Still, game is game...
‘...and you might find him 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 pictured a dusty coot like the stick-men who’d bedevilled me through Eton (interminably) and Oxford (briefly). 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 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, and backed off in terror.
Stamford just looked smug as he handed the card back to me.
II
‘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, grey and fascinating. I’ve met cobras, and they aren’t half as deadly — trust me. I imagine Moriarty left off 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’d 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 instinct — though it’s my guess bullets wouldn’t dare 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.
Facts about me.
‘... you are 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 your nerve might have gone; you are the son of a late Minster to Persia and have two sisters, your only living relatives beside a number of unacknowledged half-native illegitimates; you are addicted most of all to gambling, but also to sexual encounters, 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 which has enabled you to survive situations that would have killed another man; 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. 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-barrelhole eyes 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 dead-eye 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. That dead face was close up to mine and those eyes horribly filled 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 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 but tinged with terror. At any moment, 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 gumming 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 meeting a man. 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 Prince1. 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 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.
This was literally true. He kept no notes, no files, no address-book or appointment-diary. It was all in his head. Someone who knows more than I do about sums told me that Moriarty’s greatest feat was to write The Dynamics of an Asteroid, his magnum opus, 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 to these rooms and have already seen too much 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, who was starting to leak and make nasty little noises.
‘We are a large family, many cells with 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 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 thrill. 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 Firm 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 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 madame than baker. Which led me to wonder what fancies might be buttered up in the rooms below the Professor’s lair.
‘Colonel Moran, I am appointing you as 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 the Firm. 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.’
‘I’m flattered,’ I responded. ‘A “generous salary” would solve my problems, not to mention the use of a London flat. But, Moriarty, what is this division you wish me to head? Why am I such a perfect fit for it? What, specifically, is its business?’
Moriarty smiled again.
‘Did I omit to mention that?’
‘You know damn well you did!’
‘Murder, my dear Moran. Its business is murder.’
III
BARELY TEN MINUTES AFTER MY APPOINTMENT as Chief Executive Director of Homicide, Ltd., I was awaiting our first customer.
I mused humorously that I might offer an introductory special, say a garrotting thrown in gratis with every five poisonings. Perhaps there should be a half-rate for servants? A sliding scale of fees, depending on the number of years a prospective victim might reasonably expect to have lived had a client not retained our services?
I wasn’t yet thinking the Moriarty way. Hunting I knew to be a serious avocation. Murder was for bounders and cosh-men, hardly even killing at all. I’m not squeamish about taking human life: Quakers don’t get decorated after punitive actions against Afghan tribesmen. But not one of the heap of unwashed heathens I’d laid in the dust in the service of Queen and Empire had given me a quarter the sport of the feeblest tiger I ever bagged.
Shows you how little I knew then.
The Professor chose not to receive Elder Drebber in his own rooms, but made use of the brothel parlour. The room was well supplied with plushly upholstered divans, laden at this early evening hour with plushly upholstered tarts. It occurred to me that my newfound position with the Firm might entitle me to handle the goods. I even took the trouble mentally to pick out two or three bints who looked ripe for what ladies the world over have come to know as the Basher Moran Special. Imagine the Charge of the Light Brigade between silk sheets, or over a dresser table, or in an alcove of a Ranee’s Palace, or up the Old Kent Road, or... well, any place really.
As soon as I sat down, the whores paid attention, cooing and fluttering like doves, positioning themselves to their best advantage. As soon as the Professor walked in, the flock stood down, finding minute imperfections in fingernails or hair that needed rectifying.
Moriarty looked at the dollies and then at me, constructing something on his face that might have passed for a salacious, comradely leer but came out wrong. The bare-teeth grin of a chimpanzee, taken for a cheery smile by sentimental zoo visitors, is really a frustrated snarl of penned, homicidal fury. The Professor also had an alien range of expression, which others misinterpreted at their peril.
Mrs Halifax ushered in our American callers.
Enoch J. Drebber — why d’you think Yankees are so keen on those blasted middle initials? — was a barrel-shaped fellow, sans moustache but with a fringe of tight black curls all the way round his face. He wore simple, expensive black clothes and a look of stern disapproval.
The girls ignored him. I sensed he was on the point of fulminating.
I didn’t need one of the Professor’s ‘background checks’ to get Drebber’s measure. He was one of those odd godly bods who get voluptuous pleasure from condemning the fleshly failings of others. As a Mormon, he could bag as many wives as he wanted — on-tap whores and unpaid skivvies corralled together. His right eye roamed around the room, on the scout for the eighth or ninth Mrs Drebber, while his left was fixed straight ahead at the Professor.
With him came a shifty cove by the name of Brother Stangerson who kept quiet but paid attention.
‘Elder Drebber, I am Professor Moriarty. This is Colonel Sebastian Moran, late of the First Bangalore...’
Drebber coughed, interrupting the niceties.
‘You’re who to see in this city if a Higher Law is called for?’
Moriarty showed empty hands.
‘A man must die, and that’s the story,’ said Drebber. ‘He should have died in South Utah, years ago. He’s a murderer, plain and flat, and an abductor of women. Hauled out his six-gun and shot Bishop Dyer, in front of the whole town. A crime against God. Then fetched away Jane Withersteen, a good Mormon woman, and her adopted child, Little Fay. He threw down a mountain on his pursuers, crushing Elder Tull and many good
Mormon men2 Took away gold that was rightful property of the Church, stole it right out of the ground. The Danite Band have been pursuing him ever since...’
‘The Danites are a cabal within the Church of Latter-Day Saints,’ explained Moriarty.
‘God’s good right hand is what we are,’ insisted Drebber. ‘When the laws of men fail, the unworthy must be smitten, as if by lightning.’
I got the drift. The Danites were cossacks, assassins and vigilantes wrapped up in a Bible name. Churches, like nations, need secret police forces to keep the faithful in line.
‘Who is this, ah, murderer and abductor?’ I asked.
‘His name, if such a fiend deserves a name, is Lassiter. Jim Lassiter.’
This was clearly supposed to get a reaction. The Professor kept his own council. I admitted I’d never heard of the fellow.
‘Why, he’s the fastest gun in the South-West. Around Cottonwoods, they said he struck like a serpent, drawing and discharging in one smooth, deadly motion. Men he killed were dead before they heard the sound of the shot. Lassiter could take a man’s eye out at three hundred yards with a pistol.’
That’s a fairy story. Take it from someone who knows shooting. A side-arm is handy for close-work, as when, for example, a tiger has her talons in your tit. With anything further away than a dozen yards, you might as well throw the gun as fire it.
I kept my scepticism to myself. The customer is always right, even in the murder business.
‘This Lassiter,’ I ventured. ‘Where might he be found?’
‘In this city,’ Drebber decreed. ‘We are here, ah, on the business of the Church. The Danites have many enemies, and each of us knows them all. I was half-expecting to come across another such pestilence, a cur named Jefferson Hope who need not concern you, but it was Lassiter I happened upon, walking in your Ly-cester Square on Sunday afternoon. I saw the Withersteen woman first, then the girl, chattering for hot chestnuts. I knew the apostate for who she was. She has been thrice condemned and outcast...’
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Peerless Peer Page 11
