“It’s ‘Basher’ Moran, in’t it?” drawled someone, prompting me to look up from the gutter. “Still shooting anything that draws breath?”
“Archibald Stamford, esquire. Still practicing auntie’s signature?”
I remembered Archie from some police cells in Islington. All charges dropped and apologies made, in my case. Being “mentioned in despatches” carries some weight with beaks, certainly more than the word of a tradesman in a celluloid collar you clean with india-rubber and his hideous daughter. Six months jug for the fumbling forger, though. He’d been pinched trying to make a withdrawal from a relative’s bank account.
If his clothes were anything to go by, Stamford had risen in his profession. Stick-pin and cane, dove-grey morning coat, curly-brimmed topper and good boots. His whole manner, with that patronising hale-fellow-snooks-to-you tone, suggested he was in funds—which made him my long-lost friend.
The Criterion was handy nearby, so I suggested we repair to the Bar for drinks, assuming the question of who paid for them would be settled when Archie was fuddle-headed from several whiskies. I fed him that shut-out-of-my-usual-suite line, and considered a hard luck story trading on my status as hero of the Jowaki Campaign—though I doubted if an inky-fingered felon would put much stock in far-flung tales of imperial daring.
Stamford’s eyes shone in a manner that reminded me unpleasantly of my late feline dancing partner. He sucked on his teeth, torn between saying something and keeping mum. It was a manner I would soon come to recognise, as common to those in the employ of my soon-to-be benefactor.
“As it happens, Bash old chap, I know a billet that might suit you. Comfortable rooms in Conduit Street, above Mrs Halifax’s establishment. Do you know Mrs H?”
“Used to keep a knocking-shop in Stepney? Lazy eye and a derringer in her bustle?”
“That’s the one. She’s West End now. Part of a combine, you might say. A newly-established firm that’s thriving.”
“What she sells is always in demand.”
“True, but it’s not just the whoring. There’s other business. A man of vision, you might say, has been doing some thinking. About my line of trade, and Mrs Halifax’s, and, as it were, yours.”
I was about at the end of my rope with Archie. He was talking in a familiar, insinuating, creeping-round-behind-you-with-a-cosh manner that I didn’t like one bit. Implying that I was a tradesman did little for my ruddy temper. I was strongly tempted to give him one of my specialty thumps, which involves a neat little screw of my big fat regimental ring into the old eyeball, and see how his dove grey coat looked with dirty great blobs of snotty blood down the front. After that, a quick fist into his waistcoat gut would leave him gasping, and give me the chance to fetch away his watch and chain, plus any cash he had on him. Of course, I’d check the spelling of “Bank of England” on the notes before spending them. I could make it look like a difference of opinion between gentlemen. And no worries about it coming back to me. Stamford wouldn’t squeal to the peelers, and if he wanted to pursue the matter I could always give him a second helping.
“I wouldn’t,” he said, as if he could read my mind.
That was a dash of Himalayan melt-water to the face.
Catching sight of myself in the long mirror behind the bar, I saw my cheeks had gone a nasty shade of red, more vermillion than crimson. My fists were knotted, white-knuckled, around the rail. This, I understood, was what I looked like before I “went off.” You can’t live through all I have without “going off” from time to time. Usually, I “came to” in handcuffs between policemen with black eyes. The other fellow or fellows or lady is too busy being carried off to hospital to press charges.
Still, a “tell” is a handicap for a card-player. And my red face gave warning.
Stamford smiled, like someone who knows there’s a confederate behind the curtain with a bead drawn on the back of your neck and a finger on the trigger.
Libertè, hah!
“Have you popped your guns, Colonel?”
I would pawn, and indeed have pawned, the family silver. I’d raise money on my medals, ponce my sisters (not that anyone would pay for the hymn-singing old trouts), and sell Royal Navy torpedo plans to the Russians, but a man’s guns are sacred. Mine were at the Anglo-Indian Club, nicely oiled and wrapped and packed away in cherrywood cases, along with a kit-bag full of assorted cartridges. If any big cats got out of Regent’s Park Zoo, I’d be well set-up to use a Hansom for a howdah and track the vermin along Oxford Street.
