“This is monstrous!”
“Now, Watson—”
“Holmes, have you taken leave of your senses?”
My companion could not conceal his amusement as he shrugged off his coat.
“Come, you will admit we require the services of a translator. Even Mycroft acknowledged as much.”
I bit my lip to prevent commenting on just how easy I imagined it must have been for that chilly dispenser of “superfluous damage” to consign Anna Walling to sacrifice herself for a “grateful nation”—notwithstanding that nation was not hers.
“But we can’t just—” I turned to the lady, who was watching us with the disinterested expression of an impartial observer at a tennis match. “And what has become of your accent, madame?”
Anna Strunsky Walling offered an enigmatic smile, feline in a way that put me queasily in mind of the Cheshire cat. It was the first of many queasy moments to come.
“I exaggerate it from time to time. It has proved useful.” The accent may have diminished, yet her throaty purr remained.
She wore a becoming dark blue travel ensemble with something white at the throat and, as I watched, calmly unpinned her rakishly brimmed hat and set it on her lap. I swung back to the detective. Given his lifelong mistrust of her sex, I could not fathom this unprecedented volte-face.
“It took some doing,” he admitted, evidently anticipating my confusion, “but in the end Mrs. Walling was the logical choice. Her Russian is fluent, her visas already in order, and her…” He paused for the word. “… credentials, unique.”
“And my bags were already packed,” the lady pointed out.
“And Mr. Walling?”
“Is presently on the high seas, bound for New York. When the situation was explained to him by no less a personage than”—here she cast a look at Holmes—“a member of the Diogenes, he was … content to approve my … participation. Mr. Walling and I…” She paused. “… respect and make allowances for one another as individuals.” Seeing what must have been a look of consternation on my face, she added simply, “I am accustomed to making my way in the world.” As if to emphasize this point, she fished a cigarette from her purse and lit it with practiced gestures.
I confess I could not understand much of what she said, but there was no mistaking the confident manner in which she said it.
Indifferent to the pelting rain, the train was now rattling at a goodly clip, and I was obliged to grasp a handhold to remain upright. It was easier to grasp a handhold than the situation. There seemed little I could say and less point attempting to say it. I spared a thought for Juliet, wincing to think of her response should Anna Strunsky’s role in this business ever come to light.
Holmes, who had settled on the opposite side of the window, facing backward (and incidentally in the direction of Mrs. Walling), now packed Balkan Sobranie into a black briar with which I was unfamiliar.
“Let us review the data,” he suggested, shaking out his match. At a loss, I subsided onto the seat nearest the compartment door. “In the town of Kishinev a newspaper called—?” Here he addressed Mrs. Walling.
“Bessarabets,” she reminded him.
“Just so. This Bessarabets publishes, in serial form, the alleged minutes of a secret conclave of Jews conspiring to take over the world, a French copy of which makes its way to London at a frightful cost, where it falls into Mycroft’s hands.” Before giving Anna Walling the opportunity to pursue this cryptic reference, Holmes withdrew one of the now crumpled pages translated by Constance Garnett and read aloud from what he found there: “We will not permit any religion espousing a sole God except our own. As we are the Chosen People, we are destined to rule. Etcetera.” He shrugged and blew aromatic smoke, whose familiarity, I acknowledge, had a calming effect on me. “Upon closer examination, these Protocols reveal themselves to have been slavishly copied in Russian from a French pamphlet written forty years earlier by one Maurice Joly, during the reign of the Emperor Napoleon III and directed at him rather than against any so-called gentile oppression. But as we may reasonably infer, whoever translated the version my brother entrusted to Mrs. Garnett and myself had no knowledge of Joly’s tract. ‘Our’ French translation came from the series of Russian newspaper articles read by you and your husband, Mrs. Walling, while in Russia. Whoever was behind ‘our’ translation, the one Watson shared with Mrs. Garnett, clearly had no idea the Russian text from which he’d worked had been plagiarized from an obscure tract written by another Frenchman on another topic in another age. It was Mrs. Garnett who fortuitously recognized the theft. And it was you, Doctor, who distinguished the translations by noting what appeared to be the superfluous substitution of meaningless alternate language in what we may term the ‘Russian version.’”
“With its references to ‘tsar’ instead of ‘emperor,’ etcetera,” Mrs. Walling noted.
