My Sherlock Holmes Part 1

My Sherlock Holmes.

Michael Kurland.

INTRODUCTION.

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention; a kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then-well, then you'd be reading Shakespeare instead of Sherlock Holmes. Henry V, or Hank Cinque, as we like to call him, to be exact. What do William Shakespeare and Arthur Conan Doyle have in common? They both, without really trying, created fictional characters that have attained the literary equivalent of immortality.

Without really trying? Yes, I think it's true of both Shakespeare and Conan Doyle. Not that they weren't doing their best to create wonderful stories for their public, but neither a.s.sumed that his creations would outlive him by centuries. Look at what Shakespeare named some of his plays: The Comedy of Errors-hey, it's a comedy; the characters keep making these errors, that's what makes it funny. As You Like It-as good as saying, "I think this plot is dumb, but the groundlings like this sort of thing, so here it is." Much Ado About Nothing-how self-effacing can you get? Love's Labour's Lost-sounds like a bad sitcom. (Shakespeare apparently also wrote a play called Love's Labour's Won, which has been, er, misplaced. If you can find a copy, say on the back shelf of some old library, you might get a favorable mention in a couple of textbooks yourself.) And Conan Doyle, as we well know, thought so little of his popular consulting detective that he did his best to kill him off, to leave himself more time to write his serious historical works, like Micah Clarke and The White Company.

What can one possibly say about Sherlock Holmes that hasn't been said before? His exploits have been written up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (we'll drop for the moment the pretense that Conan Doyle was merely the "agent" for Dr. John Watson); expanded on by Adrian Conan Doyle, John d.i.c.kson Carr, and others; pastiched by August Derleth, Robert L. Fish, Anthony Boucher, John Lennon, and scores of others; parodied by Mark Twain, Stephen Leac.o.c.k, P. G. Wodehouse, and untold legions of others.

Every aspect of Holmes's fictional existence has been discussed, dissected, and the conclusions disponed and disputed by such literary lumi naries as Vincent Starrett, William Baring-Gould, Ronald Knox, Rex Stout, and Dorothy Sayers, to name just the ones who come to mind most easily. (If you are a Holmes aficionado you probably have your own list of favorite Irregulars, and you're slightly miffed at me for not mentioning Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, John Kendrick Bangs, Martin Gardner, Michael Harrison, John Bennett Shaw, Nicholas Meyer, John Gardner, or possibly Colin Wilson. Well, sorry; they just didn't come to mind.) It has been said, by the sort of people who say these things, that there are only five universally recognized fictional characters: Santa Clans, Romeo, Superman, Mickey Mouse, and Sherlock Holmes. Some would expand the list to add Don Quixote, Don Juan, King Kong, Dorothy (the Wizard's Dorothy, you know), Bugs Bunny, Wonder Woman, Charlie Chan, James Bond, and perhaps Peter Pan to that list, and, as my grandmother used to say, they're right, too.

Then there are the ones that have fallen by the wayside. Fifty years ago almost any literate adult whose native language was English could recognize Raffles, Nick Carter, Stella Dallas, Ephram Tutt, Bertie Wooster, and Bulldog Drummond, for example. But members.h.i.+p in this club for the fictional elite is transient for most; characters age and fade away from the public consciousness to be replaced by more youthful, contemporary cre-actions.

But Sherlock Holmes lives on.

It has been estimated, by the sort of people who estimate these things, that there are over a billion people living today who could tell you, at least in some vague fas.h.i.+on, who Sherlock Holmes was. Many of them don't realize that he is a fictional character, or that if he were real he'd be well over a hundred years old now, as is shown by the volume of mail the Lon don post office continues to get addressed to 221B Baker Street.

What is there about this creation of Dr. Conan Doyle's that enabled him to so quickly enter the pantheon of fictional immortals, rise to be numbered among the top five, and remain there for over a century? I'll give you my theory, but you'll have to put up with a little digression. Here goes: The detective story took some time to come into being. Edgar Allan Poe is usually credited with being its first pract.i.tioner, with his stories involving the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. (Did Holmes ever meet Dupin? See "The Adventure of the Impecunious Chevalier," from the quill pen of Richard Lupoff, in this very volume.) There had been detectives in stories before Dupin; there had been stories of detection before Dupin. What, then, made Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue the first true detective story? Simply it was the first story where: * The detective is the main character of the story.

