"I thought we were beyond courtesies, Mr. Norton," she pointed out in cold, silken tones.

"You will see how far beyond courtesy I am if you force me to it. Stop this inquiry now, while you can."

"And is that the mark of your profession-threats?"

"If you threaten me and mine, you shall be answered in kind."

The boots rushed to the door, which screamed open on its hinges, then banged shut on the man's exit. Boots thumped down the stairs until they dwindled into only the patter of rain on our roof. I launched myself at the bowed window, leaning over the daybed to press my nose against the rain-stained pane of gla.s.s.

A hansom waited below, its shiny black paint greasy under the gathering raindrops. A figure in a plush velvet top hat burst from our building, pausing only to turn and stare up at our window. I flattened myself out of sight against the wall, but not before he spied me, I fear.

When I peered out again, the man was bounding spryly inside the cab. Mr. Norton must have been in a tearing rage indeed to have taken so fine a hat out into the rain.

The reins danced on the horse's slick flanks and then the hansom was rattling away. Something crackled like distant thunder beside me-Irene's taffeta gown crushing as she crowded into the bay beside me.

She leaned her hot cheek on the icy gla.s.s as the hansom disappeared. I had never seen her so agitated, whether from rage or triumph it was difficult to tell.

"What an insufferable, odious man, Nell! But he told me the one thing he would never have wished me to know"

"What is that?"

"That there is something to Mr. Tiffany's Zone of Diamonds story. If I don't get to the bottom of it in Mr. Tiffany's employ I shall pursue it on my own. 'My sort,' indeed! Mr. Norton has no idea what my sort is if he thinks to discourage Irene Adler so cheaply."

Chapter Eight.

IN DUTCH WITH DIAMONDS.

The violin reclined on the velvet half-sh.e.l.l of its open case. The pipe lay careened in a vacant gravy boat. Scattered Daily Telegraph pages erected tents around the chamber, like an occupying army.

Finding the Baker Street rooms in such disarray stirred my suspicions. I opened drawers and moved papers in search of the telltale syringe, but found no trace of my friend Sherlock Holmes's usual retreat to a seven percent solution in the face of ennui or idleness.

I had settled down to reading the newspaper I had rea.s.sembled when the door opened and an odor of onions and charcoal invaded the air.

A figure occupied the threshold, a stooped, white-bearded prophetic figure whose eyes were sunken in tubercular circles of garnet-shaded skin.

"I say, sir," I began indignantly at this unheralded intrusion. The apparition rambled toward me, its rusty black garb rustling. I thought momentarily of Poe's grim raven, then caught a sudden sly glimmer about the eyes.

"Holmes? Where on earth have you been now?"

My friend's laughter pealed from the stranger's lips as he straightened, doffed his shapeless black hat and collapsed on a chair.

"Whitechapel, my dear Watson. It's clear that my little disguises no longer deceive you. Luckily, they do better among the subjects of my inquiries."

"Whitechapel! What can draw you to such a slum?"

"Diamonds, my friend, a trail of gemstones long enough to gird a queen."

"You have discovered the Tiffany diamonds? Where?"

"Oho, Watson, already you deem them found and in our client's possession. I fear the case will not end so neatly. Yet I have traced them from Paris to London, and they have not reappeared on the market, so their first purchaser has them still."

"You know who has them?"

"Of course, Watson. It was a simple matter."

"That answers Mr. Tiffany's quest, then."

"Not quite, Watson, and that is where the greater mystery begins. The apparent owner vanished five years ago. Utterly. And with him, the diamonds."

"Perhaps you could report the events in sequence," I suggested, "instead of getting a fellow's expectations up only to dash them down again."

"Still hoping for grist for another tale, eh? This will be an unfinished symphony of yours, I venture to predict. You wonder at my garb; it explains itself if I tell you that there are no persons more expert in the disposition of fine stones than the Jewish diamond merchants of Holland."

"Now I recognize your role-an aged rabbi."

"An aged, learned rabbi, Watson. In such guise I can go among the merchants and glean rare nuggets of information. Who would believe that the narrow, rat-and-river-fog-ridden byways of Whitechapel would hold dealers in peerless gems as well as rag pickers, strumpets and thieves? The world's Christian nations did themselves a great disservice centuries ago when they forbade Jews all trades but the managing of money. As Rothschild and Disraeli demonstrate in our century, greatness will not be denied no matter the creed."

"But only the most impoverished Jews live in Whitechapel, Holmes. What can you learn from so low a layer of society?"

"The movements of the Zone of Diamonds, Watson, if an inanimate object can be said to progress." Holmes began peeling the spirit gum from his hollow cheeks, tearing away the patriarch's beard as if it were a soap wrapper.

"And?"

