The Barker Street Regulars

gold. She also had a small collection of books about Holmes, Watson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, she’d honored me by letting me borrow one; she’d wanted me to read a charming tongue-in-cheek essay by Rex Stout called “Watson Was a Woman.” Anyway, when Robert selected the same one-volume Doubleday edition of the complete works that I owned myself, I felt terrible. I had no excuse. Althea had tried to introduce me to the science of deduction. But only now, as Robert picked up the book, removed a bookmark, and resettled himself in his chair, did I realize that Althea, the one person at the Gateway who lived amid books, had such poor eyesight that she was completely unable to read. I should have read to her. I should have scurried around finding books on tape, books, of course, about Sherlock Holmes. When I later offered to do just that, Althea refused. Robert and Hugh read to her, she explained. She had no desire to hear the Canon from the lips of others.
    I got Rowdy to his feet and excused myself.
    As we left, Robert began to read. “ Holmes laid his hand upon my arm,” he began.
    Hugh interrupted in a cheerful effort to continue from memory. “If my companion would undertake it, there is no man —”
    “No!” Robert bellowed. “No, no, no! My friend, my friend, my friend!”
    “My apologies,” said Hugh.
    Althea’s eyes were closed. She wore a gentle smile of contentment. The exchange between Hugh and Robert, I realized, must be as familiar to her as the Canon itself.
    Mollified, Robert resumed where he had left off. ”If my friend would undertake it, there is no man who is better worth having at your side when you are in a tight place. No one can say so more confidently than I.” Robert must simply have picked up where he’d left off. Even so, it now seems to me that the passage from The Hound of the Baskervilles was a fitting portion of scripture for my introduction to Robert and Hugh. Among Sherlockians, the relationship between Holmes and Watson is known as “The Friendship.”
     

Chapter Three
     
    Y OU LIVE IN CAMBRIDGE ,” Robert informed me, “but you did not grow up here and did not go to Harvard. You have ties to Maine. You are a dog writer. You own two Alaskan malamutes. They are your only pets. When you acquired Rowdy, he was no longer a puppy.”
    Robert was not, I might mention, reading my palm, which was wrapped around a coffee mug. It was the Wednesday after I’d first met Hugh and Robert. In the morning I’d finished my column for Dog’s Life, and in the afternoon I’d gone to Harvard Square to celebrate in a typically Cantabrigian fashion, meaning that I had gone out to splurge on books. In other places, high living is French wine, marc de Bourgogne, cocaine. Here, it’s hardcovers. When I ran into Robert and Hugh, I was buying paperbacks. Cambridge low life. Anyway, Althea’s friends had invited me for coffee, and we were now sitting in a booth in one of those real-world coffee shops where you don’t have to specify the country the beans were grown in and how long they were roasted.
    “You are a linguist,” I told Robert. “Your real name is Henry Higgins. When you’ve finished with me, I’ll be able to hold my own in the senior common rooms, and no one will ever guess that I used to peddle flowers on the streets of Portland.”
    Hugh smiled. “Robert makes a study of vowels.” Robert nodded.
    “Are you actually a linguist?” I asked.
    “Robert retired from Widener a number of years ago,” Hugh replied, without saying whether Robert had been one of Harvard’s head librarians or had just checked books in and out. “The deduction of occupation is one of his pastimes.”
    Althea later told me that Robert had been a fairly senior librarian who’d overseen a number of special collections. Hugh, she insisted, had pursued an occupation so technical that she’d never understood what it was. The friendship between the men had begun as a family connection: Their wives had been sisters. Robert’s had died young and childless. Hugh, widowed ten years ago, had three children who worked in the Silicon Valley and took no interest in Sherlock Holmes, to whom Robert had originally introduced his brother-in-law.
    “You met Rowdy,” I told them, “and Althea has heard about my other malamute, Kimi. As a matter of fact, I don’t have any other animals, but I could. Plenty of people have cats and dogs, even cats and malamutes.”
    “As I deduced,” Robert