21 January. The town of Kishinev, when we finally reached it by horse-drawn wagon—there being no other access from St. Basil’s, or indeed anywhere else—was remarkable only for its ordinariness. Mrs. Walling likened the sleepy Bessarabian backwater to the San Fernando Valley in Southern California, which she had known from the time she dwelt in that state. Flat fields of fruit trees and other crops stretched out from the city centre, whose few public buildings contrasted with primitive adjacent streets and one-story houses, some more closely resembling hovels. On those dusty, dried-mud side streets one could not help observing vacant lots where homes once stood, their owners fled or dead. The charred ruins were gone, but square patches of ground remained ominously black.
Yet I must count the town, however drab and uninviting, a welcome distraction from the tedium I experienced after three days within the Monastery of St. Basil, situated roughly two-thirds of the way from Odessa on the nonexistent road. Instead of miles, distances here were reckoned in versts, which, if I understood correctly, roughly correspond to kilometers. For three days I was once more obliged to sit on unforgiving benches, more properly designated as pews, this time beneath domed ceilings, emblazoned by enormous shimmering gold icons and vibrant frescoes, many displaying the Greek cross peculiar to the faith (though in some ways reminiscent of the Celtic), and feign total absorption as I listened to the black-clad choir, their tall headpieces resembling toques in mourning, intoning the chants we had purportedly come to study. In the queerest contrast to the singing, the monks spent the rest of their time in resolute and total silence. They held their missals or breviaries before them and mutely recited whatever version of the rosary their liturgy prescribed, but never spoke to one another under any circumstances. Their most common orison, as I later learned, was the ceaseless repetition of the phrase Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me. Otherwise, you might accompany one of them from matins to vespers and never be acknowledged. It was worse than the Diogenes, which I had not thought possible. Conferring with Mrs. Walling, who was not allowed within the sacred precincts but had to wait outside the chapel, Holmes took what I hoped were convincing notes about the notes.
The main thoroughfare of Kishinev was an impressive boulevard called Alexandrova Street, shaded by splendid trees, but one could not escape the impression that it was a road that led nowhere.
“Pushkin lived here,” Mrs. Walling informed us. “And despised the place.”
“The poet?” I vaguely knew the name. “Why then did he choose to do so?”
“He was exiled here.”
“Exiled,” I echoed stupidly. Yes, in this strange place people could be exiled.
“The town is more prosperous nowadays than in Pushkin’s time. It is a big agricultural centre. The land hereabouts is very fertile.”
“With no roads, how do they export their goods?” Holmes wondered.
“The River Bic is close by, and waterways ferry crops and merchandise to market. It’s a very effective system.”
Yet her civic boosterism—if that was what it was—failed to dispel a more sinister impression. The somnolence of the town I judged deceptive. As Israel Zangwill had informed us, terrible events had taken place here not two years before, and it seemed to me the quiet that pervaded its dusty streets had taken on the surreal aspect of a dream (or nightmare, to be more precise), its residents mere zombies, as though all were still stunned by the convulsion that had occurred.
Of course, dreadful events had occurred mere weeks ago in Odessa, and the city trembled with the tension of those events, but here, with the passage of time, the convulsions had subsided into a collective stupor.
“It’s changed in the year since English and I were here,” Anna Walling commented.
“How so?”
She considered, looking about her.
“Ten months ago they were still reeling from the massacre. Burnt-out homes and ruined shops were everywhere. You could scarcely see any people on the streets amid the rubble. It was as though the survivors were hiding.”
“From shame?” I inquired.
“Hiding,” she repeated without embellishment.
“There are still Jews,” Holmes observed.
“There will always be Jews,” Mrs. Walling answered. She regarded us intently, making up her mind. “Let me introduce you to some.”
