He kept his eyes open wide as he squeezed the poker in his palms, arched his back, and drew the poker down on the gasogene with every bit of strength he possessed. Glass shattered, the steel poker clanged violently against the metal base, and the force of the contact sent Harold stumbling back across the study. His wrists hurt.
“Harold White.” When he heard the voice behind him, his mind went instantly blank. The words themselves sounded foreign. Harold? White? Oh, yes, Harold realized, as the color drained from his face. That would be me. He prepared himself for jail, placating his natural terror with the thought that it wouldn’t be for more than a few years. It’s not as if he’d killed anybody, after all. It was only as he was turning around to face the voice addressing him that he realized that whoever was calling his name knew his name. And that was when Harold became scared.
He completed his turn to see the Goateed Man staring back at him across the study. The man held a gun in front of him. Harold’s vision danced between the top of the pistol and the goatee on the man’s face. The gun looked like the same one he’d seen in London. And the goatee was no more attractive than he’d first thought.
Despite the fear that squeezed on his muscles and contracted his breath, Harold realized that the man in front of him hadn’t yet pulled the trigger. Harold could handle this. He stepped forward, right foot and then left, toward the Goateed Man.
“Stop there,” said the man.
“No,” said Harold. He stepped forward again. He couldn’t be more than six feet from the man now. The man drew the gun higher, aligning its barrel directly across from Harold’s scalp.
“Take another step and I’ll bloody kill you,” said the man.
“No,” said Harold as he took another small step. “You won’t.” He stepped again. Four feet separated them now. “Because you want the diary. And you know you need me to get it.”
The man gave Harold a strange look.
“You mean that?” he said, glancing ever so quickly to the floor behind Harold’s feet. Harold turned his head, shifting his eyes down to the floor. A few feet behind him, amid a pile of broken glass and poking out from the metal base of the gasogene, sat a two-inch-thick, leather-bound diary.
“I don’t think I need your help anymore to find the diary,” said the man, grinning.
So much for that. Harold had accomplished everything he’d been asked, and then some. He was done now. So much for being just a little bit smarter than everyone else. Being clever had gotten him far, but now it didn’t seem like it would get him any further.
“Not yet,” said Harold. Only now was he truly scared. But it wasn’t the gun that terrified him-it was the thought that the gun would kill him before he could hold the diary in his hands and peel open its dusty pages.
“I wasn’t supposed to kill you,” said the man. “But now I don’t have a bloody choice. I just need the diary, but I can’t have anybody knowing where it came from. And if you’re alive when the Swiss police get here…”
“Fine,” said Harold. “Kill me. I don’t care anymore. But please. Five minutes. Give me five minutes to read the diary. I can read really fast. Really, really fast.”
“Step back and kick the diary toward me.”
“No, please. Three minutes. That’s it. You can’t let it…” Harold was pleading now, begging. He was mere feet away from the diary. He imagined that he could smell its must, that he could taste a century’s grime on the back of his tongue. “You can’t let it end like this. I just need to read it.”
Staring into the man’s eyes, Harold saw something he thought was pity.
“Look,” said the man, “I didn’t sign on to kill nobody. I’d rather not. I’ll make you a deal, all right? You get out of here, and you never tell a word of this, and I say I found my way here on my own. But you need to leave. Now.”
“No,” said Harold. He wanted to explain his desperation, to somehow make clear to this man why he couldn’t walk away. But he couldn’t explain this.
“Are you bloody crazy? Go away. Leave me the book and go.”
Harold wanted to cry, but he didn’t. He tried to speak, but all that came was a soft panting. He looked with wide, begging eyes at the man, and he stepped forward again. If he could not leave here with the diary, then he could not let himself leave here at all.
“Right then,” said the man. “You win.” His finger curled around the trigger. Harold did not close his eyes but held them open. He felt no need to shield himself from this.
“POLIZIA!” came a loud cry from elsewhere in the building. The sound snapped both Harold and the man loose from their diabolical pact. They heard footsteps and the noises of a body shifting around. Harold thought he heard the crunch of broken glass under a boot.
The man kept his gun aimed at Harold, and for his own part Harold didn’t move.
“POLIZIA!” came another shout. The voice was Italian-speaking Swiss, and female.
“Please,” said Harold to the man. “Shoot me, take the diary, and run. Or give it to me. But I’m not leaving.”
The man continued staring at Harold, gauging his seriousness. The man’s face grew tight, as if acknowledging that Harold would not bend. As the footsteps approached the study, the man turned his body toward the door. That was all the time Harold needed.
He swung the poker through the air, aiming for the man’s head but landing it across his left arm. There was a crunch, and Harold felt the recoil of contact through his own arm. The man doubled over to his left side, instinctively protecting his wounded forearm with his right hand. He still held the gun, but it wasn’t pointing at Harold anymore.
Harold swung again with the poker, ramming it into the man’s shoulder. He howled in pain. As Harold stepped back for another swing- would he aim for the man’s head? Would he kill him?-Harold saw a figure in the doorway. It was the woman who’d yelled “polizia” from the hallway, but she was not, so far as Harold knew, a member of the Swiss police.
It was Sarah.
He dropped the poker and was only vaguely aware of the clank it made against the floor. Sarah held a small gun in her hand, and she was aiming it at Harold. The man, given a moment to catch his breath, used the opportunity to lash out with his own gun, punching it into Harold’s belly. Harold felt all the air leave his body. He dropped to his knees, holding himself up from the floor only by pressing both hands into the floor. He had moments ago prepared himself for death, but now he felt like he was actually dying. It was more horrible than he’d imagined. He opened his mouth for air, but none entered. His mouth hung open as if in a silent scream.
The man didn’t waste an instant. He pistol-whipped Harold about his brow, swinging the arm that held the gun against his temple. Harold felt the hard steel batter into his head, once and then again. Everything went blurry.
Harold lost the next few seconds to shock. When he finally became aware of the world around him, he was on the floor, staring up at the Goateed Man. He felt something wet on his forehead. Blood, most likely, trickling between his eyes toward his nose. The man raised his gun to Harold’s face. Strangely, Harold felt some small measure of instantaneous joy at the thought that when he died, Sarah would watch. If a bullet was about to enter his brain, blowing gray matter and bone particulates into the floor of Sherlock Holmes’s study, he wanted her to see it.