LITMIR.BIZ

       IX

       The Diamond and Its Reflection

      Presented with aplomb by Shylock Holmes, Scummington’s card gave them easy access to Eagle Place, the London morgue. One of the attendants led them to the cell where the late Chung Ling Soo was temporarily resting on a black marble slab. As soon as the attendant left them, Holmes rebelled.

      “But really, Canterel, we’re not children . . . When are you going to explain to me what we’re doing here?”

      “The wooden leg,” said Canterel, pursing his lips. “Take off the wooden leg, will you?”

      Grimod understood immediately and did so, his eyes gleaming.

      Once he had the object in his hands, Canterel examined it and quickly found what he was looking for.

      “I knew it!” he said, showing them a horizontal groove cut into the wood in the top third of the leg.

      He aligned the beginning of the strip with this groove and asked Grimod to hold it in place while he rolled it around the leg. Gradually, as it wound around, the message appeared. His glasses perched on the tip of his nose, Holmes spelled it out aloud: “‘The diamond and its reflection are on their way. Moscow-Peking 02/15.’ As for the rest, I apologize for my pronunciation, but Ananki d oúdé theoí machontaí.”

      “Άνάνκη δ ούδέ θ∊οί μάχουταί,” Grimod corrected, smiling. “‘Not even the gods fight against necessity,’ Simonides’s famous words . . .”

      “But which in our case sounds like a warning!” said Canterel.

      “You are extraordinary. I would pay dearly to know the series of deductions that brought you to this leg . . .”

      “Even if I had the answer to your question, I don’t think you’d be able to afford my price, my dear. No offense, of course.”

      “That’s not what I meant,” continued Grimod, “though perhaps a more in-depth conversation on that topic would surprise you. Let’s move on . . . I am more a being of logic than passion, I have studied Joseph Bell’s theories, arguments drawn upon by the grandsire of our own Sir Holmes, whom I try to assist as much as I can in his work, but your method of coming to this conclusion astounds me, as it flies in the face of all deductive logic!”

      “Perhaps,” said Canterel, unwinding the strip very slowly, “perhaps it is simply a matter of a different sort of logic, just as true to reason, or what you understand by that word. If I weren’t concerned about the contradiction in terms, I would speak of an irrational logic, a mental process that I have noticed can be found in the margins, in random encounters, and in a kind of pure poetry, the magic of its operation. Thinking about it a little, I would say that I am likely not such a bad poet.”

      “Please, Monsieur, or I won’t be able to sleep tonight: how did you go from the ribbon to the scytale, and from there to the wooden leg?”

      “You imagine I know how I did it?” asked Canterel, adjusting his tiepin. “You are wrong. I try to be . . . How shall I put it? To be truly present in my surroundings, and suddenly everything begins to signal to me in some strange way. I cannot write poems that an editor would agree to publish without making me pay the expenses out of pocket, but something happens within me that is along the lines of poetry. I must be some kind of sensor, you know. Reality often works the same way in which Raymond Roussel wrote some of his books—it feels like a bad pun. Coils, pythons, a stray scytale . . . Then the intuition that a conical stick was needed to produce that shift in the letters. It’s no more than that: I lock on to the things that hide from the order that lies beneath the seeming frivolity of language.”

      “In the meantime,” Holmes noted, concerned, “the main thing I see is that we are not the only ones on the chase . . .”

      Half an hour later, they arrived back at the hotel bar.

      Holmes banged his glass down on the table.

      “Moscow-Peking,” he said, fervent. “Do we agree that it can only mean a train?”

      Grimod nodded, while Canterel merely raised his eyebrows.

      “If all this is not just the product of our imagination, the diamond should then be traveling on the Transsiberian on February 15^th to get to its recipient.”

      “Which implies,” continued Grimod, “that the

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