RECKONING
Beyond the leaded-glass windows of the receiving area, night drew down. The fire at the grate dwindled to smoldering coals.
Anna sat there listening to the clamor within the operating theater. It was a comforting sound, all that rushing, all those clipped voices, all that effort. It meant that Thomas still lived.
What she did not want to hear now was silence.
“There you are, Anna,” said Holmes wearily, pushing through the double doors. Sometime in the past few hours, he had doffed his cassock and hat and beard and resumed the appearance of an English gentleman. But he looked haggard. His face was lined with care, his skin was pale, and his eyes were twin black coals in his head. He trudged into the receiving room, nodded at Anna as if he had known she would be sitting just there, and then fairly collapsed into a wingback chair beside the fire.
“You found me,” Anna said.
“I’m supposed to be Sherlock Holmes,” he replied.
She smiled in spite of all that had happened that day. “Then, being Sherlock Holmes, you must have found my father as well.”
He replied evasively, “Surely they have brandy about here, somewhere.” His eyes swept the bookshelves around them. “This is a hospital, after all—a
French
hospital.”
Anna had seen a decanter on a table beside the doctor’s desk and had, truthfully, wished for a nip herself. Standing up, she crossed behind the desk and poured the brandy into a pair of snifters. Swirling them in her hands, she felt the cool liquor warm to her touch. She returned to Holmes, extended a snifter to him, and said, “You’re alive, which is the good news. You’re unnerved, though, which tells me there is bad news—”
“Yes. Bad news. Very bad,” Holmes echoed. He watched the faint ripple of his heartbeat spread in circles across the meniscus of brandy. “There’s so much bad to tell.”
Anna leaned toward him. “Begin at the beginning.”
Holmes took a sip of brandy and began his story. “I had glimpsed our quarry—your father—the moment he left the train. He was dressed in the blue uniform of a conductor, you see, but all the other conductors were within the train, clearing the cars—as we ourselves had experienced just yesterday. That incongruity drew my eye to him, and one look at his devilish face confirmed his identity. But what about his eyes? What were those gleaming eyes fixed upon?
“Thomas, of course. Your father had noted his incongruity as well: a porter who sleeps on crates rather than unloading them. I’m sure your father had spotted Thomas even before stepping from the train. It was the perfect chance. By putting the blade into Thomas, he would kill one of us and tie up at least one other. The professor used his criminal calculus to realize that you would go with Thomas to the hospital, and I would continue after him.”
“It’s worse than that, I’m afraid,” Anna interrupted. “There was also a certain doctor aboard that train, one who was following Father, and who thought he was a henchman rather than the crime lord.” Anna leaned toward Holmes and said
significantly, “Father wasn’t waylaying just me and Thomas and you—he was also waylaying Dr. John Watson.”
Holmes sat bolt upright in his seat and looked thunderstruck. “Watson!”
Anna nodded solemnly. “He patched Thomas’s wound and brought him here. He signed the release!”
Holmes leaned back and grew a slow, contented smile like the grin of a lizard. “Good old Watson. Hale man, and courageous. A bit muddleheaded at times. According to that article in the
Journal de Genève,
he thinks Moriarty and I both are dead, so of course he mistook Moriarty for a henchman. I feel for poor Watson should he ever corner his prey.”
“He lost his chance by saving Thomas.”
“Yes,” Holmes responded. “Courageous and compassionate, but sometimes Watson needs to be a bit more hard-nosed. There must have been ten other doctors in that crowd.”
“Watson saved him,” Anna pointed out, but then added sullenly, “if Thomas survives at all.”
“There, there. No more talk of it. I suppose I could learn a little compassion from Dr. Watson.” He stood, beginning to pace. “It’s simply that this chess match is still going on, and I cannot relax my focus for a moment.” He looked up at Anna, and his once faraway eyes became razor sharp. “Your father is still out there, still alive, still hunting us. Our situation now is no different than it was in the train station. He’s pinned us down. He knows just where we are—that we cannot move from this spot—and he is slowly closing in, calculating each move so that we cannot slip away, so that the white king falls.”
Anna demanded, “Tell me what happened!”
