The Italian Secretary Read online

  And that was enough: The shop-owner’s face lost all sense of sympathy, and he waved a hand in my face, saying sternly, ‘No. No, no, no, Doctor! Please!’ He indicated the door. ‘Leave my shop, please, sir – this is not worthy of a respected man such as yourself!’

  ‘What?’ I mumbled. ‘What do you mean?’

  The man’s manner was unflinching. ‘These are children’s games, Doctor – and they injure my business! How can you participate in such things?’

  I had begun to emerge from my haze, enough to comprehend what he was referring to – and suddenly aware that I had, indeed, upset him tremendously. Yet I could not help but insist, one last time:

  ‘But – she was here! She beckoned to me—!’

  ‘No, sir! Please, I will not tolerate it! Leave, sir – immediately!’

  As my senses adjusted to the moment and the predicament fully, my shock and fear began to subside, to be replaced by embarrassment and sympathy. ‘I must – it must have been the next house …’

  The man’s manner softened as quickly as it had hardened. ‘Ah. Yes – well, of course, Doctor, there is indeed a young girl next door.’

  I was aware of as much: I had been aware of it when I made my last statement. The only difficulty was that the young girl in the next house bore only a passing resemblance to the one I had seen. Yet in that strange light … ‘I’m very sorry,’ I went on, regaining my composure. ‘I didn’t mean to trouble you. I know you have had – difficulties.’

  ‘Yes,’ the man answered, even managing laughter, ‘and I thought that you had joined the ranks of the troublesome!’

  ‘Do forgive me,’ I said, trying to match his jocularity.

  ‘Speak no more of the matter, Doctor!’ he said. ‘And I shall not. All this silliness – unhappy spirits – I have been here many years, Doctor, and I have seen nothing. For such a powerful people, you English can be very superstitious – not that I intend disrespect to the spirits of the dead! Now, then – did you need something?’

  I quickly decided that a purchase might mend the situation. ‘Tobacco – the strongest you have. And I shall take all that you can give me.’

  ‘Ah! You and Mr Holmes are hard at work, eh? I dare say you will not tell him that you saw a “young ghost”, Doctor!’

  That gave the fellow a good laugh, and by the time I departed we were fast friends again. I took up my parcel, accepted his warm wishes, and stepped back into the street; then, as I was looking about for approaching traffic, I happened to glance up at our sitting-room windows—

  And would have sworn that I caught a quick glimpse of Holmes, suddenly moving away from the window that afforded the best view of the little shop.

  When I arrived back in our sitting-room, however, he was just where I had left him: poring over the same papers, seated in the same chair. Had he seen what had transpired across the street? A part of me desired very much to know, although another part wished to forget the matter of the spirit world entirely, and to avoid further embarrassment of any kind.

  And so I placed the package of tobacco on the table that held the newspapers, took my jacket off once again, and set to rolling up my shirtsleeves and filling my pipe without comment. As I was doing so, however, Holmes took the opportunity to say, in a very quiet and rather sympathetic voice:

  ‘You asked me once, Watson, if I was serious about believing in “ghosts” – the idea perplexed you so greatly, in fact, that you did not consider the actual statement that I had made.’ As he continued to speak, Holmes filled his own pipe with the new tobacco, and set it burning: ‘My actual words were, “I give entire credence to the power of ghosts.” Perhaps you may ask, somewhat fairly, whether any claimed difference between the two is not mere wordplay. But it is not. Within the study of crime, Watson, as within the study of all disciplines, phenomena occur that we are powerless to explain. We tell ourselves that some day the human mind will explain them; and perhaps it shall. But for now, the unexplained nature of these phenomena gives them extraordinary force – for they cause the behaviour of individual persons, as well as towns, cities, and nations, to become passionate and irrational. This is power, indeed; and what possesses power, we must admit, possesses actuality. Is it real? The question is the wrong one, and irrelevant, really – real or no, it is a fact.’

