“At Euston, I realized I was being followed,” Holmes told me later.* “You know my methods, Watson; observation and inference. Thrice my shadows were masculine. Initially I observed a traveling salesman with a sample case too light to contain any goods. He was succeeded by an effete gentleman with a monocle traveling incongruously in second class, who was in turn replaced by a haberdasher who cared for his bowler with an indifference that belied his alleged profession. And finally—leaving the terminal in Manchester and finding digs for the night—a slattern wove uncertainly in my wake, but I perceived her drunkenness to be feigned. Clumsy as they were, from these antics I deduced two points. “Primo, that, however inept, employing agents in rotation to track my movements indicated a professional operation. Secondo, that, unlike Manya Lippman, I was in no present danger. I had nothing they wanted; they were merely supernumeraries, instructed to keep track of my movements. The question remained: Who were they, and what was their purpose in keeping me in their sights? Of course I could easily have given them the slip, but then I would know rather less than before. I might instead have chosen to confront or subdue one of them, but decided it was more prudent to grant them free rein. Were their actions related to my present business or possibly to another issue altogether? Difficult at this juncture to say, but I had no doubt that when they saw fit, they would reveal their intentions, or, if circumstances favored me, our positions might be reversed and I might trace their movements instead.”
“And did you?”
He shook his head. “I miscalculated. By the time I left my hotel the following morning, all sign of them had disappeared. Against my own instincts I was inclined to believe these events were unconnected to my present errand. Hubris, Watson. If you should ever discern symptoms of it again on my part, I should be infinitely obliged if you were to merely whisper the word ‘Manchester’ in my ear.”
8 January. As a young chemist living in nearby Montagu Street, Sherlock Holmes had frequented the Reading Room in the British Museum. I, however, could not recall ever having set foot in the place. Surely I would have remembered had I done so. The high-domed chamber with its sky-blue ceiling panels, more reminiscent of heaven than St. Paul’s Basilica, larger than Rome’s Pantheon but imagined along the same lines, was clearly designed to stupefy any visitor. The vast, vaulted space emitted an echoing, respectful stillness as I entered the following morning. Innumerable readers and researchers were distributed among its concentric rings of desks, each boasting its own green-shaded lamp, the only sound in the place being an occasional sibilance of whispers, the shuffling of papers, or the faint scratching of pens making notes. The room had played host to virtually every English writer with the possible exception of Shakespeare. It took some little time to locate Constance towards the centre, where she had barricaded herself behind a pile of large, dark blue volumes that almost obscured her from view.
“What have you found?” I inquired, gesturing to the stack of books.
A white-haired gentleman opposite to her, sporting a food-stained yellow cravat and his own supply of texts, glowered in my direction.
With a finger on her lips, Constance signed to me that I must carry the tomes and follow her from the wondrous chamber to one of the adjacent study cubicles, which, for the moment, had her name on the door, indicating the space was presently reserved for her exclusive use.
“Now then,” she began, eyes bright with excitement behind those spectacles, when I had set down the load and she had shut the door behind me. “Have you ever heard of a Frenchman named Maurice Joly?”
I said I had not.
“Few have,” she acknowledged by way of consolation. “He died about thirty years ago in Paris, an apparent suicide.”
“Who was he?”
She gave a dismissive sniff.
“A lawyer.”
“Ah,” I responded, for lack of anything intelligent to contribute.
“Also a pamphleteer, a sort of satirist. And a monarchist,” she put in as an afterthought, shrugging as much as to say in toto an inconsequential figure whose life had counted for little.
If he was indeed a suicide, I reflected, perhaps he had realized this as well.
“And what has Monsieur Joly to do with the Protocols?”
Instead of replying, she opened one of the large volumes and peered at tiny print.
“Joly is most famous—to the degree he is known at all—for his Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t…”
“A pamphlet titled Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.”
I blinked uncertainly. “Machiavelli, I remember, was an Italian schemer from the Renaissance, but Montesquieu—”
“Was an eighteenth-century French philosophe. Joly’s tract was intended as a bitter critique of the so-called Emperor Napoleon III,* whom Joly despised for a preening tyrant.”
“He was certainly not alone,” I offered. “There were many who felt that emperor had few clothes.”
