Short Stories

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But you’re going to have to let me have the passport. When you’re done with it, I mean. Because it’s probably phony, too.”

“What’s going on here?”

“Where do you live?”

“Hammersmith,” he said.

“Does Hammersmith have a library?”

“Probably.”

“Go borrow a book. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The second story. It’s called ‘The Red-Headed League.’ Read it tonight, and I’ll come see you in the morning.”

Visiting Scotland Yard is always a pleasure. It’s a slice of history. It’s a slice of the future, too. Scotland Yard is a very modern place these days. Plenty of information technology. Plenty of people using it.

I found Rose in his office, which was nothing more than open space defended by furniture. Like a kid’s fort. He said, “I got the book but I haven’t read it yet. I’m going to read it now.”

He pointed to a fat paperback volume on the desk. So to give him time I took Ezekiah Hopkins’s passport back to the embassy and had it tested. It was a fake, but very good, except for some blunders so obvious they had to be deliberate. Like taunts, or provocations. I got back to Scotland Yard and Rose said, “I read the story.”

“And?”

“All those names were in it. Ezekiah Hopkins, and Ross, and Spaulding. And Lebanon, Pennsylvania, too. And Sherlock Holmes said the same Latin you did. He was an educated man, apparently.”

“And what was the story about?”

“Decoy,” Rose said. “A ruse was developed whereby a certain Mr. Wilson was regularly decoyed away from his legitimate place of business for a predictable period of time, so that an ongoing illegal task of some sensitivity could be accomplished in his absence.”

“Very good,” I said. “And what does the story tell us?”

“Nothing,” Rose said. “Nothing at all. No one was decoying me away from my legitimate place of business. That was my legitimate place of business. I go wherever dead people go.”

“And?”

“And if they were trying to decoy me away, they wouldn’t leave clues beforehand, would they? They wouldn’t spell it out for me in advance. I mean, what would be the point of that?”

“There might be a point,” I said.

“What kind?”

I asked, “If this was just some foreigner stabbed to death on Baker Street, what would you do next?”

“Not very much, to be honest.”

“Exactly. Just one of those things. But now what are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to find out who’s yanking my chain. First step, I’m going back on scene to make sure we didn’t miss any other clues.”

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Latin.”

“For what?”

“They’re decoying you out. They’ve succeeded in what they set out to do.”

“Decoying me out from what? I don’t do anything important in the office.”

He insisted on going. We headed back to Baker Street. The tents were still there. The tape was still fluttering. We found no more clues. So we studied the context instead, physically, looking for the kind of serious crimes that could occur if law enforcement was distracted. We didn’t find anything. That part of Baker Street had the official Sherlock Holmes museum, and the waxworks, and a bunch of stores of no real consequence, and a few banks, but the banks were all bust anyway. Blowing one up would be doing it a considerable favor.

Then Rose wanted a book that explained the various Sherlock Holmes references in greater detail, so I took him to the British Library in Bloomsbury. He spent an hour with an annotated compendium. He got sidetracked by the geographic errors Conan Doyle had made. He started to think the story he had read could be approached obliquely, as if it were written in code.

Altogether we spent the rest of the week on it. The Wednesday, the Thursday, and the Friday. Easily thirty hours. We got nowhere. We made no progress. But nothing happened. None of Rose’s other cases unraveled, and London’s crime did not spike. There were no consequences. None at all.

So as the weeks passed both Rose and I forgot all about the matter. And Rose never thought about it again, as far as I know. I did, of course. Because three months later it became clear that it was I who had been decoyed. My interest had been piqued, and I had spent thirty hours doing fun Anglophile things. They knew that would happen, naturally. They had planned well. They knew I would be called out to the dead American, and they knew how to stage the kinds of things that would set me off like the Energizer Bunny. Three days. Thirty hours. Out of the building, unable to offer help with the rubber-stamping, not there to notice them paying for their kids’ college educations by rubber-stamping visas that should have been rejected instantly. Which is how four particular individuals made it to the States, and which is why three hundred people died in Denver, and which is why I— unable, in the cold light of day, to prove my naive innocence—sit alone in Leavenworth in Kansas, where by chance one of the few books the prison allows is The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.