"Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective?"
"Yes."
"He is aware of us?"
"Mr. Holmes has stumbled across one or two of our activities without realizing what they were. Curiously enough, he insists upon attributing them to Professor Moriarty. They seem to dislike each other. But Mr. Holmes is an astute observer, usually with an uncanny ability to draw the correct inference from a mass of seemingly unrelated data. He is sure to be called in to investigate certain aspects, certain outward manifestations, of our great plot as it progresses toward fruition. If so, it is possible that he will ascertain the truth. And if he fails, then we shall still have the professor of mathematics dogging our heels."
The tall man nodded thoughtfully. "It is clear that these two threats must be removed," he said.
"A successful commander," the other said, "uses his enemy's strengths against him. These two men represent our enemy's greatest strength; and I think I have devised a way to use them against each other. It requires but minor revisions in the great plan."
"Perhaps we should just have them removed," the tall man said. "Dead men cannot cause trouble."
"Dead men also cannot help," the other replied. "In my new plan the professor of mathematics and the consulting detective will unwittingly aid us. And then they will die. It will be humorous, no?"
"Show me!" the tall man demanded.
The other took out a small notebook. "Follow the scheme," he said. "See how the pieces fit together and one follows naturally from the one before. All culminating in the Supreme Act. It is elegant."
"Trace the steps," the tall man said.
"Listen!" the other commanded.
And he talked long into the night.
THIRTEEN — FLEET STREET
The moving finger writes ...
— Omar Khayyam
London wears her history on her streets: the buildings, the facades, the monuments, the heroic statuary, the ornamental ironwork, the street signs, and even the paving stones. But especially the street signs. In any given mile, an average London street has only twelve blocks, but it can change names three times. As Oxford Street, for example, heads east, it becomes in turn New Oxford Street, Holborn, High Holborn, Holborn Viaduct, Newgate Street, Cheapside, and Poultry. And all of this in under two miles.
Benjamin Barnett, used to the grid-pattern uniformity of New York or the great boulevards of Paris, found the zigzag maze of London streets a constant delight. Each street, sometimes each block, had its own character, its own air, its own voice. Barnett walked the streets as much as he could over the next few weeks, trying to attain that distinctive intimacy with the city that would make him a good reporter. To know London intimately, of course, would take years, and even then he would really know only that part of the city which had become his "beat."
But if he was going to do his job, to help the professor in his search for the abnormal, he was going to have to learn what was normal in this, the largest city in the world and the center of the world's greatest empire.
Learning what was accepted was not difficult: the standards were pretty much the same over the civilized world these last decades of the nineteenth century. But the uncivilized world did not begin in Asia or darkest Africa; it peered around the corner in Lambeth, it waited in alleys in the East End, it skulked along the wharves and docks fronting the Thames. So Barnett had to go beyond what was accepted; he had to know what was condoned, condemned, controlled, misunderstood, overlooked, winked at, persecuted, prosecuted, and ignored. In these places lies the job of a reporter. It is in the interconnection of these elements that news is created.
Barnett found office space on the top floor of a small building on Whitefriars Street, just south of Fleet Street. He equipped it with a desk, a Grandall typewriter, a box of pencils, two reams of yellow paper, and a wastepaper basket, and felt at home. After much thought he found a sign painter and had him inscribe American News Service across the door with B. Barnett in much smaller letters under it.
The next step, before he saw any of the British working press, was to establish his bona fides. There was no point in faking something that could just as easily be legitimate. He made up a list of New York and Boston newspapers that might take filler material from him—he'd worry about the rest of the country later. To start with, he sent a cable to his last employer, the New York World:
Now working for American News Service comma London stop will you take news at space rates plus cable charges questionmark we pay for query comma you specify inches
BENJAMIN BARNETT
Within four hours, the fastest turnaround time Barnett had ever seen on the transatlantic cable, he had his reply from the World, signed by Hardesty Gores, the managing editor himself:
Why arent you in prison
GORES
Barnett read the cable and scribbled a short reply for the boy to take back.
