The Dragon Turn Read online

She hesitates. “… My name is Juliet. I won’t tell you my last, unless you force me. I was raised in Brixton, yes, my grandfather was a slave, but my father was in the service, a footman in Belgravia. My brothers and I were educated. But I was a restless youth, didn’t want to work for others. What could a Negro woman do? I was strong and fearless, I could actually compete at athletics with my brothers … and I was pretty. In the circus arts, they don’t care about the color of your skin because they can use it. My appearance made me exotic and alluring. I learned to ride a horse and do tricks, I learned the trapeze. I wore few clothes in my performances and became a favorite among the men. A nearly-naked black woman isn’t as scandalous as a white one … but it has the same effect.”

  “Zaza? You are Mademoiselle Zaza?”

  “I was.”

  “You hurt your back, didn’t you? That accident at the Royal Amphitheatre? I thought you simply retired.”

  “Performers don’t retire at twenty-one, young man. I disappeared. They couldn’t use me after my fall. I was almost on the streets when Hemsworth found me. I was perfect for him. He pays me more than I could make anywhere else, and it’s just our two names on the program. You cannot tell anyone that I am not who he says I am! I need this job, sir. What do you want?”

  “As I said, just answers. How long have you been with him?”

  “About two years, I’d say. I suppose I am just as exotic in his act as I was in my own. I am still wearing very few clothes. It keeps the gentlemen interested when His Highness fumbles.”

  Two years. When did Nottingham steal his wife away?

  “Did you know Mrs. Nottingham when she was Hemsworth’s wife?”

  “Oh, yes. I was there when she seduced the Wizard. She went right for him and bagged him.”

  “Seduced Nottingham?”

  “Everyone thinks it was the other way around. Women don’t do such things. She was a nice lady though. She was good to me. Not many in her position would be. She treated me as an equal; it was remarkable. But she liked fame and she liked men. She wasn’t a looker, but she wasn’t unattractive either, and she had a spirit about her, an accommodating one, shall we say, that men couldn’t resist. Nottingham certainly couldn’t, though I think he later wished he could have. In the end, it was helpful for both magicians, though. It gained them a great deal of attention in the newspapers. Both men exploited that part, at least at first.”

  “What is Hemsworth like?”

  “He is a beast. All he cares about is his show.… He hits me … but he pays me well. He says horrible things about his former wife, vile things about how he would kill her in gruesome ways if he could, after what she did to him. Nottingham wasn’t much better to work for, I hear. He was very ambitious. People in his show say he would sell his soul to the devil for a great trick, one as amazing as the dragon illusion.”

  “Have the police spoken to you?”

  “To Venus, the half-clothed, illiterate African beauty? They looked at me, they did, just like other men. But no, they haven’t asked me anything, and I would prefer, sir, if you would be so kind, to keep it that way.”

  “I will if you answer one more question and tell me the truth. Do you have any idea where Mrs. Nottingham is?”

  “I do.”

  “You do?” Sherlock’s heart races.

  “She started coming back to Hemsworth’s shows a few months ago, when they became a great sensation. She loved to be where the action was, where all the celebrated people were. I noticed her sitting with men from the continent on several nights: handsome, wealthy ones. She couldn’t resist them. His Highness told me, just last week, that she ran off with one of them. I don’t know why he bothered to tell me, perhaps he was gloating. I don’t think he has told anyone else, at least he doesn’t seem to have informed the police. He knows I don’t speak much to others.”

  “She’s run off?”

  “I doubt it was meant to be permanent, probably just one of her affairs. But she won’t come back now, why would she? Especially since Hemsworth is free. Her husband vanishes and so does she. With no one accused of the crime now, she could very well be a suspect, couldn’t she?”

  “Yes, she could. You’re in the business — why do you think Nottingham didn’t tell anyone?”

  “Because he has the same pride as Hemsworth. It isn’t just a male tendency, though that is bad enough. They can’t ever look like failures to the public. He was probably hoping he could keep her flight quiet and she would come back. Perhaps she has done it before.”

