Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (4 page)

After Raffles’ death in the Boer War, Harry Manders gave up crime and became a respectable journalist and author. He married, had children, and died in 1924. His earliest works were agented by E. W. Hornung, Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law. A number of Manders’ posthumous works have been agented by Barry Perowne. One of his tales, however, was forbidden by his will to be printed until fifty years after his death. The stipulated time has passed, and now the public may learn how the world was saved without knowing that it was in the gravest peril. It will also discover that the paths of the great Raffles and the great Holmes did cross at least once.

The Boer bullet that pierced my thigh in 1900 lamed me for the rest of my life, but I was quite able to cope with its effects. However, at the age of sixty-one, I suddenly find that a killer that has felled far more men than bullets has lodged within me. The doctor, my kinsman, gives me six months at the most, six months which he frankly says will be very painful. He knows of my crimes, of course, and it may be that he thinks that my suffering will be poetic justice. I’m not sure. But I’ll swear that this is the meaning of the slight smile which accompanied his declaration of my doom.

Be that as it may, I have little time left. But I have determined to write down that adventure of which Raffles and I once swore we would never breathe a word. It happened; it really happened. But the world would not have believed it then. It would have been convinced that I was a liar or insane.

I am writing this, nevertheless, because fifty years from now the world may have progressed to the stage where such things as I tell of are credible. Man may even have landed on the moon by then, if he has perfected a propeller which works in the ether as well as in the air. Or if he discovers the same sort of drive that brought... well, I anticipate.

I must hope that the world of 1974 will believe this adventure. Then the world will know that, whatever crimes Raffles and I committed, we paid for them a thousandfold by what we did that week in the May of 1895. And, in fact, the world is and always will be immeasurably in our debt. Yes, my dear doctor, my scornful kinsman, who hopes that I will suffer pain as punishment, I long ago paid off my debt. I only wish that you could be alive to read these words. And, who knows, you may live to be a hundred and may read this account of what you owe me. I hope so.

I was nodding in my chair in my room at Mount Street when the clanging of the lift gates in the yard startled me. A moment later, a familiar tattoo sounded on my door. I opened it to find, as I expected, A. J. Raffles himself. He slipped in, his bright blue eyes merry, and he removed his Sullivan from his lips to point it at my whisky and soda.

“Bored, Bunny?”

“Rather,” I replied. “It’s been almost a year since we stirred our stumps. The voyage around the world after the Levy affair was stimulating. But that ended four months ago. And since then...”

“Ennui and bile!” Raffles cried. “Well, Bunny, that’s all over! Tonight we make the blood run hot and cold and burn up all green biliousness!”

“And the swag?” I said.

“Jewels, Bunny! To be exact, star sapphires, or blue corundum, cut
en cabochon.
That is, round with a flat underside. And large, Bunny, vulgarly large, almost the size of a hen’s egg, if my informant was not exaggerating. There’s a mystery about them, Bunny, a mystery my fence has been whispering with his Cockney speech into my ear for some time. They’re dispensed by a Mr. James Phillimore of Kensal Rise. But where he gets them, from whom he lifts them, no one knows. My fence has hinted that they may not come from manorial strongboxes or milady’s throat but are smuggled from Southeast Asia or South Africa or Brazil, directly from the mine. In any event, we are going to do some reconnoitering tonight, and if the opportunity should arise...”

“Come now, A. J.,” I said bitterly. “You
have
done all the needed reconnoitering. Be honest! Tonight we suddenly find that the moment is propitious, and we strike? Right?”

I had always been somewhat piqued that Raffles chose to do all the preliminary work, the casing, as the underworld says, himself. For some reason, he did not trust me to scout the layout.

Raffles blew a huge and perfect smoke ring from his Sullivan, and he clapped me on the shoulder. “You see through me, Bunny! Yes, I’ve examined the grounds and checked out Mr. Phillimore’s schedule.”

I was unable to say anything to the most masterful man I have ever met. I meekly donned dark clothes, downed the rest of the whisky, and left with Raffles. We strolled for some distance, making sure that no policemen were shadowing us, though we had no reason to believe they would be. We then took the last train to Willesden at 11:21. On the way I said, “Does Phillimore live near old Baird’s house?”

