The Stalwart Companions Read online

  “I miss the point, I’m afraid.”

  “In the data we have about Sherlock Holmes there is a period known as the ‘missing year.’ From late 1895 to late 1896 there is no word in the literature on the exact whereabouts of Holmes and what he was working on. I now believe that Holmes was in America, because it was in 1895 that Teddy Roosevelt took on the job as police commissioner. I am certain that Holmes would not have hesitated to come to the assistance of his old friend, if asked, and we can see from this Gramercy Park affair that Roosevelt had witnessed the effect of calling upon Holmes in criminal cases.”

  “You stated unequivocally that Holmes solved the Gramercy Park murder?”

  “Indubitably.”

  “I will have to look up subsequent accounts of the investigation in the archives before I can grant you that.”

  “You will see I am right.”

  “Wild conjecture on your part.”

  “More than conjecture, I assure you. First, Holmes rarely failed to solve his cases. Second, because there is no record of this case before now, I deduce, because it turned into a matter of such importance, such delicacy, that Holmes took steps to see that it was never publicised as part of the record of his career. That means your job is not going to be easy.”

  “My job?”

  “Surely you are going to follow up on this?”

  “Well, I don’t know, I–”

  “God, man, think of it! Holmes and Teddy Roosevelt engaged in the solution of what we must assume was a crime with implications far beyond simple murder! I would be astounded if you did not dig into this affair.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Nonsense. We begin with the Roosevelt archives.”

  “You believe Roosevelt kept a record of his association with Holmes?”

  “Wouldn’t you? I surely would have.”

  “I see your point.”

  “Precisely. Now we must confront the question of where to look for the evidence.”

  “Washington. Oyster Bay. The National Archives.”

  Shaking his head, Wiggy said, “I think not.”

  “Then where?”

  “I would be very much surprised if we have to leave New York City to find what we’re looking for. I believe it lies within the files of the New York Police Department. Logic dictates this conclusion. Would you agree that it makes sense for Roosevelt’s papers concerning Holmes to be in his files dating from his years as head of the police department? I trust your contacts in the modern-day NYPD are of such stature that you will have no trouble getting us into the places where we are most likely to find what we seek.”

  In a taxi going downtown to the new police headquarters building, my friend was uncharacteristically animated because of his excitement at the prospect of uncovering, at last, direct evidence that Mr Sherlock Holmes had not been a mere fictional invention but was a living human being who had played a role in the career of one of America’s giants, a fellow whom B. Alexander Wiggins had obviously come to know and respect as a result of his recent research into his career.

  “A remarkable young man who has gotten short shrift in the literature of American Presidents,” he remarked as our taxi careered through the streets. “I had a devil of a time finding biographical material beyond the superficial characterisation of the man as a hardy fellow who went around shouting, “Bully!” He was a robust man, of course, due entirely to his determination to overcome childhood weaknesses which had left him puny and subject to every kind of bullying. He developed his physique and became an excellent boxer. I thrill at the thought that he and Holmes, who was an excellent boxer, might have engaged in a few bouts. A crack shot, too. And a young man at college with an interest in scientific matters that could rival Holmes’. His life was fraught with personal tragedies. Did you know that his mother and his wife died on the same day? He rebounded from that double-barrelled disaster, however, just as he recouped from a humiliating defeat when he ran for mayor of New York in 1886. Came in fourth! His public career was never easy, not even when he was head of the police department. A very curious thing, that episode! William Strong, a reform mayor, picked Roosevelt to become commissioner of the corruption-ridden force, and T. R. accepted the challenge with relish. He fired the chief of the uniformed force, a rascal who had amassed three hundred thousand dollars in graft while in uniform. While commissioner, Roosevelt used to don a black cape and go out at night looking for crooked cops. A cape! Does that have a familiar ring to it? The newspapers loved him and there was talk about a bid for the White House. But then Mr Roosevelt learned that it is one thing to root out official corruption, quite another to tamper with the trivial illegalities of private individuals. He insisted on enforcing the Sunday Blue Laws by closing the saloons. Not long, and he was under great pressure to get out of office. He did, in 1897, to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Throughout this career, I am sure, he kept in close contact with a fellow across the Atlantic, whose own career was on the rise, Mr Sherlock Holmes.”

