Game is afoot, p.65
Game Is Afoot, page 65
Though still seated in his chair, he had been mutilated hideously, almost beyond recognition.
His throat was cut from ear to ear. That was enough to have killed him. But the flesh had been almost entirely tom away from his free, and a strange series of symbols, like the ones I had seen in the letters, had been carved in the bare bone of his forehead. The crown of his skull had been smashed in by some blunt instrument, and—it revolted me to discover—most of his brain was gone.
The final detail was the worst, for it had been deliberately designed to mock us. The still smoking elephant gun lay across his lap, and, carefully placed so that it would be reflected in the mirrored surface of the polished gun barrel, was a small jade idol with emerald eyes, a stylized figure of a bat-winged dog.
“Yes, Holmes,” I said, “it is entirely too horrible.”
Dr. Watson stopped telling the story, and I, the nineteen-year-old American college student, could only gape at him open-mouthed, like some imbecile, trying not to reach the attractively obvious conclusion that the good doctor’s mind had gone soft after so many years. It was a terrible thing, just to entertain such a notion. I almost wept.
I would have remained there forever, frozen where I sat, wordless, had not Dr. Watson gone on.
“It was a case which I could not record, which Holmes ordered me to suppress on pain of the dissolution of our friendship. It just didn’t work out.”
“Wh-what do you mean, didn’t work out?”
“I mean exactly that. The affair concluded too quickly and ended in abject failure. We accomplished nothing. He would have no more of the matter, the specifics, as he acidly phrased it, being left to the ‘official imagination,’ which, sure enough, concluded the murder to be the work of a madman or madmen, perhaps directed by a sinister Oriental cult, a new Thuggee. But even the police could not account for the powerful stench of decay which lingered in the explorer’s study even long after the body had been removed, as if something long dead had invaded, done its worst, and departed as inexplicably as it had come.
“Enormous pressure was brought to bear to prevent any accurate reportage in the newspapers, to prevent panic. I think those instructions came from the very highest level. Sir Humphrey’s obituary, ironically, listed the cause of his demise as an Asiatic fever. I signed the death certificate to that effect.
“My own conclusions were profoundly disturbing. The mystery could not be resolved. What we—even Miss Thurston—had witnessed were not merely unlikely, but impossible.
“ ‘I reject the impossible,’ said Holmes vehemently. ‘as a matter of policy. Such things cannot be—’
“ ‘You and I and the girl saw, Holmes. They are.’
“ ‘No, Watson! No! The irrational has no place in detective work. We must confine ourselves to the tangible and physical, carefully building upon meticulous reason, or else the whole edifice of my life’s work crumbles into dust. Against the supernatural, I am helpless, my methods of no use. My methods have been useful in the past, don’t you think? And so they shall be in the future, but we must remain within certain bounds, and so preserve them.’ ”
Again I, the college boy, was left speechless.
“Holmes made me swear an oath—and I swore it—never to write up this case—and I never wrote it—’’
Had he, in a sense at least, broken his oath by telling me? I dared not ask. Was there some urgency now, of which he had lately become aware?
“I wanted to tell someone,’’ was all he said. “I thought I should.’’
King Midas. Ass’s ears. Who will believe the wind in the reeds?
I merely know that a week after I returned to school in America I received a telegram saying that Dr. Watson had died peacefully of heart failure, sitting in that very chair by the fire. A week later a parcel arrived with a note from one of my aunts, expressing some bewilderment that he had wanted me to have the contents.
It was the idol of the bat-winged dog.
Fecundity and literary excellence sometimes go hand in hand, but few contemporary writers can compare with the staggering fictional output of Ed wa rd D. Hoch, past president of the Mystery Writers of America. To date, every issue (/Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine since May 1973 has contained at least one Hoch story, and that is just one of many periodicals and anthologies to publish him. When asked how many pieces bear his byline, he shrugs and says, “More than I can count.” The number (somewhere around seven hundred) includes such popular series as the borderline-fantasy Simon Ark mysteries, the Jeffrey Rand cryptography puzzles and the wildly inventive thefts of Nick Velvet, a thief who only steals valueless objects. “The Theft of the Persian Slipper” is one of the latter tales.
