by John Gardner
However, Crow’s report was persuasive. Two days later he was required to wait upon the Commissioner, and less than a week elapsed before he was gently breaking the news to Sylvia that he would be off to America on police matters in a month or so.
Sylvia Crow did not take kindly to the prospect of remaining alone in London. At first she smouldered with resentment about her husband’s job taking him such a distance from her. But the resentment soon changed to a realization that her beloved Angus might actually be putting himself in danger by journeying to the far-off continent. From there, her active imagination took over and, during the week before Crow’s departure, she awoke on several occasions, anxious and hysterical, having dreamed of her husband being surrounded by hordes of yelping redskins, each one of whom was personally intent on removing the policeman’s scalp. In a muddled sort of way Sylvia Crow was in reality uncertain of the true nature of a scalp, a confusion which led to the nightmares being more terrifying though vaguely erotic.
Angus Crow calmed her worst fears, assuring her that he did not expect to come into contact with any Indians. As far as he could see, his time in America would be spent in the city of New York which, surely, could not be so unlike their own London.
But, from the moment Crow set his eyes on the wooden shambles of New York’s waterfront, he knew that the two cities were as different as the proverbial chalk and cheese. There were similarities, of course, but the essential heartbeats of each city were of a different speed.
Crow landed in the first week of March, after a tempestuous crossing, and for the first week or more he found himself bewildered by the bustle and strangeness of this thriving city. As he wrote to his wife, ‘While English is the, supposedly, common tongue, I find myself more a foreigner here than anywhere in Europe. I do not think you would care for it.’
It was the style of the place, he considered, that was so different. Like London, New York visibly mirrored a yawning gulf between opulent and impoverished: a strange amalgamation of vast wealth, vigorous commercialism and abject poverty, the whole played out in a dozen different languages and coloured by a range of complexions, as though the entire populace of Europe had been sampled, stirred in a melting pot and then tipped out into this extreme corner of the world. Yet even in those areas of the city which seemed to smell, and even taste, of poverty, Crow noted an underlying current of hope, absent in similar parts of London. It was as though the vigour and pulse of the place held out promise, even in the most miserable quarters.
He soon discovered that the problems of policing the city were very similar to those of his own home ground, and he listened with interest, not to say understanding, to the stories of the many criminal gangs which appeared to abound in the city, and of the violent rivalry between the various racial factions. Much of the crime was but a mirror of that encountered in London, as indeed was the vice which so often spawned it. But, after a week or so, Crow found himself in contact with another breed of man – financiers, railroad barons, bankers and lawyers – among whom he would have to move if his search for the illusive Sir James Madis was to reach a successful conclusion. These people, he considered, were as ruthless in their own way as the more notorious desperadoes of the New York underworld.
With his own knowledge of Moriarty’s methods and colleagues in London, Crow was able to approach the puzzle from a fresh aspect. It was not with Madis in mind that he first questioned those who were caught up in what the newspapers were already calling THE GREAT RAILROAD SWINDLE, for at the outset, he was more concerned with descriptions and impressions of the three co-directors – Pike and the two Jacobis. Gradually, after spending many hours patiently questioning equally impatient and frustrated businessmen, Crow was able to build up a mental and physical picture of the three men, and through this, a picture of Sir James Madis. So, by the end of May, he was completely convinced that Professor James Moriarty was in truth the infernal Madis, and that Spear and two more of the Professor’s henchmen had posed as the co-directors.
His search now took him further afield – to Richmond, Virginia, which had been Madis/Moriarty’s headquarters for the last crucial weeks of the plot. By the beginning of July, Crow had completed yet another part of the puzzle by tracing the last movements of the Madis faction from Richmond: discovering that they had gone as far as Omaha before disappearing. After that the trail went cold. It was as though the four men had booked into the Blackstone Hotel, Omaha, on one night and then evaporated.
Crow was convinced, however, that Moriarty had not left America and that this was now really a matter for the Attorney General’s Office. Accordingly, Crow, together with the New York City Police Department’s Chief of Detectives, travelled to Washington from whence a general alarm was put out to all law officers, asking that they should report the presence of any newly arrived wealthy man, with at least three partners and a suspected leaning towards the criminal classes.
The weeks passed and there was no news of such a man, or group. By mid-August, Crow was reluctantly preparing to make the return journey to Liverpool, home and the beauty of his wife. Then one evening a cable arrived from the Attorney General’s Office which made the detective rush to Washington. There was a new, possible suspect, a wealthy Frenchman called Jacques Meunier who had, in a comparatively short space of time insinuated himself into the thriving underworld of San Francisco. Already a Special Agent had been dispatched.
The description of Meunier, and those close to him – including a Chinese – rang a whole symphony of chords in Crow’s brain. Surely this time he was really close, and, with blood throbbing to the chase, and arrangements made to meet one of the Attorney General’s agents in San Francisco, Crow boarded the Union Pacific’s Hotel Pullman Express bound for the West coast.
There was no reason for him to imagine that he was being watched or followed, so he little knew that, skulking in another part of the train, during its long and beautiful journey across America, was one of the members of Moriarty’s Praetorian Guard he had yet to track down – the short, slimy and rodent Ember.