What followed next I can scarcely bring myself to write. Anna Strunsky Walling led us to the hut (it can only be termed thus) where a formerly prosperous wool merchant named Nussbaum now lived with his daughter. His once agreeable home had been burned to the ground in the pogrom. On that occasion, Rebecca, his wife of twenty-one years, had her throat cut, and their child, Rivka, now sitting before us, was violated that same night, according to her father, no fewer than six times by rampaging townsmen. She had been thirteen. The girl, in a rigid posture, gaped blindly into space, curled fists grasping the arms of the chair in which she sat, while her torso rocked imperceptibly to and fro, causing the furniture to creak rhythmically, almost as if there were a clock in the small room. Her red hair was tightly curled as well, as if clenching itself in response to what had happened. Her pale, freckled face seemed almost separate from her taut jaw, her yellowed teeth in a kind of perpetual snarl. But most disturbing were her wide, unblinking eyes, the pupils dilated beyond the promptings of the semidarkness, as if they had been dipped in belladonna. Those eyes had beheld too much, and yet now they refused to close. When I struck a vesta and passed it before them, the pupils refused to contract, or indeed follow the flame. In the aftermath of her experience, she remained catatonic, endlessly swaying. In the darkened single room, with odorous sheepskins hanging from rafters, and dust motes floating in shafts of sunlight from holes in the roof above her, I attempted a cursory examination while Mrs. Walling endeavored to explain our presence to the bereaved father and widowed husband. He responded in monosyllables that required no translation.
“Why don’t they leave?” I found myself asking. The girl’s pulse was astonishingly strong and regular.
“Jews are not allowed to travel.”
“And go where?” the wool merchant added when my question had been relayed. His own affect and presentation were little different, from a medical standpoint, than those of his child.
“How do they manage?” the detective, who had remained silent, now asked in a voice I had never heard before.
Mrs. Walling sighed. “They don’t. They exist without living.”
Sherlock Holmes, a man who seldom allowed himself to express emotion of any kind, made to lay his slender fingers gently on top of Rivka Nussbaum’s. With a whimper, her hands recoiled from his as from an electric shock or scalding iron—but her tremulous oscillations never ceased.
“She cannot bear to be touched,” the father explained.
As hard as it is to describe my own reaction to this excruciating interview, the response of the detective I found more unsettling. Judging from his pallor and twitching cheek muscles, I saw a man who had been poleaxed. Always excepting the murder of Manya Lippman, until now the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been an abstract outrage; now Holmes had encountered its effects in the flesh. It was now plain that men who would not scruple to crush a violin were equally untroubled doing the same to human beings. Holmes had earlier theorized that crimes in the twentieth century were getting bigger. In Kishinev we were both confronted by an example of unparalleled malice.
After endeavoring to extend our condolences to Nussbaum—and how pitiful and insufficient our mumbled words sounded in our own ears—we left the pathetic residence of the wool merchant and his ruined daughter, wincing at the daylight as we, as if fleeing a dream, returned to a reassuringly familiar sunlit world. The detective shook himself in an apparent effort to escape the effects of our visit. I knew him well enough by this time to know that such efforts would prove futile. Though he liked to present himself to the public as a reasoning machine, nothing more, I knew at present he was seething. We both were.
“Where can we obtain a copy of Bessarabets?” he asked in the same eerily strangled voice.
Mrs. Walling pointed to an impressive stone building, constructed in the late second empire style. I might have mistaken it for a substantial train station or opera house, save that I knew this part of the Russian empire possessed neither.
“What on earth is that?”
“Kogan’s pharmacy and general store. Much of it was destroyed in the pogrom, but now it is back in operation. They should have local newspapers.”
Her prediction proved accurate, and we shortly thereafter found ourselves silently consuming a very sweet tea in a shop down the street, where Anna Walling, at Holmes’s insistence, once again donned her glasses and translated the broadsheet from front to back.
There were only six pages, and as she read, Holmes’s brows knit in consternation.
“That is all?” he said, frowning, when she had closed the paper. “Farm news, crop yields, animal obituaries, and a weather almanac?”
She removed her glasses.
“I have read you everything except market prices. Should I—?”
Sherlock Holmes shook his head, reaching for the paper, which he examined minutely, going so far as to view portions of it through his pocket magnifying glass. Unable to read Russian, he only succeeded in smudging his hands with inferior ink.
“You’re certain this is the same periodical that ran the Protocols?”
“Quite certain,” she answered a trifle frostily. “This is their usual fare, but anti-Semitic tirades are regular features, typically inserted among the rest.”
Holmes reopened the paper and searched for the masthead, then refolded it and handed it back. “Who is the publisher?”
She replaced her glasses and squinted at the small Cyrillic typeface. “His name is Pavel Krushenev.” She sat back. “I seem to recall he’s well known in Kishinev. Something of a local personality.”