“Many costumes but few clothes,” she agreed, running an index finger slowly beneath the French words. “Though he was fond enough of uniforms, Louis Napoleon was no Napoleon.” She looked up. “In any event, the emperor was not amused by a conversation fancifully undertaken between a Renaissance pragmatist and a French philosopher. He duly had the book banned and its author clapped in gaol.”
“I’m sorry, but I still fail to see what you are getting at.”
“May I have the papers?”
I extracted them once more from their manila-envelope home. She placed the first page opposite the page in the large open book.
“As I thought…” She trailed off. Without looking up, she threw a backward hand over her shoulder, waggling her fingers, silently commanding me to supply another sheet of the typescript. As I did so, she turned the leaves of the big book before her and set the second page opposite the text.
“What is it?” I demanded, more than a trifle impatient.
“Stolen,” she murmured, glancing briefly in my direction before returning to the pages. “Plagiarized, to be precise. Listen carefully. Here is what Joly wrote in the first of what he calls his ‘dialogues.’ Machiavelli is speaking.”
Translating slowly from the French for my benefit, she read aloud: “Men must not scruple to use all the vile and odious deceits at their command to combat and overthrow a corrupt emperor and restore the republic to power.”
She regarded me expectantly over the tops of her spectacles.
“Go on.”
“Very well.” She now picked up one of the Protocol pages. “Here is the so-called Tenth Protocol: Jews must not hesitate to employ every noxious and terrible deception at their command to fight and overturn a wicked tsar and his goyim and deliver the Jews to power.”
I stared at the two sets of French words.
“They are certainly similar.”
“Similar?” she scoffed. “They are identical save that the word ‘Jew’ has been inserted in place of ‘men’ in one instance and ‘the republic’ in another.”
“And ‘goyim’ has been squeezed into the Protocols version.”
We spent the next two hours pawing through the two texts. In Joly’s original, a great deal of talk was spent on the question of modernizing France; in the Protocols, Russia had been substituted. Pages were inexplicably devoted to interest rates. Both proved repetitious, unsurprising since the Protocols so slavishly imitated Joly’s interminable jeremiad. Our tedium would have been inevitably quadrupled, were it not for the provoking curiosity of the duplication itself.
In my bored state, something began nagging at me.
“Stop a bit,” I said. “Can you go back to the first two passages?”
Without answering, she shuffled the typescript and flipped through the big books.
“Now, please read them both again. Slowly.”
Without comment she did as I asked.
“Curious.” It was my turn to employ the word.
“Curious, how?”
I stole a look at my watch. It was afternoon. Holmes would be expecting me by now.
“Well, it’s not merely the insertion of ‘Jews’ in place of ‘men,’” I observed, “but as you read it again, it becomes clear other words have been substituted as well, though not, apparently, so as to effect any alteration in meaning.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
I pointed.
“‘Overturn’ in place of ‘overthrow.’ ‘Noxious’ instead of ‘vile.’ ‘Terrible’ in place of ‘odious.’ ‘Fight’ instead of ‘combat.’ ‘Hesitate’ where the original says ‘scruple.’ And so on. It all comes to the same meaning, but why have these irrelevant changes been made?”
She frowned, implicitly conceding my thesis. “Doctor, you scintillate.”
I tried not to blush by returning to the question at hand. “Why?” I repeated.
She stared blindly at the words. “In an effort to disguise the plagiarism?”
“A lazy expedient if true. And fruitless. You saw through it handily enough, Constance. Come to that, so have I.”
“Why, then?”
We could neither of us imagine.
But I knew there had to be a reason.
It was after two when Mrs. Hudson opened the door for me at Baker Street. I was breathless and frozen, but at least not wet, for the rain had finally let up.
“Is he waiting for me?” I asked as I handed her my coat.
“Yes, he’s upstairs and—”
I had no time to hear the rest of the sentence, but hobbled up the seventeen steps to 221B and found the door ajar. Conscious only of my tardiness, I entered, not troubling to ponder this anomaly.
A tall gentleman with what I should describe as a messy Vandyke and the thickest pair of spectacles I had ever seen turned to face me. He peered in my direction through what appeared to be the green-tinted bottoms of Burgundy wine bottles.
“Ah, Dr. Watson.” He greeted me with an almost indecipherable accent. It was all I could do to recognize my own name.