The Theft of the Persian Slipper
Edward D. Hoch
“Nick Velvet?”
The man who greeted him at the airport in Rome was dressed like Hollywood’s idea of an American gangster. He’d been reading a copy of an English-language newspaper published daily in Italy, and he folded this under his arm as Nick approached. Obviously he knew he had the right man. “That’s me,” Nick agreed. “Where’s your boss?”
“He doesn’t meet people at airports. I’ll take you to his hotel.”
They drove through the crowded Roman streets to a fancy hotel just a bit too Americanized with its plush decor and vague bustle. “I’ll bet the boss loves it here,” Nick said. “Just like New York.”
The man ignored him and motioned toward the elevator. A few minutes later they were entering the suite of Joe Bonoto. “Velvet. Pleasure to meet you.”
Nick shook the wrinkled hand. Joe Bonoto was older than he’d expected, an aged man living on memories of the past. Deported from the United States, he ruled a band of faithful followers in the hills of Sicily. To call them Mafia or even bandits was inaccurate. They were dedicated to no cause greater than the welfare of Joe Bonoto.
“I’ve come a long way,’’ Nick told him.
“But your roots are here. In the old country.”
“My roots are in the old Italian section of Greenwich Village. That’s as far back as they go.”
Joe Bonoto signaled for drinks. “You’ll find the trip worthwhile. We want you to steal something.”
“That’s my business,” Nick said, and indeed it was. Nick Velvet stole the unusual, the bizarre, the valueless. Never money or jewelry or objets d’art. “What is it?”
Joe Bonoto smiled. The surface of his face crinkled like a relief map. “A relic of Sherlock Holmes.”
“Sherlock Holmes?”
The smile broadened. “There is a new ski resort in Meiringen, Switzerland, overlooking Reichenbach Falls. Naturally it has a Sherlock Holmes room, in honor of the place where Holmes and Moriarty fought to the death. Are you by any chance a Sherlockian, Velvet?”
“I read all of Conan Doyle’s stories in my youth, but I haven’t looked at them in years. I guess I can’t be called a Sherlockian. Just what is this relic you want stolen?”
“Holmes’s Persian slipper—the one in which he kept his pipe tobacco. It hangs near the fireplace in the Holmes room they have at Meiringen.” “There are other rooms like that,” Nick pointed out. “I’ve read about one in London, and another somewhere in Switzerland. I’m sure they all have Persian slippers on display. What makes this one so valuable?”
Bonoto spread his hands. “It is not valuable, Mr. Velvet! You do not steal valuable objects, do you?”
“Correct. But you brought me over from New York and you’re willing to pay my fee of $20,000. It must be worth that much to you.”
“For Sherlockians it has a sentimental value.”
“Why not steal it yourself?”
“My men are too well-known to the police. You can catch a plane to New York and never be seen here again.”
“All right,” Nick agreed. He’d stolen stranger things in his time, with even less explanation. Besides, Switzerland might be a nice place to visit at this time of year.
His first sight of Reichenbach Falls was a breathtaking one, and he wished that Gloria had been there to see it too. A thin stream of white water dropped down from some unseen spot among the trees, hit an outcropping of rock, and changed into a broad cone of foam and mist. He’d expected something like Niagara, but this was utterly different—a fearful, coal-black abyss as sinister now as it had been the day Doctor Watson described it.
Nick remembered the story of Holmes and Moriarty at the falls, and he could well understand the desire of a new ski resort to cash in on the legend.
In truth, the resort was some distance from the falls proper, on a hill that faced in the opposite direction. It was still too warm for skiing, and Nick had the place virtually to himself when he checked in.
“Here to see the falls?” a sandy-haired Englishman asked him in th e lobby.
