The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (7 page)

“He is a creature of my imagination,” Rohmer had insisted; for he intuited that to profess otherwise would seal his doom.

“Pray do not insult me,” Mr. King replied evenly. “I am a law-abiding British resident. Import-export is my trade, and I have no wish to conquer this troubled planet. Beyond these things, your description of me is accurate in every detail. Was it your purpose to malign my character?”

“It was not.”

“And yet I find myself incapable of doing business with gentlemen who placed absolute faith in my integrity before your canard appeared. If the situation continues I shall face ruin.”

“I sympathise. However, I am not responsible for your sour fortune.”

“Will you withdraw the book from circulation?”

“I shan’t. I am informed its sales are increasing.”

Mr. King stroked his great brow.

“May I at least extract your word of honour that this ogre who resembles me will not be seen again once the novel is no longer in print?”

“You may not. I am writing a sequel.”

“I could bring suit, of course. However, the courts take too long, and in the meantime I shall have no source of income. Shall I threaten you?”

“I rather wish you would. This conversation has become tedious.”

At this point in Rohmer’s account I laughed despite myself. Here was an Englishman! He continued without acknowledging the interruption.

Mr. King’s devilish features assumed a saturnine arrangement, he informed us. “I am, as I said, respectful of your laws. This was not always the case. It is difficult for a Chinese to advance himself in business in this society; I was forced to take certain measures, the nature of which I shall not define. I assume you are aware that if you were never to leave this house, your body would never be recovered?”

Rohmer confided to Holmes and me that he had not been so sanguine as he’d pretended. He knew the house stood before a dock, and that many a weighted corpse lay on the bottom of the Thames with little hope of recovery. The thought that his wife should never learn of his true fate very nearly unmanned him. Yet he held his tongue.

“I shall accept your silence as an affirmative response,” said the Chinese. “However, I am not without reason, and I am in the way of being a sporting man.”

Hereupon he struck a miniature gong which stood upon the desk. It had scarcely finished reverberating when one of the villains who had abducted Rohmer, now draped in the burnoose and robes of the authentic Bedouin, entered through an opening hidden behind the tapestry, placed a singular object next to the gong, and withdrew.

“This bowl is said to have belonged to the Emperor Han, who ruled China from 206 until 220
A.D.
,” said Mr. King, lifting the ornate object. “Such things are priceless. I lend it to you, in the certainty that a clever fellow such as yourself will succeed in unlocking its riddle. If in Thursday’s
Times
I read the answer in the personal columns, the bowl shall be yours, with my compliments. If upon that day the late edition has come and gone and no such item has appeared, you will not live an hour more. You have seen how easily my subordinates may lay hands upon your person. I believe you know I speak the truth.”

Rohmer concluded his tale at the moment he finished his pipe. He laid it in his lap to cool.

“I accepted the bowl, for what else could I do? Mr. King then used the gong to summon the Bedouins, both of whom were again costumed as Occidentals, and they returned me to the spot where they had first accosted me. I went home, and puzzled over the thing the night through. Morning came and I was nowhere nearer the solution—indeed, to the nature of the riddle itself—than I was yesterday evening, so I sent you the message which resulted in your kind invitation. Tomorrow is Thursday. Can you help me, Mr. Holmes? It is for my wife I am concerned. I’ve cost her many a sleepless hour with my rash wanderings. To leave her a widow at her tender age would be a mortal sin.”

“Your Mr. King is transparent, and hardly inscrutable,” said Holmes. “He fears attention and investigation more than the loss of legitimate business, if the resume you supplied is reliable.” He rubbed his hands in the way I remembered from long ago, signifying his eagerness to solve the problem which had been set before him—though he may merely have been massaging his joints. “You were correct to come to me rather than to the police. Scotland Yard teems with fresh new faces, behind which churn the same old brains. Let us examine this wondrous bowl.”

Rohmer stood, retrieved the bundle he had brought, and placed it in Holmes’s hands. A twitch of the cord, and the sun came into the room in the form of a beautiful thing which glistened as if still molten. I rose and bent over my friend, that I might see what he saw at the moment he saw it. It seemed that even in my extremity I remained the same curious creature I had been when I was no older than young Rohmer.