I was, however, not taken in. The detective had played this game too often.
“Really, Holmes, at your age, I would think you are beyond this schoolboy practice of theatrical disguises, and your attempt at a Russian accent, if I may say so, is lamentable. Kindly remove that getup and those ridiculous glasses. You’ll do yourself an injury sooner or later if you don’t discard them.”
“Watson, may I present Professor Charles Weizmann, senior lecturer in chemistry from the University of Manchester?” Holmes chuckled behind me.
To say that I was mortified is rather to understate the case, but Professor Weizmann appeared in no way put out. On the contrary, the whole episode seemed to provide him boundless amusement, and he took my error in good part.
“To be mistaken for Sherlock Holmes,” said he in his almost impenetrable speech, laughing heartily, “may be the high point of my career. I cannot wait to tell Vera!” By whom I assumed he referred to his wife. The professor held out a large hand, stained with what I took to be the by-products of his laboratory handiwork.
“We were just about to take some sherry,” Holmes informed me, walking to the deal table that contained his own odiferous chemical supply and, in addition, his stock of spirits. “Would you care to join us?”
“I think I’d better,” said I, attempting to regain my composure and sinking into the green chair with the extruding horsehair.
“I went up to Manchester by train, as you know,” Holmes explained, generously pouring out the amber liquid. “A curious place,” with a nod to our guest, “if I may say so. Nothing but factories belching smoke to blot out the sun, accompanied by the omnipresent din of steam-driven machinery. I took a room for the night near the university and boned up on Professor Weizmann,” to whom he offered a second inclination of the head. “Learning from the porter where he would be lecturing this morning, I attended, sitting in the top tier of the auditorium, introducing myself afterwards and explaining something of my errand.
“As it happened, by happy coincidence, the professor was due to catch a train to town for a conference at the London Polytechnic, and so it made sense to travel back together. I’ve offered him your old bed for the night to help him economize. I take it you’ve no objections?”
“None whatever,” I was relieved to say, and hoisted my glass in his direction. “What are you working on these days, Professor?” I was eager to make amends for my grotesque blunder and thought to take an interest in his career.
“Acetone,” came the heavily accented answer.
I glanced at Holmes, whose eyes twinkled merrily. He was still convulsed by my mistake.
“Acetone?” I repeated, determined to make up lost ground. “Isn’t that paint thinner?”
“It has many uses,” Weizmann allowed. “The human body produces and disposes of it naturally, but it has agricultural and cosmetic benefits as well. Currently I am working on an acetone-butanol-ethanol fermentation process of my own devising with a view to production on an industrial scale.”
He might as well have been speaking Chinese. All I could pluck from it was “Industrial? Whatever for? How much paint thinner do we need?”
The professor shot Holmes a look. The detective nodded, and he turned back to me. “Acetone is required for the creation of cordite.”
“Cordite?” I regarded them both with astonishment. “As a substitute for gunpowder? Why on earth are we talking about gunpowder? All Europe is at peace.”
“Asia is not,” the professor replied, finally seating himself and crossing his legs. “In point of fact, revolution has broken out in Russia.”
I stared at Holmes.
“When?”
“Today, in fact,” the detective replied equably. “We’ve had the news via telegraph. It will doubtless be in all the evening papers.”
Revolution. Constance had alluded to the possibility yesterday.
“In the port of Odessa.” Weizmann took up the story. “Sailors aboard the battleship Potemkin apparently have mutinied and murdered their officers.* The latest word is that the citizens of Odessa have gone over to the mutineers, supplying them with food in some manner of small boat brigade. If the rest of the fleet joins the rebellion, it could spread inland and become a full-fledged revolution. Other nations, such as Germany, may attempt to exploit the situation, but Russia, you may know, has entangling alliances with both France and England, so theoretically the thing could soon get out of hand.”
“You seem very well versed in politics for a chemistry professor,” I noted with confusion.
“And if the revolution does spread,” he went on, addressing Holmes, “you may be sure the blame will fall upon the Jews.”
“Ah.” Suddenly pieces began to fall into place. I couldn’t see the picture, but I was starting to make out the frame.
“Why not tell Dr. Watson what you have conveyed to me about Theodor Herzl and the Zionist conferences in Basel?” Holmes suggested, sitting at last and putting up his feet, hands clasped behind his head.