Holmes nodded. With one swift gesture, he downed the rest of his brandy, set the snifter on the mantel, and pivoted,
staring out through the dark room. “Your father threatened a cabby with his life and so rode away at high speed. As luck would have it, the next cab was vacant, and I am an excellent driver.”
“You stole it!”
“I procured it for the good of the state. The three francs in fares that man lost were a pittance compared to the gain to him and all society had I nabbed Moriarty.”
“Which you didn’t.”
Holmes peered down at her. “Do not mock, my dear. I risked every extremity; a carriage chase down the Champs-Elysées—he led me that way out of sheer arrogance, I am sure—and then north toward the Moulin Rouge. Your father took me on a tour of Paris from the highest to the lowest. At last, though, I drove my carriage up alongside his, gained the lead for just a moment, and then backed my wheel within his own, engaging the axle and forcing him to slow. I dragged back on the reins, and my team—brave mares—posted their legs and struggled to halt both coaches. The other team ran sidelong into them, but these ladies held their own, bless them, and Moriarty could do nothing but flee his carriage or be taken.” Holmes stepped away from the mantel, pacing slowly across the room.
“I followed, of course, hat and beard gone on the wind but cassock still in place—and knife, too.”
“Knife?”
“I know you had asked me to remember that he is your father, but I must ask you to remember that he is Moriarty, the most dangerous man in Europe.”
Anna nodded, but still her hands trembled. “What did you do with the knife?”
“Nothing, at first,” Holmes replied. “I chased him to a dead-end alley, and there he spun on me, holding the knife
he had used on Thomas and was prepared to use on me. Only then did I show him I was similarly armed.”
“What happened?”
“We circled each other as if we carried épées, for both of us have been trained in the art of fencing. But a knife is not an épée. It succeeds only in close quarters. The thing would be decided when we came together. We both knew it, and we both charged. Your father drove straight on at me, but I leaped to my left, letting his knife slide harmlessly beneath my right arm. I stabbed, burying my blade in his chest, and then I withdrew the blade and swung my elbow back to knock the knife out of his hand. It was a master stroke … except that …”
“Except that what?” Anna asked.
“Except that … I had stabbed just shy of the mark. It was as if the same whim of fortune that saved Thomas saved your father. The blade missed his heart but found his lung. I know because he clamped his hand on the spot so that he could breathe and speak. He staggered back and fell among the rubbish bins. I rushed up to tend him, but he shouted me back: ‘I opened my heart to your knife, and this is the best you could do? Finish it, Holmes! Finish it!’
“Of course, I would not—an unarmed and wounded man. It would have been murder. Instead, I eased him back to lie there on the cobbles and checked his pulse and heard the rattle in his lung. ‘I must fetch a doctor.’ I rose to go but could not because he gripped my hand—the hand that held the knife.
“He wrenched the knife down toward his chest and said, ‘Finish it now, or I will haunt you again!’
“I twisted free, careful not to let the blade cut him or to let him get hold of it. Then I ran to the head of the alley, hiding the blade in my pocket, and called for a doctor. With the
blood on my hands and my crude command of French, long moments passed before I could cajole a doctor to follow me down the dark alley. By the time we reached the spot where your father had been, he was gone, leaving only a bloodstain on the ground.
“I’m astonished. How could he do it? How could your father suffer such a wound and scamper away?”
“Because there’s something unnatural in him,” Anna said.
Holmes stared at her in surprise, but in the darkness of that fire-lit nook, Anna fancied she saw another face staring—her father’s manic, leering face, his eyes red as if they were awash in blood.
“Other daughters lose their fathers to drink,” she explained, piecing her thoughts together, “or to gambling … or to whoring. But I lost my father to something … uncanny. From the time he killed Jack the Ripper, there was … something inside him. At the best moments, it was simple cruelty or bloodlust. At the worst moments, it was—it was what I could only describe as demonic.”
“Demonic!”
“His eyes would be bloodred, and he would speak words that sounded like sorcery—deep and black.”
Holmes sat down beside her and shook his head. “I should not have spoken so wildly. My tale and the brandy have put—have put phantasms in our heads.”