The workmanship was exquisite. The bowl was just large enough to hold in two hands, so bright and gleaming it might have been just struck off. Around the outside of the rim paraded a row of playful monkeys in relief, no two of which wore the same expression, and each so lifelike as to seem poised to leap from its perch and gambol about that staid room. There were thirteen in all, some crouching, some reclining upon their backs, others in the attitude of stalking, rumps in the air and noses nearly touching the ground. One, of more mischievous mien than all the rest, hung from its tail, the tail curling well above the bowl’s rim, and stared straight out with arms crossed and lips peeled back into a jeering grin, as though daring the casual handler to unlock the riddle of the golden monkeys.

“This is formidable craftsmanship.” Holmes studied the outside, the inside, then turned it over and scrutinised the bottom, which bore no mark. At length he proffered it to me. “What do you make of it, Watson? I confess chinoiserie is far from my long suit.”

I hefted it. It weighed, I should have judged, nearly four pounds. “It is twenty-four karat, Holmes. I would stake my life upon it.”

“Mr. Rohmer has already staked his. It seems scarcely large enough to support more than one.” He took the bowl from me and charged his own pipe. “I commend to you both the sea air. Mind the bees. They are in a petulant humour this season.”

I understood this to be a dismissal, and conducted the writer to the outdoors, where we strolled along the chalk cliff listening to the restless Channel coursing along the base. To our left, Holmes’s bees swarmed about his city of hives, which reminded me so much of the mosques and minarets of Afghanistan.

“Mr. Holmes is older than I’d suspected,” declared my companion. “Your accounts paint such a youthful and energetic picture that I suppose I thought he was immune to dissipation. Do you think his mental powers sufficient to this challenge?”

“The crown jewels reside in an ancient structure,” I replied. “They shine now as they have for four hundred years.”

“That is true.” He sounded unconvinced.

We spent the remainder of our outing discussing Egypt, which Rohmer was eager to visit, and which I had known intimately long before any tourist with the wherewithal could hire a camel and have his likeness struck before the Sphinx. We took our rest upon a marble bench whilst he bombarded me with questions. When after two hours we returned to the villa, I was quite drained and looking forwards to a whisky-and-soda and silence; the latter a requisite during Holmes’s deliberations.

Much to my surprise, we found him quite loquacious. He looked up with sparkling eyes through a veritable “London particular” of tobacco-smoke and bade us be seated. The floor about his feet was piled with books from his shelves, many of which were splayed open upon their spines or stood like tents on the carpet. I noted Lutz’s
History of the Chinese Dynasties
, Walker’s
Ancient Metalwork
, and Carroll’s
World Primates
among the variety of titles. The wonderful golden bowl rested in his lap.

“Dr. Watson can attest that it is a long-held axiom of mine that one cannot make bricks without clay,” Holmes informed Rohmer, who unlike me had declined an invitation to make free with the siphon and bottle. “I am to some degree an autodidact, and most of my education regarding arcane subjects has taken place in the pursuit of the solution to problems which at first appeared puerile. When we met, I astounded Watson with the announcement that I was unaware of Copernicus or his theories; however, I have since qualified as an expert. At the end of two hours, the lost-wax process is not lost to me. Similarly, I may converse with some authority upon the Emperor Han’s propensity towards painful boils, the origin of the Troy ounce, and some indelicacies in the matter of the posteriors of certain species of gibbon. I am enormously wealthier for the time spent.”

“But is my wife any less likely to suffer bereavement?” Rohmer’s tone was impatient. He had evidently concluded that Holmes’s remarkable mind had commenced to wander. It shames me to confess that I harboured similar doubts. Professor Moriarty and his equally perfidious minion Colonel Moran had been mouldering now for nearly a quarter-century, and time was scarcely more kind to the faculties of reason.

“That I cannot say,” Holmes declared.

Rohmer’s face fell.

“The future is a closed book, even to me,” continued the retired detective. “For all I am aware, your driver may become distracted on the way back to Newhaven and precipitate you both over the cliff. However, assuming that your Mr. King is a man of his word, Mrs. Rohmer will not grieve because the golden monkeys have refused to give up their secret. The riddle is solved.”

