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Parthenon at Athens. Instead, he descended a flight of stairs and passed through another hall of ancient Greek pottery and textiles, looking neither left nor right.
    His steps came to an abrupt halt at the door to the water closet, located in the farthest corner of the British Museum.
    He entered. The paint on the walls was yellow and peeling above a stretch of green and white hexagonal tile. There were two stalls housing toilets flushable through the pull of a chain. The only notable aspect of the room was its history, for this was the very spot where they had broken ground on the present neoclassical structure imagined by Robert Smirke over the foundation of Montague House, the museum’s home since 1759.
    Doyle washed his hands and dried them on a towel folded atop the basin. Then he turned to the tiled wall across from the door. He touched one of the center tiles with his palm, then moved his hand to a spot two tiles above and did the same. His hand then glided across some five tiles and pressed again, then dropped down another four.
    After a pause, there was a grinding, and an assortment of tiles receded into blackness, forming the jagged outline of a hidden doorway.
    Doyle swung the door open, glancing briefly behind him, then stepped into the shadows. With a grinding of gears the tiles reattached to the door, leaving—for all intents and purposes—a perfectly uninteresting wall.
    A flaring match illuminated Doyle’s face as he touched the flame to a candle in a tin holder set by his feet. A stairwell curved down before him, consisting of twenty steps. The texture of the walls changed halfway down from smooth plaster to uneven rock and grit. At the bottom was a simple wooden door. Doyle turned the knob, and it opened.
    The revealed office smelled of old paper and jasmine incense. It was not a large space, wide enough to accommodate a desk against one wall, a chair, a wardrobe, and a single shelf of books. Arabian silks stained plum and emerald shrouded the cracking walls, and draped low from the ceiling. The wardrobe in the corner contained a portion of Duvall’s famous shoe collection: Thai slippers, Tibetan yak boots, German dancing clogs, a crumbling pair of Samurai two-toed socks . . .
    Doyle turned to the coatrack. Resting there was Duvall’s staff: a five-foot piece of wood, smooth and twisted. Burned into its surface were Druidic ogham. Sagging on posts were Duvall’s beret and overcoat.
    Doyle spoke in a whisper. “Gone walking in the rain, Konstantin? Without your staff? Without your hat?”
    Doyle glanced at a chessboard beside the desk, its pieces arranged in mid-game.
    He next turned to the bookcase stationed at the wall farthest from the door. It held a collection of occult texts. There were rows of interesting first editions: a 1619 folio of
Clavis Alchemiae
by Robert Fludd, a 1608
Discourse des Sorciers
by Henri Boguet, Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled,
and a 1555
Les Propheties De M.
Michel Nostradamus
—admirable titles for an adept of the occult, but child’s play to a magus of Duvall’s stature.
    This brought Doyle’s attention to a map. It was an eighteenth-century map of the world tacked above Duvall’s desk, its face marred by hundreds of small handwritten scribblings: symbols, x’s, and dates. Doyle withdrew a magnifying glass from his jacket pocket and held it close to the map, his finger tracing a line from Greece to Italy. Magnified by the lens, the notes read:
    First record of lost tribe, Athens to Rome in 420. Consult Dee’s

journals for date of Enochian fragments. Tribe separates in

Imperial Persia. Some to Buddhist India, others to Han China.
    Conan Doyle freed a necklace from one of the nails holding the map to the wall. The charm hanging from the frayed leather band was a coin, the symbol of a soldier on horseback on its face. It appeared to be an antique Roman coin. Glancing back to the map, Doyle noted a thick circle drawn around Manhattan Island in the United States.
    Spies