Son of Holmes

“Come, come. Vite! Vite! Vite!”

She spread the cloth under a large oak tree. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be bothered. Not today.”

I didn’t really mind, but I was curious about the other party. I sat with my back against the tree, positioned so that I could look across the pond to where the others were moving, still well back into the trees on their side. Tania opened me another beer and lay with her head in my lap.

“There,” she sighed.

The others came down to a clearing on their side, and I saw with some surprise that it was Lupa, A

“You know what I found interesting?”

I looked down at Tania. “What’s that?”

“I found myself forgetting I was French. I despised the French, even though at the time I suppose I would have been as patriotic as I am now.”

For some reason, this statement made absolutely no sense to me. Lupa and Watkins had set themselves up at their table-it looked as though they were about to play some board game-while A

“When?” I asked.

“The Napoleonic Wars. You couldn’t help but want the Russians to win. It made me slightly uncomfortable while I was reading.”

“Ah, War and Peace.”

The two men across the pond were becoming engrossed in their game and rarely looked up, while A

“I suppose we were wrong then.”

“I don’t believe we’d have thought so at the time,” I said. “But of course there are always reasons to start a war, just as there are more often than not no real reasons to end one. Everyone believes themselves right, which is probably understandable, but rather simple.”

“You don’t think we were right?”

“That depends. At that time I would have thought it, I’m sure. If your sons had been off fighting in Russia, you would never have given a thought to whether or not we were right. We would have had to have been right.”

“Yes. I suppose so.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. I thought she was going off to sleep. A

“But what about now?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we right, now? Or will some German Tolstoy come along in fifty years and make us all appear to be beasts?”

“Whatever we may appear in fifty years,” I said, “for the present time we’re at least justified. France has to survive, and now it has to fight to survive.” I leaned back and lit a cigarette. “Novelists make us think war is terrible because they tend to make a personal story out of it. Nationally, war is either desirable or necessary, never right or wrong. It’s not a personal thing, any more than a storm is personal. If a bolt of lightning strikes down a man, no one says that there’s any reason behind it. Some writers try to, saying it’s an act of God or whatever, but that doesn’t wash. It just happens, like war happens.”

“But the people…”

“People don’t matter in wars. Countries matter. Nations matter, issues matter. The last thing anyone should think about is people.”

She closed her eyes again. “I think about my sons,” she said, then added quietly, “all the time. And we both think of Marcel.”

“But we don’t know Marcel had anything to do with the war.”

She looked up at me. “Don’t we?”

I wondered how much she did know.

“And if he did have to do with the war, then he wouldn’t matter, because people don’t matter. Oh, Jules, you don’t really believe that?”

I thought of the night before, and the reasons I had decided to stay on in Valence. I had let it become personal, which was absurd. France was what mattered. But finally I didn’t believe that, and some sense of that realization had made me resign. I supposed I was, indeed, getting old. I touched Tania’s face gently.

“No,” I said, “I don’t really believe that.”

We were silent.

Across the pond nothing changed. I watched for several minutes, after which Watkins, evidently beaten in the game-I heard his “Damn!” clearly-abruptly stood up and stalked over to the fire.

“You know who that is over there?”

Tania sat up. “Who?”

“Your friend Lupa.”

“Your friend Lupa,” she said, frowning. “I’m surprised he had the energy to get all the way out here.”

“It’s not that he lacks energy-he just chooses a bit carefully how he wants to expend it.”

“Well, let’s not expend any of ours by calling him.”

“I had no intention of doing that, my dear.” I leaned over and kissed her.

She stood up. “Would you excuse me for a minute?” she asked.

She walked back a ways into the woods while I sat propped against the tree, watching the scene across the pond. A

I took a drink of my beer, long and refreshing, closing my eyes and letting the cold liquid run down my throat. Suddenly there was a loud report. Opening my eyes, I saw Lupa and Watkins drop to the ground, while A

“You’re all right?” I yelled, and she said she was. The shots I’d heard had been the loud ringing noises of a rifle rather than the soft pops of a pistol, so the range could have been great.

I took out my pistol. Tania came up to me. “You’re not going-” she began.

I cut her off. “Go see to A

“But Jules, you’re not…”

I was already moving back toward the road, where the shots had originated. Retired or not, I was a trained operative of the French government and knew how to act around hostile elements. Perhaps I was curt to Tania, but such times call for action, not sensitivity.

No more than a minute had passed since the third shot. As I ran, I saw out of the corner of my eye another figure moving through the woods to my left. It was Lupa, outpacing me as we sprinted.

We broke from the woods at about the same time, all the while moving rapidly toward the road, where we could see a figure retreating into the trees on the other side toward my house. Lupa fell momentarily from my vision, but, seconds later, he appeared at my side astride one of the dray horses.

“Get up!”

His hand grabbed me like a vice as I bounded up behind him. “Over there,” I yelled, pointing to a break in the copse just beyond the road. Lupa, holding the horse’s mane, leaned into the untrained beast and miraculously was obeyed.

I still held my pistol in my hand, dismally aware of its inadequacy. We were closing on the roadway and within another minute might expect to come upon our assailant, fleeing on foot. It was not to be, however, as over the sound of the horse’s hooves we heard a motor turning over and saw, not fifty meters away, an automobile kicking up dust as it spun from its hiding place into the road.

I fired one ineffectual shot-from that range, the gesture was about the equivalent of shouting “Stop!”-but Lupa didn’t hesitate. He spurred the horse back a bit to our right, directly toward my house.