"The Language of Bees" - читать интересную книгу автора (King Laurie R.)

5

THE DAY WAS ALREADY HOT WHEN WE SET OFF for the avocat's office the next morning, the city air close and unhealthy against us. The sling chafed at my neck; my light dress was soon damp, as was my hair beneath the summer hat. Things were no better inside the legal gentleman's office, where the stifling air was compounded by the man's unbounded energy. He put us in chairs and then strode up and down the carpet, gesticulating and thinking aloud in fluent if accented English until the heat he seemed to generate made me light-headed.

Fortunately, we had not much time before the train left. His secretary came in with his hat in her hand, and bundled us off into a taxicab to the station. Monsieur Cantelet talked the whole time, Holmes listening intently, ready to seize the scraps of information being tossed on the freshet of words.

Holmes had been following the case, albeit at a distance, for a week already, and his occasional phrase of explanation helped me piece together the central facts: Damian Adler had been arrested for the murder of a drugs seller; the man sold mostly morphine and hashish, and Damian was known to be one of his customers; the two men had an argument in a bar that ended in a fistfight, although there was some disagreement as to whether the fight had been over the man's wares or a girl. In any event, two days later, the man was found in an alleyway, unconscious and bleeding from a head wound. He died in hospital; the police asked questions; the answers led them to Damian.

The evidence against him included the presence of morphine and hashish in his room, signs of a fight on his face and hands, and the clear accusation of a witness.

M Cantelet ran through all this with a light-hearted enthusiasm, which seemed odd, if not inappropriate, until he began to tell us about the witness. “The gentleman's veracity has been questioned,” the lawyer said happily in his musical accent. Said witness, it seemed-one Jules Filot-was known to his more jocular intimates as an habitual snitch and manufacturer of evidence on demand, which explained his nickname: “Monsieur Faux.”

M Cantelet did not think that it would take a great effort to smash the case against Damian Adler. His private detective had spent the days since Mycroft's request for assistance had been received insinuating himself into the life of M Filot, and would make himself available to us at mid-day. In the mean-time, we were to be permitted an interview with the prisoner, at the gaol.

“By great good fortune, M Adler had the sense not to admit to the crime.”

“He says he's innocent?” Holmes asked.

“The young man neither admits nor denies, merely says he does not remember. Ideal, for my purposes.”

Ideal it might be, but less than wholly reassuring for us.

Ste Chapelle was a tiny village, which I had already determined that morning by the fact that it did not appear on any of the hotel's maps. The town gaol was down the street from the station and across from a tiny café. It was, in fact, the local gendarme's front room, little more than a small bedroom with bars across the windows and a square of glass set into its stout wooden door. The gendarme made note of our names in a record-book, unbolted the door, handed us a couple of stools, and left us alone.

I did not want to be there, but I did not know how to absent myself. I took a deep breath, and followed M Cantelet inside.

The young man, who stood with his shoulder touching the window-bars, looked startlingly like Holmes in a masterful disguise: thin to emaciation and pale as the walls, but with the same beak nose, the same long fingers, the same sense of wiry strength.

There, the similarity ended: Holmes' uncanny gift for tidiness was replaced by perspiration stains and the stench of old sweat; where Holmes was controlled even when excited, this younger version was vibrating with tension. His eyes darted about the room, his fingers plucked incessantly at shirt buttons and fraying cuffs. He was either nervy to the edge of a break-down, or still emerging from prolonged drug use.

The avocat, shifting to an equally energetic French, marched across the cell with his hand outstretched. The young man put out his hand, but his blank stare suggested a lack of comprehension. Surely he was fluent in French?

After a time his grey eyes wandered away from the voluble avocat to rest on me. It was a shock, because these were Holmes' eyes-same shape, same colour, same height above mine-but dull, with pain or confusion or even-hard to imagine-a lack of intelligence. I found myself searching for a glimpse of mind beneath the flat gaze, but there was no flash of wit, merely the weary perseverance of an animal in distress.

Then the hooded grey eyes came to Holmes. The head tilted in concentration, a gesture eerily like his father, and sense came into them. Curiosity, yes, but also animosity. I stepped aside, and suddenly he flushed. With colour came an unexpected beauty, the darkness of his lashes and the delicacy of his features making him for the first time utterly unlike Holmes.

