"Not a penknife," replied Miss Naismith, a kind of Arctic light in her eyes. "But I can very easily imagine you taking a brush and palette to her, to 'improve' the picture."
"I'm waiting," replied Helmuth coldly. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his finger tighten on the trigger.
Miss Naismith shrugged, and started to walk in front of the desk toward Holmes. As she passed it she whirled softly and aimed Holmes's pistol toward us. "Lewis Brookman!" she cried.
Astonishment filled the doctor's eye a moment, and his pistol wavered toward her an uncertain instant. She fired.
His gun went off by my head, but the bullet buried itself in the ceiling as he staggered backward, blood spattering from his shattered arm. Holmes and I were on him in an instant and wrested his pistol from his broken grasp. He tried to fight us, but his wound was too much for him and he passed out. I applied a tourniquet as Holmes hastily called the Yard.
"My dear friend, I owe you my profoundest apologies," Holmes said earnestly later, when Lestrade had carried off his unconscious prize and we were left alone once more. A reaction had come upon me when it was all over, I am unashamed to report, and I poured us each a stiff whiskey with hands that shook. Miss Naismith as usual refused spirits.
"My miscalculations were only exceeded by Helmuth's own," Holmes continued. "I never imagined he would walk into our trap before it was set. A just Providence must have heard me twitting Lestrade. And yet when you think about it, his approach was most logical, if bold. Why should a man his age take up the techniques of a car burglar?"
"He was always smooth like that," put in Miss Naismith. "He would be under your guard and through your heart before you knew he'd drawn steel. It's how he took me in."
She sighed. "It's been coming back to me, bit by bit. It was my own fault, really. Sheer stupidity.
"I'd been watching his operation for some time. I thought Calvin Oser and I would be able finally to nail him on the possession of certain poisons. I was going to steal Cal some samples for comparison analyses. That, plus my testimony on what I'd seen and overheard in my time there, would be enough to go to court.
"Then one evening as I was about to leave for my rooming house, Helmuth astonished me utterly by coming up to the lab and asking me to marry him. I didn't quite know what to say."
"How could you consider such a proposition from such a man even for an instant?" I asked, amazed.
"Well, I don't know. I knew his past wouldn't bear looking into, but then neither would mine. I've never been afraid of poisonous snakes, ever since I used to hunt rattlers for the county bounty when I was young, for pocket money. I didn't realize that the rattlesnakes were the more gentlemanly fellows, who always gave fair warning before they struck. I had always been impressed by his brilliance. It seemed to me that he had not patronized me for my sex, for he always demanded perfection in my work, and I respected him for it. And to tell the truth, I was foolishly flattered-my first proposal and all that. Also, I was tired. I was so shaken, 1 had this romantic vision of requiring him to give up his criminal activities. Would it not be better to reform that amazing brain than punish it? And I would be the instrument of that reform." She laughed, but her laugh had an edge that worried me. "I hinted as much, rather broadly. I then realized from what he said that he had apparently thought me blind and deaf all those months, and witless too. He was genuinely shocked that I was on to him.
"He begged me to give him a day to think it over, hinted that he was profoundly moved. When I returned the next day, he walked up to me smiling and told me how utterly impressed he was with my moral reasoning, then put a pad of chloroform over my mouth and nose, and that's the last thing I remember clearly until I woke up in that little room in Camberwell.
"He must have wanted to make me over into a kind of perfect docile wife. He was in the habit of keeping dangerous pets-poisonous snakes, and a vicious ocelot-and collecting aesthetic rarities. He just wanted to add me to his collection.
"It is a kind of disease that I inspire in all my friends; he just had it in an acute form. They have always wanted to change me to match some vision of reality they have inside their own minds. My cousin wanted me to be a suffragette, her husband wanted me to be a doctor; Dr. Watson wants me to give up smoking and take up wine imbibing, Mrs. Watson wants me to change my style of clothes and hair, and Cal Oser's the worst of all-he wants me to be a lady.
"As a matter of fact, Mr. Holmes," she continued, turning to my friend, "you are probably the most unique individual I've ever met. Not once in our acquaintance have you ever asked me to be like anything but myself."
"What I still don't understand," I said, "is why Garnett, Helmuth or whatever his name is, killed this fellow Sacker, or Sandeman."
"Sandeman could be very irritating at times," said Miss Naismith reminiscently. "In personality he was a weak bully, with a tendency to swagger over those he thought he could dominate. He tried some tricks with me once, and I surprised the very devil out of him by putting him through a window. He left me alone after that. He'd been with Helmuth a long time-came with him from South America, I believe. Perhaps he had tried attempting a bit of blackmail on the side. It would be like him, and Helmuth would be a very unsafe person to do that to."
"I shouldn't be surprised if there turns out to be some such element involved also," said Holmes. "But I submit that the principal reason he was poisoned was for the crime of lese majeste. It was his independent attempt to murder you, Miss Naismith, that sealed his fate. Helmuth's (or Brookman's, as I expect my answer from Brazil will prove) motivations for his actions throughout this case have been so very bizarre, that I rather expect that his ultimate destination will be Broadmoor rather than Dartmoor."
The arrival of Lt. Calvin Oser the next week, plus the reply to Holmes's cable to Rio, served to fill in the remaining blanks in the recent history of my patient and her two kidnappers. New York had known Helmuth only as an English doctor who had been employed for many years by a New York pharmaceutical concern as their field representative in Brazil. He had emigrated from Brazil to America on the strength of this employment, then set up his own little firm in New York. It did a legitimate business, although not enough to account for his wealth. The first assistant Helmuth had hired to run this end of the business had vanished mysteriously after not quite two years of employment. Lt. Oser had been connected with the case at that time, but no explanation of the young man's disappearance was ever forthcoming. Thus when his old acquaintance Miss Naismith came to him with her first suspicions of a second and far more sinister pharmaceutical business running under the mask of the first, he was able to counsel her with utmost seriousness. Working together, they had garnered nearly enough evidence for an arrest when Miss Naismith, Dr. Helmuth, and his secretary Sandeman abruptly disappeared. Oser had followed a false trail to St. Louis before Holmes's telegram sent him racing to catch the next ship to London.
The reply from Rio was less conclusive, but testimony later from Helmuth confirmed the hypothesis it suggested. Dr. Lewis Brookman had left the Hospital San Felice at the request of its administration for "irregular activities," and had disappeared up the Amazon upon a botanical expedition. The first appearance of "James Helmuth" took place 10 months later in Manaos. The two were one and the same man.