“Pavel Krushenev,” the detective repeated, looking about him. At such times, when his wheels were turning, he bore an uncanny resemblance to his brother. “What we need,” he proclaimed finally, “is a drink.”
“We’ve just had tea,” Anna Walling protested.
“Holmes means a drink,” I explained. “What is the local specialty?”
She laughed at this. “Colonel Morcar, you must be joking. In this part of the world there is only one drink. It is made from potatoes.”
“And where might one sample this elixir?” Holmes asked.
She puzzled briefly over this; then her countenance assumed an expression of amusement.
“Do you wish a goyische or yidische establishment?”
The detective pondered the question.
“Goyische.” Then, as an afterthought, “Will they admit you?”
She smiled. “Everywhere.”
Ruminsky’s pab, or taverna, when we entered it, was a large, smoke-filled, low-ceilinged affair, crowded with peasantry, all in a semi-intoxicated state, the result of the potent vodka they consumed in astonishing quantities, whose fumes, mingled with perspiration, permeated and characterized the foetid air. Originally and perhaps optimistically called Pushkin’s, the place bore as much resemblance to an English pub as a horse-drawn carriage to a motorcar. In contrast to the somnambulant behavior of the citizens by day, night and drink had released their inhibitions, unleashing a boisterous bonhomie, accompanied by a pleasant-sounding instrument whose twanging I confess I enjoyed more than Sarasate’s violin. Mrs. Walling informed us it was called a balalaika. She was by no means the only woman in the place. A sudden shriek, succeeded by high-pitched giggles and peals of laughter, emanated from the far reaches of the room, assuring us of others’ presence, though I knew without seeing them, none compared to our interpreter.
Ruminsky himself proved an almost predictably Falstaffian personage, whose bald scalp was compensated by a white beard of considerable dimensions, within whose tendrils I detected what I took to be bits of food. This Father Christmas did not question or remark upon our unusual trio; a beautiful woman was its own justification in his eyes, that and the fact that our kopeks were genuine. He bit one to assure himself of this. Since supplementing our apparel at the souks in Odessa, we no longer quite stood out as foreigners. Mrs. Walling, in particular, blended in, wearing Uzbek peasant attire of a white blouse with red stitching and a colourful woolen shawl.
Vodka was new to Holmes. I had experienced the drink years before in Afghanistan, but we were both surprised by its strength.
“What is this?” he inquired, indicating a yellow ceramic pot on our table.
“Ground pepper,” our guide explained. “Some take it in their drink. Go easy,” Mrs. Walling cautioned, “or you’ll be under the table before you know it.”
I noticed with moody fascination, as the evening progressed, that the drink seemed to have no effect on her whatever.
Flourishing our copy of Bessarabets, Holmes put a question to her. “Can you ask our host if he is acquainted with Pavel Krushenev?”
After the briefest hesitation, she nodded. When Ruminsky next returned to top up our glasses—(I had begun discreetly tipping the contents of mine down the leg of my chair where it mercifully mingled on the wide floorboards with scraps of black bread and other debris)—she posed his query.
“Krushenev?” He shook his head. “That character. Always stirring up trouble about the Yids.”
“You know him,” his attractive guest pursued, smiling. There seemed no question in Ruminsky’s mind his interlocutor was a Jewess, comparatively well-to-do in addition to radiant. He deferred to her accordingly, if grudgingly. Or was he perhaps intimidated by the presence of Holmes and myself?
“Not so much,” the publican finally admitted. “I don’t read, devushka,* but I know he’s always in trouble, that one.” He gestured to our copy of Bessarabets. “He went broke, you know, had to sell the paper—but still he is the publisher and still lives above the print shop and writes most of the pieces himself, they say.” He shook his head as if in wonder at this feat of legal legerdemain. “Za vashe zdrovye!”
“Za vashe zdrovye!” we chorused in return, having heard the shouted toast exchanged for the past hour.
Without bothering to ask, Ruminsky refilled our glasses.
“What sort of trouble?” Anna Walling inquired, tossing back her drink as readily as he had replenished it.
“It grows late.” The man grew uneasy, his manner less jovial.
Holmes reassured him by silently lining up several additional kopeks on the table, like pawns on a chessboard.
Shrugging unhappily, Saint Nicholas scooped them up.