The avocat filled the silence nicely. “Capitaine Adler, it is not often that a man is given the opportunity to say this, but may I present your father? Monsieur Holmes, your son, Capitaine Damian Adler.”

Neither man moved. The avocat cleared his throat. “Yes, well, I shall leave you two alone for a few minutes, while I speak with the gendarme about the case.”

I made haste to follow him out of the cell.

M Cantelet and I sat outside for a long time, waiting in the shade of a linden tree as village life went on before us. When Holmes emerged, he said nothing of what had transpired in that cell.

He never did.

We removed to a tiny hotel near the train station, where we were joined by M Cantelet's private investigator, M Clémence. The investigator was, it seemed, dressed for his undercover rôle, with flashy clothes, pencil-thin moustache, and oil-slicked hair parted in the centre, but he gave his evidence succinctly and showed no signs of the too-common shortcomings of the breed, which are an inflated self-confidence and an impatience with humdrum detail. I could feel Holmes relax a notch.

The man told us what he had done, gave a brief outline of where he intended to go from there, answered Holmes' questions, and listened calmly to Holmes' suggestions. At no point did he demonstrate scorn for the amateur, merely a workman-like and not unimaginative approach to figuring things out.

Holmes found little to object to, when the man had left us.

Which did not mean he intended to take his hand off the investigation. He might have put off his involvement in the case until now, but he had no intention of delaying it further. The avocat caught the post-luncheon train back to Paris, but we remained in Ste Chapelle to prepare our campaign: Holmes proposed to infiltrate the group in which the witness Filot-“Monsieur Faux”-moved, while I addressed myself to the more mundane aspects of property, relationship, and inheritance: the local records office, where my bad arm would not be a liability. We made a start that afternoon, going our separate ways until nightfall.

But in the end, our preparations came to naught. The next morning early there came a message from M Cantelet to say he was coming down, and requested us to meet his train. Holmes grumbled at the delay, but we were there when the train pulled in.

I had thought the avocat effervescent the day before, but it was nothing to the bounce in his step and the rush of his words today.

His private investigator had broken the case. In conversation with M Faux's lady friend late the night before, it had transpired that the man had in fact been elsewhere on the night in question. Filot could not have seen Damian Adler commit murder, because he was twenty miles away, roaring drunk, and did not arrive back in Ste Chapelle until the following afternoon.

This, of course, did not prove that Damian had not killed the drugs seller, but it did reduce the prosecutor's foundations to sand. M Cantelet anticipated a successful argument, and I think was mildly disappointed when we arrived at the gaol and found Damian Adler already free. He stood outside of the gaol with the scowling gendarme and a stumpy, round-cheeked woman of about forty, who was wearing a dress and hat far too à la mode for a village like this.

Damian's eyes would not meet ours. They wove their way along the doorway, up the vine shrouding the front of the house, along the street outside, while his fingers picked restlessly at his clothing. In the bright light, the bald tracing of scars could be seen beneath his short-cropped hair, and it suddenly came to me that this was not merely a drug-addled derelict, nor some nightmare version of Holmes, but a soldier who had given his health and his spirit in the service of France. He was lost, as so many of his-my-generation were. It was our responsibility to help him find himself again.

The woman watched us approach, and as M Cantelet launched into speech with the gendarme, she touched Damian's arm and spoke briefly in his ear before stepping forward to intercept Holmes.

“Pardon me,” she said in accented English, raising her voice against that of the avocat. “You are, I think, Damian's father?”

“The name is Holmes,” my companion replied. “This is my… assistant, Mary Russell.”

“I am Hélène Longchamps,” she said. “An old friend of Damian's. I own a gallery in Paris. Come, you will buy me a coffee and we will talk. Damian, you sit here, we will have the boy bring you a croissant.”

Mme Longchamps, it transpired, had known Damian Adler since before the War. She had sold a score of his paintings, for increasing amounts of money, and what was more, she had cared for him: bullied him into painting, fed him when he was hungry, gave him a bed and a studio in her country house. And threw him out whenever he showed signs of drug use.