“Translation is a tricky business,” Holmes observed, placing the tips of his fingers together in his accustomed fashion. “Cervantes once said that reading something in translation is like looking at a Flemish tapestry wrong side out. The image may be there, but is obscured by a great many dangling threads. How many different equivalent combinations of words may various translators working in different eras in different languages have recourse to in order to produce an approximation of the original sentence? In the present instance, we have a French original translated and plagiarized into Russian and then translated back into French again by someone else. In our case, the change of wording from ‘noxious’ to ‘odious,’ from ‘overturn’ to ‘overthrow,’ etcetera, proves to be merely the caprice of a different translator.”
With a determined effort, I shook off my lethargy of shock, finally getting into the spirit of the thing and recalling the purpose of our journey.
“But events prove there were in fact regular meetings of Jews in Switzerland over the last five years, though they were by no means secret,” said I. “Again, on closer examination, these congresses appear to have been devoted not to a conspiracy of world domination, of whatever definition, but rather the more prosaic search for a Jewish homeland. Yet the architect of these meetings, a passionate Zionist, drops prematurely dead from what may or may not have been a heart ailment just before being interviewed by … an employee of the Diogenes.”
“Splendid, Watson. I am reminded anew of your narrative abilities. If only you wouldn’t embellish,” he added, his eyes twinkling mischievously. On the chase, the detective was obviously in high spirits.
“I don’t embellish,” I insisted, annoyed at this charge he always laid at my door. “I include colour.”
I leaned over both of them and slid open the transom above the window. The air was frigid and wet, but the aperture did serve quickly to rid the compartment of smoke.
“You write very well, Doctor,” Mrs. Walling interjected, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray. “Don’t let him get under your skin.”
I could not make her out. Still less could I understand her husband’s willingness to allow his wife to venture alone back into the mouth of the Russian bear in what very possibly were its death throes. The thought of allowing Juliet to do any such thing, no matter how worthy or urgent the cause, was beyond my capacity to envision.
Holmes blew more smoke.
“On the working hypothesis, then, that the Protocols are a forgery, we are left with the following questions: Primo: Who created them? Secondo: For what purpose? And finally: What was the true fate of Theodor Herzl? If he was assassinated, who was his assassin, and what were his motives?”
“Why did you not begin your investigations with the dead man?” Mrs. Walling inquired coolly.
“Watson?” Holmes turned to me. It was clear he did not wish to acknowledge Mycroft’s prohibitions regarding Theodor Herzl. Neither, I inferred, did he feel it wise to reveal the existence of a second, more recent (and female) corpse. Having concluded we had need of Mrs. Walling, Holmes saw no point in alarming her.
“Such details may prove distressing,” I improvised, “but by this time, the decomposition of the Zionist’s body has doubtless so far advanced, trace amounts of poison would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect, much less prove.”*
“Depend upon it, if the man was murdered, those responsible have long since quitted the vicinity,” the detective added. “At the moment it must be termed a cold trail.”
Anna Walling sat back, wrinkling her nose at this information.
“But if Theodor Herzl’s entire purpose was to concentrate Jews in a country of our own, why trouble to assassinate him in the first place? Surely ridding the world of Jews was what they wished.”
Holmes’s hawklike features bespoke his appreciation of her intelligence.
“If the Protocols were believed, Herzl’s purposes may have been perceived by his murderers as a screen to conceal his true ambitions.”
“Besides which,” I struck in, “Jews have always been convenient scapegoats. Take them away and whom can people blame?”
“Bravo, Watson.” Holmes nodded, emitting another puff of Balkan Sobranie. “You continue to astonish me.”
I had astonished myself. Thanks to these malignant Protocols, things that lurked unexpressed in the dark recesses of my mind I now found myself voicing aloud for the first time in my life.
Satisfied with the detective’s reasoning, Anna Walling returned to the less odiferous problem of the translations.
“One thing must also be the case,” she suggested. “Whoever published the Protocols in Bessarabets must also be fluent in French in order to have copied from it.”
“Someone with a catholic knowledge of arcane political literature, to know of Joly,” Holmes shrewdly added. “One must also wonder: Were these Protocols published before or after the good citizenry of Kishinev turned on their Jewish neighbours? If before, they might be argued to have catalyzed the slaughter.”
“And if after?” Mrs. Walling wondered, her violet eyes, as always, unblinking.
“To have justified it.”
“There is an additional possibility,” said she. Holmes favored her with a quizzical look.