In San Francisco, Jacques Meunier, or James Moriarty – for indeed they were one and the same – read through Ember’s cable twice, a low hiss escaping from between clenched teeth as he lifted his face to look hard at the Chinese, Lee Chow, with those bright and glittering eyes feared by so many because of their mesmeristic power.
‘Crow,’ he whispered softly, but with almost visible loathing. ‘The time has come, Lee Chow. Crow is on our trail and I curse myself for not finishing him off that night at Sandringham.’
His head moved to and fro in the strange reptilian motion which was the one betraying characteristic he could never disguise.
‘I’ll not stand and fight him here, nor do the morning jig for a paltry Scot.’ He paused, throwing his head back in a short laugh. The time has come to go home and it’s the devil’s own luck that the Jacobs boys are already in London on the lurk for us. Get Spear for me, Chow. We must withdraw our investments here – America has provided an unwitting fortune for us. It’s time to put it to use and wreak revenge on those who think they can betray us. Get Spear, then go quickly. We must leave within the next four and twenty hours or we’ll be nibbed and meat for a lagging. Our friends in Europe will soon see what it is to cross me.’
‘Po’fessor,’ Lee Chow ventured. ‘Last time in London you …’
‘That was then,’ cut in the Professor sharply. ‘But this time, Lee Chow. This time our treacherous European allies will come to heel, and Crow and Holmes will taste retribution. Get Spear.’
So, when Crow finally arrived in San Francisco, there was no trace of the Frenchman, Meunier – only the fact that he had disappeared overnight having made a small fortune among the alleys and lanes of the Barbary Coast and Chinatown.
Angus McCready Crow had once more failed by a hair’s breadth. Almost in despair, he started to pack his bags, the only bright star on the horizon being the thought of returning to his wife in King Street, London.
/> He was not to know that he had already been marked down, together with five other persons, as targets for an ingenious and subtle revenge designed to place James Moriarty at the pinnacle of criminal power.
* It would be as well to note here – particularly for those who may be unfamiliar with Dr Watson’s comments on Holmes’ drug addiction – that in the passage concerning cocaine addiction in Glaister’s and Rentoul’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, the following observations are made: ‘The stimulating effect of the drug [cocaine] is responsible for the acquired habit. When the effects wear off, however, there are irritability and restlessness.… The cause of addiction may be attributed to the fact that cocaine quickly banishes fatigue and mental exhaustion, which are replaced by a feeling of mental and physical vigour.’ (p. 633. 12th edition.)
LIVERPOOL AND LONDON:
Monday, 28 September – Tuesday, 29 September 1896
(Reunion)
Moriarty could smell England, even though there was the best part of a day’s steaming ahead before they would enter the Mersey. True, it was only intuition, but it entered his nostrils in a wholly physical manner, sending a thrill of expectation coursing through his body. He leaned against the rail, looking for’ard into the glistening sheet of calm sea, topcoat collar high and buttoned, one gloved hand resting on the circular life-buoy bearing the red painted inscription SS AURANIA. CUNARD.
He was not in disguise, so many would have been surprised to learn that this upright, stocky and square-shouldered figure could, through the art of make-up, so easily become the gaunt, stooping, bald and hollow-eyed man normally identified with his name – the Professor of Mathematics who, the world believed, had fallen from grace to become the most dangerous scientific criminal of his time: the very Napoleon of crime.
They would also find it difficult to believe that he was one and the same as the well-built, red haired Sir James Madis; or the distinguished-looking, powerful Frenchman, Jacques Meunier.
But these people were all one and the same: living, together with many more aliases and physical personalities, within the cunning mind and deft body of this James Moriarty – the youngest of the three Moriarty brothers, known to the denizens of crime throughout Europe as the Professor.*
The wooden deck moved slightly under his feet as the helmsman on the bridge altered course a point or two. Moriarty reflected that he would be altering some lives a point or two once he stepped back upon British soil.
True it was all to happen sooner than he had intended. Another year would have seen his wealth doubled, but he could not really carp, for in all he had already quadrupled the amount taken from his bank acounts in England and Europe. First with the Madis Company in New York, and then among the rogues of San Francisco.
He sniffed the air again, savouring the dampness in an almost sensual manner. During this, his second exile since the Reichenbach business in ’91, he had longed for England, and most particularly London with its familiar smoky, sooty odours; the noise of its cabs, the calls of the newsboys and street traders, the sound of the English language as he knew it – the argot of his people: the family people.
But the time spent abroad had been worth while. He settled his gaze firmly upon the horizon, contemplating the sea. In some ways he could think of himself as a creature of the deep: a shark, perhaps? Huge and silent, moving in for the kill.
A wave of anger ran through his body when he considered how they had treated him – those four European crime lords he had so pleasantly greeted in London barely two-and-a-half years before.
