Death on a Pale Horse (33 page)

But what could this amiable lady have to do with the nightmare world of Moran? From what Henry Putney-Wilson had been able to tell us, a network of international criminals was deeply engaged in the trading of armaments via Belgium and its new Congo territory to the Transvaal and southern Africa. Had they encountered an obstacle which might be overcome by the removal of the Comtesse de Flandre? Was the note a warning from someone that harm was intended to this good lady at the next new moon—harm that did not exclude her assassination?

At least one or two of the pieces in the puzzle could now be put in place, thanks to our meeting with Mycroft Holmes. Moran had come away from the Transvaal with whatever he could loot from the estate of Andreis Reuter. The amount had been less than he had expected, because the young man had belatedly judged him for the rogue that he was. All the same, with the aid of his cronies, there had been enough to set up the “colonel” as an international trader in guns and ammunition. He became an agent of the cosmopolitan criminal brotherhood in which Sherlock Holmes had always believed—“the higher criminal world,” as he was apt to call it. Moran's ambition was no doubt to seize the supreme governorship of that world, perhaps literally by force of arms.

Almost in the first week of our acquaintanceship, Holmes had ridden his favourite hobby-horse for my benefit. He believed firmly in this international aristocracy of crime. Such an intricate and worldwide association worked together for common purposes and was beyond the power of any police force to destroy. To my friend's own knowledge, it included Rawdon Moran's own brother Colonel Sebastian Moran; a further pair of brothers with a common Christian name, Professor James Moriarty and Colonel James Moriarty; blackmail and extortion was in the slippery and loathsome hands of Charles Augustus Milverton. Elsewhere the organisation embraced Giuseppe Gorgiano and the infamous Red Circle gang of Naples and Southern Italy; Hugo Oberstein, international dealer in such military papers as the Bruce Partington submarine plans; Captain James Calhoun, leader of a group of professional assassins from Savannah, Georgia; John Clay, an accomplished cracksman of Coburg Square in London's East End; and very many more listed in the personal archives of Sherlock Holmes.

Could such an organisation exist? A century ago, it would have been impossible. In our own age of international railways, telegraph wires, and ocean liners, it was impossible to prevent. A case soon came our way. A pair of the most determined felons gave each other alibis on opposite sides of the globe. Our friend Sir Edward Marshall Hall gained the acquittal of one man charged with bigamy. Descriptions and photographs apparently proved that the defendant was in prison in the United States at the time. Two years later, I was in court with Marshall Hall for the trial of the Lambeth Poisoner, Dr. Neill Cream. My companion recognised him as almost a twin of he who had stood trial for bigamy and been acquitted; Cream had given him an alibi as an Illinois gaol-bird.

I stared long and hard at the oil paintings of Crimean generals on the library wall. Holmes and I were getting into this mystery deeper than we had ever intended. I could do no more good here. I slipped the card into my pocket, went down and called for my hat and coat, then set off for Baker Street. I would tell my story to Holmes and let him make what he could of it.

7

I
explained everything to him. As usual, he ignored most of the evidence and seized on one item that was crucial to the entire narrative.

“The Comtesse de Flandre?”

“I fear she means nothing to me.”

“Indeed? Does she not? There are others, my dear fellow, to whom she means a great deal. But few people are party to the secret.”

He got up from his chair by the fireplace, where he had been listening in his usual attentive posture. His long legs had been stretched out, finger-tips touching in an attitude of payer, elbows resting on the arms of the chair, eyelids lightly closed. Now, turning up the ornamental gas-lamp below the picture rail, he crossed to the far wall of the room, whose long run of bookshelves made up his archive. The lowest shelf contained a run of large scrap-books, purchased at intervals from Appincourt, our Baker Street stationer. Other men might have filled the thick blank pages of these folio volumes with family mementoes or cuttings from favourite literature. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, hardly an evening passed without the appearance of a sturdy pair of tailor's scissors as he set about the daily newspapers.