“To terrify the Tsar.”
“Ah.”
“He is easily frightened.”
“Oh?”
“A credulous, superstitious man. A year ago his son was born. The Tsarevitch is hemophiliac.”
Holmes frowned; his knowledge of chemistry and anatomy were profound. “He bleeds?”
She nodded. “At the slightest touch. It is not generally known. The Tsar and Tsarina are first cousins, which may be responsible for the boy’s condition. Their majesties are desperate to find a cure. They make no distinctions between doctors and faith healers. Lacking a cure, they seek scapegoats.”
“Ah,” repeated Holmes. “The Protocols would serve to legitimize his encouragement of these pogroms.”
It required no great act of imagination to connect the dots between a document such as the Protocols and Nicholas II’s attitude towards Jews. Such a document, which, by now, had surely been brought to his attention by zealous ministers (if not created by them), could only serve such a purpose.
I recalled, yet again, the distended body of Manya Lippman, lying on its slab in the City Morgue. True or false, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were proving to be lethal in all directions.
“Our only hope of containing their damage,” Holmes concluded, “is to expose them as a hoax. And the only way to do that is to uncover the perpetrators. We are in a race against time. Even now the contagion is spreading. If the Russian version appeared almost a year ago, there may be any number of foreign translations in circulation by now.”
Silence fell upon the compartment, and to my surprise the detective drew forth his copy of War and Peace, found his place in the book, and was soon absorbed in it.
Mrs. Walling closed her eyes.
Still recovering from the shock of her presence, I scarcely knew how to occupy myself. I made some effort to arrange these notes but soon fell into a light slumber, comfortingly rocked by the agreeable motion of the train.
At Dover, we were delayed by the weather. It had begun to snow, and the wind whipped fiercely into a gale. Our Channel crossing, when it was at last under way, proved a vertiginous ordeal. Dubiously christened The Flounder, our ferry slewed and yawed for all she was worth, her stern scouring troughs while her nose ascended vertically, only to plunge downward again. I am no mariner under the best of circumstances, and it is well known that the passage from Folkestone to Calais traverses what is generally conceded to be the roughest body of water in the world. The entire ghastly experience recalled to my mind the interminable weeks I had spent, years before, traveling on a troop ship to Bombay, prior to taking up my duties in Afghanistan. The seas were nothing to this in my recollection, and yet I remember little else of my voyage to India save my mal de mer.
It was almost eight when The Flounder hove into Calais. In an effort to recover lost time, still-trembling passengers were bundled onto the Paris train for the final leg of the route. Thoroughly seasick by now, I was no longer soothed by the rhythmic oscillations of the railway carriage. Several times I was obliged to excuse myself.
It was close on midnight when we stepped off the train at the Gare du Nord. After the smoke-filled confines of our compartment, the bracing air of Paris was welcome to this traveler, but the city was entirely shrouded in a mantle of glistening snow, and there were few taxis to be seen. Shivering, we finally located one stoic hack, whose horse was mercifully protected by a thick blanket. For a sizable inducement, the driver undertook to take us across the silent city, traversing the Seine at the Pont Neuf and so fetching up at the Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. At this hour and under these conditions, there was scarcely a pedestrian, omnibus, or motorcar to be seen, giving Paris the look of a veritable ghost city. Even the footfalls of our poor horse were not to be heard.
The Hotel Esmeralda, when we were informed we’d finally reached our destination, proved to be diagonally across from Notre Dame on the Ile de la Cité. The cathedral’s massive form could just be made out in the darkness, through vast swirling flurries of white powder, stirred upwards by a night breeze. In my exhausted fancy, the flurries took on the aspect of white locusts, undulating in endless configurations.
“Watson, come.”
Under different circumstances, I might have found the Hotel Esmeralda charming. Built in the seventeenth century, the auberge proved irritatingly cramped. Our late arrival obliged us to rouse the concierge, and the impossibly narrow, turning staircase created havoc as we struggled with our luggage. There were no bellmen.
“This, I expect, is the Foreign Office’s notion of economy,” Holmes grumbled as we clattered aloft. Mycroft had thoughtfully procured a room for Mrs. Walling, but Holmes and I were obliged to share a narrow bed.
“Any better?” he inquired from the window as I tugged off my boots.
“I will be. What are you looking at, Holmes?”
“Come and see.”
As I rose to obey his instructions, Mrs. Walling entered without knocking.