* The matter to be detected is the princ.i.p.al problem of the story.

* The detective detects; that is, he solves the problem by the application of observation guided by intelligence.

The last Dupin story was published in 1845. Over the next four decades, until Arthur Conan Doyle decided to call the main characters in his first detective novel Sherlock Holmes and John Watson instead of Sherringford Holmes and Ormond Sacker (as indicated by a rough page of preliminary notes, still preserved, plotting out A Study in Scarlet), few detectives worthy of the name were introduced to the world of fiction. Charles d.i.c.kens's Inspector Bucket (Bleak House, 1853) and Wilkie Collins's Sergeant Cuff (The Moonstone, 1868) are credible police officers, and their actions advance the plots of their respective books, but they are minor characters (no less than four other characters do their share of detecting during the course of The Moonstone), and in each book the solving of the crime takes second place to the novelists' examination of how the situation affects the other characters.

With L'Affair Lerouge (English t.i.tle: The Lerouge Case; U.S. t.i.tle: The Widow Lerouge), first published in 1866, Emil Gaboriau introduced Lecoq, a detective who uses observation, reflection, and ratiocination (Poe's word for what Dupin did; it means thinking logically) to solve his cases. Lecoq is an amalgam of Dupin and Francois Eugene Vidocq, a real detective who rose from being a professional thief to head the Paris Police Department in 1811. Vidocq wrote four volumes of memoirs after his forced retirement in 1827, which gave highly fictionalized accounts of his prowess as a detective.

It seems fitting that the first English language detective novel was written by a woman: Anna Katherine Green. It was called The Leavenworth Case, it was first published in 1848, and it was a bestseller. In his book b.l.o.o.d.y Murder, Julian Symons recounts that The Leavenworth Case was the favorite reading of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin. Since Baldwin didn't first serve as prime minister until 1923, it's clear that the book, as we professionals put it, had legs.

There were also any number of interior imitators of Poe and Gaboriau and Green. From 1870, with the publication of "The Bowery Detective" by Kenward Philp, until the 1920s the so-called dime novels published hundreds, perhaps thousands, of detective stories; strong on action, suspense, disguises, racy dialog, good men turned bad, bad men who want to be good. They were weak on characterization, plot, and anything approaching actual detection, but they moved fast and, with a combination of nonstop action and exotic locales, they provided a welcome anodyne from the dullness and drudgery of everyday life.

And then, in 1887, came A Study in Scarlet, and all lesser attempts were washed away as though they had never been. Sherlock Holmes was instantly recognized as the master of detection, by a public who had been waiting for just such a hero without knowing what it was they were waiting for until it appeared.

To the readers of the latter years of the nineteenth century Sherlock Holmes was the perfect Victorian; not as we today imagine Victorians: uptight, prudish, repressed, overly mannered, and ridiculously dressed prigs, but as the Victorians thought of themselves: logical, clearheaded, scientific, thoroughly modern leaders of the civilized world. Perhaps Holmes was a little too logical, a bit too cold and emotionless; but this merely permitted his readers to admire him without wis.h.i.+ng to be him. And, like Darwin, Pasteur, Maxwell, Bell, Edison, and the other scientific geniuses of the period, he solved mysteries that baffled other men. And you could watch him do it! You could see the results as that mighty brain attacked the problem of Thor Bridge, or The Second Stain, or The Dancing Men.

"It is my business to know things," Holmes explains in A Case of Ident.i.ty. "Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others overlook."

And today? We have all of that, with the added delight of visiting what is, for us, the alien wonderland, of tantalus and gasogene, of hansom cabs and four wheelers-"Never take the first cab in the rank"-of spending an hour or a day in a London where, as Vincent Starrett put it, "it is always 1895."

