The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [46]
He spent the rest of the journey listening to accents, accustoming his ears to the peculiarities of the language and rehearsing the shape of a few key phrases.
When the train pulled into central Amsterdam, Holmes made his way, with deliberate Dutch politeness, down from the train and towards the news stand. As he suspected, the only Times the man possessed was Monday’s. Still, he bought that and a copy of a Paris newspaper, enquired when the Tuesday editions of both would arrive, and walked down the street until he found a clothier with a French name.
One does not need to be invisible, merely explicable.
He left with his English clothing in a parcel under his arm, looking for the barber the salesman had recommended. When he had finished there, he carried his purchases down the street to a small café, requesting een kopje koffie en een broodje, alstublieft in a thick French accent. He lit a French cigarette, passed a manicured hand over his newly trimmed hair (both hair and beard trimmed into the latest Parisian mode), and sat in his new Parisian collar and Lyonnaise neck-tie, the very picture of a monsieur in Amsterdam. Only when the tiny cup and roll were placed before him did he open the English paper.
He’d been deciphering the grumbles and whispers of the agony column for more than a half century; his eyes knew its texture the way a sculptor’s hands knew a lump of stone. One glance told him that there was nothing of interest among the close-packed print. Still, he read his methodical way down each column before he permitted himself to be certain: Neither Russell nor Mycroft had left their mark there.
He dropped some coins and both newspapers on the linen cloth and set about the day’s tasks.
His first stop was a post office. There he mailed the letter to The Times that he had prepared early that morning: a notice for the agony column that began, “Bees may thrive in foreign lands.”
However, the untoward actions of Scotland Yard made him question the wisdom of depending on the Royal post. Letters were too easy to open. What he required was a private and less easily breached means of communication: a telephone. And there was, on the surface of it, no particular reason why he could not go into a public telephone office to make his trunk call.
But why should that phrase, on the surface of it, make him think of an incident that had taken place this past spring, late one evening in the midst of the Pacific Ocean? He’d been at the rails in conversation with Russell, idly tracking a bit of flotsam off the bow, paying no conscious attention to the object except that the back of his mind kept nudging his eyes towards it. Only when the insistent pressure reached forward, making him aware of the unlikelihood of a floating object keeping pace with a ship, did his eyes suddenly give the thing a shape and an identity: the dorsal fin of a disturbingly large shark.
He needed to concentrate on the Brothers case, but Lestrade’s uncharacteristic audacity kept protruding from his thoughts like that bit of flotsam from a moonlit sea.
It might be that a trap was being laid. Granted, it was equally plausible that Lestrade had lost first his mind and then his job, and that Mycroft was even now settled at his desk in that anonymous governmental office, savouring a morning coffee and considering the state of the world.
He shook his head: one matter at a time. Once Damian was free from danger, there would be time enough to focus on Mycroft. Still, there was no harm in being cautious. Without data, he might be jumping in for a swim beside a shark the size of a motorcar.
He found what he wanted twenty minutes from the station, a grand hotel that showed signs of renovations aimed at a modern traveller. He asked for, and received, a suite of rooms that was not the most expensive the hotel offered, but close to that, and informed the manager that his bags would follow by evening. To be certain, he enquired after their facilities for international telephone calls,