The Six Messiahs Read online

  "Still plenty of time," said Innes calmly.

  "Only thing is," said Larry, "with my having to raise my voice above the ruckus for the drivers to hear me I'm afraid word leaked out about your arrival—"

  "There he is!"

  And with that cry, a crowd of fifty, many with Strand magazines in hand, closed in on Doyle as he cleared the doors, an impenetrable clamoring mob between them and their cab— driver Roger standing atop, waving his arms frantically— while in the distance, the tantalizing stacks of the Elbe, their ever-so-much-closer-to-departure destination.

  "Game, set, and match," said Doyle to Innes, before putting on his public face and wading forward to meet the onslaught, pen at the ready, with a friendly word for every comer and a determination to courteously satisfy every one of their requests, as swiftly as humanly possible.

  Between signatures inscribed, greetings exchanged, anecdotes endured ("I've got an uncle in Brighton who's a bit of a detective himself...."), and offered amateur manuscripts kindly but firmly refused, half an hour flew by. A ten-minute carriage ride to the docks passed without incident, filled by their driver's monologue about his astonishing good fortune, variations on the theme: "Wait'll me missus hears about this."

  Upon arrival at the customhouse, they jumped so smoothly over every hedge of the bureaucratic steeplechase involved in departing mother country that Doyle felt a twinge of disappointment: He had worked up a terrific head of steam for annihilating the first bureaucrat who tried to obstruct them but he had had no occasion to use it.

  Something was wrong; this was too easy.

  There Doyle stood, clerk before him—papers in one hand, stamp in the other—one fence away from the finish and the ship's departure still five minutes off, when out of the corner of his eye Doyle spotted and, with the unerring instincts of hunted prey, instantly recognized the lone journalist lying in wait for him, poised like a jungle cat.

  "Mr. Conan Doyle!"

  The man pounced; pad in hand, rumpled suit, mangled cigar stump, panama hat, and the bounce and confidence of a terrier on a scent. He was a newshound, all right; an American, the most dangerous of the breed.

  Doyle glanced quickly around: Damn, Larry and Innes preoccupied with the bags. Penned in by the queue; nowhere to run.

  "Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle!"

  "You have my attention, sir," said Doyle, turning to face him.

  "Fantastic! Off to the States today—your first visit! Any thoughts?"

  "Far too many to mention."

  "Sure! Why not? Looking forward to it? Have to be! They're gonna love you in New York—great city—huge! You can't believe it; straight up!" He gestured emphatically toward the sky with both hands. "Look at it go!"

  The man was insane, realized Doyle. Completely off his squash. Smile, Doyle; always humor a lunatic.

  "So! Big plans, huh? Reading tour, fifteen cities. How 'bout that? If you aren't the second coming of old Charley Dickens!"

  "One cannot aspire to follow in the immortal footsteps of Boz with anything but the deepest humility."

  The reporter's eyes glazed over, but total incomprehension seemed his natural state and troubled him not in the least.

  "Sensational!"

  "If you'll excuse me, I must be getting on board...."

  "Which one do you like the best?"

  "Which one what?"

  "Holmes story; got a favorite?"

  "I don't know, perhaps the one about the snake—sorry, for the life of me I can't remember the name of it...."

  The man snapped his fingers and pointed at him: " 'The Speckled Band'; fantastic stuff!"

  "I don't suppose you've read any of my ... other books."

  "What other books?"

  "Right. Sorry, I really must be going...."

  "Okay, now tell the truth, what do you hope to find in America?"

  "My hotel room and a small measure of privacy."

  "Haw! Fat chance. You're big news, Mr. Doyle: Sherlock mania. It's like a fever, friend. Get used to it. They'll be lining up to take shots at you."

  "Shots?"

  "Everybody and his brother wants to know, see: Who is this guy? What makes him tick? And what kind of a 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 this ship?" Oh, no; too late to change plans.

  "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. New York Herald. Think about it, will you?"

  "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."

  "Bon voyage, sir," said Larry, waving enthusiastically even though they were only a few feet up the gangway. "Bon voyage."

  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.r />
  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 toher, there's a person in this chair! Louise embarrassed, the woman backing away, pale hands fluttering. He hated them all! They didn't know his wife, made no attempt to engage her, not a moment's appreciation for what she'd already endured, this gallant, brave, good-hearted woman.

  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. None greater than his inability to save his wife from a wasting disease for which there was no cure, that carried her farther and farther away from him by imperceptible degrees. How long now since they had truly been man and wife? Three months? Four?

  The shipyards of the Portsmouth Naval Base came into view to the southeast. Lord; so many lazy afternoons passed there during his medical apprenticeship, gazing down from his office window to watch the gunboats maneuver in the harbor. When you treat one patient in six months there's not much else to do but sit and watch the gunboats. Nearly ten years since he'd moved there after that business with the Seven. Was it possible?