The young are easily read. I saw hope and relief and a dark shadow of doubt upon the writer’s face. He leaned forwards to hear Holmes’s explanation, Holmes leaned forwards to provide it. Those two hawklike profiles in such close proximity gave me the fancy that Rohmer was gazing into a somewhat clouded mirror.

“I began with the obvious, an examination of the bowl for a hidden recess, containing some item of interest: The term ‘Chinese box’ is founded in reality. The metal is seamless, made no hollow sound when I tapped it all over, and none of the graven images performed double duty as a release mechanism. In any event, so unimaginative a solution would have disappointed me, given your impression of Mr. King’s intellect. I call your attention to the design. Doesn’t it strike you as remarkable?”

His guest accepted the return of the artifact and rotated it slowly, scowling in deep concentration. “It’s a masterpiece, certainly. To think that the Chinese were executing such things when we English were living in mud huts makes one wonder why they do not already rule the world.”

“Just so. However, that is material for another conversation, one which will almost certainly not involve this particular piece.” Having made this cryptic pronouncement, Holmes plunged ahead without pause. “I direct your young eyes towards the monkeys themselves. Does any of them stand out from the crowd?”

“They are all so lifelike. The one with its arms folded has claimed my attention from the start. The cheeky little fellow seems just this side of thrusting out his tongue.”

“Devilishly clever, these Chinese,” said Holmes. “It could be a diversionary tactic to lure the casual observer away from something more informative. Not in this case, however. What do you know of monkeys?”

His guest sought his answer in the ceiling. “According to Professor Darwin, they are related to you and me, and the Americans are of the opinion that they are quite amusing by the barrel. I know a bit more about marmosets, but none is represented here. I’m afraid that’s the sum total of my knowledge as regards the species.”

“Perhaps you will find Mr. Carroll of assistance.” Holmes scooped up
World Primates
and presented it with his thumb marking the place to which it had lain open. “I would now direct your eye to the passage I have underlined.”

Rohmer carefully laid the precious bowl beside him on the divan and accepted the book. He read aloud:

“‘Monkeys occupy two separate and distinct groups, one native to the Old World, the other to the New, in particular Central and South America. Old World monkeys are characterised by their narrow probosci, and are referred to as Catarrhine; none possesses a prehensile tail. Their American cousins are recognised by their flat probosci, and these are designated Platyrrhine; their tails are prehensile.’”

The young man closed the book, picked up the bowl once again, and studied each of the golden monkeys in turn. “All the noses appear similar. I believe they are flat, but lacking the other variety for purposes of comparison, I cannot say definitely. How narrow is narrow?”

“A valid observation. As Aristotle said in another context, one requires a place to stand. Disregard, then, the question of monkeys’ noses. What do you make of this business of tails?”

“Merely that Old World monkeys are incapable of swinging or hanging by them, while those from the New…” Rohmer’s voice trailed off. He was staring at the insolent primate with arms folded and tail curled over the lip of the bowl. “Great heavens! And I presume to call myself an Orientalist.”

“It is a broad subject. No one man can claim to know it in its entirety. The Chinese were among the first to discover the African continent and to study its flora and fauna. They were privileged to incorporate African motifs into their art. However, for all its advances, even that estimable society could not, in the third century
A.D
., posit a monkey hanging by its tail twelve hundred years before the discovery of the one continent whose simian population was thus capable.

“The bowl is a forgery,” Holmes concluded. “There is the answer to your riddle.”

“Great heavens!” I exclaimed, at the moment unaware that I had echoed Rohmer’s words.

Once again, Holmes’s guest presented a study in conflicting emotions: Relief, wonder, and disappointment paraded across his face in a variety nearly as rich as that provided by the golden monkeys. “When did you suspect?”

“At the moment the bowl appeared in your narrative. It did not seem likely that Mr. King would threaten you in one breath and in the next offer you an item so tantalising without some promise of benefit to himself. The same rules that govern legitimate commerce also apply to the
demimonde
.