We were on our feet in an instant. Holmes held up two fingers to warn him of the guards, then put one finger to his lips before gesturing that he should come. O’Hara stepped back inside for a few seconds, then reappeared with a weight slung across his shoulders, pausing to glance down the corridor at the two distant backs. He emerged fully, pulled the door shut, and in a few silent steps was with us.

The maharaja, wrapped in a dark red dressing-gown, stank of alcohol, but his sleep was that of drugs as well. He stayed limp as we slung him down the pit of the stairs; he remained lifeless across O’Hara’s shoulders through the shadows of the ground-floor arcade. The festivities on the other side of the gardens seemed to have died rapidly away once the maharaja was gone; half the lights had been extinguished, and the only voices I could hear were the querulous calls of the over-worked servants. Still, we kept to the deepest shadows, and made the western wing without raising an alarm.

We shifted our unconscious burden from O’Hara’s back to that of Holmes, and I led the way through mostly unlit passages to that off which the toy room opened. Nearly half the oil lamps had burnt out, including the one nearest the blue door itself. In near darkness, I reached for the doorknob, when the smoothly working mechanism of abduction suddenly hit a rough patch that sent it through the roof.

“Hey,” said a familiar voice. “What’s going on here?”

O’Hara stepped in front of Holmes as if he might conceal a six-foot-tall man with an insensible maharaja on his shoulders, and I reached for my gun, only to freeze when the figure down the hall-way stepped under a lamp, a large Colt revolver in his hand.

Thomas Goodheart.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The tableau held for six long breaths, seven, and then all hell broke loose. Another figure appeared beside Goodheart, dressed in the uniform of a chuprassi with a scarlet turban and an outraged voice.

“What is this thing?” the newcomer demanded in the lilting accents of the Indian, looking from us to him. “You have found dacoits stealing the master’s treasures, oah, sir—”

But to my utter confusion, Goodheart raised his revolver and pointed it, not at us, but at the red puggaree. The servant choked off his words in confusion and stared at Goodheart, as flabbergasted as I.

Tommy started to gesture with his gun, saying “You’ll have to come—” when the man broke, turning on his heel to sprint for the outside door. Without a moment’s hesitation, the American shot him.

Instantly, he turned and said urgently, “You two come fetch him, then stay in that room until I join you.” And without a word of explanation he fled up the passageway and burst outside into the courtyard gardens.