Sherlock Holmes In America (10 page)

“Done,” the Whelp said. “Do you have the map with you now?”

“Strewth! I did walk into the right saloon, di'n't I?” Goodfellow gleefully groped beneath his grimy coat for a moment . . . then froze, his expression turning wary. “'Ang on a tick. ‘Ow do I know you ain't gonna fiddle me out of me dosh?”

The Whelp regarded him coolly.

“You have my word, I have never fiddled with anyone's dosh.”

“‘'Is word,' 'e says. Ha! I'll need a lot more than that before I 'and over me map. Why, you could scarper with the whole boodle and leave me with nuffin' but me bloody 'ump! No, no . . . a security, that's what's called for. To show your good faith.”

“What sort of security are you talking about?” the Whelp asked.

Goodfellow looked him up and down, then pointed a knobby finger at the watch fob looping from the Whelp's vest pockets.

“That watch, let's say.”

“My father gave me that.”

“And I'll give it back . . . when you give me the silver.”

Slowly, reluctantly, the Whelp pulled out a gold pocket watch and placed it on the table.

“Smart lad,” Goodfellow said. After furtive glances left and right, he produced a scroll of paper and unrolled it on the tabletop just long enough to show it was, indeed, a crudely sketched map.

The Whelp swept the map off the table.

Goodfellow slipped the watch into a coat pocket.

“You stayin' at the Clarendon?” he asked.

The Whelp nodded.

“Alright, then,” Goodfellow said, “I'll meet you behind the 'otel at nine o' clock tonight to do the divvy. Till then, I'd best keep out of sight.”

He pushed away from the table, then paused before turning to go.

“Pleasure doin' business wiff you, guv,” he said, and he gave the Whelp a wink with his bulging-wide right eye.

“I can't believe even you would sink so low,” I said to the Whelp as the hunchback hobbled away.

As usual, my disapproval seemed to amuse the insolent jackanapes no end.

“Neither can I,” he said with a smile. “Well . . . I suppose I should go, too. I shan't be leaving for another hour or so, but in the meantime I've preparations to make.” He tugged at the sleeve of his black frock coat. “I'm hardly dressed for an expedition. Shall we return to the Clarendon?”

“You go ahead,” I said. “Suddenly, I find I actually prefer the company here.”

My show of pique merely gratified the Whelp all the more, and he headed for the door with such a jaunty spring to his step I wouldn't have been surprised had he started whistling.

I sat there alone, pretending to drink my steam beer so as to keep the saloon keeper at bay and avoid the curious (and hostile) stares of the other patrons. After a few minutes, however, I had company again: a hunched figure appeared in the doorway and came sidling toward me.

I greeted him with applause as he retook his seat.

“Bravo. A masterful performance.”

My companion shrugged modestly.

“I had a receptive audience,” said Sasanoff—for, as you've surely long since guessed, he and Goodfellow were one and the same. “He's so eager for adventure he would have believed me had I appeared to him as Admiral Lord Nelson. Now . . . what say we properly fortify ourselves for the cold?”

What I said was “yes,” of course, and soon we were stoking up warmth with a surprisingly serviceable whiskey Mr. Lonnegan had on hand. Eventually, however, Sasanoff drained his glass and stood up.

“Come,” he said. “All must be in readiness for the denouement.”

I followed him out of the tavern with no little reluctance. Certainly, I wanted to see him deliver the
coup de grâce
with my own eyes. Yet by necessity he'd be doing it out of doors, while I very much wished to remain safely behind closed ones . . . preferably beside a roaring fire with a glass of port close at hand.

I knew better than to deny Sasanoff his audience, however, and soon we were hustling up the road toward the mine. Quite a sight I'm sure we made: Richard III and Falstaff side by side, both of them huffing and puffing in the thin, frigid air of the mountains. Though Sasanoff had given us plenty of time to beat the Whelp—the reason for his warning about the “afternoon shipments”—he still insisted on a forced march so swift it soon had my back slick with perspiration that would turn to icicles the second we stopped.

And worse was yet to come, for Sasanoff had selected a hiding place that required us to crawl on all fours into a dense copse of prickly bramble. Of course, frames such as mine are not proportioned for easy concealment, so we had to wriggle our way into the thickest of the thicket, briers tearing at my topcoat (and my pride). Sasanoff nearly lost his false beard in one particularly dense tangle, but after some struggling he managed to free himself, whiskers intact. I'd suggested he relieve himself of his disguise, but he accused me of lacking panache. (A charge that had never before been leveled against
me
!) A dramatic unveiling, he insisted, was key to the whole thing.

Once we were finally in place, I could see why Sasanoff had picked the spot he had, trying though it had been to reach. We may as well have been in box seats, for we had a perfect view down into the rocky basin in which the final act of the farce would soon play out.

Perhaps forty feet from us was a mound of loose stones piled up that morning by Sasanoff himself. Beneath it was a shallow hole just deep enough for the battered locker that had, not long before, housed my own little treasure: my clippings. I'd volunteered it when Sasanoff outlined his plan. Now it held but a single slip of paper, upon which had been scrawled these words:

YOU'RE SACKED!

—M.S.

The plan was this: We would wait for the Whelp; we would watch him unearth the box; we would witness his dismay upon discovering its contents; we would stand and announce our presence; we would reveal the true identity of “Mr. Goodfellow”; we would gloat; we would leave.

Curtain.

As it was, however, the first scene of our little production—the waiting—ran long. Every quarter hour or so, Sasanoff would pull out a watch and glumly mutter, “Any minute now . . . any minute, I'm sure.” It heartened him considerably when I pointed out that the watch he kept consulting was the Whelp's own.