It was perhaps inevitable that, when Conan Doyle gave up writing the continuing saga of Sherlock Holmes, others would take up the pen. Even before Holmes retired to take up beekeeping, the parodies and pastiches had begun. Vincent Starrett, Mark Twain, John Kendrick Bangs; all couldn't resist the impulse to pastiche or parody the creation of Dr. Doyle. In a 1973 German magazine article, Pierre Lachat notes that over 300 Holmes rip-offs appeared between 1907 and 1930. And that's only in English, and doesn't count the Spanish, or Portuguese, or the extensive German series, Aus den Geheimakten des Weltdetektivs (From the Mystery Files of the World Detective), which features Sherlock Holmes, but does away with Watson, replacing him with a youth named Harry Taxon.

But they were, at best, weak evocations of the Master. And most of them were not at anything approaching best. Perhaps the most successful of those authors who drew from the canon not merely their inspiration, but their mise-en-scene, were those who chose not to find another ancient notebook of Watson's in the lockbox at c.o.x, but who tell their stories in another voice than that of the long-suffering doctor, although the tales are set in the world of Sherlock Holmes. In some of them Holmes is still a major character, as in my own Professor Moriarty novels, and in others Holmes appears briefly, if at all.

The continued existence of a fictional character, not only in the steadily reprinted works of the author, but in new works created by other authors, is one of the signs of literary immortality. If this is so, then Holmes and Watson are more immortal (yeah, I know, being "more immortal" is like being "less dead," but it's only an expression fer crissakes) than most and we're adding to his longevity here in a big way, with some great writers.

Sherlock Holmes appears in all the stories in this collection. His "Watson" in each story is not the good doctor himself, but one of the legion of memorable secondary characters that Conan Doyle created with such ease. What reader can forget-to cite a few examples not appearing in this volume-Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., princ.i.p.al of the Priory School and author of Huxtable's Sidelights on Horace? Or Jabez Wilson, p.a.w.nbroker of Coburg Square, with his blazing red hair? Or Hosmer Angel, the fiance of the myopic Mary Sutherland, who found it easy to vanish on his wedding day because he never really existed?

And so onward, for one more look at Sherlock Holmes through the eyes of some of those who knew him best, but who haven't, until now, had the chance to tell their stories.

This book is a compilation of new stories about Sherlock Holmes, told from the point of view of various people mentioned in the original stories except Dr. Watson or Sherlock Holmes. The authors of these stories, freed from the limitation of having to speak in Watson's voice, have taken their tales in several interesting directions. How did Mrs. Hudson, Holmes's long-suffering landlady, acquire such an ill.u.s.trious tenant? And just who was Mr. Hudson. and what became of him? Find out in Linda Robertson's "Mrs. Hudson Reminisces." "A Study in Orange," by Peter Tremayne, will give some idea of what Colonel Sebastian Moran thought of his adversary and nemesis. In George Alec Effinger's "The Adventure of the Celestial Snows," Reginald Musgrave witnesses Sherlock Holmes's encounter with the infamous Dr. Fu Manchu.

Cara Black shows us Irene Adler's later relations.h.i.+p with Sherlock Holmes, a tale that, even if Watson had known about it, would have remained locked up in his battered tin dispatch box in the vaults of c.o.x & Co. We will learn of the early relations.h.i.+p between Sherlock Holmes and his maths instructor, James Moriarty. Richard Lupoff describes an unsuspected relations.h.i.+p between a young Sherlock Holmes and the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin.

I should mention that, as we know, the pa.s.sage of time creates lapses of memory, and, as Ryunosuke Akutagawa pointed out in his story "Rash.o.m.on," different people will see the same event from vastly different perspectives, and may relate versions of the event that seem to have no relation to each other. So it is with some of these stories. Ask not which ones are true: they all are, and they are all lies.

THE CHEVALIER C. AUGUSTE DUPIN.

"It is simple enough as you explain it," I said, smiling. "You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories."

Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. "No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin," he observed. "Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropros remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some a.n.a.lytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."

-A Study in Scarlet.

by RICHARD A. LUPOFF.

The Incident of the Impecunious Chevalier.

It was not by choice but by necessity that I continued to read by oil lamp rather than arranging for the installation of the new gas lighting. In my wanderings throughout the metropolis I had been present at demonstrations of M. Lebon's wondrous invention and especially of the improved thorium and cerium mantle devised by Herr von Welsbach, and thought at length of the pleasure of this brilliant mode of illumination, but the under nourished condition of my purse forbad me to pursue such an alteration in the condition of my lodgings.