They had come at his bidding – Schleifstein, the tall German; Grisombre, the Frenchman who walked like a dancing master; the stout Italian, Sanzionare; and the quiet, sinister Spaniard, Esteban Segorbe. They had even brought him gifts and paid court to him and his dream of a great European network of criminal activity. Then, because of one small error on his part – and the work of the wretched Crow – it had suddenly changed. Only weeks after they had pledged themselves to the promotion of chaos for their own ends, they had rejected him.
Certainly Grisombre had helped him to get out of England, but it was not long before the Frenchman made it plain that neither he, nor his associates in Germany, Italy and Spain, were prepared to either harbour him or accept his authority.
So the dream had ended. Much good had it done them, thought James Moriarty, for all the intelligence he had received from that time on told a sorry tale of fights and squabbles and of no central control.
It had been while Moriarty was craftily building a new fortune as Sir James Madis in New York, and Jacques Meunier in San Francisco, that the plan had taken shape. It would have been easy simply to return, re-establish himself in London and then arrange, discreetly, for four neat, and simultaneous, assassinations in Paris, Rome, Berlin and Madrid. Then, just as easy, to dispatch Crow with a bullet, and the meddling Sherlock Holmes with a knife – for Moriarty had long realized that his final success depended on the demise of Holmes. But that would have been mere blundering retribution.
There was a better way. More cunning and stealthy. He needed the quartet of European henchmen if he was to stand astride the western underworld. So, they would have to be shown, with humiliating clarity, that he was still the only true criminal genius. With care and investment, the intricate plot would work. After that there were other plans, not for the elimination of Crow and Holmes, but for their utter discredit in the eyes of the world. He smiled to himself. Those two symbols of established authority would come to their own separate kinds of grief, and the irony was that they would be overthrown through the flaws in their own particular characters.
Running a gloved hand through his rich mane of hair, Moriarty turned from the rail and began to make an unsteady progress back to his cabin on the boat deck. Spear was waiting for him.
On most evenings after dinner – for they dined at four o’clock on board ship – Moriarty’s lieutenant would make his way up from the third-class cabins and slip, unnoticed, into his master’s quarters. He now stood waiting by the Professor’s bunk, a big heavily built man with a broken nose and features which might have passed for good looks had it not been for the scar which ran, like a lightning fork, down the right side of his face.
‘I tarried over long on the promenade deck, Spear. Here, help me off with my coat. Nobody observed you?’ Moriarty’s voice was all the more commanding because of its soft, almost gentle, tone.
‘Nobody ever observes me unless I wish it. You should know that, Professor. Is all well with you?’
‘I cannot say that I will be sorry to get the motion of this confounded ship from under my feet.’
Spear gave a short laugh. ‘It could be worse. The everlasting staircase can be worse, I assure you.’
‘Well, you should know, Spear, you should know. I am happy to say that I have never made a close acquaintance with the treadmill.’
‘No, nor likely to. If they ever did lay hands on you, it would be the morning drop and no messing.’
Moriarty smiled thinly. ‘No doubt, and the same would go for you.’ He cast aside his coat. ‘Now, is Bridget well?’ It was like a squire asking after one of his tenants.
‘The same. Sick as a cat since New York.’
‘It’ll soon pass. She’s a good girl, Spear. I trust you are seeing to her.’
‘I jolly her along,’ the laugh was almost callous. ‘Some days she thinks she’s dying and there’s a few more like that in the bowels of this tub. The smell down there could be sweeter. Anyhow, I’ve lined her guts with god’s juice tonight and coddled her proper.’
‘Aye, my friend, there’s more to marriage than four bare legs in a bed.’
‘Maybe,’ the bruising Spear sighed. ‘But when your buttocks itch, it’s good to scratch.’
The Professor smiled indulgently. ‘You have set eyes on Lee Chow in the past two days?’ he asked, abruptly changing the course of the conversation.
Moriarty was, himself, travelling first class under the as
sumed name of Carl Nicol, described in forged letters of introduction as a professor of law from some obscure university in the midwest of America. Spear and his wife journeyed third, giving the impression of having no connection with their leader. Lee Chow had been placed in the most hapless position of all, forced to sign on as a crew member for the duration of the voyage.
Spear chuckled. ‘I seen him swabbing down the after-deck yesterday morning looking as miserable as a rat in a tar barrel. A real son of a sea cook: you’d think he was one of Mr Stevenson’s pirates. You recall reading that book to us, Professor? Well, I thought for a lark I’d put pen to paper and tip him the Black Spot …’
‘I’ll have no daft games of that sort,’ Moriarty snapped. ‘There’s plenty that deserve the Black Spot, but it’s a poor joke to our own.’
Spear looked sheepishly down at his feet. Baiting Lee Chow was almost a hobby to him. A silence flared between them for a few seconds.
‘Well, this will be my last visit to you here,’ he said finally. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be safe on dry land.’
Moriarty nodded, ‘Then others can look to their drums. Just pray that Ember got over safely and the Jacobs boys had their messages clearly given. You can get word to Lee Chow before we dock?’
‘I’ll make it my business.’
‘If all is well, Ember is to meet him outside the dockyard once he has been paid off. They will go straight to the Great Smoke. By now arrangements should have been made there.’
‘And us?’