"All business today, eh, Watson? No time for social digressions. And you accuse me of indifference to the major political issues of our time? The facts are these. The Zone's timetable is as well ordered as the Great Western Railway.

"We know that the Zone vanished in 1848 when the Parisian mob overthrew Louis Philippe and managed to make off with some rarities from the royal vaults, as even the most righteously maddened mobs generally do. The first individual known to possess the Zone was Jean Claude Renard, a foxy fellow in more than name only, who brought it immediately to London. Here he found a Dutch diamond dealer, Zellerstein, who recognized that the Zone was as much a liability as a treasure in its present form.

"Renard insisted that Zellerstein find an immediate buyer, no matter how much such haste lowered the price." Holmes interrupted his narrative to nod my way. "Hand me my pipe, will you, Watson? A day spent stooping requires a relaxing ritual."

I fretted while Holmes primed the pipe to his satisfaction and lit it. When smoke was haloing his half-altered features he resumed the tale.

"This was a bit of luck for my inquiries. Had Renard broken the belt into separate stones, it would be as lost to history as chicken feed in a henyard. However, enough of the patriot was left in Renard that he disliked destroying such a spectacular jewel of French manufacture; he insisted the piece be sold whole, which complicated Zellerstein's mission and extenuated it. The younger Zellerstein-my informant, by the way-was but a child when this transpired, as were we all, but he well recalls seeing the Zone. 'A string of rainbows,' his young imagination named it.

"At any rate, Zellerstein let the Zone's availability be known amongst those of the n.o.bility and certain wealthy tradesmen who would not stick at an object's provenance. By 1849, it was rumored to be everywhere, like the Scarlet Pimpernel. The notable would-be owners include Alfred Krupp, Alexander II of Russia, our own late Prince Albert, Jenny Lind and Sir Walter Scott. Among them was an odd pretender to the diamonds: one John Chappie Norton, known as 'Black Jack' Norton. Not a pretty piece of work, Watson, a scavenger on the rim of polite society. He had married beyond his expectations: one of Sheridan the playwright's granddaughters. She had left him, for reasons no one knows-"

"Left him? Only actresses and adventuresses live apart from their husbands, even nowadays. Back in the fifties it must have caused a roaring scandal."

"Oh, it was quietly done, Watson. She was a woman of artistic breeding. And she took three young sons with her."

"Then the man must have been a monster!"

Holmes shrugged. Domestic irregularities only concerned him when they were pertinent to a case.

"Whatever the man was, he soon became mad to possess the Zone of Diamonds. I suspect a mistress; unprincipled women and illegally obtained jewels often go together, along with greedy men. Black Jack was cunning rather than clever. He had no means, but his wife's connections from her grandfather had sustained her to the point that she had become a successful writer of romantic novels."

I must have frowned my puzzlement, for Holmes gave a quick aside. "No, you wouldn't know the t.i.tles; with authors, one decade's favorite is shortly a later decade's obscurity. Suffice it to say that Mrs. Norton was soon earning a tidy sum to support her boys and a separate household. So Black Jack sued her for it."

"He went to court and demanded her money?"

"She was his wife still. All that she had was his. So the court ruled, at any rate."

"Outrageous! And the blackguard then used the money to buy the Zone?"

"Why outrageous, Watson? Only 'actresses and adventuresses live apart from their husbands,' as you point out. The court concurred."

"Yes, but in this instance... And the three sons, what became of them?"

"They vanished into the history of the ordinary, as did their mother. She died in the seventies in the same shabby poverty she had once shared with Black Jack, her novels out of fashion and all her profits out of pocket."

"And what of Norton?"

"Hmm." Holmes drew deeply on the pipe, then let the smoke puff out in staccato punctuation between his words. "A good question. Norton went about a bit in society afterwards, very smug, as if the possession-although clandestine-of the Zone had elevated his self-regard. He gambled, raced, entered into numerous shabby schemes and enjoyed the meager fruits of his wife's labors, even after her death, for copyrights do not expire with the author."

"Shockingly sordid, Holmes. It fairly makes my blood boil to think of that bounder getting away with it-with the aid of the law in fact!"

"I will make a suffragist of you yet, Watson," Holmes said sardonically, a grim smile playing about his lips. "But the law's injustice is not our concern."

Silence held while I contemplated the news. I confess that during Holmes's recital my mind had been forming a story that played very dramatically in my imagination: the wronged woman, forced to remove herself and her children from the home of that miserable man; her unexpected literary success turned to wormwood when the cad took her hard-won earnings. Her poverty-stricken death and then... justice in the person of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes catching up with the criminal after all these years and presenting him and the lost Zone of Diamonds to a wondering world... It was not to be, I could read in my detective friend's tone of finality. No one knew better than Holmes when a cause was lost.