Even so, I took comfort of an evening in crouching beside the hearth in my lodgings, a small flame of dried driftwood flickering on the stones, a lamp at my elbow, and a volume in my lap. The pleasures of old age are few and small, nor did I antic.i.p.ate to experience them for many more months before departing this planet and its life of travail. What fate my Maker might plan for me, once my eyes should close for the last time, I could only wonder and await. The priests might a.s.sert that a Day of Judgment awaited. The Theosophists might maintain that the doctrine of Karma would apply to all beings. As for me, the Parisian metropolis and its varied denizens were world enough indeed.

My attention had drifted from the printed page before me and my mind had wandered in the byways of philosophical musings to such an extent that the loud rapping upon my door induced a violent start within my nervous system. My fingers relaxed their grasp upon the book which they held, my eyes opened widely and a loud moan escaped my lips.

With an effort I rose to my feet and made my way through my chill and darkened apartment to answer the summons at the door. I placed myself beside the portal, pulling at the draperies that I kept drawn by day against the inquiring gaze of strangers and by night against the moist chill of the Pa risian winter. Outside my door I perceived an urchin, cap set at an uncouth angle upon his unshorn head, an object or sc.r.a.p of material clutched in the hand which he was not using to set up his racket on my door.

Lifting an iron bar which I kept beside the door in case of need to defend myself from the invasion of ruffians and setting the latch chain to prevent the door from opening more than a hand's width, I turned the latch and drew the door open far enough to peer out.

The boy who stood upon my stoop could not have been more than ten years of age, ragged of clothing and filthy of visage. The meager light of the pa.s.sage outside my apartment reflected from his eye, giving an impression of wary suspicion. We studied each other through the narrow opening for long seconds before either spoke. At length I demanded to know his reason for disturbing my musings. He ignored my question, responding to it by speaking my name.

"Yes," I responded, "it is indeed I. Again, I require to know the purpose of your visit."

"I've brought you a message, monsieur," the urchin stated.

"From whom?"

"I don't know the gentleman's name," he replied.

"Then what is the message?"

The boy held the object in his hand closer to the opening. I could see now that it was a letter, folded and sealed with wax, and crumpled and covered with grime. It struck me that the boy might have found the paper lying in a gutter and brought it to me as part of a devious scheme, but then I remembered that he had known my name, a feat not likely on the part of a wild street urchin.

"I can't read, monsieur," the child said. "The gentleman gave it me and directed me to your lodging. I know numbers, some, and was able to find your place, monsieur."

"Very well," I a.s.sented, "give me the paper."

"I've got to be paid first, monsieur."

The boy's demand was annoying, and yet he had performed a service and was, I suppose, ent.i.tled to his pay. Perhaps the mysterious gentleman who had dispatched him had already furnished him with payment, but this was a contingency beyond my ability to influence. Telling the child to await my return I closed the door, made my way to the place where I keep my small treasury, and extracted from it a sou coin.

At the doorway once more I exchanged the coin for the paper and sent the child on his way. Returning to the dual illumination of hearth and oil lamp, I broke the seal that held the letter closed and unfolded the sheet of foolscap. The flickering firelight revealed to me the work of a familiar hand, albeit one I had not glimpsed for many years, and a message that was characteristically terse and demanding.

Come at once. A matter of urgency.

The message was signed with a single letter, the initial D.

I rocked back upon my heels, sinking into the old chair which I had used as my comfort and my retreat from the world through the pa.s.sing decades. I was clad in slippers and robe, nightcap perched upon my head. It has been my plan, following a small meal, to spend an hour reading and then to retire to my narrow bed. Instead, I now garbed myself for the chill of the out-of-doors. Again I raided my own poor treasury and furnished myself with a small reserve of coins. In a short time I had left my apartment and stood upon my stoop, drawing behind me the doorway and turning my key in the lock.

No address had been given in the demanding message, nor was the messenger anywhere to be seen. I could only infer from the lack of information to the contrary that my old friend was still to be located at the lodgings we once had shared, long ago.

It was too far to travel on foot, so I hailed a pa.s.sing cab, not without difficulty, and instructed the driver as to my destination. He looked at me with suspicion until I repeated the address, 33 Rue Dunot in the Faubourg St-Germain. He held out his hand and refused to whip up until I had delivered the fare into his possession.