“You understand,” she told Holmes, “he changed after the War. Oh, we all changed, of course, but I am told that a head injury such as his often has profound effects on a person's mind. From what I could see, more than the injury, it was the drugs. They take hold of a man's mind as well as his body-certainly they did so with Damian. And now it takes only a moment's weakness, a brief coup de tête or a dose of un-happiness or ennui or simply a party with the wrong people, and it swallows him anew. And when that happens I become hard. I refuse him help. I say, ‘You must go to your friends, if that is how you wish to live,’ and I withhold any monies from his sales, and I wait. We have done this three times in the thirteen months since he came out of hospital and became a civilian. And three times he has returned to my door, laboriously cleaned himself of drugs, and begun to paint again.”

“Why do you do this?” I had to agree with the suspicion in Holmes' voice: A well-dressed, older woman with a talented and beautiful young addict was not a comfortable picture.

But she laughed. “I am not after a pretty bed-warmer, sir. I knew his mother, before she died, and I knew Damian from when he was five or six years. I am the closest he has to an elder sister.”

“I see. Well, madame, I thank you warmly for assisting the boy. I should like-”

She cut him off. “If you want to help the boy, you will leave him here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“M 'Olmes, I imagine you will propose to take Damian back to l'Angleterre, n'est çe pas?”

“I should think it would not be altogether a bad idea to remove him from the source of his temptations,” Holmes said stiffly.

“But yes, it would be a bad idea, the worst of ideas. The boy must find his own way. I know him. You do not. You must believe me when I tell you that attempting to shape a future for him will guarantee failure. You will kill him.”

She leant forward over the tiny table, quivering with the intensity of her belief. The effect was that of a small tabby facing down a greyhound, and it might have been laughable but for those last four words.

Holmes studied her. Even the avocat across the way fell silent, turning to see what both the gendarme and Damian were watching so intently.

Mme Longchamps sat, as implacable as any mother.

Holmes looked over at his son, and then he nodded. Mme Longchamps closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at me and gave me an almost shy smile in which relief was foremost.

Holmes walked back across the road to where his son sat. “Mme Longchamps suggests that I return to England and let you get on with it. Is this what you wish?”

Damian did not actually answer, not in words, but the look he gave the woman-grateful, apologetic, and determined-was a speech in itself. Holmes reached into his breast pocket and sorted out a card.

“When you feel like getting into contact, that is where to reach me,” he said. “If I happen to be away, the address on the reverse is that of your uncle. He will always know where I am.”

Damian put the card into his coat pocket without looking at it; something about the gesture said that he might as easily have dropped it on the ground. Holmes put out his hand, and said, with an attempt at warmth, “I am… gratified to have made your acquaintance. The revelations of this past week have been among the most extraordinary in an already full life. I look forward to renewing our conversation.”

Damian stood and walked over to Mme Longchamps. Holmes' face was expressionless as his hand slowly fell, but Mme Longchamps would not have it. She put her hands on the boy's shoulders and forced him around.

“Say au revoir to your father,” she ordered.

He looked at Holmes with an expression of hopelessness and regret, a look such as a ship-wrecked man might wear when, seeing that help would not arrive, he chose to let go of his spar. I was only nineteen and was well supplied with problems of my own, but that look on his face twisted my heart. “Adieu,” Damian said.

“I am very sorry,” Holmes told him. “That your mother never told me of your existence.”

Damian lifted his head and for the first time, the grey eyes came to life, haughty and furious as a bird of prey. “You should have known.”

“Yes,” answered Holmes. “I should have known.”

He waited. For weeks. I went back to my studies, but whenever I came down from Oxford, I saw how closely Holmes watched the post, how any knock at the door brought his head sharply around.

In the end, it was Mme Longchamps who wrote, in early December, to say that she was desolated to tell him, but Damian had gone back to his ways, and that no-one had seen him for some weeks. She assured Holmes that Damian would find her waiting when he grew fatigued of the drugs, and that she would then urge him to write to his father.

It was the only letter Holmes had, from either of them. In March, when she had not replied to two letters, he began to make enquiries as to her whereabouts.

He found her in the Père Lachaise cemetery, a victim of the terrible influenza that followed on the Great War's heels.

M Cantelet's investigator was immediately dispatched to Ste Chapelle, but Damian was gone. Cantelet and others searched all of France, but the trail was cold: No gallery, no artist, no member of the Bohemian underworld had heard news of Damian Adler since January. Even Mycroft failed to locate his nephew.

Holmes' lovely, lost son vanished as abruptly as he had appeared.

Until one summer evening in August 1924, when he stood in the middle of our stone terrace and said hello to his father.