The Six Messiahs

'What did I do?'

'You've cracked it open, old boy,' said Doyle, walking him rapidly toward the nearest hatchway.

'I did?'

'Call back that engineer of yours. Have him fetch a fireman's ax, a hammer, and a crowbar. It's time we had a few words with Mr. Stern and Captain Hoffner.'

The engineer flashed the beam of his lantern into the dark recess of the storage bay, picking out a sealed, rectangular shipping crate from among the forest of cargo.

'Is that your crate, Mr. Stern?' asked Doyle.

'Yes, it is.'

'I'm sure we are all most interested, Mr. Conan Doyle,' said Captain Hoffner with chafed civility, 'but I'm afraid I am not seeing the point of this exercise....'

Doyle raised the ax and with one short, economical blow smashed the cover of the crate to pieces. Stern gasped. Doyle reached down, picked through the splinters, and extracted the contents of the box: a large square sheath of blank white paper.

'Equivalently weighted to approximate your Book of Zohar,' said Doyle to Stern, balancing the stack in his hand.

'I didn't know; I swear,' protested Stern. 'I mean I saw ; them; I was there in London when the Book was crated.'

'It seems your late partner Mr. Selig had other plans, which may account for his disinclination to leave your cabin.'

'What is the significance of this, please?' asked Hoffner.

'Begging your patience for the moment, Captain, I will | attend to that presently,' said Doyle, dropping the paper and hefting the ax over his shoulder. 'Now if you would be good enough to accompany us to our next destination. Innes?'

Innes gestured and the little engineer—secretly thrilled at the spectacle of his rigid, disciplinarian Captain kowtowing to this crazy Englishman—led the way through a maze of passages and hatches to an adjacent hold: a frigid, uninviting room dominated by a row of square steel-hood-handled vaults. Rows of bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling, their pale auras failing against the odors of decay that permeated the air.

'May I be permitted to ask what we are doing in the morgue?' asked Hoffner.

With Innes holding up a lantern, Doyle cracked open one of the refrigerated lockers and rolled out its enclosed metal tray, introducing the rigid enshrouded outline of a corpse. He pulled the sheet away from the face and dispassionately yanked down the lower eyelids of the late Rupert Selig, revealing congested spiderwebs of blue and purple capillaries.

'Contrary to your ship physician's opinion that he was in perfect health for a man his age, Mr. Selig suffered from heart disease and severe high blood pressure, evidenced as you can see by these massively ruptured vessels in the soft tissue under his eyes—a condition he kept secret even from you, Mr. Stern. You were not aware of it, were you, sir?'

Stern shook his head.

Doyle showed them a small glass vial of medicine; round, white pills. 'Mr. Selig carried this homeopathic remedy—a mixture of potassium, calcium, and tincture of iodine of no small popularity but little established benefit—in a hidden pocket sewn into the lining of his jacket.'

'All very well and good, Mr. Doyle; it supports in fact my doctor's conclusion that a heart attack was being the cause of the gentleman's death, but what does it have to do with—'

Doyle raised a hand, cutting Hoffner off again. 'One point at a time, Captain; there is a design at work here, if you will trust me to bring it to light in the appropriate sequence.' Doyle tossed the sheet back over Selig's gray face and gave the tray a shove, and it slid home with a metallic clang that echoed through the grim room.

'Innes, if you please ...' said Doyle.

Innes took the torch from the engineer and illuminated the far corner of the room; an orderly row of coffins lined the floor next to the wall.

'You accepted these five coffins as cargo in Southampton, isn't that correct, Captain?'

'Yes, so?'

'All from the same shipping agent, I trust.'

'That would be customary.'

'I shall in short order wish to examine the bill of lading lor them,' said Doyle, accepting the hammer and crowbar from the engineer. 'There was only one insurmountable dif-ficulty in the resolution of my theory; as we saw while boarding the ship, security was airtight—which is more than I can say for this casket.' Doyle shimmed the crowbar with the hammer into a gap beneath the mahogany lid of the first coffin.

'Mein Gott, sir, think what you are doing....' Hoffner moved to stop Doyle from proceeding with the exhumation: Innes clamped a strong hand on his arm, holding him back, as Doyle continued.

'If a band of professional assassins have found their way onto the Elbe—and I assure you, Captain, that is exactly what we are dealing with here—they had to have managed it by some less conventional means than strolling up the gangplank in plain view—'

'I must order you to stop this at once....'

'You'll recall one of your passengers heard the cries of a 'ghost' from somewhere in the hold our first day out of port....' Doyle heaved at the crowbar; with a piercing shriek of protest from its nails, the coffin lid separated and lifted an inch from the sides. The shriek echoed hauntingly down the steel passageways around them. Doyle took a strong grip on the exposed edge of a coffin lid and pulled it open the rest of the way.

'This is a desecration....' Captain Hoffner broke free of Innes and rushed forward to discover that the plush pink satin-lined interior of the coffin was completely empty. Hoffner stared at Doyle, mouth agape.

'The 'ghost's' cries were followed shortly thereafter by a loud, rhythmic knocking.'

Doyle dropped the lid shut and hammered the nails back in.

'Look closely and you can see the indentations made when they hammered the nails back in,' said Doyle, beckoning Hoffner closer to the box. 'Your cargo hands have assured me that each coffin carried the full, shifting complement of a body weight when they were carried aboard. If you examine them closely down here as well, Captain, you can see that minute holes were drilled in the corners for the circulation of air.'

Hoffner ran a finger over the perforations. 'I do not know what to say.'

'An apology to Mr. Stern might be a prudent beginning. And the next time one of your passengers approaches you with concerns for their personal security, regardless of their religious or cultural persuasion, one hopes you will respond with a generosity more befitting your position.'

Hoffner's face turned crimson; he grabbed the hammer and crowbar from Doyle; three minutes and four more open empty coffins later, a winded, chastened Hoffner laid down the tools.

'Mr. Stern,' he said, standing tall. 'Please accept my deepest and most sincere apologies.'

Stern nodded, avoiding the Captain's eyes.

'You have five stowaways on board. Captain. There are dozens of places to hide on a ship this size. I don't need to suggest that you take all appropriate actions.'

'No. Yes, of course. We shall conduct a search of the entire ship at once,' said Hoffner, wiping his brow, mind racing. He considered himself a man of reason, above all, and second-most, a man of action.

'A concerted effort to find the Irish priest Father Devine would also be in order,' said Doyle.

'Why is that?'

'Because this man is not a priest. He is their leader.'

That's when the lights went out.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

To call this place the Devil's Kitchen does not do it justice, thought Kanazuchi, watching a rat chase a cockroach. He lay on a lice-infested blanket covering a wooden pallet he had secured the use of for the princely sum of two pennies a night. The beds of twenty other vagrants crowded the fifteen-square-foot room, one of four equally