The streets of the metropolis were deserted at this hour, and mostly silent save for an occasional shout of anger or moan of despair-the sounds of the night after even revelers have retired to their homes or elsewhere.

As the cab drew up I exited from it and stood gazing at the old stone structure where the two of us had shared quarters for so long. Behind me I heard the driver grumble, then whip up, then pull away from number 33 with the creak of the wooden axle and the clatter of horse's hooves on cobblestones.

A light appeared in a window and I tried, without success, to espy the form of the person who held it. In a moment the light moved and I knew that my erstwhile friend was making his way to the door. I presented myself in time to hear the bar withdrawn and to see the door swing open.

Before me stood my old friend, the world's first and greatest consulting detective, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. Yet though it was unquestionably he, I was shocked at the ravages that the years had worked upon his once sharp-featured visage and whip-thin frame. He had grown old. The flesh did not so much cover his bones as hang from them. I saw that he still wore the smoked-gla.s.s spectacles of an earlier age; when he raised them to peer at me his once ferretlike eyes were dim and his hands, once as hard and steady as iron rods, appeared fragile and tremulous.

"Do not stand there like a goose," Dupin commanded, "surely by this time you know the way."

He retreated a pace and I entered the apartment which had meant so much to me in those days of our companions.h.i.+p. Characteristically, Dupin uttered not another syllable, but instead led the way through my onetime home. I shut the door behind me, then threw the heavy iron bolt, mindful of the enemies known to seek Dupin's destruction in a former epoch. That any of them still survived was doubtful, that they remained capable of working mischief upon the great mind was close to what Dupin would have deemed "a nil possibility," but still I threw the bolt.

Dupin led the way to his book closet, and within moments it was almost as if the decades had slipped away. He seemed to regain his youthful vigor, and I my former enthusiasm. Not waiting for me to a.s.sume the sofa upon which I had so often reclined to peruse musty volumes in past decades Dupin flung himself into his favorite seat. He seized a volume which he had laid face downward, its pages open, upon the arm of his chair.

"Have you seen this?" he demanded angrily, brandis.h.i.+ng the volume.

I leaned forward, straining in the gloom to recognize the publication. "It bears no familiarity," I confessed. "It looks but newly arrived, and my reading in recent years has been entirely of an antiquarian nature."

"Of course, of course," Dupin muttered. "I will tell you what it is. I have been reading a volume translated from the English. Its t.i.tle in our own tongue is Une etude en ecarlate. The author has divided the work into chapters. I will read to you from a chapter which he ent.i.tles ingenuously 'La Science de Deduction.'"

Knowing that there was no stopping Dupin once he was determined upon a course, I settled upon the sofa. The room was not uncomfortable, I was in the company of my ancient friend, I was content.

"I will omit the author's interpolations," Dupin prefaced his reading, "and present to you only the significant portions of his work. Very well, then! 'Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some a.n.a.lytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.'"

With a furious gesture he flung the slim volume across the room against a shelf of volumes, where it struck, its pages fluttering, and fell to the carpet. I knew that the Poe to whom the writer averred was the American journalist who had visited Dupin and myself from time to time, authoring reports of the several mysteries which Dupin had unraveled with, I took pride in recalling, my own modest but not insubstantial a.s.sistance.

"What think you of that?" Dupin demanded.

"A cruel a.s.sessment," I ventured, "and an inaccurate one. Why, on many occasions I can recall-"

"Indeed, my good friend, you can recall the occasions upon which I interrupted your words to tell you your very thoughts."

"As you have just done," I averred. I awaited further words from Dupin, but they were not at that moment forthcoming so I resumed my speech. "Who is the author of this scurrilous a.s.sessment?"

"The author's name matters not. It is the villain whom he quotes, who is of significance."

"And who, may I inquire, might that person be?"

Dupin raised his eyes to the ceiling where smoke from the fireplace, draughty as ever, swirled menacingly. "He is one whom I met some years ago, long after you had departed these quarters, mon ami. I had by then largely retired from my labors as a consulting detective, and of course my reputation had long since reached the islands of fools."