From the pages of the morning's
Times
or the evening
Globe
, he would cut some item that had caught his eye. It might be the use of a refined form of strychnine by a French widow-robber, now making his last vain appeal to the Court de Cassation. Or perhaps there had been a sensation in the Place de Greve, after the desperate fellow had been strapped to the fatal plank and tilted forward under the hoisted blade of the guillotine. As his severed head fell into the basket, the felon's eyes were distinctly seen to turn and glare at Sanson the executioner. Most often, however, these brief paragraphs followed the progress of some petty villain who had risen from trivial burglaries in the slums of Whitechapel to the Olympian heights of homicide or extortion.

With a brush of his left arm, Holmes swept clear a space in the rubble of his chemical table. He lugged out from the shelves a tall volume in marbled boards. Spreading it open, his long agile fingers turned the crackling pages, stiffened by the newsprint with which they had been pasted. He stopped at a panorama of cuttings, annotated heavily in rusty ink. I caught the word “Reichsanzeiger” and knew only enough German to tell me that this was an official compilation of confidential memoranda. Thanks to his elder brother, Holmes acquired occasional documents and reports that were not yet for public inspection. He traced a line across a column and rested it under the words “Comtesse de Flandre, Marie Louise Alexandrine Karoline, Princess of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.”

I looked over his shoulder and said, I fear rather foolishly, “Holmes, you have the advantage of me.”

He chuckled and again flattened the surface of the broad page with his hand. “Happily for the good people of England, Watson, they sleep soundly in their beds. They are oblivious to those darkling plains of Europe where Mr. Mathew Arnold's ignorant armies clash by night. They do not yet know how close the powers of Europe came to a major war a matter of months ago. We owed that crisis to Rawdon Moran and his masters, for there are even mightier villains than he. Such men have come close to accomplishing the greatest criminal conspiracies of modern times. The damage is still far from being undone. To this point, they appear to have been merely flexing their muscles for the grand assault that will one day come. These are the documents that prove the case.”

“But why should they want a war?”

He looked at me with unfathomable sympathy.

“My dear Watson, why should a grocer want his customers to grow hungry—or a tailor to see his clients grow ragged? Who will profit from a modern war in Europe? Not the poor young heroes who will be slaughtered in their thousands by the devices of an industrial age. Not the householders who, with their wives and children, will be bombarded from the land, from the sea, and very probably in future from the air. But who else?”

“The merchants of murder!” I took up a phrase he had used earlier when talking of Moran or his kind and tossed it back at him. He nodded slowly.

“Very good, Watson. And whom do we know whose litany is a hymn of homage to the houses of Krupp and Maxim-Nordenfelt, Creuzot and Howitzer, Colt and Armstrong, Enfield and Webley? Why be content with the Congo and the Transvaal if all Europe is hungry for weapons?”

“But there has been no European war. What was their plot?”

He turned to another page.

“A few months ago, they decided to see what they could do, by forged despatches, to strike up the diplomats' dance of death. To bring two great power blocs of Europe to war, Austria and Germany on one side, France and Russia on the other, the old Turkish Empire and the straits of the Dardanelles with access to the Mediterranean to be the prize. The gateway to the East. If there were war, well and good. If not, the world would see how far a criminal clique could push the nations towards one. The war was to be precipitated by a German prince claiming the throne of Bulgaria, Ferdinand of Coburg, kinsman of the Comtesse de Flandre. She is also sister to his closest ally, the King of Rumania.”

“And her part in all this?”

“The Comtesse was the innocent recipient of forged letters purporting to be written by Prince Ferdinand. They were intercepted, as the authors intended, by secret agents of Tsar Alexander. Their contents were forwarded to St. Petersburg. Ferdinand appeared to promise his kinswoman that he had a secret treaty with Count Bismarck to defeat the Russian army in the provinces of the Black Sea. With perfect truth, the despatches pointed out that Russia could not sustain the cost of an all-out war longer than a few weeks. The so-called Prince Ferdinand therefore asked the Comtesse de Flandre to act as a loyal German princess and sister-in-law of King Leopold of Belgium. France would be quick to seek revenge for her defeat of 1870 by joining Russia against Austria and Germany. A Belgian army need only hamper a French advance in the Vosges for a few days. Only for as long as it took Germany and Austria to knock out Russia. A victorious Bismarck would impose terms. Belgium would never again have cause to fear her powerful French neighbour. That was the scheme outlined in the forged diplomatic papers by Moran and his associates. There was not a word of truth in this concoction, but it was so plausible that it nearly did the trick.”

