John T. Lescroart
The Adventure of the Giant Rat of Sumatra
from Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine
We were seated over breakfast, my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes deeply engrossed in his morning paper, when I heard him mutter something. “I beg your pardon, Holmes?” I asked.
“Sumatra,” he repeated, all but to himself. “My God, even for Moriarty this is appalling!”
“Holmes,” I exclaimed, “what is it?”
He put down the paper and looked in my direction, but he appeared not to see me. That in itself was so singular that I was immediately on my guard. When Sherlock Holmes looked, he saw — it was one of his dicta. But on that cold December morning in 1888, he stared as if through me out to the drizzly fog that enshrouded London.
I tried again to speak to him, but he waved me off impatiently. “Watson, please, don’t interrupt me. It may already be too late.”
Accustomed as I was to his outbursts, his tone still smarted. I started to remonstrate, but he had already risen and gone to the corner by the coal scuttle in our rooms at 221B Baker Street. There he kept his stack of past editions of London’s newspapers. As I watched in growing concern, he attacked the pile, throwing whole sections out behind him when they didn’t contain that for which he was searching.
Then, with an armload of papers, he half fell into his chair, grabbing his pipe on the way down. For the next quarter hour he sat engulfed in tobacco smoke, muttering or cursing one moment, and the next falling into a quiet and desperate depression. After watching him for a time, I ventured another syllable.
“Holmes?”
He flung some of the papers at me. “Read it for yourself, Watson. It may be the end of us all.”
I picked the papers from the floor and began perusing them. Some were up to two years old, and I must confess I saw nothing in them but yesterday’s news. Nevertheless, I slogged through the sections, pausing from time to time at a familiar name or at the mention of a case in which Holmes and I had been involved. While I read, Holmes evidently finished his work and rang for Mrs. Hudson. When our landlady appeared, he sent her to fetch Billy the page, saying it was a matter of the utmost urgency.
Quickly, he scratched a note on a pad and then, filling another pipe, turned to me as he lit it. “Well, Watson, I must say that as a doctor you are calm enough about it.”
I must have looked at him blankly.
“The plague, Watson! The plague! Can it be you don’t see it?” Before I could respond, he had rushed to the table and snatched several of the papers away from me. “Look here!” he exclaimed. “And here! And here! You see nothing? Nothing?” He was grabbing and pulling the sections every which way. I had never seen him so agitated.
“Holmes! There’s no need to be rude.”
That brought him up short. He visibly summoned that control upon which he prides himself, straightening himself to his full height, taking a deep breath. “My dear man, please forgive me.”
“It’s nothing, Holmes, it’s forgotten. But what is it? Please tell me.”
Looking at the door, he came to some decision. “Well, I guess there is time before Billy comes.” And he sat down, pulling that day’s Times in front of him.
“Here, Watson, on page five — the article on our old friend Colonel Sebastian Moran.”
I had read it, of course. The travels of the famous hunter were always of interest to me, both because they were often fascinating in themselves, but also and not least because of his position as Professor Moriarty’s chief lieutenant. The article was an account of a Boer pirate attack on Moran’s ship as it had been rounding the Horn on its return from Sumatra, loaded with hunting trophies. Moran and his crew had fought off the belligerents, hauled the injured ship back to Johannesburg and delivered it and its dead crew to the British authorities. A particular point of interest was that they had neither docked nor resupplied at port and had allowed no one to board their vessel.
“It seems like a typical Moran adventure,” I said upon rereading it.
“By itself, you may be right, Watson. But what of this?”
He placed before me the oldest of the newspapers and pointed to a piece on the outbreak of bubonic plague that had occurred two years before on Siberut, a tiny island off the west coast of Sumatra.
“And these…”
The other articles related to a Dr. Culverton-Smith, who had announced and then retracted the news that he had developed and hoped shortly to perfect a serum that would prevent and cure bubonic plague.
I had just finished the last of these when there was a sharp rap at our door, followed immediately by the entrance into our quarters of Billy. One of the street urchins who frequented the alleys hereabouts, Billy had more than once proved a useful ally to my friend and me.
Holmes wasted no time on greeting him but handed him the note he’d scribbled earlier. “Ah, Billy, here. Deliver this at once to the address listed, and wait there for a reply.”
Without a word, the boy was off, and I was again left alone with Holmes, pondering the obscure links in this bizarre chain. “What is this about, Holmes? What was that note?”
Now that he had taken some action, he reverted to that languid pose I knew so well. His eyes had become so black they appeared nearly hooded. But this time there was none of the sparkle in them that always appeared after the “view halloo” had been sounded, when the game was afoot. This time it was no game.
“The note was to Dr. Culver ton-Smith, Watson — one of the most evil and brilliant men to ever grace your profession.” He took a long pull at his pipe. “I wondered how long it would be before Professor Moriarty and he made each other’s acquaintance.” Then he sighed with an ineffable sadness. “I only wish I had acted to prevent it. I only hope now I’m not too late.” He sighed again, wearily.
“What did the note say?”
He waved his pipe. “Oh, it was prosaic enough. It said, ‘England will pay you more than Moriarty.’”
“For what?”
“For the serum, of course. The cure for bubonic plague.”
“My God, Holmes, could it be…?”
“I don’t know yet. I won’t know for sure until Billy comes back. Halloa? That would be him now.”
He jumped up and ran to the door, opening it before the panting boy could even knock. Breathlessly, Billy handed a missive to Holmes, who ripped open the engraved envelope. As he read, his shoulders sagged.
Absently, he forced some coins on Billy and rather unceremoniously shooed him out. I thought he was a little too brusque with the boy and told him so.
“Watson, it’s as I suspected. Moriarty, Moran and Culverton-Smith are in it together, and no one must know. There would be panic.”
“What does the reply say?”
Holmes smiled but with no humor. “‘My dear Mr. Holmes,’” he read, “‘Your offer is interesting. Unfortunately, what England can pay me is rather off the point, since within a year, my associates and I will England.’”
“Holmes!” I exclaimed.
“Exactly. Moriarty plans to inoculate himself and his henchmen against the plague, then introduce the disease into England.”
“How would he do that?”
“Probably through an animal that Moran has captured and smuggled onto his ship.”
The pieces were beginning to fit, though my own enlightenment had none of the epiphanic quality of Holmes’s. “But if they merely patented the serum,” I argued, “they would be millionaires many times over.”
Again that frigid grin. “Power, Watson. Power is more seductive than money, and for Moriarty it is everything. His mind envisions an England desolate and depopulated but one where he is absolute ruler, a medieval king. The population not under his power — including you and me, my friend — would die in swollen, boil-infested agony.”