Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,107

of a sturdy pair of tailor’s scissors as he set about the daily newspapers.

From the pages of the morning’s Times or the evening Globe, he would cut some item that had caught his eye. It might be the use of a refined form of strychnine by a French widow-robber, now making his last vain appeal to the Court de Cassation. Or perhaps there had been a sensation in the Place de Greve, after the desperate fellow had been strapped to the fatal plank and tilted forward under the hoisted blade of the guillotine. As his severed head fell into the basket, the felon’s eyes were distinctly seen to turn and glare at Sanson the executioner. Most often, however, these brief paragraphs followed the progress of some petty villain who had risen from trivial burglaries in the slums of Whitechapel to the Olympian heights of homicide or extortion.

With a brush of his left arm, Holmes swept clear a space in the rubble of his chemical table. He lugged out from the shelves a tall volume in marbled boards. Spreading it open, his long agile fingers turned the crackling pages, stiffened by the newsprint with which they had been pasted. He stopped at a panorama of cuttings, annotated heavily in rusty ink. I caught the word “Reichsanzeiger” and knew only enough German to tell me that this was an official compilation of confidential memoranda. Thanks to his elder brother, Holmes acquired occasional documents and reports that were not yet for public inspection. He traced a line across a column and rested it under the words “Comtesse de Flandre, Marie Louise Alexandrine Karoline, Princess of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.”

I looked over his shoulder and said, I fear rather foolishly, “Holmes, you have the advantage of me.”

He chuckled and again flattened the surface of the broad page with his hand. “Happily for the good people of England, Watson, they sleep soundly in their beds. They are oblivious to those darkling plains of Europe where Mr. Mathew Arnold’s ignorant armies clash by night. They do not yet know how close the powers of Europe came to a major war a matter of months ago. We owed that crisis to Rawdon Moran and his masters, for there are even mightier villains than he. Such men have come close to accomplishing the greatest criminal conspiracies of modern times. The damage is still far from being undone. To this point, they appear to have been merely flexing their muscles for the grand assault that will one day come. These are the documents that prove the case.”

“But why should they want a war?”

He looked at me with unfathomable sympathy.

“My dear Watson, why should a grocer want his customers to grow hungry—or a tailor to see his clients grow ragged? Who will profit from a modern war in Europe? Not the poor young heroes who will be slaughtered in their thousands by the devices of an industrial age. Not the householders who, with their wives and children, will be bombarded from the land, from the sea, and very probably in future from the air. But who else?”

“The merchants of murder!” I took up a phrase he had used earlier when talking of Moran or his kind and tossed it back at him. He nodded slowly.

“Very good, Watson. And whom do we know whose litany is a hymn of homage to the houses of Krupp and Maxim-Nordenfelt, Creuzot and Howitzer, Colt and Armstrong, Enfield and Webley? Why be content with the Congo and the Transvaal if all Europe is hungry for weapons?”

“But there has been no European war. What was their plot?”

He turned to another page.

“A few months ago, they decided to see what they could do, by forged despatches, to strike up the diplomats’ dance of death. To bring two great power blocs of Europe to war, Austria and Germany on one side, France and Russia on the other, the old Turkish Empire and the straits of the Dardanelles with access to the Mediterranean to be the prize. The gateway to the East. If there were war, well and good. If not, the world would see how far a criminal clique could push the nations towards one. The war was to be precipitated by a German prince claiming the throne of Bulgaria, Ferdinand of Coburg, kinsman of the Comtesse de Flandre. She is also sister to his closest ally, the King of Rumania.”

“And her part in all this?”

“The Comtesse was the innocent recipient of forged letters purporting to be written by Prince Ferdinand.