I was referring to the money lender killed by Jack Rutter, the details of which case are written in
Wilful Murder.

“As a matter of fact,” Raffles said, watching me with his keen steel-gray eyes, “it’s the
same
house. Phillimore took it when Baird’s estate was finally settled and it became available to renters. It’s a curious coincidence, Bunny, but then all coincidences are curious. To man, that is. Nature is indifferent.”

(Yes, I know I stated before that his eyes were blue. And so they were. I’ve been criticized for saying in one story that his eyes were blue and in another that they were gray. But he has, as any idiot should have guessed, gray-blue eyes which are one color in one light and another in another.)

“That was in January, 1895,” Raffles said. “We are in deep waters, Bunny. My investigations have unearthed no evidence that Mr. Phillimore existed before November, 1894. Until he took the lodgings in the East End, no one seems to have heard of or even seen him. He came out of nowhere, rented his third-story lodgings—a terrible place, Bunny—until January. Then he rented the house where bad old Baird gave up the ghost. Since then he’s been living a quiet-enough life, excepting the visits he makes once a month to several East End fences. He has a cook and a housekeeper, but these do not live in with him.”

At this late hour, the train went no farther than Willesden Junction. We walked from there toward Kensal Rise. Once more, I was dependent on Raffles to lead me through unfamiliar country. However, this time the moon was up, and the country was not quite as open as it had been the last time I was here. A number of cottages and small villas, some only partially built, occupied the empty fields I had passed through that fateful night. We walked down a footpath between a woods and a field, and we came out on the tarred woodblock road that had been laid only four years before. It now had the curb that had been lacking then, but there was still only one pale lamppost across the road from the house.

Before us rose the corner of a high wall with the moonlight shining on the broken glass on top of the wall. It also outlined the sharp spikes on top of the tall green gate. We slipped on our masks. As before, Raffles reached up and placed champagne corks on the spikes. He then put his covert-coat over the corks. We slipped over quietly, Raffles removed the corks, and we stood by the wall in a bed of laurels. I admit I felt apprehensive, even more so than the last time. Old Baird’s ghost seemed to hover about the place. The shadows were thicker than they should have been.

I started toward the gravel path leading to the house, which was unlit. Raffles seized my coattails. “Quiet!” he said. “I see somebody—something, anyway—in the bushes at the far end of the garden. Down there, at the angle of the wall.”

I could see nothing, but I trusted Raffles, whose eyesight was as keen as a Red Indian’s. We moved slowly alongside the wall, stopping frequently to peer into the darkness of the bushes at the angle of the wall. About twenty yards from it, I saw something shapeless move in the shrubbery. I was all for clearing out then, but Raffles fiercely whispered that we could not permit a competitor to scare us away. After a quick conference, we moved in very slowly but surely, slightly more solid shadows in the shadow of the wall. And in a few very long and perspiration-drenched minutes, the stranger fell with one blow from Raffles’ fist upon his jaw.

Raffles dragged the snoring man out from the bushes so we could get a look at him by moonlight. “What have we here, Bunny?” he said. “Those long curly locks, that high arching nose, the overly thick eyebrows, and the odor of expensive Parisian perfume? Don’t you recognize him?”

I had to confess that I did not.

“What, that is the famous journalist and infamous duelist, lsadora Persano!” he said. “Now tell me you have never heard of him, or her, as the case may be?”

“Of course!” I said. “The reporter for the
Daily Telegraph!”

“No more,” Raffles said, “He’s a freelancer now. But what the devil is he doing here?”

“Do you suppose,” I said slowly, “that he, too, is one thing by day and quite another at night?”

“Perhaps,” Raffles said. “But he may be here in his capacity of journalist. He’s also heard things about Mr. James Phillimore. The devil take it! If the press is here, you may be sure that the Yard is not far behind!”

Mr. Persano’s features curiously combined a rugged masculinity with an offensive effeminacy. Yet the latter characteristic was not really his fault. His father, an Italian diplomat, had died before he was born. His English mother had longed for a girl, been bitterly disappointed when her only-born was a boy, and, unhindered by a husband or conscience, had named him Isadora and raised him as a girl. Until he entered a public school, he wore dresses. In school, his long hair and certain feminine actions made him the object of an especially vicious persecution by the boys. It was there that he developed his abilities to defend himself with his fists. When he became an adult, he lived on the continent for several years. During this time, he earned a reputation as a dangerous man to insult. It was said that he had wounded half a dozen men with sword or pistol.