“It was a long time ago,” he began plaintively. “That boy, what was his name? Mikhail something, I can’t think now. Wait, Rybachenko—, that was it! Mikhail Rybachenko. The constables found him with his head bashed in, and Krushenev got everyone worked up the Yids did it—called it Jew sacrifice or something. Blood libel! That was it! Next thing you know we’re all at each other’s throats—and then it turns out Igor Ivanovich was the killer. The lad’s own cousin! For his share of the estate!” He shook his head once more. “I’m glad I can’t read. All that news that made us wild and it turns out it wasn’t true. These days how can we know what’s true? Someone tried to kill him a while back.” He gestured again to the newspaper, evidently referring to the publisher. “Probably a Yid. You couldn’t blame him. We—many died,” he amended. “Now he keeps Vladimir—that big Cossack—with him all the time, and his own chef! Worries about being poisoned. That’s the rumor, anyway. Coming!”
He fled, pretending to answer a summons from the bar.
“Notice with what dexterity he rationalizes his part in the massacre,” Holmes commented sourly. “It was ‘a long time ago.’ He was the victim of false information. Well done, Mrs. Walling,” he added. “May I offer you a cigarette?”
“In Russia women do not smoke. Certainly not in public.”
“Very like home,” I mumbled through a haze of vodka. The decoction had released feelings of self-pity, loneliness, and longing for my sweet girl.
Holmes, his face flushed with the effects of the drink, took deliberate and elaborate care, lighting a cigarette of his own and blowing graceful smoke to join the blue haze of the room. His face now looked unfamiliar to me. Drink had transformed either his features or my vision. He sneezed, his eyes watering.
“Watson, you still have the Webley?”
This sudden change of topic gave me pause. I blinked in an effort to regain my senses.
“Yes, if it’s not been taken from our rooms.”
“And the bullets, I assume.”
“Mr. Altmont, what are you suggesting?” Anna Walling remained sober.
“I think a visit to the publisher of Bessarabets may be in order.”
Had I been sober, it might have occurred to me to caution “Manchester” in my friend’s ear, but in my present condition, the proposition seemed eminently sensible.
Our rooms, as it happened, remained untouched. Having stumbled back to our lodgings from Ruminsky’s in the cool night air, my heart was slightly clearer. I mean to say, head. Several vigorous shakes of my boot succeeded in disgorging my revolver.
Anna Walling’s eyes widened at the sight.
“Dr. Watso—Colonel Morcar, what are you doing?”
“Boys will be boys,” I returned, unrolling a pair of dark brown socks and spilling out a half dozen bullets, which I shakily managed to insert in the six empty chambers of the cylinder.
“Watson, are you ready?”
“Wait. Wait!” Anna Walling rushed to the door and stood before it, arms outspread, barring our way. “What on earth do you think you are doing?”
“Quite ready, Holmes.”
“No. No!” Mrs. Walling cried. “We didn’t come here to kill the man. In God’s name, I’m a pacifist!! Do you hear me? A pacifist!”
“Time is short, Mrs. Walling. If we are to prevent more pogroms, we are compelled to take extraordinary measures and take them quickly.”
She stiffened, her back pressed against the door.
“The first man to raise a fist is the man who has run out of ideas!” It sounded as if she were quoting something, but before I could ask what, Holmes responded.
“I have an idea,” he protested mildly, but to no avail. Her panic was now in full flood.
“No! Not this! It’s the vodka talking.”
“No. It’s only me.” He moved forward.
“If you do this, it is all over between—”
“And I need your help,” Holmes hastily interposed with a sharp glance in my direction. “We must speak with Mr. Krushenev. And he must be made to answer.”
This served to somewhat stem her alarm.
“Do you promise—?”
“I need your help,” the other repeated. “Please come now.”
Gently, one might say tenderly, he edged her from the door and held it open. We followed him out.
There were few lights in the streets of Kishinev, and by this hour the few oil lamps boasted by homes in this vicinity had long since been extinguished.
My companion was unperturbed. “What is the one building whose lights always burn far into the night?” He answered his own question. “A newspaper!”