I sometimes feared that I had for a friend not a man, but a brain without a heart, as lacking in fellow-feeling as he was preeminent in deduction. His aversion to women was but a symptom of a deeper alienation, it struck me. He had never even spoken of relations. I began to suspect that Holmes-of all beings on this earth-was the sole exception to John Donne's poetic a.s.sertion that "no man is an island."

"To make a sorry story short," Holmes resumed at last, "Norton little troubled the world in a significant sense until five years ago- when he vanished. Utterly. The house in Brompton was sold, the proceeds handled by a lawyer, now dead. His old friends in dissolution never saw him further. The Zone never surfaced. He was in his seventies by then, but no headstone in London or its surrounds marks his resting place. It is as if he had been plucked from the earth by the scruff of his neck, along with the Queen's diamonds. And so I shall have to tell Mr. Tiffany."

And therefore I must set aside forever my naive hopes of injecting a tincture of romance into the ascetic formula of my friend's life. It should have been obvious to me by now that-however much Holmes might astound myself and others in the areas of logic and crime-in the personal arena no surprises were in store from a man who lived his life as a machine, without intimate connection or emotional needs.

"Cheer up, Watson! You know that I find blood-hounding for gems tediously unrewarding. I warned our client that I would likely uncover villainy but not the diamonds. Such unholy stones often bury themselves in history's missing pages, as if tainted beyond our ability to redeem them. I myself am relieved to wash my hands of the matter. When our eminent American, Mr. Tiffany, arrives at four, as arranged, I will tell him so."

"Still, it would have been a coup."

"Greater coups await. It is a fine summer evening. I propose a stroll at six or thereabouts to the Diogenes Club, which is the queerest place in London, where we are sure to find my brother Mycroft and an interesting problem or two."

"Brother? Diogenes Club? I have heard of neither. How is that possible? Holmes...?"

Chapter Nine.

UNWANTED GIFTS.

"It is hideous! Misshapen. Ghastly."

"Unusual," Irene admitted, pressing the object in question to her shoulder and studying the effect in the mirror.

It was a large brooch of enamel and opals formed into a sort of starfish-squid with writhing pearl-studded tentacles.

"This is a grateful parting gift from Mr. Tiffany?" I marveled. "I shudder to think what he would give one if he felt ungrateful."

"His son, Louis, designed it," Irene informed me.

"I see. The father's blind eye overlooks the son's lack of talent."

"Not so blind." Irene jabbed the pin through her jacket lapel, having decided to wear the monstrosity. She turned with a thin, cynical smile. "Tiffany's in New York stocks all such creations of Louis Comfort Tiffany, but they do not sell, not even with the salesmen given a special ten percent commission for peddling them. So the elder Tiffany kills two birds with one opal by giving me this."

"Still, he didn't have to do more than pay you. He must be grateful."

Irene sighed. "I regret that I had nothing concrete to tell him."

"Mr. Tiffany himself said that better men than you had failed."

She laughed. "Yes. I would suspect him of a sense of humor except that he speaks in the universal male so unthinkingly he never noticed the incongruity. He hinted that even Sherlock Holmes had attempted to trace the Zone."

"Holmes? The name is familiar."

"So it should be; you've read it in the papers. The consulting detective, remember? The one who a.s.sisted in the capture of poor Mr. Hope."

"Ah, yes. Well, the case is closed now and you can forget about diamond girdles and concentrate on your career."

"As you must concentrate on yours, dear Nell," Irene said with a charming smile. "I fear that my little investigative matters have distracted you from the great business of typewriting."

"Not in the least. I have an a.s.signment this very afternoon in the Strand."

"And I," said Irene, donning a fur-trimmed bonnet to foil the November wind and fixing it with a lethally long pin, "have an appointment with Mrs. Bram Stoker on Cheyne Walk regarding the whereabouts of Oscar Wilde's cross of gold."

So we parted, each to our errands, mine as usual more pedestrian than hers.

The chemist in the Strand wished me to transfer a roster of his various potions into a fresh listing. I spent the afternoon converting alien terms half-obscured by spilled chemical blots into legible type. Such words as "hydrochloric" and "sodium alginate" and the names of herbs like a.r.s.enic and jewelweed did not come trippingly to my typewriter.

I returned home cross, with a stiff neck and a headache, to find Irene still gone and a strange man quite at home in our rooms.

"I suppose you're a Pinkerton in search of Irene," said I rather brusquely from the threshold. "And I suppose Mrs. Minucci misguidedly let you in."

The young man nodded and shrugged, drawing my attention to his singularly dull plaid suit.

"Still, and however legitimate your business, there is no excuse for your settling into our chambers with your bowler hat still planted on your head and dried mud caked upon your boots."