Stamford knew from my look what an outrage he had suggested. This wasn’t the red-hot pillar-box-faced Basher bearing down on him, this was the deadly icy calm of—and other folks have said this, so it’s not just me boasting—“the best heavy game shot that our Eastern Empire has produced.”
“There’s a fellow,” he continued, nervously, “this man of vision I mentioned. In a roundabout way, he is my employer. Probably the employer of half the folk in this room, whether they know it or not…”
He looked about. It was the usual shower: idlers and painted dames, jostling each other with stuck-on smiles, reaching sticky fingers into jacket-pockets and up loose skirts, finely-dressed fellows talking of “business” which was no more than powdered thievery, a scattering of moon-faced cretins who didn’t know their size-thirteens gave them away as undercover detectives.
Stamford produced a card and handed it to me.
“He’s looking for a shooter…”
The fellow could never say the right thing. I am a shot, not a shooter. A sportsman, not a keeper. A gun, not a gunslinger.
Still, game is game…
“…and you might find him, well, interesting.”
I looked down at the card. It bore the legend PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY, and an address in Conduit Street.
“A professor, is it?” I sneered. I imagined a dusty coot like the stick-men who’d bedevilled me through Eton and Oxon. Or else a music-hall slickster, inflating himself with made-up titles. “What might he profess, Archie?”
Stamford was a touch offended, and took back the card. It was as if Archie were a new convert to Popism and I’d farted during a sermon from Cardinal John Henry Newman.
“You’ve been out of England a long time, Basher.”
He summoned the barman, who had been eyeing us with that fakir’s trick of knowing who was most likely, fine clothes or not, to do a runner.
“Will you be paying now, sirs?”
Stamford held up the card and shoved it in the man’s face.
The barman went pale, dug into his own pocket to settle the tab, apologised profusely and backed off in terror.
Stamford just looked smug as he handed the card back to me.
* * * *
“You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” said the Professor.
“How the devil did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.
His eyes caught mine. Cobra-eyes, they say. Large, clear, cold and fascinating. I’ve actually met cobras, and they aren’t half as deadly—trust me. I imagine Moriarty left off mathematics tutoring because his pupils were too terrified to con their two-times table. I seemed to suffer his gaze for a full minute, though only a few seconds passed. It had been like that in the hug of Kali’s Kitten. I would have sworn on a stack of well-thumbed copies of The Pearl that the mauling went on for an hour of pain, but the procedure was over inside thirty seconds. If I’d had a Webley on my hip, I might have shot the Professor in the heart on sheer instinct—though it’s my guess bullets wouldn’t dare to enter him. He had a queer unhealthy light about him. Not unhealthy in himself, but for everybody else.
Suddenly, pacing distractedly about the room, head wavering from side to side as if he had two dozen extra flexible bones in his neck, he began to rattle off facts, as if cramming some dullwit child for an examination.
&
nbsp; Facts about me.
“…you are lately retired from your regiment, resigning at the request of a superior to avoid the mutual disgrace of dishonourable discharge; you have suffered a serious injury at the claws of a beast, are fully-recovered physically, but worry that your nerve might have gone; you are the son of a late Minister to Persia and have two sisters, your only living relatives beside a number of unacknowledged half-native illegitimates on three continents; you are addicted, most of all to gambling, but also to sexual congress, spirits, the murder of animals, and the fawning of a duped public; most of the time, you blunder through life like a bull, snatching and punching to get your own way, but in moments of extreme danger you are possessed by a strange serenity that has enabled you to survive situations which would have killed another man five times over; in fact, your true addiction is to danger, to fear—only near death do you feel alive; you are unscrupulous, amoral, habitually violent and, at present, have no means of income, though your tastes and habits require a constant inflow of money…”
Throughout this performance, I took in Professor James Moriarty. Tall, stooped, hair thin at the temples, cheeks sunken, wearing a dusty (no, chalky) frock-coat, sallow as only an indoorsman can be, yellow cigarette-stain between his first and second fingers, teeth to match. And, obviously, very pleased with himself.