By this time I could see that Dupin was off on a tale, and I settled myself more thoroughly than ever upon the sofa, prepared to listen to the end: Those were days of tumult in our nation (Dupin said) when danger lurked at every turning and the most ordinary of munic.i.p.al services were not to be taken for granted. When I received a message from across the Channel I was of course intrigued.

The writer was a young man who professed admiration for my exploits and a desire to learn my methods that he might emulate them in the building of a reputation and a career for himself in his own land. I received many such communications in those days, responding to them uniformly that the entire science of detection was but a matter of observation and deduction, and that any man or even woman of ordinary intelligence could match my feats did he or she but apply those faculties with which we are all equipped to their full capacity. But the person who had written to me mentioned a particular case which he had been employed to resolve, and when he described the case my curiosity was piqued.

Your expression tells me that you, too, are aroused by the prospect of this case, and I will tell you what it concerned.

The young man's letter of application hinted only of a treasure of fabu lous value, a cache of gold and gems lost some three centuries, that had become the subject of legend and of fanciful tales, but which he believed to exist in actuality and to be in France, nay, not merely in France but in the environs of Paris itself. Could he but find it he would be wealthy beyond the power of imagination, and if I would but a.s.sist him in his quest a portion of it would be mine.

As you know, while I am of good family I have long been of reduced means, and the prospect of restoring the fortunes of my forebears was an attractive one. My correspondent was reticent as to details in his letters, for I wrote back to him seeking further information but was unable to elicit useful data.

At length I permitted him to visit me-yes, in this very apartment. From the first his eccentric nature was manifest. He arrived at a late hour, as late I daresay as you have yourself arrived this night. It was the night before that of the full moon. The air was clear and the sky filled with celestial objects whose illumination, added to that of the moon, approached that of the day.

He sat upon the very sofa where you recline at this moment. No, there is no need to rise and examine the furnis.h.i.+ng. You do make me smile, old friend. There is nothing to be learned from that old sofa.

The young man, an Englishman, was of tall and muscular build with a hawklike visage, sharp features, and a sharp, observant mien. His clothing bore the strong odor of tobacco. His hollow eyes suggested his habituation to some stronger stimulant. His movements suggested one who has trained in the boxing ring; more, one who has at least familiarized himself with the j.a.panese art of baritsu, a subtle form of combat but recently introduced in a few secretive salons in Paris and Berlin, in London, and even in the city of Baltimore in Maryland.

It took me but moments to realize that this was a person of unusual tal ent, potentially a pract.i.tioner of the craft of detection to approach my own level of proficiency. It was obvious to me as we conversed on this topic and that, the politics of our respective nations, the growing incidence of crime which respects neither border nor sea, the advances of science and literature among the Gallic and Anglic races, that he was watching me closely, attempting to draw my measure even as I was, his.

At length, feeling that I had seen all that he would reveal of himself, and growing impatient with his avoidance of the topic that had drawn him to my apartments, I demanded once for all that he describe that which he sought and in the recovery of which he desired my guidance, or else depart from my lodging, having provided me with an hour's diversion and no more.

"Very well, sir," he replied, "I will tell you that I am in search of a bird."

Upon his making this statement I burst into laughter, only to be shocked back to sobriety by the stern expression upon the face of my visitor. "Surely, sir," I exclaimed, "you did not brave the stormy waters of the Channel in search of a grouse or guinea hen."

"No, sir," he replied, "I have come in search of a plain black bird, a bird variously described in the literature as a raven or, more likely, a hawk."

"The feathers of hawks are not black," I replied.

"Indeed, sir, you are correct. The feathers of hawks are not black, nor has this hawk feathers of any color, but the color of this hawk is golden."

"You insult me, sir," I stated angrily.

My visitor raised his eyebrows. "Why say you so?"

"You come to me and speak only in riddles, as if you were humoring a playful child. A hawk that is black but has no feathers and yet is golden. If you do not make yourself more clear you must leave my apartments, and I wish you a speedy return to your country."

He raised a hand placatingly. "I did not wish to offend you, sir, nor to speak in conundrums. Pray, bear with me for a little longer and I will make clear the nature and history of the odd bird which I seek."

I permitted him to continue.