  Holmes stood, his head surrounded by smoke that seemed to have a kind of solidity, and approached the same window again. ‘We believe; we act accordingly; others tell us that our beliefs are false; yet how can they be, when those beliefs have persuaded us, sometimes many of us, to alter our behaviour? No, Watson – we cannot question the power of that which motivates human action, particularly that which motivates such action along the lines that we have lately witnessed. Are ghosts – indeed, are gods, real? We cannot know; but they are powerful facts of human intercourse. And so …’

  He indicated the shop across the street with his pipe. ‘Did you see that young girl playing outside the shop before you entered it? If you believe you did, your behaviour will be forever altered; if you choose not to believe it, and to think that she entered some other building, then the same effect is produced, although along different lines. Even in denying the encounter altogether, you would give it actuality. It nonetheless remains a fact; indeed, it is the only fact concerning the matter that will ever truly be of consequence, to you, as well as to those who are your companions and associates, whose behaviour your behav-iour must influence. Thus, the question of whether or not the girl was there means almost nothing. Baker Street is Baker Street in part because of these tales. They may not be real; but they, like the street itself, are facts …’

  Suddenly, Holmes turned, waved the smoke from about his head as he deliberately changed his train of thought and conversation, and then put his pipe back in his mouth and one hand on his hip. ‘So, old friend! With that admittedly humble theory in mind – let us see if we cannot locate a criminal who operates solely in the realm of material facts. It will seem, somehow, such an easy, such a refreshing undertaking, just now …’

  And with that, we turned back to the papers, and set to work once more.

  Afterword

  ‘Dr Kreizler, Mr Sherlock Holmes …’

  by

  Jon Lellenberg

  Perhaps the most famous introduction of one literary character to another in the English language – not to mention the countless other languages into which the work has been translated – occurs in chapter one of the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet by a then-unknown writer:

  ‘Dr Watson, Mr Sherlock Holmes,’ said Stamford, introducing us.

  ‘How are you?’ he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’

  ‘How on earth did you know that?’ I asked in astonishment.

  ‘Never mind,’ said he, chuckling to himself.

  The scene was a concatenation of medical men, and very deliberately took place in a scientific setting, the chemistry laboratory of London’s great St Bartholomew’s Hospital. (For many years, a brass plaque has hung upon its wall commemorating the event.) John H. Watson, the narrator, was a doctor recently back from service in the British Army during the Second Afghan War. Stamford had been his ‘dresser,’ or surgeon’s assistant, at Bart’s before the war. The creator of these characters, Arthur Conan Doyle, was himself a doctor. The third character in this scene, as time would prove, was not one. But while Sherlock Holmes was not a doctor, Conan Doyle had based Holmes’s method as a detective upon one of his former professors of medicine at Edinburgh University, Dr Joseph Bell, whose powers of observation and deduction had made him a wizard at diagnosis.

  It was, as Conan Doyle’s Scottish colleagues may have murmured to themselves at the time, a very canny approach. With the exception of Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering stories about Auguste Dupin of Paris, Dr Conan Doyle recalled many years later, most contemporary fictional detectives produced their results by chance or luck
. Dissatisfied with that, he had decided, he said, to create a detective who would treat crime as Dr Bell had treated disease. This meant, in short, the application of scientific method to crime detection. That was a novel concept in 1887, to be sure, but it worked, first in fiction and then in practice, with life imitating art as it so often does when the art in question is a work of genius.

  And while Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a doctor, Conan Doyle gave him a good deal of doctor’s training and all the traits of modern scientific method as he knew it, from what he called the ‘very austere school of medical thought’ in which he had himself been raised. On their way to Watson’s introduction to Holmes, Stamford tells his old friend that Holmes:

  ‘is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would astonish his professors … Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes – it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.’

  ‘Very right too.’

  ‘Yes, but it may be pushed to excess. When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a bizarre shape.’

  ‘Beating the subjects!’

  ‘Yes, to verify how far bruises may be produced after death. I saw him at it with my own eyes.’

  ‘And yet you say he is not a medical student?’

  ‘No. Heaven knows what the objects of his studies are. But here we are, and you must form your own impressions about him.’

