The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols Read online

  “I take it you will accompany me tomorrow?” he added, his eyes aglow with the twin reflections of his match. “Do come, Watson. When Mycroft sees fit to summon me, the matter is bound to be somewhat outré, and you know I am lost without my Boswell.” He nudged a fragrant cognac snifter in my direction. “Besides, you will serve as a buffer between us.”

  What could I do but what I always did and succumb to his Siren lure?

  It was after midnight when I reached Pimlico and crawled into bed, trying without success not to wake Juliet.

  “How did it go?” she murmured.

  “Very well, considering.”

  “Umm?”

  “Considering he’d no recollection it was his birthday. Mycroft put in an appearance,” I added for no particular reason.

  There was a pause.

  “Really. Had you asked him?”

  I said I had not. I could almost hear her frown in the darkness.

  “How queer. And my gift?”

  “I think he was quite touched, actually, though he has difficulty expressing himself along those lines, as I think I’ve explained. He does not as a rule read novels, but he asked me to thank you.”

  Juliet patted my arm, yawning.

  “It is a stupendous work,” she maintained. “Everyone ought to read it, and now, thanks to Constance, everyone will. Including you, my dear.”

  “I plan to, my love, at the first opportunity. Gracious.” I could not suppress a groan. “Tomorrow I shall have a head. Which reminds me, can you ask Harris to cover for me? I must somehow get myself to Pall Mall by ten.”

  This intelligence finally served to rouse her.

  “Whatever for?”

  “I promised Holmes to meet him and his brother at the Diogenes.”

  My wife was sitting up now, blinking away sleep.

  “Diogenes? What on earth’s that?”

  “Mycroft’s club.”

  “I have never heard of such a club. I’ve heard of the Reform,” she added in a vague tone.

  “Yes, I daresay even your Bloomsbury lot knows of the Reform. And certainly the Garrick, come to that. As for the Diogenes, it is altogether fitting you’ve not heard of it. That is exactly as its members would wish. The Diogenes one might characterize as beyond eccentric. Talking is entirely forbidden.”*

  I heard a faint gasp at this, accompanied, I was confident, by a moue.

  “James,** none of this makes the least sense. Why meet where you are unable to converse? And do you not have a tonsillectomy scheduled for eight thirty at the Royal Marsden? I saw it in the book. The Winslow boy?”

  I sighed, subsiding into my pillow.

  “The procedure must be rescheduled. I wouldn’t trust myself at this juncture to operate on a cadaver.”

  “But—”

  “Please don’t press me, dearest. I must go, and I cannot enlighten you.”

  As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could see her still pouting as she primly drew up her knees beneath her nightgown.

  “Cannot or will not?”

  I sighed once again. “May not.”

  We had been married not quite two years, and during that time our pleasant routine had scarcely varied. More properly, I suppose, it may be said that no summons from Holmes had caused me to vary it. Thus it was my sweet wife was put out by my sudden and inexplicable obduracy, but there was no way I could explain. Even had the detective made a concession in the matter of secrecy, I knew that Mycroft was in no position to do any such thing. If I had given the matter any additional thought, I might have wondered what the big man’s reaction would be to seeing me alongside his brother at the appointed time in the Diogenes’s forbidding precincts.

  * * *

  7 January. There was in fact one room at Mycroft’s hidey-hole in which talk was permitted, and thither I hastened in a light rain the following morning, with a pounding head. My powers being somewhat under a cloud, I had not thought to bring my umbrella. I debated returning to fetch one but mistakenly assumed I would find a cab before the weather worsened. When one failed to materialize and the other to oblige, I was compelled to trudge to Victoria, which I reached soaked to the bone. I sat in miserable damp from there to Westminster on the Circle Line, then resumed my limping trot through what had become a frigid sleet, my leg now throbbing as painfully as my head, and arrived five minutes late, a sopping mess. An impassive steward in white gloves and sky-blue livery trimmed with gold filigree ushered me into the Strangers’ Room, where speech was allowed so long as voices were kept low and conversations brief.

  Mycroft was not amused but, to give him credit, evinced no great surprise at my appearance. Later, when I understood more, I reasoned his business was too urgent for him to cavil at my presence. Unsuccessfully concealing his distaste for the task, he assisted me as I shrugged my way out of my sodden greatcoat and handed it to a second steward, who bore it off to the cloakroom at arm’s length, as if transporting a carcass. I turned and beheld Holmes sitting before the fire. His garments were dry.

  “As intercourse is not encouraged, even here,” Mycroft stated without preamble, “I shall forgo banter.” Reaching behind a divan, he produced a red dispatch box with a familiar coat of arms emblazoned in gold on the lid. With something like ceremony, he extended a silver key from his fob and unlocked the box, producing from within its recesses a manila envelope of standard dimensions, impressively sealed with red wax. The seal’s imprint matched the box’s gold escutcheon.

  I sensed, rather than saw, Holmes cast a glance in my direction. With precise movements, betraying, I suspected, a certain relish for the task, Mycroft relocked the dispatch box, snapping its clasps with finality, and set it aside, retaining hold of the envelope.

  “How is your French, Sherlock?”