It didn’t take long in this small place to locate a larger building, through the lighted lower-story windows of which we could see two compositors throwing letters into wooden page “fronts” almost faster than the eye could follow. I was surprised to find a woman loading the “make ready” forms. As it happens, I was not unfamiliar with such places. My years of chronicling Holmes’s exploits for the Strand magazine had found me inside pressrooms on more than one occasion, arguing about my copy with intransigent editors. The Bessarabets press looked to be fifty years out of date but appeared nonetheless well maintained. It did boast rollers but was still hand cranked. When I reflected these letters were in fact Cyrillic and being loaded backward into the bargain, I could not help but admire the skill of these clever typesetting fellows, so at ease in a language that was entirely bewildering to me. The fact that the text they were so adroitly loading was just as likely to be filled with hateful bile and shameless falsehoods did not occur to me at the time. Compositors do not look different than other people.
The clattering of the lead type, audible from where we stood, made it unlikely our presence outside could be heard. Treading gingerly, Holmes motioned us to follow and led us around the building’s exterior. There was an impressive entrance, above which large gilt wooden lettering proclaimed (I am assuming here) the name Bessarabets. Holmes eschewed this portal and continued his tour of inspection, discovering in the narrow lane behind the building—really more an alley—a smaller point of access.
Gently he prodded the narrow door, which appeared at first to be bolted. This would prove a setback, but he tried again, pressing more firmly now, and discovered the thing was merely warped and gave way with a mild squeak of protest.
We froze, listening for any reaction, but the clattering within continued apace, punctuated by talk and an occasional burst of laughter. And then luck favored us, for they commenced cranking the press, and its rhythmic clacking overlaid any sound we might inadvertently produce.
“Close it, but not tightly,” Holmes whispered, gesturing to the door. “If we leave it ajar, they’ll feel the cold air…”
I nodded. Anna Walling looked as if she were enacting the lead role in her own nightmare. She was by any measure a daring woman, but such an enterprise as this, to which she was, in addition, morally opposed, was quite beyond her experience and possibly her capacities. I was obliged to tug her forward inside the small entryway, wedging the door against, but not entirely into, its swollen jamb.
Inside, the odor of printer’s ink mingled with the distinctive scent of the viscous paraffin oil printing presses require to keep them in working trim. Taking in our surroundings by the dim illumination, we spied a narrow staircase immediately to our left. Holmes gestured with an index finger, and we stole upwards behind him. There was a groan when he trod upon the fourth step. Again we stopped and listened. Again no one appeared to have been alerted to our presence over the furious rattle of the press. As we followed the detective, we made it our business to omit the treacherous stair. As we ascended, the sounds of work receded below.
Near the darkened top of the steps, a faint, intermittent thwack was now audible from above. This, too, was familiar to me. I recognized the fits and starts of a typist in search of just the right word or phrase. We stopped where we were and listened. It was hard not to imagine the rage behind that erratic pounding. I exchanged looks with Holmes, and we both understood we were listening to the imaginative outbursts of Pavel Krushenev. Sometimes the blows would cease for a minute altogether. Had the writer finished for the night? But no, soon inspiration returned, and his fingers pummeled the keys anew before a distant ping! announced the completion of another line of vicious text.
There were voices, too. At first only one, as though the writer were talking to himself, but then another, deeper, rumbled in return. I didn’t have to be a lip reader to understand Holmes’s mouth forming the word “Vladimir,” referring to the editor’s Cossack bodyguard, foretold by Ruminsky.
With his hand, he pantomimed his wish, and I produced the Webley.
Seeing the weapon, Mrs. Walling opened her mouth, but Holmes laid an emphatic index finger across his own. He inched up a step below the topmost, stood to one side, and then, with no warning whatever, deliberately and violently sneezed.
Instantly, conversation behind the door ceased. I looked at Holmes in dismay. His hand slid into the pocket of his own jacket.
The next instants were a blur. In less time than it takes to relate, the door was flung wide and an enormous figure, his shape defined by light from behind, appeared wielding a pistol whose proportions matched his own. But before he could discharge the weapon Sherlock Holmes had hurled two fistfuls of pepper in his face. The giant screamed, flinging away his weapon—which mercifully did not discharge—clawing madly at his eyes, sneezing convulsively (like the villain in The Scarlet Pimpernel I had disdained to believe), as Holmes smashed his legs from under him with a ferocious baritsu kick, followed by a nerve pinch to the neck and shoulder, peculiar to that Japanese form of combat.* The effect was instantaneous, forcing us to jump aside lest we be crushed by Vladimir’s massive form as it barreled down the stairs like a human avalanche to the bottom, where he remained in a crumpled heap.