Weizmann took another sip of sherry.
“Anti-Semitism is a familiar aspect of life in Russia, where I was born,” he explained. “Jews are natural scapegoats, usually resented for their business acumen, but rather than state this openly, they accuse us instead of ridiculous obscenities such as requiring the blood of a Christian child to celebrate our holy days.”
“The blood of—?”
“Russia is a primitive place,” Professor Weizmann continued. “Legends and superstitions take easy root and proliferate. The Tsar in photographs may appear an identical twin to his first cousin, your Prince of Wales—recall they are in fact both grandsons of Queen Victoria—but there the resemblance ceases. The Tsar is ignorant and backward, entirely ruled by his equally uneducated wife, who surrounds herself with mad holy men and allows them to make policy. When the Great Houdini performed for their court a year ago, he stupefied one and all by causing the Kremlin bells to ring, which they had not done in a hundred years. The Tsar, followed by his entourage, genuflected, trembling, and crossed himself, praising Houdini for a saint.” Weizmann’s amusement was magnified by his glasses. “He would have been appalled to learn the Great Houdini turns out to be another Jew, Ehrich Weiss, a rabbi’s son from Budapest,” he added, with what I took to be more than a touch of pride. “Nicholas is quite content to let Jews shoulder the blame for Russia’s primitive conditions, her lack of contact with the outside world, absence of railways, electricity, paved roads, food supplies, manufactured goods…”
The chemist paused for another sip of sherry. Holmes’s eyes were closed, not in sleep, I knew. This was his attitude of strictest attention.
“Theodor Herzl, about whom I gather you have already heard, was concerned about the persecution of our race—not just in Russia, but over the centuries and throughout Europe as well. He realized that through an accident of history”—he shrugged—“or perhaps a history of accidents, to be more precise, Jews are a nation without a country.”
“A nation in need of a country,” Holmes supplied, without opening his eyes.
“Just so. A country of our own. This is the Zionist goal. Successive congresses have grappled with the mechanics of this question. Where would this country be? How could the territory be obtained? From whom? And of course, who would pay for such a country and who would populate it? Can you imagine the cacophony of a convocation of Jews as they fall to debating such questions?” He eyed us, evidently reconsidering his own query. “No, of course not. It would be like eavesdropping on a rabbinical discussion of the finer points of the Talmud. A Jewish homeland. It was this cause to which Theodor Herzl devoted his life’s blood.”
“Until his sudden death,” Holmes interjected.
“Precisely. Sudden and most regrettable. I have attended all the conferences but one,” Weizmann informed us. “Most regrettable—and most mysterious,” the professor echoed, swallowing the last of his sherry.
“Have you any reason to suspect his death was … unnatural?” the detective inquired softly, eyes still shut.
Unlike Mycroft, Weizmann seemingly did not feel the need to address the question of motive.
“Herzl had already been diagnosed with a heart ailment,” he said. “But the two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. As a chemist, I need not tell you there are many ways to make a death look perfectly natural. The fact that a diathesis* had been established might have eased the task. And as you are doubtless aware, the Russians have the reputation of being the most accomplished poisoners since the Borgias.”
In the silence that followed, I attempted to digest so much that had been said. A revolution was taking place half a world away. Events were unfolding that, if the nearsighted chemist enjoying Holmes’s sherry was correct, could conceivably drag the rest of Europe into a conflagration in which massive quantities of British gunpowder might well be required.
In fact, Holmes and I had been involved years earlier in an effort to prevent such a conflagration. Holmes had remarked at the time that our success had likely merely postponed it.*
Beside these grim realities, the Protocols looked more farfetched than ever. The Zionist Congresses, if Weizmann was to be believed, had nothing whatever to do with schemes of world domination but rather with the understandable yearning of a long-dispossessed people for a homeland. Had that goal been worth a woman’s life?
“Tell Dr. Watson about the prime minister,” Holmes prompted the chemist.
I looked from one to the other.
“What prime minister?”
“The present one. Arthur Balfour.”
I could not keep the surprise from my voice. “Where does Balfour come into this?”