  Holmes endeavored to conceal his surprise. “Schoolboy at best, as you are aware,” he confessed. Mycroft, I knew, spoke at least six languages, claiming it took but eight weeks to master a new tongue, which Holmes sneeringly once asserted in my presence was a sure sign of idiocy.

  “It will have to do for now,” his brother replied, handing him the envelope.

  Here was mystery upon mystery.

  “I wish you to take this to the privacy of your rooms,” Mycroft went on, “where you may open and inspect the contents at your leisure.”

  “And then?”

  For the first time, the big man hesitated.

  “I wish you to tell me what you make of said contents.”

  “The French contents.”

  “You’ll get the gist, I am confident. In any event, the document is incomplete.”

  “Incomplete.”

  “Judging by the pagination numbers, you will see these are random samples from among a total of over three hundred pages. For the present it is only necessary that you see a portion. You’ll get the general idea,” he concluded dryly.

  It was clear that with every question and each unsatisfactory answer he was obliged to supply, Mycroft was becoming increasingly discomfited.

  “That is all?”

  “For now.”

  Holmes turned the envelope over, examining it minutely as was his wont.

  “Are you quite sure it will be safe? My rooms have been burgled before, as I think you know.”

  Mycroft ran one of his large hands through his thinning hair.

  “The contents of the envelope are already known in certain quarters,” he admitted reluctantly. “As I’ve indicated, what you hold is merely a copy.”

  This time Holmes’s glance met my own.

  “Already known? Then why all the secrecy? Why the hugger-mugger? And what do you expect me to make of a mere copy? I cannot fashion bricks without clay, brother.”

  Mycroft drew an irritated breath and then conceded, “I have in fact included one page of the original.”

  “One page?”

  “Will you kindly do as I ask?” the other cried with exasperation. “The matter at hand is of a delicate and entirely confidential charac
ter and of grave concern to … members of this establishment.”

  “Oh, I see.” His brother smiled. “This establishment.”

  “I will call on you this afternoon to hear your views and communicate the wishes of His Majesty’s Government.”

  At which point Mycroft fled the room with waddling alacrity, leaving the detective and myself alone, staring at one another in perplexity.

  “You cannot possibly travel home on the Underground in this,” Holmes declared after consulting the weather outside the room’s enormous window. Tugging the bell pull, he instructed the steward to send for a taxi.

  Once ensconced within its agreeable confines, there was no thought of going anywhere but Baker Street. I would telephone my wife from there.

  We rode in silence, rain drumming on the roof while the engine puttered reassuringly as we jounced over cobblestones. Holmes fiddled with the envelope in his lap like a boy impatiently fondling a wrapped present, turning it this way and that, tapping it, holding it up to the grey light of the window—all to no avail. The thing stubbornly remained what it was, an ordinary manila envelope, distinguished only by its impressive wax seal.

  And then, with an abrupt and decisive gesture, Holmes broke the seal.

  “Holmes!”

  “My dear boy, do you not despise all brother Mycroft’s melodrama? I have already ascertained we are not being followed. Do we imagine our random cabbie to be an agent in league with a foreign power? What is all the fuss about?”

  So saying, he withdrew what looked to be twenty typewritten pages and subjected them to a cursory examination.

  “Very well. This is French, to be sure, albeit transcribed on an English typing machine, a Hammond 2, if I’m not mistaken, doubtless by some clerk in Whitehall. Hmm…”

  He held up what appeared to be a title page, pursing his lips as he examined it minutely.

  “This is clearly the original page Mycroft was kind enough to include.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “There is dried water on it. And, if I’m not mistaken, this pinkish tinge is blood.”

  Unless I was deceived, there was something very near satisfaction in the detective’s voice. I watched as he employed his magnifying glass, hovering over the pale stains.

  “A woman’s blood,” he muttered.

  “Holmes, that is preposterous. How can you possibly determine what sex the blood came from?”

  “See here.” He held the page up to the light, by which I was able to perceive a long flaxen strand of hair stuck to the paper.

  “Can you make out what it says?”

  The detective scowled and finally shrugged, reading aloud, “Les Protocoles des Sages de Sion.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve less French than you.” I blushed to own it.

  He frowned.

  “Well, roughly, I should translate it as ‘The Protocols of the Wise Men of,’ no, perhaps better, ‘The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.’”

  2.

  LOST IN TRANSLATION

  It had been almost a year since I last visited my old Baker Street digs, and while Holmes laboriously toiled away, jotting down notes and consulting a Larousse* as he worked through those twenty typed French pages, I prowled the flat, noting changes and improvements here and there. Incandescent light, at 221B as elsewhere, had long since replaced gas. The framed portrait of General Gordon was nowhere in evidence. Holmes’s correspondence, I was disappointed to see, was no longer affixed to the mantel with a jackknife. He had become too well known for such a primitive, not to say Bohemian, expedient, and now, supplanting my former workstation, a bulky rolltop desk with pigeonholes had taken over the task, though I noted with a smile that the compartments themselves were bulging with unruly papers, among them invoices, receipts, and the post. I was relieved in addition not to spy, in its habitual location atop the mantel, the fine Moroccan case wherein slept the lethal syringe whose use I had vociferously decried in years past. Holmes might have chosen to conceal it, but I considered this unlikely; he hadn’t known I intended to visit. It pleased me to think he appeared to have permanently overthrown his loathsome habit.