  “That’s for the files to prove,” I noted.

  “They will, my friend,” Wiggy grinned. “They will.”

  No reporter ventures into the archives of any police department without suspicion, but when it became known that I was interested in the annals and files from the last century, the New York Police Department accepted the fact that my poking around was no threat, and Wiggy and I were left undisturbed to go where the archives might lead us. “That was easier than I expected,” laughed Wiggy as we descended deep into the bowels of headquarters.

  “The power of the press,” I muttered, sniffing the dry, dusty, cardboard smells of the huge storage room where the New York Police Department kept its past, its triumphs, its failures, its heroic tales and its skeletons.

  Clapping his pudgy hands, Wiggy chuckled, “Ah, the game’s afoot!”

  Watching my bulky friend as he knelt and bent (not without difficulty) to peer at the faded, yellowing labels on the fronts of battered and sagging storage cartons, each one leading us farther back into history, I saw B. Alexander Wiggins as the personification of all Sherlockians who, as Vincent Starrett wrote, visualised Holmes with trusty Watson at his side, alive to those who love them well in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind where it is always 1895.

  We, however, were looking for Holmes of a still earlier year – 1880.

  “What have we here?” boomed the voice of B. Alexander Wiggins, sprawled on the dusty floor, moon-round face pressed close to a storage bin. “A pair of initials. T. R. Ha! My friend, we are on the trail!” Gently, tenderly, trembling with awe and anticipation, he drew the aged box into the dim light of bare bulbs from the ceiling above and carefully lifted its lid. Pausing before reaching into the half-empty box, Wiggy looked at me with tears sparkling in his eyes. “Such a moment!” he sighed, pressing a hand to his thick chest. “I have dreamed about this since my youth. To hold in my hands the evidence that he lived. I know it is hard for you to appreciate what this means to me. It is as if I were a Crusader about to touch the Holy Grail.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I warned. “We don’t know what’s in that box yet.”

  “All the evidence points to success,” he cried, eyes closed, voice trembling.

  Slowly, he reached into the box and gingerly brought into the light a brittle sheet of paper, which he studied intensely before handing it to me. “Yes. These are his files,” he sighed. The paper was a letter on the stationery of the President of the Board of Police Commissioners. The signature was that of Theodore Roosevelt. It bore an 1895 date. But it had nothing to do with anyone named Holmes.

  The box of documents which we examined was the first of dozens, each scrutinised as excitedly by Wiggy as if it were the first rather than simply another among dozens. The search stretched into hours, then days, but though my expectations flagged early, Wiggy pressed on, working tirelessly to prove his conviction that at any moment we would come upon the answer to
the question.

  The climactic moment came late in the sixth afternoon of our search. “We have found it,” stated Wiggins softly, a scrap of paper fluttering in his trembling hands.

  “What is it?” I asked, awed.

  “A cablegram,” said Wiggy, carefully handing the yellowed paper to me. “Note the date. July 1894. At that time, Roosevelt was serving on the United States Civil Service Commission. Note that that is how the cable is addressed. Note the message and the signature.”

  The cable was brief:

  “ROOSEVELT. DO NOTHING WITH THE MATERIAL UNTIL YOU HEAR AGAIN FROM ME. ESCOTT.”

  “There is no doubt that we are on to something,” cried my friend, poking into the papers at the bottom of the carton that had yielded the cable. “And what we are about to find is surely as delicate a matter as Holmes ever encountered, else why the necessity to continue the use of the stage name? Why the guarded reference to ‘material’?”

