“Well done!” Jeffrey beamed. “So I do.”
“But I think you owe me two drinks. The quote isn’t quite right. It should be ‘the affair has taken a very much graver turn,’ not ‘a grave turn.’ ”
Jeffrey thought for a moment.
“My, you’ve been invested in the Irregulars all of two minutes and look at you! Picking nits at an old man already. Well, very well. I’ll keep you in scotch until dawn at this rate.”
Harold had initially encountered this Sherlockian quotation game at the very first meeting he’d attended. Four years ago, before he had written anything for the Baker Street Journal or met any of the Irregulars, he found himself at the meeting of the local Los Angeles “scion” society, the Curious Collectors of Baker Street. They were a small group, considerably less prestigious than the Irregulars. Meetings were open to the public. In an oak-lined bar, over glasses of peat-smelling scotch- all Sherlockians seemed to think that ice cubes were made from poison and were therefore to be distrusted, as far as Harold could tell-they called out quotes from Sherlock Holmes stories. One member would holler a quote-“ ‘ I never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive to the logical faculty,’” for instance. Then the man or woman to his right would have to provide the name of the story from which it came-in this case The Sign of the Four. If he answered correctly, it would then be his turn to yell out a quote, and then the turn of the Sherlockian to his right to supply the answer. Whoever erred first would find the next round on his or her tab. Given most Sherlockians’ fondness for highquality scotch, and for voluminous quantities of same, new and inexperienced members would find their American Express cards pressed to their limits.
“It’s my first night as an Irregular,” said Harold. “And my guess is, you’re more than a little responsible for that. I think I’m the one who owes you a drink.”
Jeffrey’s grin returned. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, kid. Now let’s make use of the bar.”
A few minutes later, Harold sat on the stool beside Jeffrey, sipping bourbon. A group of revelers had staged a nonviolent coup over the bar’s piano and were sing-chanting an old Sherlockian ditty. The bartender regarded them with equal parts disapproval and bemusement.
“To all our friends canonical / On both sides of the crime / We’ll take the cup and lift it up / To Holmes and Watson’s time,” sang the drunken group, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” It was both off-key and arrhythmic, though Harold had to admit that he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard a Sherlockian song sung with much regard for proper pitch.
Harold and Jeffrey were soon talking about the diary, which Harold suspected was all anyone was talking about that night. The singing and drinking were a distraction, but there was really only one thought haunting the minds of the hundreds of Sherlockians in the Algonquin Hotel: the lost diary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The lost diary that had finally been found.
After Conan Doyle died, one volume of his diaries had gone missing. The author had kept a detailed daily diary of his activities for his entire life, and yet when his wife and children surveyed his papers after his death, one book was strangely not present. No worn, ink-drenched leather journal for the period from October 11 through December 23, 1900, could be found. And in the century that had passed since that day, not one of the hundreds of scholars and family members who had tried to find it had been able to do so. The lost diary was the holy grail of Sherlockian studies. It would be worth a fortune-perhaps as much as $10 million, if it ever went up for sale at Sotheby’s. But more importantly, it would provide a window into the mind of the world’s greatest mystery writer, at the height of his powers. For a hundred years, scholars had theorized about what was in the diary. A manuscript for a lost story? Some secret confession from Conan Doyle? And how on earth had it vanished so completely?
Three months before the dinner at the Algonquin, each member of the Irregulars had received a tantalizingly brief e-mail from Alex Cale, a fellow Irregular. “The great mystery is solved,” it had read. “I have found the diary. Please make all necessary arrangements that I might present it, and the secrets contained within, at this year’s conference.”
It was a delicious mystery, even for Alex, who had a particular fondness for this sort of drama. Quickly, a flurry of e-mails skittered across the globe: “Is he serious?”… “He can’t mean THE diary, can he?”… “He’s been looking for that damned thing for twenty-five years; he only just found it NOW?” The Baker Street Irregulars reacted with incredulity only to buffer themselves from their forthcoming shock; the next three months would see them through stages of exhilaration, anxiety, twitchy anticipation, and, from some darker corners, jealousy.
Alex Cale was already the most accomplished of the Sherlockians. It was difficult to argue that he was not the world’s greatest expert on Sherlock Holmes, though the Irregulars boasted more than a few experts who might be inclined to disagree. But of course, his rivals had said, of course it would be Alex Cale who found the missing diary of Arthur Conan Doyle. With his money. With his free time. With dear dead Daddy’s seemingly never-ending trust fund behind him.
And yet the question currently foremost in the minds of Harold, Jeffrey, and the hundreds of other Sherlockians drinking, laughing, sleeping, or, less commonly, making love in the Algonquin Hotel was this: Where had Alex found the diary? And how had he found it?
After his initial message, Alex stopped responding to his e-mails. He returned no phone calls. He answered no letters, even though the craft of old-fashioned letter writing had always been one in which he’d taken some pride. Finally, after a number of attempts at communication from Jeffrey Engels, Alex wrote back a message. If one could even call it that.
“Am being followed,” Alex wrote to Jeffrey. “Will update soon.” It had the clipped syntax of a telegram, and as a result Jeffrey couldn’t tell whether Alex was joking or whether he was losing his mind. He forwarded Alex’s message around, and the consensus was that Alex was having a little too much fun with all of this, taking the fantastical mystery a bit too far. Certainly the diary would be valuable, but who- what shadowy figure-would trail Alex around his London home? Cale must be teasing, they thought. Though Harold, prone to fantasy as he was, harbored fears. Was it possible that someone really was trying to hurt Alex Cale?
“My best guess?” said Jeffrey. “It’s a story. A lost manuscript. Conan Doyle must have decided it was garbage and hidden it away. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to find and publish his subpar work.”
“Maybe,” said Harold. “But Conan Doyle published a lot of material in his life. And look, not to be blasphemous or anything, but they’re not all gems. ‘The Lion’s Mane’? ‘The Mazarin Stone’? I mean, really.”
Jeffrey laughed.
“I always took the view that Conan Doyle didn’t even write those awful late stories himself. They don’t quite sound like him. But the diary is from the fall of 1900. He was preparing to write The Hound of the Baskervilles. Probably his best work, if you ask me.”
“Yeah,” said Harold. “I’m not sure… I just don’t think it’s a story, for some reason. I think it’s…” Harold drifted off. He felt silly saying this out loud.
“It’s…?” prompted Jeffrey.
“I mean, that it’s… That the diary has a secret in it. Something he didn’t want anyone to know. Something he wrote down for himself. And only himself. He was a writer. He was a devout diarist. He liked to put things on paper. It’s therapeutic. But then he didn’t want the world knowing whatever is in that thing.”