the Strangers’ Room, where I found Holmes already seated. Even the dust appeared unchanged.
“Watson,” said he with a faint smile. “Good old reliable Watson.”
Whatever carapace he had shed during our exploit, I now perceived, with a mixture of emotions growing back in its accustomed shape, altered only by the addition of a faint white scar on his right cheek.
“Holmes.”
“All is well?”
“That ends well.” There was a pause. “Mrs. Walling?”
“Sails this afternoon from Southampton.” He occupied himself intently packing his pipe. The awkwardness ended when Mycroft joined us.
“Sherlock, well done!” He shook his brother’s hand with jovial energy, as if he meant to prime a pump. “And you, Doctor. Splendid. Really, brilliantly brought off.”
“Mycroft—”
“No, truly. I think I may tell you—in confidence, of course—that you are both due for formal recognition.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, a private investiture will take place at St. James’s Palace in a fortnight’s time. I’m afraid you will not be able to wear your decorations. They must be returned at the end of the ceremony.”
“Naturally.” I saw the faintest hint of a smile on the detective’s face.
“And now,” Mycroft said, seating himself in his long-suffering armchair, which wheezed air as he compressed it, “tell me everything.”
We then proceeded to do so. More precisely, we told him a great deal, not, in fact, all, but enough for Mycroft to utter a running commentary of exclamations and surprise; also to raise toasts in our direction with what he averred was an outstanding lemon squash.
Holmes delivered Krushenev’s confession. “A trifle worn,” he admitted, handing over the much folded and wrinkled pages.
“But the signature legible nonetheless. I’ll have one of our Russians go over it.”
“Not Mrs. Garnett?” I chided.
“Not this time.” He patted my arm in a fashion that seemed unusual. It was only when he withdrew his hand that I saw the word “Remain” on a slip of paper torn from a familiar source.
Holmes, it must be said, appeared distracted throughout our conversation and disposed to leave as soon as he felt he could without exciting curiosity or comment. “A new case,” he murmured. “Most suggestive. Demands my full attention. Watson?”
“I believe I’ll have a lemon squash before I make my way.”
“As you please. Mycroft.”
“Congratulations again, my dear Sherlock.” The big man walked his incongruously slender brother—a giraffe and a grizzly bear, or perhaps tortoise and hare?—to the door and waited a decent interval, until certain the detective had left the premises, before turning to me.
“Thank you for staying, Doctor.”
“Why have you asked me to do so?”
He sniffed, took a turn about the room, bringing a large hand down the back of his head, as though to smooth the remaining hairs there. I realized abruptly that he was melancholy.
“I’m not quite sure how to begin.”
“The Caterpillar tells Alice to begin at the beginning and when you get to the end, stop.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “I seem to recall Alice being invoked in this room before.”
I waited, passing the interval by lighting a pipe of my own.
“You once wrote, and I recently had occasion to cite your observation, that my brother’s knowledge of politics was—how did you describe it?—‘feeble.’”
“I daresay it is less so than formerly.”
“I daresay less than formerly.” He cocked his massive head, a man not entirely convinced. “But still…” He stole a glance in my direction and seemingly determined on another tack. “We live in strange times, Doctor.”
What ailed the man? I rose to my feet.
“What are you endeavoring to tell me, Mycroft?”
He turned and faced me directly at last.
“I’m endeavoring to tell you that my brother has failed. That Sherlock Holmes has failed.”
I don’t know what I thought he was about to say, but this was certainly the farthest thing from my mind.
“Failed? How?” I protested. “Your brother went to Russia, ingeniously obtained a full confession from the perpetrator behind the nauseating hoax known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and managed to keep hold of it despite the most urgent personal promptings to surrender it.”
“The problem is it doesn’t make any difference.”
“Doesn’t make any difference,” I dumbly repeated.
“The damned Protocols of the Elders of Zion have taken root in the popular imagination; confessions be damned, they are disbelieved. Worse, the confessor, this Krushenev creature, has recanted.”
“Recanted?” All I seemed able to do was echo every final word.
“Mr. Krushenev declares the confession to have been coerced, and if I understand what transpired, he is in fact telling the truth.”
He waited, peering at me closely.
“He is,” I found myself admitting. “But I was there! I tell you his confession was genuine.”
“It makes no difference, alas. Those people who are determined to hate and fear the Jewish race have fastened onto it in half a dozen languages already. Of course we have contacted the newspapers,” he went on, anticipating my next remark. “There will be the inevitable retractions, articles, and exposés.” He shook his massive head again. “But people believe what they want to believe.”
“I think I expressed that idea in this very room not so long ago.”
“What they need to believe—and no facts will convince them otherwise,” he went on, speaking as much to himself as me. “They will not be accepted as facts. They will produce alternative facts. Sherlock was naïve to think otherwise. We all were.”
Now it was my turn to subside heavily into a chair as the realization sank in.
“Then everything we went through, everything she went through—”
“Mrs. Walling?”
“Rivka Nussbaum. And Manya Lippman. What they all went through. It was all for nothing.”
Mycroft didn’t reply. There was, I suddenly understood, nothing he could say.