Anna breathed raggedly. “It’s not the brandy, Mr. Holmes. My father has a demon inside of him. I’m sure of it.”
“It’s a thought I cannot abide.”
“But you must, Mr. Holmes,” Anna pressed. “I’ve been reading about you, how you said that after all other possibilities were exhausted, the one remaining, no matter how improbable, must be true.”
“I suppose I did say that,” Holmes replied, glancing down
out of the corner of his eye. “But there is only one way to test your proposition.”
“How?”
“We must lay a trap for your father, capture him, and submit him to the exorcism machine.”
THE PENTACLE
The door to the operating theater swung open, and out trudged a weary Dr. Maison. His hands were clean, though his once-white smock bore btoodstains—bright red and dark brown. He looked like a butcher. The doctor strode to Anna and Holmes and stood, staring into the fire.
“Un apres-midi des plus difficiles.
”
“English, please,” said Holmes wearily.
Dr. Maison glared down at him. Then, with clipped pronunciation, he said, “By rights, your friend should be dead. Indeed, he died twice on the table, his lung filling, but twice I pumped out the blood and brought him back. At last, the wound has clotted, and the lung is recovering, but he has lost a great deal of blood. We’ve taken him to a bed in Ward Four, but he will not be able to be moved from it for at least a week.”
Holmes looked gravely at Anna and murmured, “Pinned down.”
“Which, of course, is fortunate for you, in that you have no papers to prove that this man is a veteran,” Dr. Maison continued, “yes?”
Anna stared at her hands. “We have no papers.”
“Indeed, he could hardly be a veteran, this man only just old enough to enlist.”
“Yes,” Anna said, “hardly.”
The doctor gave a perfunctory nod. “Once he is strong enough, he will have to be moved—and you will pay for his care while he is here.”
“Of course,” Anna replied, though she and Holmes did not have a pound between them.
Dr. Maison smirked. “What a charming liar you are. You should know that I never believed him to be a veteran but, because of your lie, was required to save the man. There is not a doctor in Paris who is my equal at bayonet-style wounds—”
“I can think of one,” Anna murmured.
“And this new he—that you will pay for his treatment here—wett, it doesn’t fool me, either, though it will satisfy the state.” He brushed his hands off. “I’ve done all I can do.”
“You make a most likable hero, Dr. Maison,” Homes said wryly, “reluctant, perhaps even petulant. But I should warn you that your heroism has only begun.” Slow dismay bloomed across the doctor’s face. “This stab wound didn’t result from some back-alley brawl. It was a deliberate attempt at murder, and the murderer remains at large, bent on killing this man. As a result, we must remain with him to guard him. Also, I have sent for a gendarme to help us keep watch.”
“A gendarme?” the doctor objected.
“I stopped by the Metropolitan Police before coming here, and they are sending a man.”
Dr. Maison snorted. “Why would the Paris police guard a vagrant?”
“And why would the surgeon of Les Invalides operate to save one?”
“She claimed he was a veteran! A lie is a lie.”
“And a life is a life,” Holmes responded pointedly, “whether the life of a vagrant or a grandson of Napoleon.”
“Grandson of Napoleon?”
Holmes changed the subject. “But whoever this young man may or may not be, the Paris police want to catch his would-be killer.”
“The Metropolitan Police have no equal,” said Dr. Maison suspiciously, and he felt compelled to add, “but this is a hospital, not a garrison. We haven’t accommodations for you and the lady
and
a gendarme.”
“This is a
military
hospital, man,” Holmes snapped, standing up in front of the doctor, “a haven for those at war. I cannot imagine four people more at war than that stabbed man, this woman, and I—and the gendarme who will guard us. Besides, we do not need ‘accommodations,”’ he pronounced the word with a faux French accent, “but merely two chairs, moved alongside the sickbed where our friend lies. In fact,
these
two chairs will do.” With that, he hoisted the wingback chair where he had sat and held it before him. “Please show us the way to Ward Four.”
“Highly irregular!” the doctor responded, stepping away.
