Son of Holmes

The answer, of course, had to be no. We were both agents at war, trained to trust no one. Hadn’t Lupa been sitting in Marcel’s seat just before he’d been poisoned? But then another thought occurred to me: it really wasn’t my decision to make. I’d been ordered to find and work with Lupa. I didn’t have to trust or respect my superiors, but as a soldier I had to obey them.

And there was another point: I had already revealed myself to the younger man. If he was not to be trusted, then my usefulness here in Valence was at an end. Now my own vulnerability, here in Lupa’s quarters, could become my own best test of his credibility. Simply put, if I were alive in the morning, he would have proven himself worthy of my confidence. It may not have been the most professional of solutions, but in my wearied state it made a great deal of sense.

One final consideration, even more unprofessional, forced itself into my consciousness. With Marcel dead, perhaps I simply needed to trust someone to fill the hole he had left. With more instinct than reason, I felt Lupa to be the man for that role.

“I have to believe in you,” I said at last. “I have no choice.”

He sipped at his beer and stared into the fire. Quite some time passed. “I suspect everyone,” he said finally.

A wave of regret over the loss of my friend passed over me. “Please,” I said. “I need your help.” He started to blur before me as fatigue set in. I put my hand over my eyes and felt his come to rest on my shoulder.

“Come,” he said, “we’ll talk in the morning.”

He took me back to his quarters, down a hall that seemed to be a dead end. He put down a mattress on the floor and brought a thick blanket for it.

“Let us be careful,” he said almost gently. We were by now speaking in the familiar. “We’re going to be needing each other.” I lay down and blew out the candle beside me. He retreated a few steps, then stopped. “Do you mind if I call you Jules?”

“No.”

“Satisfactory.” Another pause. “I am very sorry.”

I slept for seven hours. When I woke up, my clothes had been sent out and already returned, so I dressed and walked back out to the kitchen. No one was there. I went outside and found Lupa on the sidewalk finishing his beer. It was still drizzling, but the awning had been pulled.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

I felt miserable, so I merely grunted. He ordered me a petite calva; and I drank it off quickly.

“Have you been awake long?” I asked.

“Since eight o’clock.” I must have looked at him in disbelief, for he continued, “A schedule that may be whimsically broken is no schedule at all. In the end the logical order one tries to impose on one’s life is sacrificed to quotidian cares. Even this beer,” he said, motioning to the brew, “though it doesn’t compare to yours, helps in its way to reestablish the order that last night destroyed.”

I thought he was being peevish, so I said nothing. He looked at me and smiled, emptying his glass. “Come with me, Jules. I have an appointment.”

We went back down to his quarters, which seemed smaller than they had been in the early morning, or even a half hour before. The hall I’d slept in was off to the left of the sitting room, but we crossed over to a door at the right and into a rather large office. The right-hand wall was covered with pots and pans, costly copper and cast iron, while the left sported a picture of Dreyfus and, somewhat incongruously, a bull’s ear. Behind the desk was another of the cheap tapestries that he used to cover the bare rock wall. His entire quarters seemed to be a type of bunker-certainly nothing like the typical cellar one finds around here.

He walked to the corner nearest the bull’s ear-a memento from Spain, I later learned-and lifted away the tapestry, showing a large hole opening into blackness, into which he stepped, motioning for me to follow. He lit a tallow and we moved through a narrow, high cave for several hundred meters. So this was where he disappeared to in the afternoons. I wondered where the cave would come out.

“Handy having all the limestone around here,” he said. “It took comparatively little work to finish this passage after I arrived here.”

I found that difficult to believe, though I knew that some of the natural caves in the region extended for incredible distances. In the end, the cave proved to be nearly a kilometer in length, and I was totally unprepared for where it abutted. Lupa pulled aside another bit of rug and stepped into a cellar of amazing fragrance.

“Where are we?” I asked. The smell alone had nearly driven away my headache.

He seemed almost playful as he leaned back against a waist-high bench. He held the candle out behind him, and I could make out rows and rows of flowers. He breathed deeply.

“Marvelous,” he said. “It always affects me.”

Then quickly he straightened up again and moved to a door, which led to a stairway, which in turn opened into a well-lighted planting room. There was a partition in front of the door, and we waited behind it while Lupa peeked out to see who was in the shop. When he was satisfied, we walked out. A woman, about thirty, with dark hair and features, stood talking with a man whose back was toward us as we approached. Lupa went up to the woman, kissed her on the cheek, and said something to her in a language I didn’t understand-and I speak five languages. She disappeared to where we’d been.

“Watkins.”

“Hello.”

The two men embraced and began speaking in English.

“Where have you sent A

“She forgot to turn on the cellar lights again. The plants will surely die. I’m glad you’re here. We’ve had problems.”

“I’ve heard already. Routier’s been killed. No clues. You were there. Who did it?”

The man was in his twenties and would have looked perfectly nondescript except for the great swelling in his left cheek. His hair was short and brown, his suit common, and he wore no tie. Occasionally he chewed at his cheek.

“I haven’t much of an idea,” said Lupa. “It could have been any of us. Oh, excuse me, this is Jules Giraud. Joseph Watkins.”

We shook hands as the woman returned.

“Look at his cheek, will you?” she said. “Those damned olives again.”

Watkins gri

“He’s been horrible all morning,” said the woman. “Eating so many of them he can’t talk, spitting the pits wherever he happens to be. I should have tossed him out long ago. If he wasn’t so…” She smiled and touched his arm. He moved aside. “Hello,” she said, crossing to me, “my name is A

I nodded. “Jules Giraud.”

Lupa suggested we go to the back of the shop. On the way, Watkins leaned over one of the potted plants and straightened up again without the swelling in his cheek. He was gri

“Anyone care for an olive?” he asked, taking ten or fifteen from his coat pocket. When no one responded, he deposited the entire handful into his mouth.

Lupa stood with an arm around A

“Any news?”

“Yes, and specific.” Once he started talking, he was entirely businesslike. Perhaps he wasn’t as frivolous as he seemed.

“Continue.”

“Well, naturally you’re here on your own affairs, something about assassinations and so forth, but I thought-”

“You can drop that,” said Lupa. “M. Giraud, as you know, is an agent of the French, and he is now in our confidence.” He turned to me, continuing, “I am a free operative working for the English government. I know all this has been denied time and again in your inquiries about me. You know how that is. My uncle is a nonambulatory genius whom I detest, but he is probably the most important man in England, and we share some views during wartime.”