“It was close to the truth of what might happen in any case!”

“Precisely. The entire continent was set to go up in flames. There were also forged letters between Count Bismarck in Berlin and the German ambassador in Vienna, Prince Reuss, confirming the tale.”

“And how was a war averted?”

Sherlock Holmes became modesty itself.

“At the eleventh hour, Brother Mycroft was kind enough to think that my own modest talents might be of some little use in saving the peace of Europe. What did I find? Our rulers are profoundly neurotic. Our adversaries must have been gratified at the mischief they were able to make with so little effort. Do not underestimate them, Watson! The forged letters from Prince Reuss to his master Count Bismarck were almost perfect. Those from Prince Ferdinand to the Comtesse de Flandre approached perfection.”

“Yet they failed?”

“Only because of the suspicious ease with which they had fallen into the hands of the Tsar's agents. That should have alerted all the great powers. Conflict was avoided, but distrust between nations has immeasurably increased. The name of the innocent and admirable Comtesse de Flandre was cynically exploited. Next time—and there will be a next time—our enemies will have learnt by their mistakes.”

“But there was no war this time.”

He shook his head.

“It was close, Watson. The Russian High Command issued secret orders to its forward units to advance within sight of the Hungarian frontier. The Hungarian ministry replied with a confidential warning to St. Petersburg: ‘If war should be forced upon us, Hungary will do her duty.' St. Petersburg at length offered promises of peace to the Austrian Emperor, but Vienna refused to suspend its military preparations in return for promises alone. It called up all reservists for ten days' training in the use of the new repeating rifle. Mycroft tells me that Lord Salisbury summoned the Turkish Ambassador privately to Downing Street. The Prime Minister promised that England would never consent to an alteration in the balance of power in the Mediterranean. The Royal Navy put to sea. It was nearly a bonfire of all the treaties and all the hopes.”

He slid the weighty scrapbook back into its place on the bottom shelf. I stood there, trying to remember how it was that I had not noticed his preoccupation with a great diplomatic crisis at the time. Of course! It had come and gone during that summer fortnight of my visit to the Devonshire cousins. I had lost myself in the pleasures of fishing for trout on Exmoor, among the steep rocky falls of Heddon's Mouth by the Bristol Channel, or facing the breeze on the links of Woolacombe golf club above the sandhills and the Atlantic surges. Now that seemed like another world. Over all my thoughts lay a sense of awe that this brotherhood of political gangsters had brought millions of their fellow human beings to the brink of destruction in the name of financial profit.

Holmes lay back luxuriously in his chair and sent up several blue-grey wreaths of smoke from his pipe.

“The Comtesse de Flandre,” I said hopefully.

He stood up abruptly, his back to the fireplace, and frowned at the carpet. “Why not try the new moon?”

“I don't think I follow you, Holmes.”

“Do you not? Consider the message that was waiting for you this morning. I believe that the last two words, concerning the moon, may be more important than the esteemed Comtesse de Flandre. They specify a time. In doing so they eliminate at least twenty-seven of twenty-eight possible dates in the month ahead.”

“It would be dark at the new moon.”

“Indeed it would. Perhaps we are to meet our foe during the hours of darkness, that is to say approximately between seven o'clock at night and seven o'clock in the morning.”

He turned again to the bookshelves and took out a familiar cheaply bound volume. It was the current issue of
Old Moore's Almanac
, sold by the street vendors of Piccadilly. Flipping through it, he came to the tides and phases of the moon.

“For what it matters, Watson, the new moon is on 29 March, just a couple of weeks away. We may suppose that it is the next new moon which is indicated. If not, then this message would have very little value as information or as an ultimatum.”

“And the Comtesse de Flandre? Why should the phases of the moon matter to her? At this time of year, she is probably on her way to the Swiss lakes or the Venice Lido.”