Dramatis Personae: Public Domain

By Joseph Lamere

Pro Se Productions Introduces A Series that Breaks All The Rules of Genre Fiction! Discover the real world of fiction in Author Joseph Lamere's debut novella "Dramatis Personae:Public Domain"!
The Truth isn't stranger than Fiction. Truth is Fiction!
For your whole life secrets have been kept from you. Science and history books have gotten it wrong. They only tell part of the story. Maybe someday these books will be rewritten, but only if Diogenes Ra's secret gets out.
If you only knew what Diogenes Ra knew.
He knoes something the rest of us don't. Fiction is real. All your favorite characters exists, their stories overlapping in one grand, timeless narrative. Diogenes Ra can access that narrative. For the right price he will even bring your favorite fictional characters here to our world. But they can't be gone long. They have to get back to their stories in time for you to read them or watch them on TV.
Diogenes Ra believes he alone possesses the ability to pass unchecked between this world and the one we mistakenly call fiction. He's about to find out he's wrong.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: PUBLIC DOMAIN by Joseph Lamere! The first of a fantastically imaginative new series from Pro Se Productions!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pro Se Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2013

Book preview

PART I: THE GREAT DETECTIVE

PRESENT DAY

Sherlock Holmes looks natty, even imperious, in the Armani suit the Baker Street Irregulars sprang for, his patrician features favoring the cut and the coloring. He looks like an old-money banker or the distinguished spokesperson for moderately priced Chablis. In real life—such as it is—he looks less like Basil Rathbone than the Sidney Paget drawings from The Strand, ethereal, circumspect, made sordid by his contemporary surroundings. His eyes, for the record grayish blue, leaning more toward the gray than the blue, miss nothing, and because of this they don’t possess that alacrity perhaps suggested by this feature; rather they are dull, heavy-lidded, a lizard sunning itself on a rock.

He sighs, letting me hear his discontent. He doesn’t like being here for these celebratory affairs, the Irregulars paying five grand a plate to tug at him, to get his autograph, to pester him with fanboy questions about the canonical—and non-canonical—stories, as well as the vast cottage industry of imitators which sprang up in the wake of his supposed death at Reichenbach Falls. He craves action. He craves the chase. These staid affairs bore him, and I have to bribe him with some rigorous mental acuity—as we have come to euphemistically refer to it—in order to lure him across. I have brought him across the border on enough genuine adventures that the annual Baker Street Irregulars dinner renders him mute and defensive.

He sits beside me in the back of the limousine (also paid for the by the Irregulars) in his posture of contemplation so familiar from the Canon. It’s been some time since either one of us spoke. How many times have we done this? Holmes is by far the most-requested of the characters I pull from their stories, so much so that I am usually offered a premium. I first brought him across the border, perplexed, assuaged only with the highest-grade cocaine I could muster, when I was eighteen years old, by special request of a Hollywood film director whose daughter had been kidnapped. It has to be close to twenty times we’ve done this, including the last three Baker Street Irregulars dinners.

How many times is this then? the great detective asks, breaking in on my thoughts as he is wont to do.

More than a dozen, I say, and less than twenty.

Do you then not keep records?

I’m not allowed to.

But you keep a diary.

How do you… I don’t bother asking the rest of the question. I don’t want to sound like his portly amanuensis, with whom I am no longer on speaking terms because of some weird, quasi-homo-erotic jealousy on his part, not mine. How does Holmes know I keep a diary? He knows I keep a diary because of tell-tale indentations on my fingertips, or because he caught sight of a Moleskin-shaped bulge in my jacket. Then again maybe it’s because the scrap of paper upon which I hastily wrote down a phone number was a receipt for a book store in which the amount of purchase was less than the price of new hardback, leaving only a Moleskin journal of the sort favored by hipsters such as myself.

Ah, he says, tapping the smoked-glass partition which separates our compartment from the driver’s. The driver lowers the window with the insouciance so common to his profession. He’s been checking the rearview mirror all night, trying to figure out where he’s seen this guy before, but he’s from New York and he’s too cool to ask; his tip might depend on it. Might I suggest a detour to Harlem? the great detective inquires. The driver’s eyebrows work quizzically; he’s from Trinidad-Tobago according to the license displayed on our side of the partition.

The driver gives me a look. I shake my head. Uptown has better blow.

But don’t you want to see Trick? Trick, his usual Harlem dealer, had earned Holmes’ eternal affection by asking, What up, Holmes? upon the occasion of their first meeting, thus taking his shuck-and-jive bonhomie for recognition.

No, I don’t want to see Trick.

Holmes adds wryly, But you get on so well.

Trick blew his porch light. I have to admit: I use contemporary figurative language to get on his nerves. Nobody likes to be around a know-it-all, even if the know-it-all is Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes gives me an arch stare that seems to last for a while. I’m not familiar with the colloquialism.

He died.