He reminded me of Gladstone gone wrong. With just a touch of a hill-chief who had tortured me with fire-ants.
But I had no patience with his lecture. Frankly, I’d eaten enough of that from the pater for a lifetime.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I interrupted…
The Professor was unpleasantly surprised. It was as if no one had ever dared break into one of his speeches before. He halted in his tracks, swivelled his skull and levelled those shotgun-barrel holes at me.
“I’ve had this done at a bazaar,” I continued. “It’s no great trick. The fortune-teller notices tiny little things and makes good guesses—you can tell I gamble from the marks on my cuffs, and was in Afghanistan by the colour of my tan. If you spout with enough confidence, you score so many hits the bits you get wrong—like that tommyrot about being addicted to danger—are swallowed and forgotten. I’d expected a better show from your advance notices, ‘Professor’.”
He slapped me across the face, swiftly, with a hand like wet leather.
Now, I was amazed.
I knew I was vermillion again, and my dukes went up.
Moriarty whirled, coat-tails flying, and his boot-toe struck me in the groin, belly, and chest. I found myself sat in a deep chair, too shocked to hurt, pinned down by wiry, strong hands which pressed my wrists to the armrests, with that dead face close up to mine and those eyes horribly filling the view.
That calm he mentioned came on me. And I knew I should just sit still and listen.
“Only an idiot guesses or reasons or deduces,” the Professor said, patiently. He withdrew, which meant I could breathe again and become aware of how much pain I was in. “No one comes into these rooms unless I know everything about him that can be found out through the simple means of asking behind his back. The public record is easily filled in by looking in any one of a number of reference books, from the Army Guide to Who’s Who. But all the interesting material comes from a man’s enemies. I am not a conjurer, Colonel Moran. I am a scientist.”
There was a large telescope in the room, aimed out of the window. On the walls were astronomical charts and a collection of impaled insects. A long side-table was piled with brass, copper and glass contraptions that I took for parts of instruments used in the study of the stars or navigation at sea. That shows I wasn’t yet used to the Professor. Everything about him was lethal, and that included his assorted bric-a-brac.
It was hard to miss the small kitten pinned to the mantel-piece by a jack-knife. The skewering had been skilfully done, through the velvety skin-folds of the haunches. The animal mewled from time to time, not in any especial pain.
“An experiment with morphine derivatives,” he explained. “Tibbles will let us know when the effect wears off.”
Moriarty posed by his telescope, bony fingers gripping his lapel.
I remembered Stamford’s manner, puffed up with a feeling he was protected somehow but tinged with terror that the great power to which he had sworn allegiance might capriciously or justifiably turn on him with destructive ferocity. I remembered the Criterion barman digging into his own pocket to settle our bill—which, I now realised, was as natural as the Duke of Clarence licking his own stamps or Florence Nightingale giving sixpenny knee-tremblers in D’Arblay Street.
Beside the Professor, that ant-man was genteel.
“Who are you?” I asked, unaccustomed to the reverential tone I heard in my own voice. “What are you?”
Moriarty smiled his adder’s smile.
And I relaxed. I knew. My destiny and his wound together. It was a sensation I’d never got before upon first meeting a man. And when I’d had it from women, the upshot ranged from disappointment to attempted murder. Understand me, Professor James Moriarty was a hateful man, the most hateful, hateable creature I have ever known, not excluding Sir Augustus and Kali’s Kitten and the Abominable Bloody Snow-Bastard and the Reverend Henry James Prince. He was something man-shaped that had crawled out from under a rock and moved into the manor house. But, at that moment, I was his, and I remain his forever. If I am remembered, it will only be because I knew him. From that day on, he was my father, my commanding officer, my heathen idol, my fortune and terror and rapture.
