The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (39 page)

“It was at this point, having agreed to acquire the pearl, that the Cabinet sent the Colonial Secretary to discuss the matter with me. Our discussion was held at this very table, Sherlock. Here he presented to me the matter as I have just related it. He requested help in finding the person capable of completing the acquisition in absolute secrecy.”

“I assume,” said Sherlock Holmes, “that the Colonial Secretary is the same gentleman who visited me in Florence with regard to the Tibetan affair.”

“Indeed, my dear Sherlock. The first thing he asked was your whereabouts and whether you could be convinced to undertake this mission. I replied that we had been out of touch for several months, and that as far as I knew you were still in the Orient, perhaps on your way back, but that I would try to communicate the request to you as soon as possible. I of course reminded him that my confidence in you had only been strengthened by your exploits in Tibet and elsewhere, but that acquiring an expensive bauble for Mr. Gladstone was not exactly as enticing an affair as the Tibetan adventure.

“For his part, the Colonial Secretary agreed that the task itself would present few challenges for you, but that Government was prepared to make it worth your while with a handsome remuneration. For Sherlock Holmes, a series of simple if uninteresting tasks: to find the present owners of the pearl, to establish its authenticity, to negotiate its sale, and deliver it to Mr. Vansittart for safe transport to England. You will recall, Sherlock, that in my message to you, I emphasised that though you might consider the mission to be without sufficient interest, the continued pleasure of the Queen and the deepening of her good feelings towards Mr. Gladstone would keep both home and empire strong and firm as we moved, rather perilously I thought, into the last years of the present century.”

Mycroft paused to sip his drink and wipe his brow. He was almost exhausted by his relation and sagged in his chair as if he had expended the last of his energies. Noting his brother’s fatigue, Holmes broke in to continue the tale.

“I recall that I was quite annoyed when I first read your message,” he began. “To speak in all candor, I had no interest whatever in the Prime Minister’s difficulties with Her Majesty, and the acquisition of a plaything to please her was not an especially inviting task. What, after all, is Mr. Gladstone to me or I to Mr. Gladstone? Surely, I thought, the entire task could be accomplished easily by Vansittart himself. But I was beginning to feel the pinch after my travels had depleted my pocketbook, and the remuneration was something I sorely needed. It is also true,” he added quietly without emotion, “that I have a special knowledge of precious stones, pearls among them, because they are so often the object of criminal desire.”

These last words visibly affected Mycroft. Despite his fatigue, he pulled himself up in his chair and said, “Come, come, Sherlock’s modesty prevents him from setting forth all the reasons I had for choosing him for the task. His success in Tibet was only one. There are several others—”

“Enough, my dear Mycroft,” said Holmes. “As you know, Watson, I have never considered modesty a virtue, for it only clouds the truth and misleads one into false positions concerning one’s abilities. If I am reticent on the subjects to which Mycroft alludes, it is because there are still solemn promises of silence to be honoured. There are indeed earlier cases of mine which provided me with the rather unique experience necessary for dealing with the matter in Ceylon, and it would break no solemn oath to refer to them in a general way. One is of course the case of the black pearl of the notorious Count Batthyani.”

“It was Sherlock,” said Mycroft interrupting once again, “who proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that this pearl had been stolen from the British Crown Jewels a century and a half before.”

“How it was finally found in a pawn shop in Budapest would make most interesting reading,” said Holmes, turning to me with a smile, “as would the case of the pearl known as ‘La Pellegrina,’ a gem once in the possession of the Zosima brothers of Moscow. Perhaps someday they will be told. In any case, we have the Trincomalee affair before us.”

“But surely there is something else, Holmes,” I said, “something even closer to this case, for I distinctly remember mentioning the Atkinson brothers of Trincomalee in my early chronicles, if I am not mistaken at the beginning of the affair concerning Irene Adler.”