Weizmann smiled modestly behind those improbable glasses. “In addition to being Prime Minister, Sir Arthur is also the MP for Manchester East, which is how we first became acquainted. I have the honor to call Sir Arthur my friend. Doubtless my current work on behalf of the British government in the possible future mass production of acetone plays some role in this. But I have had occasion to discuss the—what shall we call it?—the Jewish Question more than once with Sir Arthur.”
Every word this remarkable man spoke was more intriguing than the last.
“And what is Sir Arthur’s view?”
The professor hesitated then tossed his shoulders, as much as to say, In for a penny …
“He will not state so publicly at present, but Sir Arthur has assured me His Majesty’s Government would look with favor on the creation of a Jewish homeland.”
“In Palestine,” Holmes added quietly.
“He won’t say it publicly,” the professor repeated. “And of course, not everyone shares this opinion. About Palestine, I mean. Many who have attended the conferences have found the idea of a homeland carved out of the Middle East impractical and are advocating other locations. Madagascar, for example.”
“Have you formed an opinion?”
The professor turned to Holmes. “Would you trade London for Saskatchewan?” he inquired, smiling.
Holmes saw that by this point I was reeling.
“Watson, we have flooded your brain with data, but surely you have some information of your own to communicate?”
I confess I was relieved to find myself away from murky world politics and on the firmer ground of my own recent experiences. Methodically, therefore, I laid out what Constance and I had uncovered, showing both men my handwritten copies of the two initial texts Constance and I had compared.
Weizmann listened with gravest attention, but he was not surprised to learn of the Protocols.
“They were published in a Russian newspaper,” he informed us.
Holmes sat up, eyes open and shining at this intelligence.
“Ah, the key!” he exclaimed. “The missing piece. You recall that Cuvier insisted that from a single bone it was possible to infer the entire skeleton.”
Holmes picked up the two handwritten passages I had copied and now accorded them serious scrutiny.
“You are learning, Watson! This news explains these seemingly superfluous word changes, so keenly noted by you.”
I tried to conceal the pride I felt at this bouquet. For years, Holmes had twitted me that I saw but did not observe. And only this morning (while a revolution was taking place in Russia!) Constance had told me I scintillated. What a day!
“How so?”
“Because, dear man, the French version of the Protocols was not made from Monsieur Joly’s original tract about Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Rather it now appears that what Mycroft showed us was the French translation of a Russian text. It was a previous translator’s word choice that accounts for ‘noxious’ instead of ‘odious’ and so forth. Professor, what was the name of the newspaper that printed these Protocols?”
Weizmann shrugged apologetically. “It was several years ago, one of many hate sheets that flourish in Russia.”
“Which has now appeared in Paris in French,” Holmes noted gravely.
“Holmes, this is clever,” I allowed, but still feeling duty bound to “scintillate,” I had to ask: “But how can you ascertain that the translation Mycroft gave us was made from Russian and not some other tongue?”
“Elementary, Doctor. The proof that you missed is the singular substitution of the word ‘tsar’ for ‘emperor.’ Whoever was behind the version you were given was writing the Protocols for a Russian readership. QED.”
The professor squinted from one to the other of us. “Was Theodor Herzl assassinated?” he demanded.
Holmes chose not to answer. “May I pose a final question?” the detective asked instead.
The professor took the evasion in stride. “You may pose it.” His inflection implied that no answer was guaranteed on his part.
“Your accent, as I hear, is Slavic with an overlay of the Teutonic.”
“That is not a question,” the other responded, smiling.
“Yet your name is Charles, which is neither Russian nor German.”
This time the question was at least implied.
“Very good, Mr. Holmes. Some find my first name difficult to pronounce, so I anglicize it. My first—I do not say Christian—name is Chaim.”*
“Chaim,” the detective repeated, striving to mimic his guttural pronunciation.
“In Hebrew it means ‘life.’”
Outside, searching for a taxi, I wondered aloud how Houdini had caused the silent Kremlin bells to ring for the Tsar.
“Very simply,” Holmes replied. “He had a confederate with a silenced Mannlicher carbine and sighting scope shoot at the bells from a place of concealment, perhaps a nearby vacant flat. It had to be a carbine,” he added. “They couldn’t have taken a larger weapon apart to conceal it in their luggage.”
I stared at my companion. “You know this?”
He shrugged. “I deduce it.”