II

As usual, the mortuary was still and silent. Even the technician stared at Holmes and Watson through dark, inanimate eyes. He spoke sparingly as he led them to the latest victim. The body was swollen and stiff, but the cool of the underground corridors quelled its natural stench. Holmes proceeded to measure the sides of the triangle and the degrees of each of its angles.

"A little more acute than the one before it," he said.

"Well it's not exactly a precise art, Holmes," Watson muttered. With his eyes narrowed, he glanced over his shoulder to the corner of the room where the young man still stood watching them. "If it were up to me, I'd tell you to look for clues elsewhere."

Sherlock Holmes was beginning to feel the unmistakable sensation of defeat. It was one thing to predict a massacre, but it was another thing entirely to be able to prevent it. Prediction, after all, was only concerned with the elementary matter of identifying a pattern. But prevention required insight. Not even the confirmation of his most recent suspicions provided him with the critical evidence necessary to draw a useful conclusion.

"I'm at least able to deduce from this that the triangles were carved by the same individual, though with different instruments. According to my experiments, the aberrations demonstrated in these twenty-two cases indicate one individual and multiple knives, and not many individuals with many knives, or even one knife and many individuals. In some instances, believe it or not, the instrument was not even a knife at all, though in this particular case it most certainly was."

"How incredibly meaningful this discovery must seem to you, Holmes. But I regret that I must tell you that it brings you no closer to an explanation for all of this hocus-pocus and witchery."

"That it does not, my dear Watson." Holmes lifted his hand to his chin where he left it to rest indefinitely. "But it does suggest to us that although Pythagoras cannot be working alone to kill all of these men, he must nevertheless have come into contact with each of the bodies in order to mark them, or to sign them, if you will."

"Remarkable."

"Elementary," said Holmes. "It does, however, present us with a delicious temporal puzzle. As the police and their charming, if rudimentary, techniques have already assured us, these murders occurred in three graduated shifts, the vast majority of them simultaneously."

"This is true."

"But if Pythagoras himself must have been present for each of the murders, many of which took place in three distinct locations in London, our man has a special talent for accelerated spatial travel. And if not spatial, then temporal."

Watson uncrossed his arms long enough to signal to the technician that he return the body to its locker. He seized Holmes by his forearm and began to guide him from the morgue, shaking his head in disbelief as they crossed the unlit corridors and ascended the staircase toward daylight and the street outside.

"Time travel? Has it perhaps occurred to you, Holmes," he said, "that you put far too much faith in your wild experiments, and far too little in nature?"

"As my experiments are themselves a part of nature, I would never presume to suggest that these superficial contradictions are indicative of separate realities."

"Well, have you at least considered the possibility that you're mistaken with everything you say about these so-called 'aberrations'? As far as I see it, your Pythagoras gave his minions a quick lesson in the carving of more-or-less right triangles, and what you see here is his students' work. There are too many variables to support your conclusion, Holmes. You're grasping at straws and talking like a madman."

Sherlock Holmes squeezed his eyes shut as he and Watson stepped onto the bright street outside the entrance to the mortuary. He felt that Watson was deliberately provoking him to reveal everything he knew, and not only the sane and abbreviated summary of his findings. After all, if Watson were privy to the detailed facts of the matter, there was no way he would be able to suggest that the subtle variation in the dimensions of the triangles was the work of the students of Pythagoras. Yet he knew that to suggest the true nature of his findings would only further call into question his sanity. Watson had already invoked the word "madman" once. It frightened Holmes to even consider the possibility that he was right.

But how else could he explain it? With the numerical data available to him, he had constructed numerous charts and graphs, switching each time the function of "x." First, it was the time of death with respect to the angles (but the mortuary sciences were too imprecise to allow for this); second, he had considered the relationship between the profession of the victims and the length of the hypotenuse (this too had yielded only gibberish); the third and fourth attempts had had similarly outlandish relationships with one another. But finally, he had related the length of the hypotenuse to the near perfectness of the right angle. In no case was it ever truly ninety-degrees. Instead, with an apparent purposefulness, it had danced below and above ninety, never quite striking perfection. When he had charted the twenty-one triangles, having just recently graphed the twenty-second in his mind, the purpose of these purely numerical aberrations had become alarmingly evident.

There on the graph, if he indulged himself in the trivial delight of connecting the twenty points with one another, there was no mistaking that he was able to spell two cursive letters: S.H. Sherlock Holmes. Of course he had been reluctant to believe it at first. The data must have been corrupted by his obsessive behavior; the results proved only the subconscious emergence of the ego, impressing itself arbitrarily on what ought to have remained scientific and factual. It was impossible that an accurate reading of the findings would push him toward this absurd conclusion—that this villain, Pythagoras, was calling him by name, provoking his intellect and challenging his investigative faculties with this murderous riddle serving as the signed invitation.

"Holmes?" asked Watson. He squeezed his shoulder to get his attention. "Holmes, there's something I'd like you to do for me."

"Anything, my dear Watson," said Sherlock distractedly.

"Well, as you're working this riddle out in your head, if you'd only lend me your body long enough to place you in a seat at the latest investors' meeting, I'd be much obliged to you."

"Investors' meeting?" said Holmes. "Tell me you're not still going on about the sinking of that ship."

"The Landlord's Daughter, Holmes. And yes, I am still going on about it. You and I both stand to lose a lot in this venture, and forgive my materialism if I express the slightest concern over the loss of such a vast portion of my assets."

Holmes struggled to concentrate, but the noise on the street robbed him of his focus. This final point confirmed the intricacy of the carvings. Had it been entirely incompatible with the others, he would have been willing to doubt his original suspicions. But this proved it to him. Pythagoras knew who he was; he wanted him to look deeper, to see the scheme as it had guided his actions in the past, and to anticipate its progress in the future.

"The idea, Holmes, is to finance a salvaging expedition. Obviously it's a gamble, but with so much at stake, it's worth the risk. I'd appreciate having you there. You're a respected game theorist, though I'm sure you're already too well aware of it. One encouraging word from you and the matter is settled. If only you'd cooperate, we might stand to gain a little after all. I imagine quite a few of the investors will withdraw in spite of you, and what that means is that one tiny salvaging expedition might guarantee us the lion's share of the remaining profit to be had. I don't have your reputation, Holmes—I'm not eccentric enough to be famous—but I've worked it all out myself, and there's really no going wrong."

"So you want me to convince the investors, but not convince them so well that I convince all of them?"

"Essentially, yes," said Watson. "That is the plan."

"Very well," he said, "And approximately how many investors ought I direct into each of the categories for you?"

"Don't make a joke of this," warned Watson. "These are serious people, so please put on your serious face."

"Anything you say.

"They've contracted an exceptional captain to oversee the voyage to Bermuda—a Captain Sparrow, if I'm not mistaken. His very involvement in the venture ought to inspire confidence, and your cooperation is really all I'm asking."

"A 'Captain Sparrow'? You're serious?" asked Holmes.

"Supposedly as eccentric as you."

Sherlock Holmes nodded wordlessly. He resumed considering the riddle Pythagoras had designed for him. What could these triangles mean? Where would they lead him? But he would have to resolve this matter later; and in the meantime, he would pacify Watson's tiresome economical preoccupations long enough to guarantee his future collaboration in the case.