“Have you seen?”
“Yes.”
All three of us now crowded the mullioned fenestration and gazed into the medieval lane. There, beneath a solitary lamppost, two figures huddled in astrakhan greatcoats and Persian lamb’s-wool hats, clapping their gloved hands and stamping their feet in a futile effort to promote circulation. One bearded face was briefly revealed as its owner, retaining his thick gloves, awkwardly attempted to light a cigarette.
“Okhrana,” Mrs. Walling informed us in a quiet tone which admitted of no doubt.
“I thought as much,” Holmes concurred. “I was wondering if they’d put in an appearance.”
“Which is Okhrana?”
“What,” corrected Holmes.
“Okhrana is the Tsar’s secret police, Doctor.” It was Mrs. Walling who answered my question, never taking her gaze from the two figures below.
“But how did they know?”
“They followed me to Manchester, that much is now clear,” the detective admitted, “but they had no way of knowing what my business there was.” He turned to face Mrs. Walling, who shrugged.
“They could not have learned from me,” said she. “Officially, Anna Strunsky Walling sailed for New York two days ago with her husband from Southampton on The Majestic. I”—here she gestured to herself with a gloved forefinger—“am Miss Sophie Hunter, music copyist, currently traveling on a British passport with that name, supplied by your brother.”
Holmes stared at the two men below. One could almost feel sorry for them.
“How, then?” I repeated.
“When you eliminate the impossible,” the detective murmured, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” He faced me. “It’s your Mrs. Garnett.”
“What? Holmes, you are absurd. My wife’s family—”
“And you, my dear doctor. It’s you.”
I felt my jaw sag.
“Me?”
I was uncomfortably aware Mrs. Walling had turned her wide violet eyes in my direction. I felt myself pinned by their beam of unalloyed interest.
“Not on purpose, my boy. I’m not suggesting either of you is in league with the Okhrana—”
“I should think not! Constance, that Bloomsbury bunch … they’re all … bluestockings, ‘artistes’, intellectuals…”
“But one of them is a translator of Russian,” the detective reminded me. “That fact alone had doubtless long since drawn their attention.” He rummaged on the bed and held up his copy of War and Peace. “Count Tolstoy and his civil disobedience terrifies them, but they daren’t arrest him. The fact that your sister-in-law was disseminating his writings to a wider readership was by itself cause for a certain level of interest, but when you brought her the Protocols…”
“Dear God. Cedric West!”
“Who?”
It now all came back to me in a rush: the propitious arrival of the stockbroker in the taxi, with his vaguely unplaceable accent, offering me a lift.
“That was when they chose to transfer their attentions from Mrs. Garnett and fasten them on you,” Mrs. Walling concluded.
“I didn’t give him my true name,” I now remembered with relief, “as I hadn’t wished to get into conversation about my writings.”
“Excellent, Watson,” Holmes murmured. I knew he was trying to put the best light on my blunder but it had been mere impulse, not cleverness, that prompted my deception.
“He wasn’t by chance carrying a box camera and proposing to take your photograph?“
“Certainly not.” With a shudder, I wondered if Cedric West, my kindly cab-sharer, concealed a kosher butcher’s knife on his pinstriped person.
“Then at the least he has no confirmation of your true identity.”
“I told him my name was Baskerville,” I now recalled, whereat the detective laughed and Mrs. Walling appeared confused.
Holmes shook his head. “No matter,” he declared. “I will explain it another time.”
The idea of Russian agents operating freely in London, knifing women in the heart of what I thought of as civilization and throwing their bodies into the Thames, was a notion I would have ridiculed less than a fortnight since. After all, weren’t England and Russia allies, bound by treaty? What need had they to spy upon one another?
“Allies spy on each other all the time.” Holmes was reading my mind. “The nature of espionage is such that once commenced, it never knows where or how to stop. Secrets are addictive. Knowledge confers power.”
“She was the right person for the job,” I protested. “If it weren’t for Constance, we’d never even have learned about the Joly plagiarism.”
“No one is blaming either of you,” Holmes again assured me. “The question is, what do we do about these gentlemen now?”
The room was freezing.
“To elude them would only excite their suspicions,” Mrs. Walling argued.
Holmes made no remark in response, but I knew he was turning over the problem in his agile brain. It was clear this unusual woman had some experience in these matters. This could hardly be surprising; if she and her husband had been traveling in Russia for a year, poking their noses into a Jewish hornets’ nest, they could not have failed to attract official notice.