“Among other things. I drove up from Italy. Name’s Nick Velvet.”
“Mine’s Cottonwood. Felix Cottonwood. I travel in tobacco.”
“Tobacco?”
“My firm supplies tobacco products to many resorts in this area. I come around in the autumn and the spring to take orders.”
Nick glanced around the lobby. “I understand they have a Sherlock Holmes room here.”
“Right this way. It’s a prime tourist attraction.”
Cottonwood led him down a short passage to a cluttered sitting room fenced off by a low railing. Here indeed was the famous room at 22IB Baker Street, with its bust of Holmes by the window, its bullet-pocked “V.R.” on the wall, and—yes—its Persian slipper hanging by the fireplace.
“It seems complete in every detail,” Nick said. “I’m surprised that souvenir hunters don’t hop the railing and make off with things.”
“There’s an alarm system,” Cottonwood answered casually. “But there’s never any trouble like that. Sherlockians are content to come and look. Rooms like this are all they have that’s new and exciting, unless someday someone comes up with Watson’s fabled dispatch-box of unpublished cases.”
They returned to the lobby and Nick excused himself to go to his room. He decided to wait till the following day before attempting to steal the slipper. The thing was too easy, too certain.
And the very simplicity of the assignment is what gave him doubts.
He spent the following day touring the area and getting to know the other off-season guests at the ski resort. He found time after lunch to take another look at the Sherlock Holmes room, this time noting especially the electric-eye alarms that criss-crossed the reconstruction of 22IB Baker Street.
That night, when activity had settled down to a table of late drinkers in the resort’s rustic bar, Nick made his move. He leaped quickly over the railing and carefully avoided the first of the electric-eye beams, using a misty aerosol spray that pinpointed their path without setting off the alarms. It was a trick he’d learned from a recent film, which proved an occasional Saturday night at the movies with Gloria need not be a total waste.
He crossed the second beam and reached out for the curved Persian slipper on its hook by the fireplace. He wondered if it really was filled with tobacco or if there might be something far more valuable inside—something to tempt a man like Joe Bonoto.
In a moment he would know.
“Hold it right there,” a woman’s voice said suddenly from behind him. “I have a gun pointed at the back of your neck.”
He turned slowly, keeping his hands in sight, and saw that she was only a girl, surely still in her early twenties. She had a tiny automatic pointed at him, but it only added to her beauty—in a way that moviemakers had discovered long ago. She was dark, probably French, but her English had been learned in Britain if he was any judge of accents.
“I’m Nick Velvet,” he said with a smile. “Who are you?”
Even against a gun he was more at ease with a beautiful girl than with a goon like Bonoto, and perhaps she sensed this. “My name is Annette— don’t move—Annette DuFrois. I followed you here from Rome.”
He silently cursed himself. It wasn’t like him to travel all that distance without spotting a tail, especially a girl as pretty as Annette DuFrois. “What do you want?” he asked her, feeling just a bit foolish.
“To talk, right now. Come out of the room very carefully, without tripping the alarms. If any bells ring, I’ll shoot you.”
“But—” He glanced back fondly at Holmes’s Persian slipper, then decided it might be safer where it was for the present.
He negotiated the light beams with ease on the return trip, then walked ahead of the girl to the side exit. There was a moment when he might have disarmed her with ease, but he was curious now about her reason for following him. He decided to listen before he acted.
“Which way?” he asked when they were outside.
“Straight ahead. I have a car parked down the road.”
“Is that it?” he asked, reaching a low-slung white sports car parked among the weeds.
For answer she poked his ribs with the gun. “Inside. The door’s unlocked.”
Nick bent almost double to fit under the low roof, and the girl followed him into the front seat. He felt the gun nudge him again. “All right, we’re here. Now what is all this?”
“You’re working for Joe Bonoto,” she said. “I saw you at his hotel.” Nick didn’t answer at once. A car passed them on the road and its headlights flickered for an instant on her face. “You have lovely eyes, Miss DuFrois.”