God, I could have done with a stiff drink.
Instead, the Professor tinkled a silly little bell and Mrs Halifax trotted in with a tray of tea. One look and I could tell she was his, too. Stamford had understated the case when he said half the folk in the Criterion Bar worked for Moriarty. My guess is that, at bottom, the whole world works for him. They’ve called him the Napoleon of Crime, but that’s just putting what he is, what he does, in a cage. He’s not a criminal, he is crime itself, sin raised to an art-form, a church with no religion but rapine, a God of Evil. Pardon my purple prose, but there it is. Moriarty brings things out in people, things from their depths.
He poured me tea.
“I have had an eye on you for some time, Colonel Moran. Some little time. Your dossier is thick, in here…”
He tapped his concave temple.
Later, I learned this was literally true. He kept no notes, no files, no records, no address-book or appointment-diary. It was all in his head. Someone who knows tons more than I do about sums told me that Moriarty’s greatest feat was to write that book no one can make head or tail of, The Dynamics of an Haemorrhoid or whatever, in perfect first draft. From his mind to paper, with no preliminary notations or pencilled workings, never thinking forward to plan or skipping back to correct. As if he were singing “one long, pure note of astro-mathematics, like a castrato nightingale delivering a hundred-thousand-word telegram from Prometheus.”
“You have come here, to these rooms, and you have already seen too much ever to leave…”
An ice-blade slid through my ribs into my heart.
“…except as, we might say, one of the family.”
The ice melted, and I felt tingly and warm. With the phrase, one of the family, he had arched his eyebrow invitingly.
He stroked Tibbles, which was starting to leak and make nasty little noises.
“We are a large family, many cells who have no knowledge of each other, devoted to varied pursuits. Most, though not all, are concerned with money. I own that other elements of our enterprise interest me far more. We are alike in that, you will be surprised to learn. You only think you gamble for money. In fact, you gamble to lose. You even hunt to lose, knowing you must eventually be eaten by a predator more fearsome than yourself. For you, it is an emotional, instinctual, sensual thri
ll. For me, there are intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual rewards. But, inconveniently, money must come into it. A great deal of money.”
As I said, he had me sold already. If a great deal of money was to be had, Moran was in.
“The organisation is available for contract work. You understand? We have clients, who bring problems to us. We solve them, using whatever skills we have to hand. If there is advantage to us beyond the agreed fee, we seize it.…”
He made a fist in the air, as if squeezing a microbe to death.
“…if our interests should happen to run counter to those of the client, we settle the matter in such a way that we are ultimately convenienced while our patron does not realise precisely what has happened. This, also, you understand?”
“Too right, Professor,” I said.
“Good. I believe we shall have satisfaction of each other.”
I sipped my tea. Too milky, too pale. It always is after India. I think they put curry-powder in the pot out there, or else piddle in the sahib’s crockery when he’s not looking.
“Would you care for one of Mrs Halifax’s biscuits?” he asked, as if he were the vicar entertaining the chairwoman of the beneficent fund. “Vile things, but you might like them.”
I dunked and nibbled. Mrs H was a better madam than baker. Which led me to wonder what fancies might be buttered up in the rooms below the Professor’s lair.
“So, Colonel Moran, I take pleasure in appointing you as the head of one of our most prestigious divisions. It is a post for which you are eminently qualified by achievement and aptitude. Technically, you are superior to all in this firm save myself. You are expected to take up residence here, in this building. A generous salary comes with the position. And profit participation in, ah, “special projects.” One such matter is at hand, and we shall come to it when we receive our next caller, Mister—no, not Mister, Elder—Elder Enoch J Drebber of Cleveland, Ohio.”
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #3 Page 9