“Will they follow us on the train tomorrow, do you think, or simply telegraph ahead, Holmes?”
“The latter, more likely,” the lady theorized before he could answer. “These are most probably agents in place.”
“As were those who trailed me to Manchester,” Holmes concurred. “The resources of the Okhrana following Russia’s recent defeat at the hands of the Japanese cannot be unlimited. The likelihood is our watchers are mere ‘day hires’ who will hand us on to others, like a relay baton. This, however, still leaves us in a quandary regarding our own doings.”
I took a turn about the small room.
“Why do anything?”
They regarded me.
“We are Mr. Altmont, Colonel Morcar, and Miss Hunter. We are traveling to St. Basil’s Monastery to study Greek Orthodox liturgical music. What contradicts that?”
“These.” Holmes held up a sheaf of the crumpled Protocols.
“Then we must destroy them.”
“Not destroy,” Holmes mused, warming to my idea. “They were acquired, after all, at great cost. Not destroy,” he repeated. “Conceal.”
“But these are merely copies,” I protested. “Your brother has the originals. Why trouble to retain them? If they are discovered, we will be hard put to account for ourselves.”
This was a sobering thought.
“True,” the detective conceded, “and yet retaining them may prove useful in ways we cannot presently anticipate.”
“Give them to me.”
It was Anna Walling who spoke, extending a slender gloved hand.
“You?”
“Mr. Holmes, surely you know what devious creatures we women are. You have said so often enough in print. Give the pages to me.”
After a flicker of hesitation, he did as she asked.
Later, as Holmes and I lay exhausted side by side on our flaccid mattress, each struggling for a share of that flimsy coverlet, the detective allowed himself a rare moment of introspection.
“I hope I’ve done the right thing.”
“So do I.”
At that time, I suspect neither of us was sure what thing we were referring to. Or even if it was the same thing.
But after this exchange, neither of us seemed capable of keeping our eyes open.
When we looked out our window again, it was morning. The blizzard had stopped, and our two watchers had vanished.
“They left hours ago,” Holmes declared, vigorously rubbing his thin upper arms.
“How can you be sure?”
“Their footprints are entirely obscured by fresh snow.”
So they were.
Meeting Mrs. Walling half an hour later in the confining vestibule of the Esmeralda, a cab was summoned, but Holmes waved it off, first paying the driver and ordering him to proceed to the Gare de Lyon, with neither fares nor luggage. His action appeared to baffle Anna Walling, but I knew from experience what this dodge was meant to accomplish.
Sure enough, as we watched from within the hotel, two ruffians emerged from behind the corner at the bottom of the road and hastened after the cab, shrieking for another as they kicked up the fresh snow.
“Never take the first cab,” Holmes explained.
Mrs. Walling, I could see, was impressed.
Our hack, when it arrived, brought us instead to the Gare de l’Est, where we boarded the Orient Express, première classe, entirely undetected, so far as I could determine, by our pursuers.
“Première classe?” I asked the detective. “Isn’t this rather rich for our blood? I understood Mycroft to say we were traveling second class.”
As we stepped aboard, Holmes allowed himself the gleeful smile of one sibling who has outwitted another.
“An oversight, surely. The man is so terribly busy. I had Cook & Son correct our booking.”
Smartly uniformed porters adroitly handling our bags were a welcome change from the Esmeralda.
“We have certainly earned it,” I allowed.
“By the by, Watson, I infer from your new hat that your marriage is flourishing.”
The train in question was simply enormous, stretching over fourteen hundred handcrafted feet and comprising no fewer than eleven sleeping carriages, many with individual names such as Perseus, Minerva, Ibis, Ione, and so forth mounted in raised brass on their vestibules and painted in gilt on their sides as if they were ships. There were in addition several so-called “Continental” Pullmans that could only boast numbers. In addition to the sleeping carriages, there were three restaurant cars, two “parlour” or bar cars, and a new innovation, a “business car,” boasting ten typists on call at the push of a button, day or night, ready to transcribe important communications on diverse typing machines in as many languages for whichever diplomats, royalty, or titans of industry had need of their services.*
“How convenient for you, Watson,” Holmes remarked. “Your memoranda can be transcribed en route.”