Holmes became visibly annoyed by my mention of Miss Adler, to whom he still referred even after all these years as
the
woman. A dark look came over his face, but he recovered quickly and said, “Excellent, Watson, you have a most prodigious memory. There was, indeed, an earlier case in which I was consulted here in London involving some of the same principals, but I never visited Trincomalee before the present episode. Although the matter is of some relevance here, it too must remain, for reasons of state, yet untold. Let it suffice to say that it too concerned a jewel, in that case a magnificent sapphire . . . and several murders.”

Holmes broke off his narrative for a moment to sip his drink. A faraway look came across his face, one mixed with sadness.

“Think of it,” he said, “the misery produced by these playthings. A pearl is merely the grave of some tiny parasite, sometimes a grain of sand, sometimes a worm, but in all cases a microscopic intruder into the private residence of a brainless mollusk buried fathoms below the surface of the sea, an intruder which annoys its host into secreting a substance that envelops it and buries it forever. Like all good gems, it is among the devil’s pet baits. For every fifty grains of weight, there is often a monstrous crime. Who would think that such bonny things, with such humble origins, would be purveyors to the gallows and the prison? But there it is. And it was with the knowledge that this most beautiful of all pearls, if indeed it truly existed, would already be the focus of criminal intent, that I accepted the task. Ah, this pearl, Watson! Despite my annoyance at the task, I knew that it would keep me in my element. Like fresh-killed prey, it would draw many of the worst to it, as hawks and buzzards gather in ever narrowing circles above a wounded or dying animal. And I would be there watching—unseen—I hoped, as they gathered. The danger? The obvious. The closer I came to the prey, the greater the chance that I would be devoured as well. And yet, the scent of the criminal was so strong that I could not but stay close, with ever increasing anticipation, I might add.”

“I have always thought of you as a bit of a sleuth hound, Holmes,” said I.

Mycroft laughed. “It is precisely that, “he said, “which distinguishes me from my younger brother. It is what activates him, this ability to follow the scent, the total lack of which limits me to observations made from my chair.”

Holmes said nothing, and again paused for a moment to sip his drink, and I took a moment to glance about the room. It had emptied for the most part. The beautiful Indian woman had left with the Ethiopian, and those who remained appeared to be regular denizens of the club, eccentric in appearance most of them, but all quiet in demeanour. The room had also cooled considerably. I noticed through a nearby window that the sky had begun to cloud over and that there was the welcome threat of rain. I turned towards Holmes again. The sadness that had come across his face had gone, and he continued the tale.

His reply to Mycroft’s message, he said, was brief and affirmative. His final instructions came almost immediately. Mr. Gladstone’s Cabinet had set aside one hundred thousand pounds for the purchase of the pearl, and the Gneissen in Utrecht had already been commissioned to design the new crown. He was to proceed directly to Ceylon, where he would meet with Anthony Vansittart, our resident in Colombo, at the circuit house in Marichakudi, the small village near the pearl fisheries where the great pearl reportedly had been found. From then on, he would be on his own.

“I booked passage at once from Singapore to Ceylon on the
Susannah II
, a steamer out of Liverpool, expecting to reach my destination within ten days. Two days out, however, our captain learned of several storms off Ceylon. He therefore diverted the ship north, towards the Coromandel Coast. Here we came in sight of land south of Madras and set anchor. After a day of waiting, I left the ship, having decided that it would be quicker for me to complete the journey by land. I came ashore near Pondicherry, where I spent the night. It was here that I sent a message to my old friend, Gorashar, now in Calcutta, asking him if he could join me in Ceylon. I conveyed no reason, but urged on him that I would need his aid in a matter of great importance. I wrote simply: ‘If convenient, come at once; if inconvenient, come all the same.’ In the morning I took the first train to Rameshwaram.”

It was on this portion of his trip that Holmes received confirmation of his early doubts about the secrecy of the recently discovered pearl. The train was crowded, filled with merchants and jewelers from all over India and from as far away as the Levant. They chattered constantly about the great harvest of pearls and the discovery of the greatest of all pearls at Mannar, the equal of which had never been seen before. Holmes listened to the talk in silence, anticipating now that the tasks set for him would be far more difficult than Government in London might have thought. The pearl had already received an unofficial name: the Moonstar of Mannar. Holmes avoided all comment, maintaining his disguise as a professor of archaeology from London, on his way from Singapore to Ceylon to study the celebrated ruins of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. This scholarly disguise bored his companions instantly, for they soon lost interest in the apparently absentminded figure who sat among them.