“I should hope so.” With a wink at his companion, Holmes turned to follow Dr. Maison. Anna went along. They crossed through a doorway and entered a long room lined on either side with sickbeds. The chamber held perhaps fifty beds, but it had no inmates except for Thomas in the bed nearest the door. Holmes snorted to see the room: “No accommodations!” He set the chair down.
Dr. Maison shrugged. “The empire is at peace. What can I say?”
As the doctor left and Holmes walked out to bring in the other chair, Anna knelt down beside Thomas’s bed. He was nearly as pale as his sheets, and his face was drawn and still. She kissed him. His lips were cold, but gentle breath luffed against her cheek. She clasped his hand. “Thomas, you have to survive.”
“He will,” Holmes assured, setting down the other chair. “He has youth, which is almost the same as having immortality. And he has you. Thomas is not going to vanish from this world … unless your father gets at him again.”
“We’ll stand guard, night and day,” Anna said.
“Yes. And the gendarme will help us. It took some doing to convince the police that I was not a lunatic—but at last I did. I expect the gendarme any moment.”
“Good,” Anna said, standing. “He and I can guard Thomas while you go to the garret and get the exorcism machine.”
Holmes paled. “I can’t abandon you—”
“You said we had to use that machine on Father. It’s our only hope.” She grasped Holmes’s hand and looked him square in the eye. “I want my father back. This is the only way. If there’s no demon in him, he may be unable to attack for a week or more, in which case we’re safe. But if I’m right about this demon, Father will attack us by tomorrow, and we’d better have the exorcism machine.”
Holmes looked down at Anna’s hand on his, and he smiled warmly. “I have never been one to be swayed by the soft touch of a woman. But I have always been persuaded by sound deduction. You’re right, Anna. I’ll get the machine—once the gendarme arrives—”
As if on cue, a gendarme stepped through the doorway to Ward Four and marched up to Thomas’s bed. The officer was a young man with a clean-shaven face and blond hair parted above blue eyes. He seemed all too eager to prove himself.
Holmes was eager to do so as well. He stepped up before the officer and barked, “What do you mean, arriving so late?” Holmes lashed out, slapping the man’s cheek—and received a punch to the stomach for his efforts. Holmes collapsed to the floor, clutching his belly in pain even as he laughed. “Very good! Very good!”
“What is this?” asked the officer in stilted English.
“A test, simply,” Holmes said, groaning, “the slap to tell me whether your face was a mask or real skin, and the punch to tell me whether you have the reflexes for this assignment.”
“And … the result?” asked the young gendarme, extending a hand to help Holmes to his feet.
Gratefully receiving the assistance, Holmes said, “You passed—with flying colors … . Now, how much have you been told about the situation?”
“Everything, I believe.”
“You understand that the man who is trying to kill this patient is none other than a criminal mastermind?”
“I understand.”
“And that he excels at disguise and deception, so that you must meet everyone who arrives with the same ill treatment you have just now received?”
“Yes.”
“And you understand that these two young people are precious to me, and that if any harm befalls them, well—you will have to reckon with me. And the only opponent I can imagine who is more formidable than the murderer is myself. Do you understand?”
The gendarme blinked thoughtfully and bowed his head. “I understand.”
Holmes smiled and lightly patted the young man’s cheek, which he had so brutally struck only moments before. “Good. I will return.” He stepped over to Anna. “See what you can do to wake Thomas. The exorcism machine is utterly worthless unless he knows what to do with it. We’ll need Thomas to build this trap—this strange pentacle of his.”
“I’ll do my best,” Anna said.
Holmes gave the gendarme one final look up and down and then headed out of the ward. The gentle clink of glass in
the room beyond told them that Holmes had one last gulp of brandy before he stalked out the double doors into the night.
The cold and dark and isolation of the place settled heavily on Anna.
The gendarme was watching her. His eyes were youthful and eager but distrustful of all things adult. Anna averted her gaze, sitting in the chair beside Thomas’s bed. “Wake up, Thomas,” she said, stroking his hair. “You have to wake up. Holmes said so.
I
said so. I need you, Thomas. Please, wake up.”
He didn’t stir beneath her trailing fingertips. He barely even breathed.