Just as my fingers and toes were going numb with the cold, we heard something moving toward us from the road.

“At last,” Sasanoff whispered. “The fly enters the web.”

And then someone finally stepped into the clearing below us . . . a mustachioed, bow-legged someone wearing a droopy, round-brimmed hat and rough clothes and mud-splattered boots.

In his hands was the map Sasanoff himself had drawn that morning—the one he'd given to the Whelp.

Hanging from the holster at his side was a revolver the approximate size of a small cannon.

“Who in God's name—?” I murmured.

Sasanoff shushed me.

The man moved slowly at first, glancing down and up, down and up, from the map to the glade before him. But when he spied the pile of stones (marked, but of course, with a thick-inked X on the map) he charged forward, cackling. When he reached the rocks, he began tossing them wildly aside.

Sasanoff 's web, it seemed, had snared the wrong fly. And now it was about to snare two more.

As the man tore at the stacked stones, he glanced up, eyes darting this way and that. He was grinning madly, giggling, yet he seemed anxious, almost frantic, as well.

And then his giggles stopped, his grin wilted.

The man was staring directly at us.

Surely, he couldn't see us, I told myself. We were crouched low amidst a thick layer of shadow-eaved brush, and the afternoon sun had long since given way to the gray of approaching dusk.

Yet his gaze didn't waver. We might as well have been caught in the blinding light of a follow spot.

“Who's there?” he called out.

We said nothing.

“I know you're there, dammit!” the man bellowed. “I can see your breath!”

His right hand hovered over the butt of his gun.

“The better part of valour is discretion,” I'd often said onstage as Falstaff. And I believed it and even lived by it, for “Run away!” I'd often said offstage as myself.

There would be no screwing of courage to the sticking place. I possessed no courage to screw.

I stood up with my hands held high.

Or tried to, at any rate. The thorns and vines clawed at me as I arose. When I was finally standing straight, I found Sasanoff on his feet beside me, face scratched, beard pocked with clinging thistles.

“Ummm . . . could you point us back to the road?” he said. “We appear to be lost.”

“So lost you end up creepin' around the bushes?” the man spat back in an American accent as coarse and thick as his handlebar moustache and muttonchops. “Ha!”

“Oh, we were just looking for my . . . poodle,” I said. “He slipped his leash when we were walking him, and—”

“Get down here,” the man snapped. “
Now
.”

Sasanoff and I scrambled down the steep embankment side by side, kicking up dirt and stumbling over rocks and rotting logs.

“So,” the man said when we were finally lined up before him, “who are you two workin' for? Tabor or yourselves?”

“I don't know what you mean,” Sasanoff said. He was not so much a hunchback now as a hunch
buttock
: his hump had slipped down so low it looked as though he had a third cheek at the base of his spine.

The American took an angry step toward him.

“Are you mine police or bandits?” he demanded.

He was a tall man, obviously well built despite his bandy legs, and Sasanoff and I shrank back from him as one.

“N-n-neither,” I said. “We're actors.”

The American barked out a bitter laugh.

“Actors? Oh, I'll say you are! Bad ones, too, 'cuz I see right through you.” He jutted a lantern jaw at me. “Judgin' by them lavender duds of yours—” he jerked his head at Sasanoff, “—and the rags on you? And you both talkin' all hoity-toity? I'll bet you're Pinkertons set after the missin' silver. Well, congratulations, boys. You done found it. You just ain't leavin' with it. I am.”

“I assure you I have no idea what you're talking about,” Sasanoff said with as much stiff-spined dignity as a man with a false beard and an extra rump can muster.

“Sir . . . if I may,” I began, a whole new wave of sickly dread churning to life in the pit of my stomach. “How did you come to have that map?”

The American flashed me a smile sour enough for a Malvolio.

“You may not . . . but I'll tell you anyhow. I took it off a feller I followed outta Leadville. Word around town was he'd got his hands on an honest-to-God treasure map. So I caught up with him along the trail and, well . . . ” He patted the butt of his gun. “I persuaded him to hand it over.”

I could see Sasanoff go pale even beneath his grease paint. His performance back at the saloon had been
too
good, it appeared. It wasn't just the Whelp he'd convinced—it was all the eavesdroppers, too.

“Was your persuasion . . . fatal?” he asked.

The American shrugged.

“I didn't wait around to find out. Now, unless you want some of the same persuasion—” He backed off a few steps and nodded down at the mound of rocks nearby. “Get to diggin'.”

“But—” I began.

“
Dig!
” the American finished for me.

So dig we did, rolling aside the last of the stones covering the low hole in which my little trunk rested. I briefly considered turning and telling the brigand behind us that there was no stolen silver; it was all just a ruse we'd concocted to teach a much-needed lesson to a prattling malapert. I had the distinct feeling the man wouldn't see the humor in it, though. Best to feign ignorance and hope he'd take disappointment well.

Of course, I had the feeling he wouldn't do
that
either.

“By God,” the American mumbled to himself as Sasanoff and I lifted the chest up out of the ground. “It was true. I'm rich!”

“Not necessarily,” I said, trying to soften the blow before it fell. “Who knows what's inside?”

“Quite right,” Sasanoff threw in. “Someone might have beaten you to it, then reburied the strongbox.”

“Like who?” the American growled. “You, maybe?”

“Oh, no! I just meant—”

“Open it.”

“But—”

“
Open it!
”

I let Sasanoff kneel down and do the honors. I wanted to keep my distance from that box both literally and figuratively.