“Among the many passengers, I recognised only one person,” said Holmes. “She had appeared at the station in Pondicherry after I boarded, and I watched her arrival from my seat at the window in my compartment. Her name was Franziska van Rhede, a woman of unknown European origin. I first observed her in Benares, but we had never met. She was a tall, slender woman, with long black hair, who often dressed in the clothes of a Punjab peasant woman. Most would have judged her beautiful, for her features were regular and her complextion light, but there was a look of cruelty in her eyes that marred her otherwise pleasing countenance. I had watched her unseen at the burning ghats, where she walked often by night, like some giantess, dressed in black, examining the fires, poking at them with a long stick, conversing with the cremation workers over whom she towered, sometimes screaming at them in a high-pitched voice. Her most remarkable feature were her large hands, and her fingernails which were exceedingly long and sharpened to most dangerous points. I had seen her use them in a fit of rage on one of the cremation attendants, bloodying him badly. I made careful mental note of her presence on the train, then buried myself in my battered copy of Petrarch.”

The train reached Rameshwaram at dusk. It was the end of the rail line, and Holmes followed the crowd of passengers onto the steamer that would take them across the Palk Strait to the Ceylonese mainland. As he alighted from the train, he noticed that Franziska van Rhede, now somewhat ahead of him, instead of walking with the crowd had stopped with her coolie as if in wait for someone. He slowed his pace so that he could watch her as long as possible. A tall, handsome, man, dressed completely in white, came up to her and embraced her in welcome. As Holmes passed, he recognised him: it was Colonel Sebastian Moran, the deadliest of his remaining enemies from the Moriarty gang. It had taken far longer for them to come upon each other than he had expected. The two walked into the train station, and he then lost sight of them. He smiled in the deepening twilight, for I knew now that his mission in Ceylon would be far more interesting than any assignment of Mr. Gladstone’s.

The crossing of the strait was a rough one, and many of the passengers became ill. The steamer was overcrowded with merchants and pearl workers, mostly Indians, but some from as far away as the Andamans. Luckily, the distance was a short one. After they disembarked, a waiting train took them south along the coast. Here Holmes looked out at the beautiful beaches and the sun setting into the sea. He knew almost nothing of the island on which he had just arrived. He had only a small map, which one of the passengers disembarking in Dhanushkoti had given him. On it, the island appeared like a pearl itself, gently hanging near the tip of the Subcontinent. From what he could see, it appeared to be a paradise, but not an isolated one like Nepal. The rich Indian Ocean surrounded it, and its coast had many harbours, which had served as ports for sailors from places as far away as Rome and China. Through the varied names of its geography, one saw the imprint of the invader – the Portuguese, the Dutch, and finally the English. Intermixed with the local names were Adam’s Peak, World’s End, Foul Point, and other names that attested to the British presence.

Holmes arrived in Marichakudi the following morning and went, according to instructions, to a small hotel on Chetty Street. The innkeeper handed him a note from Vansittart saying that he would expect him at the circuit house at four that afternoon.

“My room was a misery, hot and breathless, with only a small window blocked by a piece of torn brown paper that buzzed with flies occasionally, and placed there by some previous occupant in a vain effort to keep out the swarms of insects hovering outside. In the center of the room, there was a filthy bed over which had been hung an old mosquito net. I climbed in to catch a moment’s rest, but I quickly abandoned the notion as I felt the small but sharp bites of a variety of Asiatic pests. I decided then to have my first look at Pearl Town, as the central bazaar of the pearl fisheries is known. It was of no solid construction and displayed many of the shoddy aspects of a settlement that had gone up almost overnight. Little would remain of it after the fisheries were over, I thought, including my ramshackle hotel. The town was merely a row of
cajang
huts, thrown up temporarily to house the pearl fishers and the many merchants, with vile conditions for food and drink.”