“Holmes, I—”
EDITOR’S NOTE: IT IS AT THIS POINT THAT THE DIARY PAGES HAVE MADDENINGLY GONE MISSING, SEVERAL EVIDENTLY TORN OUT. THE NARRATIVE, AS WE SHALL SEE, RESUMES OUTSIDE VARNA, AND SO WE MUST CONTENT OURSELVES WITH LISTING THE KNOWN STOPS MADE AT THAT TIME BY THE CELEBRATED TRAIN. FROM PARIS, THE ORIENT EXPRESS STOPPED IN MUNICH AND THEN VIENNA, BEFORE WENDING ITS WAY SOUTH TO GIURGIU IN ROMANIA AND FROM THERE STILL FURTHER SOUTH TO VARNA, ON THE BLACK SEA.* NORMALLY THE JOURNEY TOOK FIVE DAYS, WITH OCCASIONAL STOPS TO REPLENISH THE ENGINE’S COAL AND BOILER WATER, AS WELL AS RESTOCKING THE DINING CARS’ LAVISH GUSTATORY REQUIREMENTS. I THINK WE MAY ASSUME THIS PASSAGE WAS NO DIFFERENT.
THE NARRATIVE RESUMES MIDSENTENCE:
… arguably as exhausted by this time as its occupants, finally squealed to a panting stop, punctuated by an unending belch of steam, at Varna’s gloriously sunlit station. Though we had availed ourselves of every amenity and convenience along the way (though carefully refraining from doing so in Bucharest, as Mycroft advised), we were nonetheless travel weary, our bones rattled from a journey that had crossed all Europe.
I descended first, limping awkwardly, followed by Holmes, who handed Mrs. Walling down behind us.
“Thank you, Sherlock.”
“Mrs. Walling, aren’t you warm?”
The fact that suddenly we all experienced the rise in temperature served to distract me from this exchange. Had it not done so, I would certainly have noted Mrs. Walling’s familiar use of the detective’s Christian name. Neither, at the time, was I conscious of the fact that Holmes and the lady never looked at one another throughout these banalities. It was only later that this was brought to mind.*
Holmes helped Mrs. Walling shed her heavy traveling cloak, slid out of his own ulster, and turned to me.
“Watson, we are overdressed.”
“I’m fine,” I insisted testily, but, ignoring me, he tugged at my greatcoat with his surprisingly powerful hands, then handed off our wraps to a shabbily attired porter, who addressed him rapidly in a foreign tongue.
“Romanian,” Mrs. Walling explained. “Or Bulgarian. No matter. They all speak Russian. In the Balkans,” she informed us in a neutral tone, “frontiers and languages are fluid.”
“Can you ask when our train leaves for Odessa?”
She posed the question to the porter, who jabbered back with much gesticulating while we waited. Why is it, I wonder, that when such seemingly simple exchanges occur in a foreign tongue they always appear to consume inordinate amounts of time?
Finally she turned. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Maybe?”
“Tomorrow?”
Holmes and I had spoken simultaneously. This information differed from our itinerary.
She turned back to the porter, and more rapid-fire talk and gesticulation ensued.
“Most likely tomorrow. We will need rooms for the night.”
This at least was easily accomplished. A large, if undistinguished, Hotel Terminus was situated within two minutes of the station. Two minutes toting several pieces of bulky luggage on a warm day is not the most difficult task, but not the pleasantest, either. We were surrounded by packs of chattering children, palms extended, some offering to carry our luggage (which I was convinced we should never see again), others simply begging. They settled about and traveled with us like a squadron of houseflies.
“Watch your pockets,” Anna Walling cautioned us. I was indeed obliged to slap away an importunate hand reaching for the notebook bulging in my pocket.
At the hotel, while Holmes booked rooms, I located the concierge and obtained a postcard, on the back of which I drew a heart before posting it to Juliet c/o poste restante in London. After depositing our belongings in adjoining rooms on the third floor, we gathered in the foyer for a stroll through the city. We were all, I think, eager for some diversion after days of confinement aboard the train.
From the first, we could not escape the impression that we had somehow contrived to journey backward in time. Regardless of its attractions, this part of the world appeared not merely impoverished, but fifty years behind the conveniences we in England take for granted. Such streetlamps as we observed were still illumined by gas; roads were largely unpaved, and motorcars were nowhere to be seen. The port of Varna on the Black Sea was obviously famous for its sun-drenched situation. The shingle, even in January, boasted hardy sun worshippers and was fronted by an esplanade up and down which visitors and holiday-makers promenaded, taking their ease.