“Quick, Watson!”
Long experience had enabled the detective and myself to communicate in such circumstances with a kind of shorthand. Without pausing to determine whether our fracas had been overheard by the typesetters over the roar of the press below, we leapt like madmen into the upstairs office in time for me to train the Webley on the scrambling figure of Pavel Krushenev, who was in the act of throwing open the sash behind his desk, evidently attempting an escape through the window.
Seeing the barrel of my revolver leveled at his torso caused him to freeze in the act.
“Tell him to stand still,” Holmes directed the ashen Mrs. Walling, “while I see to it Vladimir does not disturb us when he wakes.” Woodenly, she obeyed. Before leaving the room, Holmes helped himself to the long muffler wound about Krushenev’s neck, and on second thought appropriated as well the man’s handkerchief to use as a gag.
I held the publisher at bay with my revolver, and we stared at one another, or rather, I stared at him and he gazed intently at the muzzle of my weapon, which he seemingly found of compelling interest. His glazed brown eyes, wide with alarm, put me altogether in mind of a twitching rodent’s. His trick of constantly gnawing at the bottom of his impressive moustache added to this impression.
Pavel Krushenev was a smallish man of medium build with a bulbous nose and receding hairline. His chief distinction was a neatly trimmed beard, topped by the aforementioned moustache, whose artfully tapered and waxed tips in the style once called “Imperial” suggested a certain vanity. Later pondering these events, I noted a fleeting resemblance to that other wax-tipped-moustachioed scoundrel, Napoleon III. Given what we were to discover, this was certainly fitting. In England I would have set him down as impoverished gentry, which he more or less proved to be.
“Tell him to place his palms flat on the desk,” I commanded.
He did as Mrs. Walling instructed.
“What now?” she inquired in a quavering voice quite unlike her own confident timbre.
“We wait.”
And so we did for perhaps two minutes before Holmes returned, a trifle breathless but evidently satisfied.
“May I?” he asked, holding out his hand. I handed him the revolver, which he examined briefly.
“Now then.” He turned to the writer. “I shall put some questions to you, and you will answer truthfully.”
“Nyet! I shall say nothing!” Krushenev replied in a defiant tone when he understood Holmes’s words.
The detective appeared both untroubled and unsurprised by this response. Studying the weapon in his hand, he appeared to give the matter impartial consideration.
“Do you enjoy games?” he addressed this question to the Russian but looked at Mrs. Walling, who hesitatingly repeated it in that language.
“Games?” the other responded in a tone of evident bewilderment. His rodent eyes shifted from one of us to the other and back again.
Holmes held up the revolver and snapped open the cylinder. As the editor watched with increasing apprehension, the detective tipped out five bullets into the palm of his hand, taking care to leave the sixth snug in its chamber.
“Games of chance.” Holmes lined the five bullets upright like palisades on the man’s desk. “Have you ever tried your luck in Monte Carlo?”
As we all watched in disbelief, Holmes spun the cylinder, then placed the barrel of the gun to his own forehead.
“Holmes!”
And pulled the trigger.
Click.
“A variation on roulette,” he explained equably.
Mrs. Walling sank into a chair with a gasp. I felt my knees about to buckle and grasped at the table’s edge for support.
“Holmes!”
Ignoring me, the detective smiled, lowered the gun from his temple, and spun the cylinder once more.
“I see you understand how the game is played,” he told Krushenev in language and gestures which necessitated no help from Mrs. Walling, who was in any case, at this juncture, incapable of supplying any assistance. “Now then, my first question, this one merely a formality: Did you publish the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion?”
Before the quivering man could answer the translation, Holmes had put the gun to the publisher’s sweat-soaked forehead and pulled the trigger.
Click.
“Da!”
“Very good.” The detective patted him approvingly on the shoulder. “We understand one another. And you have beaten the odds. This time.”
No translation was required.
“Sherlock, in God’s name—”
“This will take but a moment,” he assured our interpreter, spinning the cylinder yet again, this time nestling the barrel between Krushenev’s eyes, slightly above the bridge of his nose. “Where did you obtain the Protocols? Mrs. Walling, if you please.”
The question, when he understood it, appeared to puzzle the man. He looked about in confusion. Again, Holmes was not surprised.