  “And you say Hemsworth hasn’t told the authorities where she’s gone,” muses Sherlock out loud.

  “Maybe he liked being a suspect for a while.”

  “Liked it?”

  “It was good for business, wasn’t it? He is always thinking about that. His arrest caused a sensation. I always had the feeling that he knew they couldn’t convict him.”

  “Well, they will, if I have anything to do with it.”

  “They will? I am not so sure, young man. I despise Hemsworth, but I’m not certain that he did it. He isn’t clever enough to pull off a perfect crime. And as for his hating Nottingham, I’m not even convinced about that.”

  “But —”

  “I’m not saying that His Highness wasn’t angry and resentful after his wife left — I know he was. But I think he blamed her more than the Wizard. Their rivalry may have been a bit of a dressed-up thing, like many things in show business, something they used. I saw the two of them talking just a few days before the murder, behind the theater. They didn’t seem upset, though they stepped away from each other when they saw me.”

  “Miss Juliet, it is not unusual for a villain to stalk his prey in order to discover what he is up to. Perhaps Hemsworth was pretending to be past his anger … as he plotted. Maybe he was inviting the Wizard into his lair and you simply witnessed him drawing him in.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” Her beautiful face looks frightened. “That gives me the shivers.”

  “What about the dragon? You’ve seen it up close. Is it real?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really see it onstage. Can I go? I’ve answered everything you asked. I can’t afford to be seen on the street talking to anyone.” She pulls her veil down again.

  He waves her off and she rushes away.

  “I don’t really see it onstage.” It is a curious statement. But she is blindfolded at that moment, of course. She is probably the only one in the theater who doesn’t see it. And Hemsworth is so secretive that she likely never so much as glimpses it any other time. But can’t she feel its presence in the cage during those terrifying seconds, sense if it is real or not, smell its very breath? She was so calm when she spoke of it. That seems awfully strange.… Or is it? Maybe it’s proof that the dragon isn’t real, that it is all just a trick? Or is Venus simply a consummate professional, a steely nerved former daredevil?

  Whatever the case, Holmes thinks again, in admiration of how Hemsworth disguises Juliet as a white woman for that scene, how he transforms her. It must be makeup and lights. It is perfect: it serves to not only fill the audience with wonder, but scare them even more … a white woman in grievous peril. He may not be the greatest magician, but he is an extraordinary showman. He knows what thrills London.

  Tonight, Sherlock has found an important piece of the puzzle, or at least, helped eliminate one. He now knows where Mrs. Nottingham has gone, and that he cannot pursue her — he doesn’t have the resources to find her on the continent, and obviously, she is interested in staying lost. He has just one option left, the one he discussed with Sigerson Bell. He must find out what instrument of terror Hemsworth used to reduce Nottingham to tiny specs of flesh … he must explore the possibility that it was a living and breathing monster, a Frankenstein beast.

  And whatever it was … and is … he must hunt it.

  DESPERATION

  That night he dreams of slaying a dragon. He stands before it wearing Saint George’s armor, bearing the ancient red
-crossed flag of England, his sword drawn. The creature looms over him, monstrous in size, forked tongue darting out. Defeating it seems an impossible quest. A crowd, led by Inspector Lestrade, has come up the hill from a nearby village and gathers around. They wield weapons and offer their help. But Sherlock must do this alone. He sees Irene and Beatrice looking on, and Scuttle bursting with pride, telling the others in the crowd that he knows him. When Sherlock is done, they will all cheer and his fame will be sung throughout the kingdom. He turns to the beast … and it kills him.

  Holmes rises the next morning thinking that he must visit his father again. He puts it off. He will go to school first. But all day in the classroom he feels guilty. Guilt is coming at him from so many sources: he isn’t visiting his father and he may very well be responsible for setting free a murderer, making it possible for the villain to act again. On top of everything, Sherlock isn’t offering the police his latest evidence … proof that he may have erred.

  When he thinks of his father he thinks of something he was taught long ago.