  As ever, Wiggy’s deductions were telling. The cable clearly proved, he explained, that Holmes (Escott) and Roosevelt had shared an extremely sensitive experience, one so sensitive that Roosevelt had filed this cable with material from his days with the police rather than include it in his documents from his federal service. Its inclusion in these files, Wiggy reasoned, linked the cable to a police matter.

  The deduction gained considerable credence with the discovery of the following letter dated in early July 1894:

  Mr Sherlock Holmes

  221B Baker Street

  London, England

  Dear Mr Holmes:

  My friend Dr Watson will, I am sure, share with you my letter of this date to him complimenting him on the publication in The Strand Magazine of his excellent stories. I eagerly await the next number in this exciting series of adventures based on your famous cases. Watson will undoubtedly inquire about the suggestion which I have made in my letter to him, namely, that he might want to look at the notes and observations which I made at the time of our very thrilling association in the matter of the Gramercy Park murder. I have gone so far as to suggest a title: “The Adventure of the Stalwart Companions.” I will, of course, be guided by your wishes and look forward to receiving your views and some information on how you are and what you are up to.

  Very truly yours,

  T. R.

  Rubbing his hands and chuckling, Wiggy remarked, “One can imagine the haste with which Holmes shot off that cable to Teddy, eh?”

  “Is there no copy of Roosevelt’s letter to Watson?” I asked eagerly, kneeling on the cold floor of the basement storehouse as Wiggy picked through more bundles of papers in a deeply stuffed box.

  “Nothing. I fear that one is lost. I hope there are others. And, God, I pray that Roosevelt’s ‘notes and observations’ are to be found in these endless archives!”

  Presently, Wiggy exploded with excitement, shooting upright and coming very close to performing a jig. “Eureka! The find of the century! There has never been anything like this! Look! Look, my beloved friend; a letter from him in his own hand!”

  The text of the letter:

  My Dear Roosevelt:

  Under no circumstances must the details of the singular affair of Gramercy Park be published so long as the participants live and so long as there might be the slightest chance of repercussions.

  Watson, who has written to you on this matter, will explain my reasons for insisting that certain of my cases be withheld from the public, and he will tell you, I am sure, of the numerous instances in which I have insisted that certain names, dates, locations, and some significant details of my cases be deleted or masked in the adventures he has already publicised.

  It is safe to say that only a handful of my numerous investigations match the Gramercy Park affair in sinister implications and tragic aftermath.

  As to the title you suggested, I can only say that I am disappointed to know that you have seen fit to indulge in the same kind of sensationalism which marks the writings of my dear friend Watson. One day I would like to read your notes on the adventure we shared, hoping to find you have not committed Watson’s crime of slurring over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy in order to dwell upon sensational details which would excite but could not possibly instruct the reader.

  Your servant,

  S. H.

  I had barely finished reading the letter, penned in the exquisitely fine hand of – I was convinced now – Sherlock Holmes, when Wiggy exploded again.

  “Here it is! Watson’s letter. The one Holmes refers to!”

  The hand was bold, assured – the hand of both a doctor and an author:

  Dear Mr Roosevelt:

  I thank you for your very generous comments on my literary efforts recounting Holmes’s work in the adventures in The Strand Magazine. I assure you the current adventure has a most thrilling ending, but I obey your admonition not to reveal it to you in advance as I understand your desire to follow the tale in subsequent issues; which I am delighted to know you receive in America.

  Holmes has surely expressed to you personally his strong feelings on the suggestion that the adventure you and he shared be published. I know some of the facts in that serious matter and agree with my colleague that it ought to be withheld for years to come, possibly forever.

  Holmes is quite set in his mind on withholding certain of the cases which he has investigated and brought to satisfactory conclusions. In a vault in the bank of Cox & Co., I keep a tin dispatch box crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Holmes had at various times to examine. The discretion and high sense of professional honour which have always distinguished my friend are at work in the choice of the memoirs.