“Let me rephrase the question. Parlez-vous françcais?”
Click!
“Oui! Mais oui!”
“Well done, Little Father. Bien fait. You have beaten the house again. Give him my congratulations,” he ordered Mrs. Walling. Numbly, she conveyed them.
I heard a confusing noise, a dripping I could not at first identify, then realized the man had lost control. He screamed something at Holmes.
“You are insane,” Mrs. Walling said. It wasn’t clear whether she was speaking for herself or on behalf of the editor. Holmes remained impassive.
The cylinder was spun again.
“Alors, dites-mois, donc, est-ce que vous connaissez l’ouevre de Monsieur Maurice Joly, écrivain français?”
Click!
This time his answer tumbled from his mouth before the click was even complete.
“Oui! Da, mon Dieu! Oui!”
“Quelle surprise,” Holmes remarked acidly. “We’re almost finished,” he reassured us before turning back to Krushenev.
He now withdrew our copy of the Protocols from his breast pocket and placed them before the terrified man.
“You cannot explain where you obtained the Protocols because in fact you wrote them yourself. Is this not the case? Not only did you publish, you are in fact the actual author, creating the Protocols of whole cloth. Well, not entirely,” the detective allowed. “You copied and adapted language from Monsieur Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu for your own purposes?”
Mrs. Walling translated the question slowly so as to ensure it was comprehended in its entirety. Krushenev stared at the pages set before him. Though in English, the paragraphs separated by familiar numerals cast little doubt as to their contents, which served to convince the man we knew a good deal more than he’d supposed.
Holmes raised the Webley once more, but before he could place its barrel again—
“Da. Da!”
Heaving sobs; there could be no question the detective had broken his prisoner.
Holmes now opened his other hand to reveal the sixth bullet. The weapon had been empty the entire time. I had never in my life beheld or believed him capable of such behavior. Only his own fury could have accounted for his chosen means of interrogation.
Krushenev stared at the bullet with incredulity, then raised tear-filled eyes to Holmes. I shared his stupefaction. How had Holmes managed to extract the last bullet?
“Why do you so hate the Jews? What have they done to you?”
Hearing the question, the writer shot the detective a look of stubborn silence.
“Was it because of the girl?” Holmes asked quietly. He nodded, and Mrs. Walling, bewildered, rendered the question in Russian.
The explosive response was almost as surprising as the question itself.
“She has nothing to do with this!” Krushenev shrieked, leaping to his feet and trembling from head to foot. “The little baggage! Nothing, do you hear?” Foamy spittle flecked his lips. His mottled cheeks and beard were soaked with tears, the melted waxed tips of his once impressive moustache now sagging. Curiously, now that the woman—whoever she was—had been mentioned, he could not abandon the topic. “Jew slut! I offered her everything! My name! I begged her to marry me, and she laughed! She laughed!”
Even now, in the midst of his collapse, the memory of his rejection pushed the present moment aside, unleashing his fury anew. “They must all die!”
Mrs. Walling flatly translated the appalling language. She was fully absorbed now, notwithstanding her principles.
“Including Theodor Herzl?”
“Who? Oh,” Krushenev recollected with a sniff. “The Zionist. Why bother? He was going to lead them all to Africa or someplace.”
Holmes considered this.
“Would that have contented you?”
The question was enough to set the maniac back on his hobbyhorse.
“Jew scum! Scum of the earth! Liars! Cheaters! Shysters! Usurers!” He had no interest in Herzl.
“Final question. Who commissioned the Protocols?” the detective inquired. Opening his silver case, he offered the man a cigarette, but Krushenev, still in the grip of his fever, ignored the gesture.
“Pharaoh should have pushed them all into the sea! Drowned them like the vermin they are!”
Shrugging, Holmes lit his own cigarette and had Mrs. Walling repeat the question.
“There is another way to play this game,” he added, flicking open the gun under his victim’s nose and letting Krushenev watch the lone bullet sliding into one of the chambers before snapping the cylinder into place. This time there would be no sleight of hand. Mrs. Walling and Krushenev flinched in unison at the sight, which appeared to focus the Russian’s mind. He sagged into his chair, reminding me of nothing so much as a balloon with its hydrogen leaking out. Had he been capable of rational thought, the editor might have reasoned Holmes was again bluffing; were he killed, the detective would never learn the answer to his question, and a gunshot would certainly attract attention and capture. But the hypnotic stare with which the monster had followed the bullet’s deliberate progress into a random chamber, and watched entranced as Holmes suggestively rolled the cylinder back and forth against his sleeve, assured me such logic was giving him no comfort. A quick glance in Anna Walling’s direction likewise convinced me no such rationale had occurred to her.