  “I am going to teach you about a word, son,” Wilberforce once said. “That word is integrity. It has to do with honesty, but it is much more than that. It is about never lying to yourself, never doing what you know is wrong, making sure that what you say you believe in is what you do. I want you to always be a man of integrity.”

  “Integrity?” Sigerson Bell remarked earlier this year, when Sherlock, feeling a little homesick, brought up the subject. “It is the chief characteristic of a great man. If you do not exhibit it while in my employ I shall plunge it into you like a sailor dropping an anchor into the sea, hammer it into you like a spike being drilled into your skull, like a surgeon reaching into your chest and carving your heart out whilst it is still beating and showing it to you, blood still pumping from —” Then he realized he had gone too far, and commenced to apologize. It lasted for a week.

  Sherlock Holmes knows he is not a young man of integrity at this moment. He had felt it most acutely this morning while instructing his summer students on the subject of History, and what has been, over the centuries, right … and wrong. His late August classes finish at two o’clock. He has time to do what is right today. When school ends, and after more soul searching, he finds his way … to Scotland Yard.

  This is one of the most difficult things he has ever had to do. He paces up and down Whitehall Street before summoning the courage to enter the police offices. He knows that Lestrade Sr. won’t see him, so he asks for his son. The young detective appears, reluctantly.

  “I am surprised that you would show your face here.”

  “I was … not correct,” Sherlock blurts out. “I may have not been correct.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I may have been … wr … wr … wrong.”

  “Wrong? Did you say you were wrong about something? Can you repeat that?”

  “I was wrong.”

  “And again?”

  “Lestrade!”

  The other boy laughs. But he doesn’t when Sherlock tells him what he is concerned he’s wrong about.

  “You think Hemsworth is guilty?! You, who are responsible for setting him free! Father!”

  The desk sergeant nearly jumps from his seat.

  “May be guilty, I said may be. Don’t call your father … I can’t face —”

  “FATHER!”

  The Senior Inspector is in the foyer in seconds. He doesn’t hear his son shout at him with such volume often and is concerned that something is terribly wrong.

  “Son?” Then he sees Sherlock. “The Holmes brat! Get him out of here!”

  “Father, he has something to tell you, something you are going to be very interested to hear.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “No, sir, it isn’t.” He turns to Sherlock and motions to him, as if handing him the stage.

  Sherlock can barely speak at first. He starts slowly but picks up speed. Lestrade seethes as he listens, his face growing progressively more red. The boy tells him that he is worried that his solution to the Hemsworth question was too easy, that he is feeling guilty about it, that all that motivation is still very much against the magician, that he has learned of His Highness’s cruelty and immorality, that Hemsworth may very well have been acting during the hat scene, that all magicians keep adjustable hats (Lestrade almost cries out at this), that Mr. Riyah isn’t really a Jew though he claims to be, that his real name is under suspicion, that someone was hiding in Hemsworth’s dressing room both times he and Miss Doyle visited, that it may have been Riyah, that he worries that those two men have known each other for some time but pretend to be strangers and —

  “ENOUGH!” shouts Lestrade.

  Sherlock closes his mouth.

  “You are a fool, do you know that? A boob!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have put us into a great conundrum! Through your interference, you have freed the man whom I have known from the start to be the murderer. You have provided him with an alibi. But now, you have gathered circumstantial evidence that veritably proves my theory!”

  “Circumstantial?”

  “None of what you say, though very telling and harmful to the reputations of a number of the principals … can hang the villain!”

  “That is correct,” adds the Inspector’s son, grinning at Sherlock. “You were correct all along, sir, and you are correct now.”

  “Thank you, son.” Lestrade turns on Sherlock again. “You have nothing that places Hemsworth at the crime scene. Your little hat demonstration took care of that! You do not have a murder weapon, or even any idea as to how it was done! And yet we all, even you, have come to the understanding that he did it.” Lestrade begins furiously pacing around the foyer. “But how did he do it? It didn’t matter before, when we had his hat inches from the blood, but now it does! Now we must know. Did Hemsworth blow him up? Did he wave a wand and make him vanish?”