The local population appeared a polyglot of Bulgars, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Romanians, also Macedonians, more than a smattering of Russians, Magyars, and, of course, ubiquitous Jews. There was a large cathedral topped with various silver-gilt, onion-shaped domes, and the sea air was pungent with competing aromas, ranging from the cooking fires of differing cuisines to the not unpleasant scent of fish wafting from nearby trawlers.
The sun was soon setting behind several white-and-pink stone public buildings, the most modern features of this provincial metropolis. In this part of the world it was accounted far too early for supper, but a waterside bistro with a name in Greek lettering above its shutters afforded us a respectable charcuterie, dominated by lamb.
“It makes a refreshing change after days of cordon bleu,” Holmes admitted.
We ordered a bottle of the local white we found undrinkable.
“Ouzo,” Mrs. Walling informed us, smiling. “It is an acquired taste.”
I declined to acquire it.
“Holmes, what are you looking at?”
“Those curious tourists.”
I twisted in my chair in the direction of his gaze.
Two gentlemen, attired in identical straw boaters and seersucker jackets, were using binoculars to scrutinize the horizon. All the fishing craft had long since put into port.
“What can they be looking at, Holmes? There’s nothing to see.”
“That is what makes them curious.”
“They’re looking at us, Doctor.” It was Mrs. Walling who grasped the detective’s meaning.
Holmes resumed his meal.
“It was to be expected,” he conceded. “When we failed to appear at the Gare de Lyon, they realized their mistake.”
“What will they do?”
Holmes tried the wine again and made a face. “They are unsure.”
“Unsure of what?”
“Are we Mr. Holmes and party, poking our noses into sensitive Jewish issues…”
“Or?”
“Or are we, as our passports and visas proclaim, the Altmont party, bound for St. Basil’s Monastery? In a word, have they been trailing the wrong troika?”
“But in London,” I objected, “they saw me. They saw Mrs. Garnett…”
“Yes, you were seen in London,” the detective agreed, “and a description has certainly been circulated, but if what you report of your encounter with your spurious stockbroker is accurate—”
“It is,” I insisted vehemently.
“—and no actual photograph has been transmitted, they cannot be sure. Very likely they will not take chances. Tomorrow, we will give them their answer.”
“How will we do that?” Even the knowledgeable Mrs. Walling was at a loss.
“By visiting the Monastery of St. Basil and studying the motets of the Orthodox liturgy. The metropolitan* is expecting us.”
Tomorrow, however, would prove too late. Returning to our hotel, we ascended to the third floor where Mrs. Walling unlocked her door while Holmes and I repaired to our room, only to be startled by what we beheld there. The place had been turned topsy-turvy, suitcases flung open, linings slit, mattresses gutted, goosedown like snow everywhere, the huge wooden wardrobe tipped on its side and our clothing strewn about pell-mell. I searched frantically and was relieved to find my Webley where I had wedged it in the toe of a boot. My rolled socks, as it proved, were deemed unworthy of their attention, and thus my cartridges were likewise safe. Had they found bullets, doubtless they would have redoubled their efforts to locate my weapon.
Holmes’s copy of War and Peace had been torn in half and his cherished violin smashed to bits. It was perhaps the only time I ever beheld the detective stupefied. I don’t believe I understood fully the fiddle’s importance to him until this instant. He sat as one turned to stone, holding the instrument’s fragments in his open hands, staring with unseeing eyes at the shards as they slid from his fingers.**
More fortunately, my journal had escaped their clutches. I always carry it with me.
It was at that moment we heard the muffled cry.
“Sherlock!”
“Anna!” Holmes exclaimed, and we ran back to Mrs. Walling’s room.
Clothing, including articles of intimate apparel, as well as toiletries and miscellaneous items of no conceivable interest or value, had been torn to shreds and flung about as though by a madman. Mrs. Walling did not own (or at any rate, did not travel with) much in the way of jewelry, but such as she had remained conspicuously untouched.
She was sitting motionless on the bed, facing the window, her back to us.
“Mrs. Walling, are you all right?” I asked.
She turned, displaying an ashen face. Unable to speak, she could only stare, those violet eyes displaying an emotion I had yet to behold: fear.
“The Protocols!” shouted Holmes. “Where are the Protocols?”