Holmes raised the gun.
“Rachkovsky,” Krushenev sighed. “Rachkovsky ordered it—to explain the pogrom.”
“The pogrom you fomented with your tale about Jews and their human Passover sacrifice.”
He nodded absently. “And to alarm the Tsar.”
“Rachkovsky? Who is that?”
Krushenev eyed Holmes with a short laugh of disbelief. “You know nothing. You have no idea what your meddling has begun.”
“Who is Rachkovsky?” Holmes repeated.
“Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, director general of the Okhrana. He was here after, immediately after the—immediately after. He gave the order in this room.”
Holmes frowned and exchanged looks with us.
“Did he specify—?”
“It was all left up to me. ‘Give us a casus belli,’ says he. May I have one of those now?” This last in a plaintive tone, accompanied by a feeble gesture that required nothing from Mrs. Walling.
Holmes lit a cigarette for him and placed it in his mouth. The Russian had barely the strength to suck at its glowing contents. What he inhaled prompted a coughing fit that doubled him over for a time. Holmes waited for his convulsions to end with the patient air of a man who had all the time in the world.
“And you knew about Joly,” he resumed, tapping our pages when the coughing had ceased. Krushenev regarded them and gave an exhausted shrug.
“I studied in Paris. It was perfect. I didn’t have to change very much.”
“The Tsar’s secret police commissioned a forgery to deceive the Tsar?” I asked. “What is the sense of that?”
He looked at me. “Many people wish to influence His Majesty. Justifying killing Jews and seizing their property—”
“Is easier than trying to modernize a country the size of Russia,” Holmes finished for him. “Why translate the Protocols into French?” he added as an afterthought.
Krushenev favored him with a patronizing expression. “Because no one outside Russia can read Russian. All Europe understands French.”*
The room fell silent. Daylight would shortly be upon us, and with it the risk of discovery. Holmes looked about the office.
“Where is your carbon paper?”
“What?”**
The response required no translation. The detective frowned at this but again appeared unsurprised. Looking about, he tore the typescript from the platen of Krushenev’s cumbersome typing machine—its long keys looking like so many spider legs—and crumpled it, inserting in its place a sheet of blank paper. “Now then,” he told the man. “You will write a full confession, including names, dates, and places. You will affix your signature to the bottom. And remember”—he displayed my Webley beneath Krushenev’s running nose—“any hesitation, any omission, and we will resume the game with the difference of an actual bullet.”
The man nodded dully, looking for his handkerchief, and then, remembering the detective had taken it, wiped his nose unceremoniously with the back of his sleeve and sat before his typewriter.
“Begin with today’s date. ‘I, Pavel Krushenev, owner and editor of the broadsheet Bessarabets, do hereby confess that I alone forged and published the document known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I did this at the direction of Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, director general of the Okhrana, for the purpose of inciting hatred against the Jewish race.”
Holmes strode about the small room as he alternately dictated and waited while Mrs. Walling translated and Krushenev transcribed her words.
“I further state that to accomplish this, I plagiarized portions of Monsieur Maurice Joly’s…”
There were fewer hesitations by the typist on this occasion. Krushenev had no need to search for words as Holmes was supplying them. The spider’s long legs thwacked the paper in the otherwise silent room. When he had finished, Holmes presented the two pages to Mrs. Walling for her review.
She read carefully, silently mouthing the Russian words as we watched, then nodded without speaking, whereupon Holmes set the document before Krushenev and witnessed his signature. After the exhausted man reluctantly affixed his name to both pages, Holmes briskly retrieved and folded them before striking a match and setting fire to our copy of the Protocols, placing the smoldering ashes in a nearby dustbin. He then tapped the publisher forcefully on the shoulder, eyeing Mrs. Walling to translate his next words.
“And be sure, when next you see Director General Rachkovsky, to present the compliments of Professor James Moriarty.”
“James Moriarty,” he echoed her.
Holmes offered a cigarette to Mrs. Walling, and this time she accepted.