weird, twisted mind can think up stuff like this?'
'How appalling.'
'Hey, why do you think the paper booked me on this ship? Get a first look at you, that's the idea.'
'Booked you a passage on
'Okay, so here's my proposition,' said the little man, sidling up confidentially. 'Help me out with a few exclusives on the way over and I can make things pretty easy for you on the other side. I got connections in New York. Animal, vegetable, mineral; you name it. Sky's the limit. Silver platter.'
The man winked at him. What an extraordinary creature.
The customs agent handed back Doyle's transport papers with a sheepish, gap-toothed grin. 'Din't have to kill him, didja, guv?'
'We all have to go sometime,' said Doyle agreeably, tucking the papers away and striding quickly toward the gate.
The reporter dogged his steps, holding a card in front of
Doyle's face. 'Name's Pinkus. Ira Pinkus.
'Thank you, Mr. Pinkus.'
'Could I invite you to join me for dinner tonight?'
Doyle waved and smiled.
'Or how about drinks? A cocktail? What do you say?'
The guard at the gate stopped Pinkus from following. Could it be? Yes! The man hadn't cleared customs yet. The gap widened; Doyle grinned. Was any human experience more purely pleasurable than escape?
'Say, any plans on bringing Sherlock back?' shouted Pinkus. 'Can't leave him buried up there in that Swiss Alp! We want more stories! Your readers are ready to riot!'
Doyle never looked back. A knot of activity ahead: Larry at the trolley, Innes paying the porter. Dock hands shouldered their bags up the gangway. Farther down the pier a row of plain wooden coffins were being loaded from a jitney directly into the ship's cargo hold; bodies going home for burial.
Odd, thought Doyle; the dead shipped home unnoticed on every transatlantic crossing but were usually loaded in the night before, out of the paying customers' sight. Must be last-minute arrivals.
Concerned officers looked down at Doyle from the quarterdeck; one consulted a watch. Two minutes to noon. Along with the corpses, it looked as though they would be the last passengers to board, save Ira Pinkus.
Or, with any luck, excluding him.
'I'm afraid there isn't time for me to see you on board,' said Larry.
'We'll say our good-byes, then. Here's this morning's correspondence,' said Doyle, handing him a generous packet of letters.
'Right sorry I'm not going with you.' Larry stared at his feet and looked as mournful as a bloodhound.
'No more than I, Larry,' said Doyle, banging him affectionately about the shoulders. 'Don't know how I'll manage without you, but someone needs to mind the home front. No one better than you, old boy.'
'Hate to think there'll come a moment you might need me and I won't be at hand, that's all.'
'I'm sure Innes will do a bang-up job in your stead.'
'Or die trying,' said Innes, with a crisp salute.
'We'll write every day. You do the same. These are for the children,' he said, handing over a bag of gifts and sweets.
'We'll miss you something terrible,' said Larry, lower lip trembling.
'Keep the missus away from the damp, now, there's a good fellow,' said Doyle, clutching Larry's arm, his voice husky with emotion. He turned away to hold back the tears. 'Here we go, Innes. Onward. Off to conquer America.'
The purser greeted them warmly as they boarded. The stalwart figure of Larry stood on the dock below, swinging his arm like a pendulum.
Behind him, a darting figure sprinted from customs for the gangway.
Ira Pinkus. Damn.
Doyle walked out onto the upper deck and took a deep breath of bracing salt air, alone for the first time since the tugs had led them from shore. A man of thirty-five, his six-foot-two-inch frame filled out by two hundred pounds of muscle well conditioned by a strict regimen of boxing and gymnasium work. His moustache thick, black, and well-groomed; his face more rounded now, ridged and shaped by experience; his eyes set with an authority justified by a worldly success his dress and manner suggested he had found more than agreeable. Doyle had about him the magnetic, unselfconscious aura of a man destined for great things, but he still considered himself first and foremost a family man and this long separation from his wife and three young children posed a trying deprivation.
The trimmings of fame did nothing to protect one from the plague of life's unhappy little surprises, as Doyle had quickly discovered, let alone the deeper discomforts of loneliness or emotional turmoil, while the daily maintenance of what seemed a prosperous life demanded such enormous expense of capital that the margin between income and outgo was shaved down to the same razor's edge that haunted every man's existence.
Not that Doyle expected sympathy for the trials of newfound affluence, however far short his actual worth fell from people's speculations—a jolly great distance indeed. No, he had made his bed and he was lying in it, eyes like dinner plates. He still didn't understand why the arrival of cash only momentarily preceded its abrupt departure— often for ridiculous objects put right to work collecting dust, neatly disappearing along an orderly line of retreat: closet, packing box, garage, garbage heap—but it did. And this from a native Scotsman, a man with thrift embedded in the fiber of his being, who had labored heroically throughout his life to avoid the unnecessary and extravagant.
No use fighting it: The migration of money must be respected as one of the fixed laws of nature. A man labors to earn enough to satisfy his basic biological needs—warmth, food, shelter, sex—then, in order to reward himself for his backbreaking work, carries right on spreading any surplus cash around for nonessential luxuries, until the basics are so thoroughly jeopardized it drives him back to start the damn business all over again. As trapped by our genetic destiny as salmon swimming upstream to die.
A week at sea: Good Christ, how he looked forward to it. To leave behind those grinding, commonplace headaches for a while. A fellow never realizes how responsibilities accumulate like stones in his pockets until he takes a swim. A week of his obligatory correspondence alone—sixty letters a day on average—would be enough to sink any ordinary man.
And what a tremendous vehicle for his escape, this grand steamship, an opulent juggernaut cutting through the swell, nearly immune to the vicissitudes of wind and weather; a refined, dignified experience in contrast to the cramped frigates and sloops he'd sailed during his tours as a young ship's doctor. Fifteen years ago now; those long months afloat felt like a dream he'd had a century ago.
He rested a foot up on the rail and watched England recede, telescoped his new spyglass and trained it on the promenade that hugged the Southampton shore below the harbor. Tourists parading on the boardwalk fronting the seaside resorts, taking the air. He pulled focus on the glass, saw the blankets in their laps, the black cloths stretched across the mouths of the consumptives in their rolling chairs....
A stab pierced his chest. Not three months ago, wheeling his wife, Louise, in one of those rollers along a walkway in Switzerland. Cold blue sky. Mountains looming overhead; how he'd resented the majestic indifference of those stolid rocks. Hated how the sanitarium staff treated Louise with their standardized, patronizing cheeriness ...
Finally, he'd grabbed one of them by the arm, a shovel-faced Austrian nurse, shook her, hard: You're talking to the disease! Talk to
Why did people turn away from suffering? The ravages of disease were cruel, hard to witness; how many times had he himself been guilty of retreating behind the mask of a doctor's authority, when what the person before him needed more than medicine was a steadying gaze that looked past their affliction to the heart, where a soul cried out for comfort. His anger at that nurse's indifference had been inspired, in equal part, by his own failings.