  They did take rooms together, at 221B Baker Street, but as a proper Victorian professional and gentleman, Watson was too polite to ask his new fellow lodger what his livelihood was; and so his impressions of Holmes, after they had lived together a little while, mystified him. In a list headed ‘Sherlock Holmes – his limits,’ Watson recorded that Holmes was completely ignorant of the humanities; his botany was ‘variable’ and his geology ‘practical, but limited’; his chemistry was ‘profound,’ true, but his anatomy was, at best, ‘accurate, but unsystematic.’ Holmes had a good practical knowledge of English law, was a good single-stick player, boxer, and swordsman, and played the violin well. It all left Watson at a loss; and it took Sherlock Holmes to inform him, after Watson scoffed at a magazine article about ‘the science of deduction and analysis’ which Holmes turned out to have written himself, that he was a consulting detective, ‘if you can understand what that is.’

  Sherlock Holmes may have been the world’s first detective of that sort, as he claimed, but in London in the 1880s there were, as he pointed out to Watson, ‘lots of government detectives and lots of private ones.’Yet the curious and intrigued Watson failed to make the connection. Of course, the application of science to crime detection was something new. But what might have made the penny drop for Dr Watson, in conjunction with the other evidence of Holmes’s limits (for example, ‘well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally’), was one more item on that list: ‘Knowledge of Sensational Literature – Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.’

  ‘The importance of this cannot be overstated,’ writes Caleb Carr, author of The Italian Secretary, in a non-fiction contribution elsewhere to an upcoming collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories by mystery writers: ‘It was in “sensational” literature that one was most likely to find, in British society of the late 1880s and early 1890s, many spectacular yet semi-scholarly studies that we would today categorise under the heading of “forensic psychology.”’* Sherlock Holmes made good if psychologically uncomplicated use of his immense knowledge of sensational literature: ‘I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set [Scotland Yard] straight,’ he told Watson. ‘There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can’t unravel the thousand and first.’

  That was Sherlock Holmes acting within his limits, which he had to do, as Carr observes in his essay, with the material, physical world. As a detective in a scientific sense, Holmes always wants to know and looks for the physical evidence; he made himself a master at observing and analysing physical evidence that the police and other detectives overlook or fail to recognize at all. By his innate but also rigorously trained powers of deduction, he is able to reason backwards from this evidence to reconstruct the crime and delineate the physical attributes of the perpetrator. And this is no mean achievement. But as Carr notes, Holmes pays little attention to the psychology of crime, and neither does Watson, whose medical training and interests do not run far in the direction of psychiatry.

  Suppose that legendary introduction had gone this way instead:

  ‘Dr Watson, Dr Laszlo Kreizler,’ said Stamford, introducing us.

  What a different experience that would have proven for the man who became Sherlock Holmes’s Boswell: to have found himself lashed to the chariot wheels of Caleb Carr’s protagonist in The Alienist and Angel of Darkness – a man who knew medicine quite as well as Watson did, but also vastly more about the human mind, particularly its darker side – and who used this knowledge to solve crimes differently from, but as brilliantly as, Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was not always a comfortable companion for Dr Watson; God knows, he made no attempt to be. But Kreizler’s insight into the criminal mind, and especially the mind of the serial killer – the man or woman who kills not for profit, nor from momentary rage, but instead out of deep, dark psychological wellsprings from which an eminently normal person such as John H. Watson would shrink – might have been more than Watson could have stood for long. Sherlock Holmes’s role in life was to make the world safe, and Watson found that right and good. He was ready to stand beside that man, come what may. But Dr Kreizler’s role was to awaken people to the depths inside humanity, and to the madness and danger that often lurk there. In fact, his philosophy was the antithesis of liberal Victorians’ conviction about progress.