From the little bag in which he carried the tools of the trade, Raffles brought a length of rope and a gag. After tying and gagging Persano, Raffles went through his pockets. The only object that aroused his curiosity was a very large matchbox in an inner pocket of his cloak. Opening this, he brought out something that shone in the moonlight.

“By all that’s holy!” he said. “It’s one of the sapphires!”

“Is Persano a rich man?” I said.

“He doesn’t have to work for a living, Bunny. And since he hasn’t been in the house yet, I assume he got this from a fence. I also assume that he put the sapphire in the matchbox because a pickpocket isn’t likely to steal a box of matches. As it was,
I
was about to ignore it!”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. But he crouched staring down at the journalist with an occasional glance at the jewel. This, by the way, was only about a quarter of the size of a hen’s egg. Presently, Persano stirred, and he moaned under the gag. Raffles whispered into his ear, and he nodded. Raffles, saying to me, “Cosh him if he looks like he’s going to tell,” undid the gag.

Persano, as requested, kept his voice low. He confessed that he had heard rumors from his underworld contacts about the precious stones. Having tracked down our fence, he had contrived easily enough to buy one of Mr. Phillimore’s jewels. In fact, he said, it was the first one that Mr. Phillimore had brought in to fence. Curious, wondering where the stones came from, since there were no reported thefts of these, he had come here to spy on Phillimore.

“There’s a great story here,” he said. “But just what, I haven’t the foggiest. However, I must warn you that...”

His warning was not heeded. Both Raffles and I heard the low voices outside the gate and the scraping of shoes against gravel.

“Don’t leave me tied up here, boys,” Persano said. “I might have a little trouble explaining satisfactorily just what I’m doing here. And then there’s the jewel...”

Raffles slipped the stone back into the matchbox and put it into Persano’s pocket. If we were to be caught, we would not have the gem on us. He untied the journalist’s wrists and ankles and said, “Good luck!”

A moment later, after throwing our coats over the broken glass, Raffles and I went over the rear rail. We ran crouching into a dense woods about twenty yards back of the house. At the other side at some distance was a newly built house and a newly laid road. A moment later, we saw Persano come over the wall. He ran by, not seeing us, and disappeared down the road, trailing a heavy cloud of perfume.

“We must visit him at his quarters,” said Raffles. He put his hand on my shoulder to warn me, but there was no need. I too had seen the three men come around the corner of the wall. One took a position at the angle of the wall; the other two started toward our woods. We retreated as quietly as possible. Since there was no train available at this late hour, we walked to Maida Vale and took a hansom from there to home. Raffles went to his rooms at the Albany and I to mine on Mount Street.

When we saw the evening papers, we knew that the affair had taken on even more bizarre aspects. But we still had no inkling of the horrifying metamorphosis yet to come.

I doubt if there is a literate person in the West—or in the Orient, for that matter—who has not read about the strange case of Mr. James Phillimore. At eight in the morning, a hansom cab from Maida Vale pulled up before the gates of his estate. The housekeeper and the cook and Mr. Phillimore were the only occupants of the house. The area outside the walls was being surveilled by eight men from the Metropolitan Police Department. The cab driver rang the electrically operated bell at the gate. Mr. Phillimore walked out of the house and down the gravel path to the gate. Here he was observed by the cab driver, a policeman near the gate, and another in a tree. The latter could see clearly the entire front yard and house, and another man in a tree could clearly see the entire back yard and the back of the house.

Mr. Phillimore opened the gate but did not step through it. Commenting to the cabbie that it looked like rain, he added that he would return to the house to get his umbrella. The cabbie, the policemen, and the housekeeper saw him reenter the house. The housekeeper was at that moment in the room which occupied the front part of the ground floor of the house. She went into the kitchen as Mr. Phillimore entered the house. She did, however, hear his footsteps on the stairs from the hallway which led up to the first floor.