Moriarty Returns a Letter Read Free

lobster claws, huddled around pub tables like children around a campfire and scaring themselves with tales of the bogeyman.
    This, thought the American at the time, could be useful.
    And so he had invested sixpence and picked up last month’s issue of The Strand and read “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty.”
    And then he had backtracked and read all the others, all the way back to A Study in Scarlet . He wanted to know who this fictional detective was, and why even streetwise felons seemed to want to believe him to be real.
    The American thought he understood.
    Bleeding and barely conscious, he was now going to put it to the test. He had no other choice.
    His tormentors in the cargo hold were practically begging for some reason to believe that the failures of their vicious, shortsighted schemes were due to some other cause than their own personal faults. He would give them one.
    He was ready. He looked up at his interrogator.
    “What are you smiling at?” said Redgil, and he gestured for the brute to deliver another lash from the cargo net.
    “Oh, yes, you are the smart one,” said the American quickly. And then the lash of the whip came anyway. He held back his scream, he did his best to control the frantic, involuntary hyperventilation that the pain induced, and then, after several agonizing, dizzying seconds, he maintained consciousness. He looked up.
    “Yes, the smart one,” he said, forcing the smile again. “I knew that about you. You’re right. That rag right there is just The Strand Magazine . Not a newspaper, where everything is God’s own truth. No sir, not a bit of it. It’s just a magazine full of halfpenny stories. Stories that everyone repeats. In every pub. On every dock. That every whore and pickpocket and stockbroker in London knows about. But all the same, it’s just stories. You are absolutely correct.”
    “Right, then,” said Redgil, buying the flattery, but suspicious of where it was going.
    “Except it isn’t just.”
    The thick man with the net whip raised it again, eyes gleaming, and looked at Redgil.
    But Redgil hesitated. Too many of these and the shackled man would actually just die; he would go into shock or bleed out; he didn’t look to be far from it now. And he still hadn’t revealed what he knew.
    Redgil raised his hand to stay the whip.
    “What do you mean?” he said.
    The American took a moment to spit blood out onto the floor. Then he looked up, calmly and contemptuously, at Redgil.
    “The stories in this magazine are not something some writer made up. They are biography. You know what biography is, don’t you? It’s not fiction; it’s fact. The stories are a biographical account, written by an educated man, a doctor, this John Watson. He’s writing biography—actual reminiscences—about this detective he knows. If you’d been reading them all along, you’d know that. The very first one said right up front ‘a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.’ It’s fact. And he’s not just a doctor; he’s an army doctor. You know they wouldn’t have let him write things that aren’t true.”
    Redgil was suspicious, but he looked again at the skinny man. The skinny man nodded emphatically. “That’s right,” he said. “I read that in the very first one. A reminiscence. By John H. Watson, M.D. Late of the Army Medical Department.”
    “So there you are,” said the American agent to Redgil. “Read it for yourself, if you like.” Then he added, “You can read, can’t you?”
    That remark brought another slap across the jaw. The American knew that would happen; he was already pretty damn sure Redgil couldn’t actually read. The slap confirmed it, and it was worth the inconvenience—because now he had made the leader of the little group defensive about what he didn’t know, and anxious to prove he knew more than he did.
    “Sure I can,” said Redgil. “Of course I’ve read them. I’ve read all of them.”
    “Then think about it. Who