Chinaman approached me and offered me so little for the tablets, I felt my whole life was for nothing. I was a puppet with no one on the strings. I sold him the tablets, and then . . . and then. . . .'
The voice dwindled away. The seated man's head slowly turned back so that his unseeing eyes were fastened on the blank wall again. Heinrich Hublein had retraced his steps back to the kingdom of forgetfulness, of silence, of nothingness.
Holmes's eyes encountered mine. There was a resigned expression in them, as though he realized that he had no more bait to tempt the vanishing personality back into the world of reality.
He signaled to Hammer, who opened the cell door. Hublein was not conscious of our departure.
An aura of sadness enveloped me when we left the poor, misguided, unbalanced man, but it vaporized in the heat of excitement liberally spiced by wonderment.
'Holmes, how did you ever deduce that Hublein was the perpetrator of five crimes? And that he created the character of a spurious cleaning woman?'
There was a thin smile on Holmes's aquiline features that I recognized as an indication that he was pleased with himself.
'When von Shalloway described the robberies in his office, did not something strike you?'
I cast my mind back in a determined effort to locate the telltale that had allowed Holmes to cut the Gordian knot, but in my heart of hearts sensed that it would elude me.
'Each crime bore the trademark of one criminal who had a cast-iron alibi.'
'The alibis were happenstance. Think, Watson! The Morenstrasse robbery involved the flat of a fence. In Bremen, the jewels were stolen from a suspected smuggler. It immediately occurred to me that someone was using the Meldwesen files not only to copy the methods of certain criminals but to select the victims as well. Who, besides the officials, would have access to the files? Someone invisible.'
'Oh, come now, Holmes!'
'Patience, old chap. Mailmen have a certain invisibility. We see them on their appointed rounds with such regularity that after a while we cease to see them. A cleaning woman falls in the same category. And we had Hublein, a female impersonator. The Germans file and list everything, so I was able to learn that one of the nighttime cleaning force, a certain Frau Mueller, failed to show up for work the day that Hublein surrendered himself to the police. She has not been located to this day.'
'Until the elusive Frau Mueller was unmasked by Sherlock Holmes,' I stated proudly. 'Your discoveries will certainly delight von Shalloway, but how do they affect us?'
'Hublein mentioned a Chinaman who purchased the tablets from him at bargain rates.'
'Chu San Fu?'
Holmes shook his head. 'An agent of his, no doubt. This was four years ago, and Chu was still in the role of the collector. I suspect he secured the tablets because they were too good a bargain to miss. Since then something has happened that has made them precious to him.'
We were almost back at von Shalloway's office when another thought struck me.
'Hublein mentioned white gold. What is that, Holmes?'
'Pure gold is twenty-four carats. In modern times, most gold is mixed with an alloy to provide rigidity. The most common, fourteen-carat, has a large percentage of brass. Pink gold uses copper. White gold can be produced in two ways: with nickel, which is inexpensive; or with platinum, which is rarer and more valuable than gold itself. The sacred tablets used platinum as an alloy, not for the sake of rigidity, it being as malleable as gold, but for ostentation.'
'No receiver would touch the tablets because of the platinum content?'
'I think they misled Hublein there. The man was not a trained criminal but merely a mimic. A fence could have had the tablets melted down and then separated the gold and platinum. I think the robbery was just a little too hot, and it scared them off.'
Not long thereafter we returned to the Bristol Kempinski, leaving a delighted von Shalloway in Alexanderplatz. The police chief with his unresolved cases solved and the matter of Hublein cleared up as well was much inclined towards hosting a victory dinner, but Holmes begged off, I regret to say. He stated that duties beckoned, and von Shalloway was too acute to inquire as to their nature.
Back at the hotel, Holmes indulged in one of his disappearing acts. I suspect that he beat a hasty path to the British Embassy and made use of the diplomatic wire to contact his brother in London. What other messages he may have sent or received I do not know. On his return we packed, which was not time consuming since we were traveling light.
Now Holmes was intent on reaching Egypt. I mentioned, somewhat snidely perhaps, that I hoped the freighter carrying the relic stolen from the Spaulding mansion had not altered its plan of sailing and beaten us to Alexandria. Holmes, as usual, had an answer.
'The Hishouri Kamu was missing two stokers just before they weighed anchor, Watson. They were forced to sign on two new crew members: Burlington Bertie and Tiny. The freighter is on schedule and will not reach Egypt for some days.'
So, Holmes, had planted his men on the cargo ship to keep an eye open. I had thought him somewhat casual about the Sacred Sword to which he attached so much importance.
I suggested that we augment our limited wardrobe at one of the fashionable Berlin shops, but there was no time for that. Holmes booked us by rail to Constanza, Romania. The train trip was dull, but there was a surprise when we arrived at the port on the Black Sea. A carriage took us to the waterfront, where we boarded a destroyer of Her Majesty's Navy, a means of transportation provided without a doubt by Mycroft Holmes. Wasting no time, the needle-thin craft traversed the Black Sea to the Dardanelles, and soon we were pitching and tossing in the Mediterranean.
I shall draw the curtain of charity over this trip. Suffice to say that I was pale, wan, and frightfully sick throughout. Holmes did his best, I must say, staying with me in the little cabin in the officers' quarters that we shared. In an effort to distract me from my misery, he did speak in unusual detail about the matter that we were involved in, opening up a new line of thought completely.
'You know, good fellow, ancient Egypt was a literate society completely capable of leaving a clear history, and after Champollion deciphered the Rosetta stone, it was reasonable to expect answers to age-old mysteries. But such was not the case.'
'You feel the golden tablets might unlock hidden doors?' I asked, and then made myself available of the tin basin that Holmes had in readiness.
'Or I may be in fear of it. We are very vague on how they built the pyramids, you know, and have no idea of why they are aligned with the four compass points. Or why the Sphinx and the Colossi of Memmon both face east, parallel, by the way, with the axis of the great Amon-Ra temple at Karnak.'
'Simple, Holmes,' I sputtered, wiping my face and mouth with a wet towel. 'The rising sun. They did worship the sun along with other deities.'
'I'll accept that,' he said. 'But consider that other ancient structures, seemingly impossible to build in a non- mechanical age, are also lined up to risings and settings of the sun and moon. I refer to Stonehenge and the Mayan temples in Yucatan, to name but two.'
'Good heavens, do you suspect some cosmic significance, some secret power?' I never got an answer to that, for I became deathly sick again and lost all interest in the subject.
Chapter Thirteen
Back Alleys of Cairo
'Of course,' said Colonel Gray, 'all of the seven wonders of the ancient world were constructed B.C., for the Greeks listed them in the second century before Christ. All gone now save the oldest and the largest.' His right hand, which had been fanning him with his hat, gestured westward towards the Nile. 'The pyramids of Giza remain as the sole survivors. Built two thousand years before Nebuchadnezzar conceived the hanging gardens. Infinitely old when the bronze fragments of the toppled Colossus of Rhodes were carted away by a junk dealer.'
The skin on the colonel's hands and arms was ebony dark, but his face was the color of new brick. He took a sip of gin and lime and continued in his drawling, somewhat bored, voice.
'And, Doctor, when we are gone and when England is gone, they'll still be there. I'll take you to see them