Holmes takes a moment with this information, and I take a beat to enjoy the feeling of having surprised him into speechlessness. Such draconian laws governing the use of stimulants, he says. We have agreed not to talk about the relative merits of life in this world as opposed to his; this isn’t a buddy movie. As long as one adheres to a strict seven per-cent solution… His voice trails off. Might I ask how he met his end?

I watch the reflection of the city lights play on the surface of passing cars. I’m in a philosophic mood tonight. Don’t you want to use your ratiocination skills?

He smiles. Sure, he says in his best imitation of me. Why not? Holmes settles back into the plush upholstery, his eyes closed, his features slack with contemplation. I can only deduce his death can be attributed to the hazardous nature of his occupation.

I think even I would have been able to deduce that. After several attempts Holmes has given up trying to endear me to the relative merits of deduction. I’m fine where I’m at.

A rival business concern did it, which meant they wanted to send a message to others of Trick’s ilk. Holmes still has his eyes closed. I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t quite hold the same thrill it once did. Poison wouldn’t do; poison could be played off as accidental death.

You’re getting warmer.

A knife, or strictly speaking the poniard, would be the Classical method of assassination harkening back to Julius Caesar, but it wouldn’t quite have the desired impact of a warning. Death by knife is relatively painless in the comparative sense.

How would you know that? I ask, then remember the Canonical story—I forget which one, the chronology of the Holmes’ stories is notoriously troublesome—where Dr. Watson meets Holmes for the first time and Holmes is striking corpses with a stick in order to compare the lividity of the bruises.

Holmes doesn’t hear me; he’s caught up in his train of thought. A painful death, he muses. A death which would serve as a warning to other entrepreneurs looking to ‘horn in’ on his territory…a gun is too prosaic… He nods; he has made up his mind. It was a bomb.

You’re right. It was a car bomb. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, not after all these years, but I am. Maybe there’s something to this ratiocination thing after all; it doesn’t matter what world he inhabits: given enough information Holmes can work any problem backwards to its source. I wonder if it still thrills him, the art of deduction, deciding finally that it probably doesn’t. I know this from personal experience.

Holmes considers for a moment before saying to the driver: Uptown then.

We finish conducting our business in the back of a Verizon wireless store. The dealer hints around that he’s mobbed-up. I’m guessing he’s not. He has the weasly look of a snitch, and everybody knows snitches get stitches. He asks if we’re undercover cops despite the referral from one of the Irregulars, one of his regulars. Holmes starts to dear boy the guy but I gesture for him to keep quiet. We don’t need any heat right now.

I drop Sherlock Holmes and his Bolivian marching powder at the Plaza and tell him I’ll pick him up after the dinner. I get a percentage of the gate as a finder’s fee, but one stipulation is I don’t actually have to attend the dinner. I get net points, not gross. It’s not a bad way to make a living.

I need to prepare, Holmes says apologetically, which means he needs to do a couple lines in order to mentally gird himself for the coming conflagration.

I give him some privacy and let him do his thing. Whatever blows your skirt up.

I can feel the great detective’s eyes on me, that heavy-lidded regard that seems so innocent. I wilt beneath the scrutiny. A boon from your father, that.

How could you possibly have known that? I’m genuinely stunned by this insight; indeed the phrase came from my father, absentee though he was, this boon shared by my mother during one her rare moods of generosity on the subject.

He doesn’t answer me. You could do this, you know. You could be like me. He wipes stray powder from underneath his nostrils. Thus we could dispense with the need for…

I turn toward him. The leather seat creaks beneath me. How did you know the phrase came from my father?

It’s an archaic phrase, Holmes says. It doesn’t suit you, and though you want to give the impression that it is well-worn you stumbled through it.

The driver clears his throat; the doorman, white-gloved, waves the limousine on, anxious to be rid of the unsightly burden.

You could do this.

We’ve had this conversation before. He had offered to tutor me in the ways of ratiocination. There was a time I considered taking him up on the offer. Business got in the way. Still, something doesn’t jive in the answer he gives me. An archaic phrase? How could he possibly know what an archaic phrase was considering he died before the phrase had been popular?

I shrug the thought away. I’m anxious to get back to the Chelsea where Gilda is waiting. I don’t think so. It strikes me then: he is concerned about his legacy, about passing along what he knows. We have had this conversation with increasing frequency of late. (Holmes and I know he will never have a son; during one of his trips across the border we had taken a DNA sample to prove Nero Wolfe wasn’t his son, though Mycroft, his older brother, was in the ninety-fifth percentile).

He nods, resigned to my answer. Into the fray then.

One last bump before he goes upstairs. He doesn’t like me to watch; I turn away while he lays out a couple to-go lines. While he’s getting into character I call Curtis, my man with the Baker Street Irregulars. He picks up on the first ring, a high school girl waiting for the star quarterback to call and ask her to the prom. The Beekeeper is in the house, I tell him, rolling my eyes at the euphemism. Each time we use a different code name for the great detective. Last time it was F. Hugh Manchu. My idea.

Curtis sounds giddy—and just a little drunk. There is always plenty of booze at these black-tie affairs. "Send him up.