“What will you tell Sherlock?”
This question he had at least anticipated.
“I shall tell him nothing. And I suspect he will not ask,” he added before I could object. “He will not ask because I imagine that somewhere he has already understood. There will always be a war between light and darkness, between science and superstition, between education and ignorance. Ignorance is easier. It requires no study. Faith is the enemy of thought,” he added, mordantly pleased with his aphorism.
I now recalled Holmes’s prescient question at the start of this entire misbegotten affair. He had asked me if I thought it better were the Protocols bona fide or fraudulent. I had unhesitatingly chosen the latter, but now I perceived my error. Authentic, the Protocols could be halted in their tracks, their nefarious perpetrators—Jewish or otherwise—found and dealt with. But how to stop a lie from spreading?
“You paint a gloomy picture of our new century.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
He saw my expression change. “What are you thinking?”
“I was just remembering—it was only weeks ago. Holmes, Sherlock, I mean, and I were celebrating his birthday. He was bemoaning the lack of criminal ingenuity and talking of retirement…” I trailed off.
“And later?”
“Later he said the crimes were getting bigger. He spoke of Dr. Pavlov and his conditioned reflex as applied to people.”
“He understands more than I gave him credit for.” Mycroft Holmes loved his brother.
My pipe had gone out. Or perhaps I’d entirely forgotten to light it.
Shortly thereafter, I left the Diogenes Club and walked for some time before boarding the Underground. Juliet knew me well enough by this time to comprehend my moods. Supper was waiting, and Maria was happy to welcome me back with mutton, dressed as I preferred, with mint sauce, parsley, and new potatoes. I did the best I could by way of enthusiastic conversation, but there was so much I could not tell Juliet, much that would only distress and confuse her.
I did see Holmes once again, not two but three weeks later at St. James’s Palace, where, in a small ceremony attended by Mycroft, and no one else so far as I was able to determine, we were duly decorated by His Majesty King Edward VII. In fact, this is not strictly speaking, accurate. Before our investiture, His Majesty solemnly affixed a decoration we could not see to the lapel of a young boy whom I judged to be roughly thirteen years of age, telling him something I could not make out. The lad was accompanied by an older woman of perhaps sixty. Both were dressed in black and left directly the King shook their hands. My sense was that Edward VII had a heavy schedule that day, for after pinning OBEs on our lapels and mumbling perfunctory salutations on behalf of a grateful nation, His Majesty took himself off at a brisk pace, surrounded by his bevy of attendants, leaving his equerry to gracefully repossess the blue fleur-de-lis crucifixes and purple-ribboned honors we could never display, for services that would remain forever secret. For some reason the whole exchange put me in mind of a trip to the dentist, a mere detour out of one’s normal day. Afterwards, in the open air on Kensington Gore, I could inhale the first inklings of spring.
“Come, Doctor, we have a visit to make.”
I did not need to ask where. The Highgate Cemetery was already quite green, and we threaded our way in silence through its pleasant leafy pathways without speaking. We found the sexton, who directed us to Manya Lippman’s simple headstone. According to the dates, the woman had been only thirty-four years of age. Beneath her name, and dates of birth and death, was engraved a startling postscript:
Beloved Mother of Boaz.
With a shock of recognition, I now realized who the young boy was whose investiture had preceded our own.
“Perhaps the lad will be allowed to retain his medal,” Holmes murmured, reading my thoughts.
“Small enough recompense” was my only comment. I wondered, without saying so aloud, if the woman known as Manya Lippman had also been awarded a medal. Come to that, had she possibly been buried with it?
We stood by the grave for some moments, each wrapped in our own thoughts. And then left her as we had abandoned her in the London City Morgue.
March 15. Our old, comforting routines—Juliet’s and mine—soon reasserted themselves. “A kingdom for an appendectomy!” I laughed, and soon our mad chase back and forth across the Continent receded from immediate memory. Time passed, and I heard little from my remarkable friend. There was a short note on our wedding anniversary in which he alluded again to the possibility of retirement. I read the line with a twinge and wrote back asking if he had replaced the Stradivarius. Its destruction, I was convinced, had taken a toll on him that music might redress—that remedy had worked wonders before—but he did not answer.
Juliet and her friend Edith Ayrton—aka Mrs. Israel Zangwill—continued their efforts on behalf of women’s suffrage. After my experiences with Anna Strunsky Walling, the idea struck me as increasingly sensible, if not inevitable.
I did not confide my reasoning to Juliet, but now and again, when my schedule permitted, I found I was marching, banner in hand, for the cause.*
The following Christmas I was agreeably surprised to receive a note from Mrs. Walling, wishing me the season’s greetings and relating the progress she and her husband were making spearheading their brainchild, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
Nowhere did she mention Holmes.
And I doubt the detective, his carapace fully reformed, will ever again allude to her.
As years passed, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion intermittently resurfaced, usually in hate sheets and always rebutted in The Times of London and other reputable publications.
But sometimes, fast asleep, I would dream of Rivka Nussbaum and wake weeping.
THIS IS WHERE WATSON’S NOTEBOOK ENDS.