  “Very repetitive,” the detective muttered under his breath as I continued my inventory. “A little of this sort of thing goes a long way.”

  A telephone was now sandwiched atop the already crowded deal table, with its odiferous chemical apparatus reassuringly more or less as I had known and inhaled it.

  Of the Turkish slipper that formerly contained his tobacco, there was no sign, though in truth that item had been giving out long before I quit my rooms. Its place, and Holmes’s cheap shag besides, had been usurped by a dark tin of Balkan Sobranie. Success had made some inroads on my friend’s personal habits. Some eccentricities had given way to creature comforts.

  Doing my best to ignore the detective’s snarled expletives, I picked up Juliet’s birthday present and tried to make heads or tails of War and Peace. I was mildly diverted to see that parts of the first chapter were rendered in French—obviously Count Tolstoy’s intention—and realized I’d forgotten my wife’s sister-in-law was fluent in that language as well.

  “I say, Holmes—”

  “Five more minutes, Watson.”

  Obediently I tried passing that time mouthing some of those Russian names; the task was hopeless. Mercifully, it wasn’t quite five minutes before my companion flung his pen across the room with an oath.

  “There, that’s the best I can do, anyway,” he mumbled as we were interrupted by a knock on the door and Mrs. Hudson—her hair now entirely white—appeared to inform us that Mycroft Holmes was below in the entryway. He was certainly wasting no time.

  “Dr. Watson,” our landlady exclaimed, her face wreathed in smiles, “I had no idea you were here. Did you see? We now have a telephone. Heavens, you are soaked. Give me your coat and I’ll hang it by our radiator to dry. Would you gentlemen care for tea?”

  I said I would, and she retreated upon that errand, bearing away my poor greatcoat.

  Holmes stared meditatively out the bay window at rush- hour traffic as we listened to Mycroft’s stentorious panting on the stair. I knew Holmes to be mentally reviewing what he had just managed to extract from the French typescript.

  It took his ponderous sibling the better part of two minutes before he had breath to commence conversation.

  “Well?” he managed at length.

  Holmes turned, his back to the window, hands clasped behind him.

  “May I ask how you came upon these curious pages?”

  “You may not.”

  “I will tell you, then.” The detective held up the pink-stained title page. “They were retrieved by a police launch from the corpse of a tawny-haired woman whose body was found the day before yesterday floating in the Thames near London Bridge.”

  Mycroft, it was clear, contemplated an emphatic denial, but gave it up as he looked at the detective. His massive shoulders sagged.

  “She called herself Manya Lippman, and she was…” Here he hesitated. “… in our employ.”

  “A most dedicated agent. She gave her life for those pages.”

  “She did.” The fact weighed heavily upon him. “Kindly return the page with her blood on it.”

  Holmes carefully handed over the pink-stained page. With something like reverence, Mycroft folded the paper and slid it into his pocketbook. As he did so, his brother ambled over to the desk, glancing down at his notes.

  “If I am reading correctly,” he said slowly, “these pages purport to be the minutes of a secret meeting of a conclave of Jews who are plotting to take over the world.”

  He said this in a studiously neutral tone of voice, as one might remark the regrettable postponement of a test match.*

  Before I could ejaculate an astonished response, Mrs. Hudson returned with the tea things and we waited in awkward silence while she poured and distributed the cups, supplying a running commentary as she did so, concerning the inclement weather, my welcome reappearanc
e, and her intention of going to see the latest West End rage, something called The Scarlet Pimpernel, at the New Theatre—that is, if she could obtain a ticket. Actually two would be preferable, as her brother** had expressed a similar desire to attend a—

  Mycroft quietly assured her he would procure the two coveted tickets, upon which she withdrew, whereupon I renewed my expostulation.

  “A plot to take over the world? Come now. What can that even mean?”

  Holmes eyed his brother, who sipped his tea in silence before noting, “I did say the matter was a delicate one. Consider,” he went on, before the detective could speak, “the Jews have always exerted a disproportionate influence in relation to their slender numbers. In the arts, in the sciences, and certainly in finance. Even politics. You will recall the late Lord Beaconsfield was in fact a most well regarded prime minister and a great favorite of Her Late Majesty.* And Sherlock, I believe you purchased your Stradivarius from a Jew in the Tottenham Court Road? You have at least twice assisted Jewish clients, among them a Viennese physician, who, I believe, aided you in turn, as well as a certain artillery captain in the French high command, accused of treason, no less?”

  “As you well know, Captain Dreyfus has been pardoned,” Holmes insisted, with evidence of growing impatience.

  “But the matter did involve treason,” Mycroft reminded him quietly.

  The effrontery. His brother was having none of it, returning to the pages before him like a dog worrying a bone.

  “Mycroft, who was this Manya Lippman, now unfortunately in the City Morgue? Manya is a Russian name, is it not? I ask again, how did you come by this document? Or rather, how did she?”