The man kept his gun aimed at Harold, and for his own part Harold didn’t move.

“POLIZIA!” came another shout. The voice was Italian-speaking Swiss, and female.

“Please,” said Harold to the man. “Shoot me, take the diary, and run. Or give it to me. But I’m not leaving.”

The man continued staring at Harold, gauging his seriousness. The man’s face grew tight, as if acknowledging that Harold would not bend. As the footsteps approached the study, the man turned his body toward the door. That was all the time Harold needed.

He swung the poker through the air, aiming for the man’s head but landing it across his left arm. There was a crunch, and Harold felt the recoil of contact through his own arm. The man doubled over to his left side, instinctively protecting his wounded forearm with his right hand. He still held the gun, but it wasn’t pointing at Harold anymore.

Harold swung again with the poker, ramming it into the man’s shoulder. He howled in pain. As Harold stepped back for another swing- would he aim for the man’s head? Would he kill him?-Harold saw a figure in the doorway. It was the woman who’d yelled “polizia” from the hallway, but she was not, so far as Harold knew, a member of the Swiss police.

It was Sarah.

He dropped the poker and was only vaguely aware of the clank it made against the floor. Sarah held a small gun in her hand, and she was aiming it at Harold. The man, given a moment to catch his breath, used the opportunity to lash out with his own gun, punching it into Harold’s belly. Harold felt all the air leave his body. He dropped to his knees, holding himself up from the floor only by pressing both hands into the floor. He had moments ago prepared himself for death, but now he felt like he was actually dying. It was more horrible than he’d imagined. He opened his mouth for air, but none entered. His mouth hung open as if in a silent scream.

The man didn’t waste an instant. He pistol-whipped Harold about his brow, swinging the arm that held the gun against his temple. Harold felt the hard steel batter into his head, once and then again. Everything went blurry.

Harold lost the next few seconds to shock. When he finally became aware of the world around him, he was on the floor, staring up at the Goateed Man. He felt something wet on his forehead. Blood, most likely, trickling between his eyes toward his nose. The man raised his gun to Harold’s face. Strangely, Harold felt some small measure of instantaneous joy at the thought that when he died, Sarah would watch. If a bullet was about to enter his brain, blowing gray matter and bone particulates into the floor of Sherlock Holmes’s study, he wanted her to see it.

Harold heard the gunshot. It was the loudest sound he’d ever heard, and his ears screamed from the volume. It sounded more like static than like any of the gunshots he’d heard on television or in movies, but it still sounded like a gunshot. And Harold heard it. Which meant, he quickly realized, that he wasn’t dead. Dead people didn’t hear the bullet as it entered their brain, he was pretty sure of that. So he hadn’t been shot. Who had?

“Step back,” Sarah said. Her tone was insistent but calm. Harold looked over at her and at the gun she held before her. She’d fired the shot. But as he turned his head to the Goateed Man, he saw that neither of them had been hurt. The man obeyed Sarah, stepping back away from Harold. When he moved, Harold could make out the hole that had been ripped by her bullet in the wall behind him. She hadn’t been trying to kill anyone, Harold realized. Just to make a point.

If the bullet hadn’t done the job, the look on Sarah’s face certainly did. The man stepped back farther, and he even lowered his gun without being asked to.

“The bleeding hell are you doing?” the man said to Sarah.

“I’d ask you the same thing,” she responded. “No one was supposed to die.”

“I don’t see how it’s your problem whether I kill this bastard or not.”

“It is my problem,” Sarah said. “And it’s yours, too. ’Cause if you kill him, how much longer do you think I’ll let you live?”

Harold had no doubt whatsoever that she was serious. He felt himself growing light-headed. He was coughing, choking, trying to get some air into his lungs but finding himself unable to take a breath. He was suffocating-and growing panicked.

Sarah glanced at him quickly.

“Breathe slowly, Harold,” she said. “Calmly. Slow, deep breaths. You just had the wind knocked out of you. That’s right. Very slow. Don’t try to take in too much air at once or you’ll choke more. There you go. There you go.”

Harold did as she suggested and felt the oxygen warming his lungs. He tried to press himself up to his feet but stumbled. He was still lightheaded, and he doubted that the wound on his head was helping. He looked down and saw a line of blood that had dribbled to the floor. He raised his hand to his head and, bringing it back down in front of his face, saw that it came back stained with red. The sight of his bloody hand made Harold nauseous.

The man held the gun to his side but didn’t drop it. Sarah tensed herself, preparing to fire again. This time she would not aim for the wall.

“Please drop the gun, Eric,” she said. “Or I’m going to shoot you.”

Harold looked up at the Goateed Man. Eric. It seemed odd for him to have a name, a real name, a normal name. He didn’t look like an Eric.

Between the wooziness in Harold’s head and the blurriness of his vision, he was never clear about the exact order of the events that unfolded next. Everything moved very fast, and the actions taken by Sarah, Eric, and even himself seemed not so much to happen in response to one another as all at once. At the very same instant Eric raised his gun toward Sarah, Sarah lowered hers and pulled the trigger. Two more violent gunshots blared across the study, rattling Harold’s senses.

The next sound he heard was far off-sirens. The actual Swiss police were finally on their way.

Screaming. Male screaming. Eric was alive, and screaming. Cursing.

Harold could see nothing. Thanks to the deafness he was temporarily experiencing due to the gunshots, all he could hear nearby was some sort of scuffling. He felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him up. A voice said something to him, but he had no idea whose it was or what message it conveyed.

He struggled to his feet. He was in no position to fight back at anyone right now, whoever happened to be pulling at him.

There was more screaming, but Harold couldn’t make any of it out. And a moan. The hand on his shoulder pulled him across the room, and he went as it directed. He felt himself tripping over things, stumbling, but he managed, somehow, to put one foot in front of the other as he tumbled through the museum. The hand was pulling him faster now, yanking more insistently. Whether he was headed toward salvation or summary execution, he didn’t know. He was not sure which outcome he’d prefer.

It wasn’t until he felt the freezing Swiss air on his cheeks that he looked up. It was darker now than when he’d broken in. The street they were on, whichever one it was, was lit only by stars and the sliding, shifting red-blue of distant police lights. Harold felt the air stab at his head and became aware of the cold nipping at his open wound. There was no way to know how much blood he’d lost. The hand kept pulling at him, however, and for the first time Harold brushed it aside. He used a sleeve of his coat to wipe the blood from his forehead. The owner of the hand, still a blurry shape, paused for an instant and turned back to face him.

“Come on,” she said. It was Sarah.

“The man… Eric… Is he…?” Harold had only the faintest idea of what he was saying.

“No, he’s alive,” she said quickly. “Bleeding, but alive. Which is about where you’re at right now. Time to run away. We have what we need.”