  When we chance to meet again I expect to hear from you in person some of the details of the affair which you intriguingly title “The Adventure of the Stalwart Companions.’”

  Very truly yours,

  John H. Watson, M. D.

  In a matter of a few minutes, dusty and forgotten cartons in the depths of an official building in Manhattan had yielded up to my friend and me the incontrovertible evidence that Holmes and Watson had not been mere fiction from the pen of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle! Yet this astounding discovery was eclipsed by the fear Wiggy and I shared that we might not uncover the document which Holmes and Watson – and, obviously, Roosevelt – agreed could not be published in their lifetimes.

  A few minutes after we uncovered Watson’s letter, we found – sealed in a thick envelope – the amazing document which Roosevelt chose to call:

  “The Adventure of the Stalwart Companions”

  One

  It was the last day of June 1880 when I left Harvard with my head filled with the anticipation of a thrilling journey into the plains, hills, and valleys of Iowa and Minnesota in the company of my brother, Elliott. A vacation was exactly what I needed, having just completed arduous scholarly pursuits at college. I relished the thought of spending time in the great out-of-doors, especially because I was planning further scholarship in the study of law at Columbia. I was also, at this time, on the verge of marriage, a prospect which delighted me, although my photograph taken in my senior year at Harvard by J. Notman of Boston indicates that I was a very serious-minded young man – jaw firmly and determinedly set, the eyes unflinching, the straight nose, all bespeaking a youth of purpose. Yet the sideburns, coming very near to being muttonchop whiskers, indicate the real Roosevelt behind that sombre visage. Not rakish, precisely, but adventuresome, beyond question.

  I had thoroughly enjoyed Harvard, which I had entered in the fall of 1876, and I was confident that it did me good. I had earned a Phi Beta Kappa key. I had spent a good deal of my time in studying scientific matters because when I entered college I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history. My ambition at the time was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type. Much of this interest had been tolerated in me by my father, who had told me I would have to make my own way in the world and if
that meant a scientific career, I could do so. Before he died, he impressed upon me the need to be serious about my intentions. He warned that the comfortable financial situation in which he left me should not be an excuse for me to approach scientific matters as a dilettante. He also told me that if I was not going to earn money, I should even things up by not spending it. Unfortunately, Harvard disappointed me in my aims. The outdoor naturalist and observer of nature was ignored in the curriculum and biology was treated as purely a science of the laboratory and the microscope. While I was quite disappointed, I was also resolved to pursue my interests on my own, if necessary. As a result, I spent a good deal of time teaching myself by whatever means I could find. It proved difficult and I began to resign myself to giving up science as a career.

  While my own scientific explorations were to leave me disappointed in terms of my own career, they were to bring me into contact with a young man residing in London, England, to whom science was also a passion and for whom the structured formalities of university science had also proved a disappointment. How I came to know this remarkable fellow is important because of subsequent events shared by the two of us, so I will devote some time here to relating how it came to pass that there had developed by the middle of the year 1880 a friendship, albeit by correspondence, between myself, Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr Sherlock Holmes.

  That I should undertake a friendship through the post was not unusual for me. The writing of letters had been one of the most important contacts with the outside world in my boyhood. I had the misfortune to be a weak and sickly child. I suffered terribly from asthma and often had to be taken away on trips to find a place where I could breathe. One of my memories is of my father walking up and down the room with me in his arms at night when I was a very small person, and of sitting up in bed gasping, with my father and mother trying to help me. I went very little to school, and never to public schools because of my illnesses. I studied under tutors in the grand old house wherein I had been born on October 27, 1858, at 28 East Twentieth Street in Manhattan. It was during my childhood in that house that I developed both my interest in natural history and my penchant for keeping diaries and writing letters. I did not consider it unusual to write to strangers, such as the authors of books I had read, or to interesting personalities I encountered in newspapers or magazines.