“And this was the arrangement of it all?” the Doctor asked, studying the diagram.
“That’s it.”
The Doctor made a noise of disappointment. “There’s certainly nothing remarkable in any of that. The key, I should think, will be to find the contractor who did the work.”
“Oh.” Miss Howard looked up, her eyes going wide like maybe something’d gotten by her that she hadn’t realized she’d missed. “But-he’s dead. We asked.”
The Doctor spun on her. “He’s what?”
“Dead,” Mr. Moore threw in simply. “Died right after the job was finished. Apparently, he was a friend of the clerk we spoke to at the Hall of Records. Did a lot of research work down there.”
The Doctor began to rub his temples. “Did the clerk happen to say what he died of?”
“He did,” Mr. Moore answered, absentmindedly rummaging through his pockets and coming out with an old piece of wrapped butterscotch. “Ahh-sustenance!”
“Moore,” the Doctor said impatiently.
“Hmm? Oh, right. The contractor. Got his name right here-it was on the permit.” He pulled out a scrap of paper as he sucked noisily on the butterscotch. “Henry-Bates. His office was in Brooklyn. Anyway, he had a massive heart attack a couple of days after he finished the Hunter job. And I don’t blame him. Working for that lady’d give me a heart attack, too.”
The Doctor just shook his head in his hand, sighing. Miss Howard grew ever more nervous as she watched him. “Do you think it’s important, Doctor?”
He lifted his head, pulling at the skin under his eyes with his fingers. “It does strike me as an odd coincidence, yes.”
“We’ve already had one coincidence on this case,” Mr. Moore announced, waving a careless hand. “You can’t take stock in too many of them.”
“I shouldn’t take stock in any of them, Moore,” the Doctor thundered back, “were they in fact coincidences! Marcus, I suggest that you find out what you can about a contractor named Henry Bates in Brooklyn. It may well be that he had a family.”
“And they’ll know his medical history,” Marcus said, noting the name on a pad with a nod.
Miss Howard clutched at her forehead. “Of course. Dammit…”
“What the hell are you all getting so worked up about?” Mr. Moore asked; and I’m bound to say that even I thought he was being a little dim at that point. “So the man had a heart attack. So what?”
“Moore,” the Doctor said, trying to be as patient as possible. “Do you happen to remember Dr. H. H. Holmes, the mass murderer whose existence caused your grandmother so much distress last year?”
“Of course I do,” he said. “Who doesn’t? Killed who knows how many people in that ‘torture castle’ of his.”
“Precisely,” the Doctor answered. “The ‘torture castle.’ A seemingly unending maze of secret rooms and chambers, each designed by Holmes himself to serve some horrendously sadistic purpose.”
“Well?” Mr. Moore asked. “What’s that got to do with this?”
“Do you know the first thing that Holmes did once the castle was completed?”
Mr. Moore’s face stayed simple. “Killed somebody, I’d imagine.”
“Correct. He killed the one person on earth besides himself who knew the exact plans of the place.”
Finally, Mr. Moore’s noisy smacking of the butterscotch came to an end. “Uh-oh…” He looked up slowly. “That wouldn’t have been-”
“Yes,” the Doctor answered quietly. “His contractor.”
Glancing from one of our faces to the next, Mr. Moore suddenly stood up. “I’m going to Brooklyn,” he said, racing toward the front door before any real abuse could be shoveled onto him.
“I’m going with you,” Marcus said, following. “The badge may come in handy.”
“We need the exact cause of death!” the Doctor called after them as they closed the elevator grate. “As well as any details of the job that he may have shared with his family, should he have had one!”
The front door banged closed, and the rest of us were left to listen as the Doctor mumbled in discouragement, “I ought to’ve known better. It’s hard enough to keep John’s mind focused in the cold weather, but in the summer…” He paused, and looked at the diagram on the wall again. “The basement,” he repeated softly. “The basement…”
Miss Howard came over to stand by him. “I really am sorry, Doctor. I was the one who should have thought of it.”
The Doctor attempted to be gracious. “I doubt that it’s cost us too much time, Sara,” he said. “And even if we do discover some terrible secret about the construction of this basement, the question remains, what can we do about it? A direct approach by the police, given Señor Linares’s attitude, is ruled out, not only because of the danger to the señora but because of diplomatic privilege, as well. The denizens of Mulberry Street, even if we could convince them to investigate the matter, would never defy the wishes of a foreign dignitary. And the dangers to our own group of returning to the house are now clearly evident-one word from Elspeth Hunter, and we should find ourselves, as Miss Devlin said, at the bottom of the river. And then there is the question of our unidentified friend with his arrows and knives…”
“Were you able to discover anything about all that?” Lucius asked.
“I received pieces of an answer,” the Doctor said. “To which it is necessary to add a conjecture-a rather bizarre conjecture-in order to obtain a likely answer. We are presented with two weapons. The first, as you said, Detective Sergeant, is the well-known trademark of the pirates, mercenaries, and simple thieves who haunt the Manila waterfront. The second is more obscure-an aboriginal weapon, as we surmised, one which, if judged by its small size alone, we could do no more than identify as originating with one of the pygmy tribes of either the southwestern Pacific, Africa, or South America. It is the strychnine that permits us to be more specific-it is known to be used in this way only by the natives of Java.”
“Java?” Lucius said. “But Java’s in the Dutch East Indies-far to the southwest of the Philippines. It wouldn’t seem to match with the kris.”
“True, Detective Sergeant,” the Doctor answered. “But you must bear in mind what the waterfront of Manila is-a stewpot of everything violent and criminal from as far away as Europe, San Francisco, and China. An habitué of the place is likely to become familiar with weaponry from much farther away than Java-and if he is ethnically predisposed toward a particular weapon, the chances are all the greater that he will adopt it.”
“What do you mean?” Miss Howard asked.
The Doctor finally turned and walked away from the diagram. “In certain isolated parts of the Philippines-the northern part of the island of Luzon, for instance, and the Bataan Peninsula-there exist small groups of aboriginal pygmies. The Spanish and Filipinos call them ‘Negritos’; their own tribal name is ‘Aëtas.’ They are the oldest residents of the islands, thought to have crossed over from the Asian mainland when there was still an ice bridge over that part of the Pacific. They are quite negroid in their features”-the Doctor looked to me and Cyrus-“and their average height is about four and a half feet. Which might make them appear, at a distance-”
Cyrus nodded. “To look like a ten-year-old boy, in this country.”
“Precisely.”
Miss Howard suddenly gave out with a gasp. “My God,” she whispered.
The Doctor turned to her. “Sara? You have, I suspect, recalled something from one of your conversations with Señora Linares?”
“Yes,” she answered blankly, not bothering to ask how the Doctor’d guessed. “Her husband-he comes from an old diplomatic family. When he was a young man, his father was posted to the governor-general’s office-in Manila …”
The Doctor only nodded. “On the island of Luzon. There had to be a connection. The Aëtas are outcasts in Filipino society. If one of them should, for whatever reason, have found himself in Manila, virtually the only place where his presence would have been tolerated would have been on the waterfront. He would have brought with him the aboriginal hunting and warring skills of his people-and, in all likelihood, picked up other methods of combat necessary for his survival. At the same time, like many aborigines, the Aëtas place a high premium on loyalty. Should such a man ever have been employed or befriended by someone in a position of power…” He turned to Miss Howard. “It will be for you, Sara, to contact Señora Linares somehow, and determine whether or not her husband ever had such a man in his employ.”