  “No sir. I doubt that.”

  “Then how?”

  “I have a theory.”

  “A theory!!” shout the two Lestrades at once, both smirking.

  “This,” continues the Inspector, “should be enjoyable, a tale for the London stage.” He stops moving about. “Perhaps we should sit down, serve tea? Go on. Enlighten us.”

  “Sir … what … if it wasn’t a human being? What if the villain was another sort of creature? That might account for what was left behind.”

  “Not surprisingly, you aren’t making sense.”

  “What if it was a beast?”

  “A beast? Of what sort?”

  “A dragon.”

  Young Lestrade laughs out loud. But his father does not. He turns and looks out the window. “A dragon?”

  “Or whatever it is that Hemsworth has created to look like one.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” says young Lestrade.

  “Have you been to see the show, sir?”

  “Of course, we watched it the night we arrested him.”

  “And what did you think?”

  Lestrade swallows. “To be honest … I found it … rather convincing.”

  “But it can’t be a real dragon, Inspector, can it?”

  “Of course not … that’s nonsense.”

  “But there was nothing left of Nottingham … just his spectacles and blood … and little pieces of flesh. Can a human being do that?”

  Lestrade swallows again. “I have long suspected that there is something magical about this crime. But —”

  “Sir, it would be simple for you to either prove or eliminate this possibility. You have the power to stop the show at the moment the dragon appears.”

  Sherlock doesn’t want to tell the Inspector about the third chamber below The World’s End Hotel. He will hold that card up his sleeve. He has no idea what is down there anyway. At this point, the police are not even aware of the second room. If he were to send them on an investigation of the inner chambers and they found nothing of interest, he would l
ook like an even greater fool than he appears now. I know that this apparition, this dragon, appears on The Egyptian Hall stage at the end of every show. I don’t know what is in that chamber. If I have to gamble, I should bet on the surer thing, what I have seen with my own eyes … we must seize this thing, whatever it is, red-handed, during the performance.

  “I cannot subject us to possible ridicule in front of an audience,” snaps the Inspector.

  “Then you could simply position yourselves backstage and keep the dragon from being secreted away again, as it somehow must be following each performance? You, sir, could examine His Highness Hemsworth’s great illusion.”

  Lestrade looks tempted. He starts pacing again. “If the magician … has something, even a disguised lion or tiger, or a giant hound, then we might be able to, at least, keep the case against him in motion, put the circumstantial evidence together with him harboring a murderous beast capable of …” He comes to an abrupt halt and barks at the desk sergeant. “I want this Riyah fellow brought in!” He hesitates to give his next order.

  “There is no show tonight, sir. Hemsworth performs every other evening. You could attend tomorrow.”

  Lestrade regards him for a moment, then turns back to the desk sergeant. “Get us some tickets to the next Egyptian Hall spectacle!” He glances at the boy. “Get one for him as well.” Then, looking directly at Sherlock, he mutters, “This had better be worthwhile!”

  On the street outside the station, Holmes has the feeling that someone is watching him. He scans the court in Scotland Yard and thinks he sees a dark face peering around a corner just two buildings away. He runs toward it, but by the time he arrives, it has flown, out into the heavy crowds on Whitehall Street. Sherlock squints and looks into the masses. He thinks he sees the man, wearing a black greatcoat, much like Riyah’s.

  The boy pauses in the majestic park in front of Buckingham Palace for a while on his way home, watching the swans in the queen’s ponds. He decides to walk past The Egyptian Hall. It is a hot afternoon and the front doors are open. The boy can hear music and a beautiful voice. It sounds familiar. He walks up to the entrance. Someone is accompanying a woman on a piano, both the playing and the singing informal, like a rehearsal. The voice is familiar indeed. Irene. Then he hears a scream, a bloodcurdling shriek. He runs into the lobby, past a few attendants, who are lounging about and smoking. He rips open the doors of the amphitheater and comes to the top of the lower bowl. Irene Doyle is standing on the stage close to a piano, where Hemsworth sits playing. The magician rises.