  A flood of memories released: little Innes—only twelve then—working that summer as his hallboy; fresh-faced in his stiff blue suit, eagerly waiting to greet the clients who never arrived. Warm morning sunlight inching lazily across the kitchen wall of their Southsea cottage. The sharp tang of the kerosene lamp on his red maple desk where he sat up nights, writing, writing endlessly, dreaming of the new life his work might bring them. The tiny bedroom where their firstborn, Mary, was conceived and came into the world. Laughing as he carried Louise over that threshold, their marriage just beginning in a bubble of youthful ignorance, sentiment, and blind faith.

  The horizon went blurry, his eyes misting over—mustn't think of her now, come on, old boy, put some backbone in it.

  Passengers filled the decks below him. Excited chatter. Ship seemed at capacity. Germans mostly. Well-heeled. Only two dozen English had come on at Southampton. The Elbe, out of Bremen, a German steamer; the Nordeutscher Lloyd line, an entirely new breed of ship. Nine thousand tons. Twin screws; with a top speed of seventeen knots she cut a fast line through the hard gray chop of the Channel. First-class accommodations for 275, only 50 second-class cabins. An impeccable, disciplined crew. German lines nearly monopolized the North American commercial routes; one expected a high standard of professionalism from the German people: They were a nation on the march....

  On a lower deck he caught a glimpse of Innes. Someone pressing in on him, handing him a card, hard to see the man from this angle—good Christ, it looked like Ira Pinkus.

  "Heading home or taking leave of it?"

  Doyle turned sharply; he thought he'd been alone at the rail. The man stood ten feet away, big-bellied, ruddy-faced. A receding halo of grizzled red hair. Graying muttonchop whiskers. Looked fifty. A lilt of Irish in the voice.

  "Leaving," said Doyle.

  "Sorrowful partings often precede long journeys," the man said.

  Doyle nodded a polite agreement. Yes, Irish. The man shifted slightly, still facing out to sea, and Doyle saw the priest's collar, thick boots, the black beads and crucifix protruding from his pocket. Damn, the last thing he wanted to hear now was some empty, unsolicited homily from a Roman—

  "Sometimes the pleasure of sadness is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself," said the priest. "Something new has entered us. We're able to look at the unknown without prejudice or preconception. Welcome it as an opportunity. And we may find in ourselves an undiscovered territory, a place closer to the heart of the terrible mystery of who we really are."

  The man's warm tone struck a deep note of authenticity. This wasn't the usual pious blather; real sympathy weighed in behind his words and moved Doyle in spite of his resistance. He found it difficult to respond; how could this priest know so precisely what he was going through? Were his feelings so transparent? The man kept his eyes toward the shore, respecting the borders of Doyle's privacy.

  "Sometimes we leave the best of o
urselves behind," said Doyle.

  "Journeys may have a purpose unimagined at departure," said the priest. "They can save a life. Sometimes they can even save a soul."

  Doyle allowed the words to slip in and soothe him; his inner voice went quiet. The lazy rhythms of the Channel captured his eye and a peaceful stillness descended over him.

  A fracture of sunlight danced off the water and broke his reverie. He wasn't certain how long he'd been standing since they'd spoken; the shoreline had changed. Open countryside now, rolling hills. Ocean beckoning ahead. He looked over.

  The priest was gone.

  One deck below where Doyle stood alone, a tall, handsome, smartly dressed man, blond and big-shouldered, walked out of a stairwell leading down to the Elbe's cargo hold. He slipped smoothly into the crowd, speaking casually to people around him in flawless German that bore the clean, clipped aristocratic accent particular to natives of Hamburg. Having effortlessly made himself seem a part of their group without leaving any particularly vivid impressions, his strong features coiled in a mask of perpetual amusement, the man ordered a drink, lit a cigarette, and leaned against a column, studying his fellow passengers.

  Intent on the receding shoreline, not one of these self-satisfied burghers had noticed him arrive from belowdecks, the man decided. That was good. No one had seen him in the hold, either. And so far no ship's officer had paid him so much as a passing glance.

  Landfall faded from sight; he scanned the passengers carefully as they drifted from the rails. Many moved inside to the bar, turning their attentions to the empty-headed fun they all seemed determined to enjoy on board an Atlantic crossing.

  There they were: the two young men—distinctly less well dressed than these vacationing bourgeoisie—in the corner near the lifeboats. The stink of merchants about them, talking in that earnest conspiratorial way he had seen so often while observing them in London; two Jews making an effort to assimilate, but he knew better.

  Had they realized they were being watched? Not now. But something had scared them off, alerted the two men in London to make them book this passage so quickly. Assembling his team and following them here on such short notice had not been easy: He had managed.