SHERLOCK HOLMES
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SINISTER CHINAMAN
by
Barbara Hambly
As the reputation of Mr. Sherlock Holmes
advanced, his freedom to choose his cases – adhered to even in
early days when the pair of us were occasionally beholden to Mrs.
Hudson’s grace in the matter of rent – increased. Astute
investments by Holmes’s brother Mycroft eventually freed him from
the need to accept cases that did not present features of interest
to him which would broaden his own experience.
One exception which he made to this rule was
in the spring of 1901, when he agreed to investigate the
persecution of American railroad magnate Hollis Connington, a case
which both bored and annoyed him and which he undertook – I believe
– for the sole reason that it followed hard upon my own near-fatal
bout of pleurisy. Dr. Stamford at Bart’s was adamant in
recommending a sea voyage for my cure, and Connington’s mansion and
headquarters lay in San Francisco.
When Holmes informed Connington by telegram
that my assistance was a condition of his handling the case,
Connington – a miser who had, by Holmes’ later count, twenty-four
active candidates for the role of chief suspect in the attempts
upon his life – reluctantly agreed, but took a petty revenge. While
Holmes was lodged in the Palace Hotel in the city itself, I was put
up in a modest boarding establishment across the bay in Berkeley.
This circumstance led us both into a case which, Holmes said, made
the entire California excursion worthwhile, and introduced us to
that extraordinary madman, the balloonist and prestidigitator Oscar
Zoroaster Diggs.
Mrs. Ellen Carey’s boarding-house on
Telegraph Avenue was patronized chiefly by members of the local
theatrical profession: actors, vaudevillians, magicians, acrobats,
chorus-girls, a keeper of trained dogs, and a Central European
harpist who spoke no language intelligible to anyone in the city.
Holmes naturally found this company far more congenial than
anything on offer at the Palace Hotel, and formed the habit of
arriving for dinner – having swiftly won the approval of Mrs. Carey
- and remaining all evening to listen to the professional
small-talk in the parlor. Diggs was frequently the center of this
group, partly on account of his truly astonishing adeptness in the
arts of illusion, and partly on account of the warm friendliness of
his personality, which accepted all humanity as sisters and
brothers encountered upon a wonderful journey. He was, as Hamlet
says, “mad north north-west,” seeming perfectly sane in all
respects except for the delusion – apparently believed in firmly by
himself – that he had spent the past forty years of his life
stranded in Fairyland due to a ballooning accident. His adventures
there formed a cycle of tales that made him a great favorite with
Mrs. Carey’s four children and the assorted juvenile vaudevillians
of the household, and which, I must confess, hugely entertained me
as well.
On a certain Friday evening, Diggs had
undertaken to teach Holmes the Illusion of the Seven Knives, so
Holmes was at first vexed upon his arrival to discover that the
little wizard was not at the communal supper-table. But his
annoyance was swiftly swept away when Enzo Moretti (of the Flying
Moretti Brothers) explained, with great concern, that Diggs had
gone down to the Geary Street Precinct House in the city, to see
what could be done for the Celestial Sorcerer Li. “And he’s a
braver man than I, Mr. Holmes,” said Moretti, shaking his head.
“They arrested Li last night after the show, but when men get
drinking after work, and talking each other up in the saloons along
Market Street, there’s danger they’ll mob the jail, and lynch Li
out of hand.”
I said, “What on earth for?” and Holmes,
“Have they found some further proof?” I had spent the day walking
among the astounding beauties of the near-by California forests
with friends I had met on the voyage, while Holmes
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