She raised the gun an inch, otherwise ignoring his remark. “He hired you to steal something from that Sherlock Holmes exhibit, didn’t he?” “Does that concern you?”
“Joe Bonoto concerns me. A long time ago he caused the death of my brother.”
The girl was much too young for anything to have happened to her brother too long ago, but Nick said, “Tell me about it.”
“There’s not much to tell. Richard was running with a bad crowd. He had a job as a courier for Joe Bonoto, and he was paid off in narcotics. Richard became hooked on heroin and died in Paris of an overdose.” She stared off into space for a moment, as if remembering it. ‘‘I was twelve years old at the time, and I couldn’t understand what was happening to him. I was with him when he died.”
‘‘That’s a reason for you to risk your neck going up against Joe Bonoto?”
‘‘It’s reason enough for me. Somebody has to keep the Joe Bonotos of this world from taking over.”
Nick wondered if he had ever been that young and idealistic. ‘‘You’re too pretty to be a philosopher, especially a dead philosopher.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Joe Bonoto will threaten you, if you get in his way.”
“I have the gun, remember. You’ll do what I say.”
“And what’s that?”
“Where are you to meet Bonoto after you steal this thing?”
“I’m not. I’ll pass it to one of his men.” That wasn’t strictly true, but he wasn’t about to set up his client for a bullet before he’d been paid.
The subterfuge didn’t work. Annette raised the gun another few inches, until it was pointed at Nick’s chin. “Joe Bonoto doesn’t work that way. He never did. He doesn’t trust anyone, including you. He’ll be close by, ready to show himself and collect the loot personally.”
He knew she spoke the truth. “You want to kill him, don’t you? I suppose you figure gunning him down up here in Switzerland is a lot easier than shooting up his hotel in Rome or his villa in Sicily.”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, you won’t get any help from me.”
“Then I suppose I’ll have to shoot you,” she said calmly.
“I suppose you will. I’ve got no great love for Joe Bonoto, but he is paying me. I’m not about to lure him into a trap.”
Annette DuFrois smiled. “I’m not asking you to do that. If I kill you now, and hide your body, he’d show up here sooner or later—-just to find out what happened to you.”
Nick weighed the possibilities and decided it was time to move. They’d talked long enough. He measured the distance between them and decided he could easily reach her before she could fire a shot. There was always an instant’s hesitation when an amateur was faced with the need to kill. And that instant was all he needed, Nick moved.
He was almost on her when the gun exploded in his free, spraying his eyes and face with a stinging cloud of chemical Mace. He’d made one miscalculation—she hadn’t planned to shoot him at all.
“You fool,” she said, and brought the pistol down on his helpless head.
He woke to awareness slowly, and his first conscious thought was the realization that he was face down in damp grass that tickled his nose. Then he felt something kick him in the ribs and he rolled over. It was just beginning to get light, and he could make out the gangster type who’d met him at the Rome airport. The man was standing over him with a gun, and Joe Bonoto himself hovered in the background, half sitting in the front seat of his car with one hand on the open door.
“Get up, punk,” the gangster type growled.
Nick staggered to his feet, still rubbing eyes that felt like burning coals. That damned girl, she’d dumped him from the car and left him by the side of the road!
“We waited for your call,” Bonoto said quietly. “When we didn’t hear anything we came looking for you. We checked the ski resort and then we spotted you out here.”
“I had an accident,” Nick mumbled.
“Yeah.”
“Besides, I wasn’t supposed to call till morning.”
Joe Bonoto leaned down. “It was lonely waiting for you. I kept remembering I paid you half your fee already. What happened?”
“A car sideswiped me.” His vision was clear at last and he had only a slight headache from the blow of Annette’s gun.
“Where is the slipper?”
“Still back at the resort. I didn’t have a chance to lift it yet.”
“We pay you twenty thousand dollars so we can come up here and get it ourselves?”