  Kreizler does owe certain recognisable debts to Sherlock Holmes. He has his own Watson, in a police reporter for the New York Times, John Schuyler Moore. The Irish surname suggests a parvenu in the social life of turn-of-the-century New York; in the eyes of polite society Moore may have been little better than the police, even if redeemed to some degree by the Schuyler side of his descent, and by an education superior to his chosen calling. (We learn that it was at Harvard College that he, Laszlo Kreizler, and Theodore Roosevelt, the reform-minded police commissioner in The Alienist, first met as students.) Like Holmes, Kreizler has a band of Baker Street Irregulars, ‘street arabs’, on whom he may call, led by a kid from the gutters named Stevie Taggert. We glimpse Kreizler for the first time at Bellevue Hospital, just as we did Sherlock Holmes at Bart’s. A distinctly Continental note about Kreizler does set him apart from Holmes, though – a slight accent since childhood, when he arrived in America with his German father and Hungarian mother, fleeing the failed European liberal revolutions of 1848. (The chronology does not quite work: surely Kreizler and Moore were not quite as old as that would make them; but then internal contradictions are what the practice of Sherlockiana, the so-called ‘Higher Criticism’ of the four novels and 56 short stories that comprise ‘the Canon,’ is all about.) But from Bellevue we accompany Kreizler and Moore to police headquarters on Mulberry Street, and then see them off to a gourmet lunch at Delmonico’s – an itinerary that might easily have been pursued by Sherlock Holmes on any day of an adventure set down for us by Dr Watson.

  The police do not appreciate Dr Kreizler, but the police commissioner does. In The Alienist, Kreizler and Moore embark upon a clandestine
investigation of serial murders, the first of the studies of crime that produce what Moore, looking back years later, calls ‘the brilliant doctor whose studies of the human mind have disturbed so many people so profoundly over the last forty years.’ Here is the sharpest difference between Dr Kreizler and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes was reassuring for people, by clearing up the mystery, identifying the guilty, and restoring order. ‘You need not fear,’ Sherlock Holmes tells his terrified client, Helen Stoner, in The Adventure of the Speckled Band, speaking to her ‘soothingly, bending forward and patting her forearm. “We shall soon set matters right, I have no doubt.”’ But even when Dr Kreizler solves the crimes before him, he leaves people profoundly disturbed.

  Physically, he resembles Holmes. He dresses in black, has black eyes ‘like a large bird’s,’ and gives an impression ‘of some hungry, restless hawk determined to wring satisfaction from the worrisome world around him.’ Grim as this may sound, it could be the beloved sleuth of our childhood, played on the screen by Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett. But there are important differences too, including a physical shortcoming that suggests inner damage: Kreizler’s left arm is underdeveloped because of a childhood injury. (If Sherlock Holmes had childhood injuries, they were purely psychic ones that affected his personality in ways that writers of pastiche have seized upon frequently, if not necessarily well.) Kreizler’s dark hair is cut unfashionably long, and he wears a neatly trimmed moustache and a small beard. This might easily be a villain in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Watson would probably have cast a suspicious eye at him, though it would be interesting to know what Holmes would deduce from Kreizler’s physical appearance upon meeting him for the first time.

  Although a partnership between Kreizler and Watson might have taken even more adjustments for Watson than his partnership with Holmes did (though those adjustments went on continually the entire time they were partners in crime detection – nearly two decades, during much of which Watson was married and living elsewhere), Watson actually remedied some of Holmes’s deficiencies, even if Holmes seldom acknowledged it or thanked him for it. The dynamic with Kreizler would have been different – a creative tension between two physicians whose approach to disease, and therefore crime, had followed different forks in the road, starting at medical school. Watson, conventional in his outlook, examined and drew conclusions from the physical evidence of the body. Kreizler was interested primarily in the mind, especially as the key to criminal motivation and behaviour. But both men did realise that the mind is shaped in great part by ancestral and environmental factors, just as disease is. Watson was not insensible to the power of the mind where health was concerned, and neither doctor believed in free will beyond a certain point. Drs Kreizler and Watson could have worked things out – though in the long run, I suspect, John Schuyler Moore, with his knowledge of sensational literature, nearly as great as Sherlock Holmes’s, would have been of more value to Kreizler than another MD like John H. Watson. The similarities between Kreizler and Watson might have cancelled out some of their differences in outlook, failing to produce enough tension to make the partnership an effective one. They could have set up a comprehensive medical practice together, but it would have belonged on Harley Street, not Baker Street, or their turn-of-the-century New York equivalents.