I died
BARNETT
The next morning, when Barnett arrived at the office to supervise the hanging of curtains and a few other necessary amenities, another cable from the World awaited him:
Want exclusive your personal story stop will take to one hundred inches space rates
GORES
So there was his first account. And an interesting challenge it would be, too, to write the story of his incarceration and escape without violating the terms of his agreement with the professor. He'd have to work on that one.
Barnett sent cables to the other papers on his list and turned his attention to getting to know the editors and journalists of Fleet Street. He started with the morning papers, which traditionally have the better local reporting staff. A morning paper usually has the late-breaking news and has to whip it into shape and dish it out for its readers' breakfast enjoyment. An evening paper has time to reflect and specializes in perspective and analysis of the news it gets from the morning papers. Or so it was in New York, and so Barnett assumed it would be in London.
Within the next two days, Barnett had consulted with the city editors of the Daily Telegraph, the Daily News, the Standard, and the Times. Under the pretext of doing a series of articles for the American market on crime in metropolitan London, he arranged to have access to the newspapers' clipping files and to be apprised of current happenings by messenger once a day. Newspapers tend to be very responsive to the requests of outside journalists who are not direct competitors. It was a cheap and effective sort of bread-casting.
Within a week, Barnett had replies from eleven East Coast dailies to the effect that they were willing to see his queries and buy from him at space rates if he had anything that interested them. "I have," he told Professor Moriarty over dinner, "quite inadvertently established myself in a business. I'm going to have to go out and hire that secretary you suggested just to keep up with the legitimate stories, not counting the research I'm doing for you. I didn't think it would be so easy."
"You must be considered a good journalist by your American peers," Moriarty suggested.
"I don't think that's it," Barnett said. "Not that I'm not a good journalist, you understand. I'm the best. But I think what these papers see is the notoriety value of my byline. Something like this: 'Mr. Barnett, our London correspondent, is the man who recently conducted a daring escape from a Turkish prison—no, make that a Turkish dungeon—after being tried and convicted for the murder of a British naval officer. A murder he assures us he did not commit. Full details in our Sunday edition.' "
"Fascinating. Clearly shows the advantages of compulsory literacy even in the most primitive cultures."
"Remember," Barnett told him, "that where I come from a woman who killed her lover with a nickel-plated revolver last year was acquitted of the crime when she told the jury that he had lied to her. And then she went on a vaudeville singing tour that took her to twenty-seven cities. Despite a voice like a bullfrog, she packed the house at every stop."
Moriarty put down his fork and stared at Barnett. "If I followed that properly," he
said, "the moral of it would have to be, 'When in America keep nickel-plated revolvers out of the hands of women who can't sing.' " Then he chuckled and returned his attention to his pudding.
-
Barnett put an advertisement in the next morning's Daily Telegraph for a "secretary for a small news-office, conversant with the operation of typewriting machines. Reply to Box 252, Telegraph." He arranged for a messenger to deliver the replies to his office. By that afternoon's post he had sixteen replies, and by the following morning when he arrived at the office, eighty-seven.
He piled them all up on top of his new desk and settled down to go through them, with no clear idea of how to go about culling them down to manageable size. He found that a good many of the applicants eliminated themselves through unacceptable vagaries of grammar, syntax, or spelling. He counted the letters remaining: fifty-two. He had no interest in interviewing fifty-two people, and felt that he'd be even more helpless in deciding when actually faced with them than he was when merely faced with their letters of application. There were seventeen nearly identical letters in the pile. They each began, "I read with interest your advertisement in today's Daily Telegraph ..." and continued, with little variation except for the name of the applicant, to precisely one inch from the bottom of the page. Barnett pulled them all out. Obviously copied from some popular letter-writing guide, he decided. Well, if he arbitrarily eliminated these as lacking in imagination, that still left thirty-five.
There was a knock at the door. Barnett looked up. More applications, no doubt. He put his pencil down. "Come in."
The office door opened, and a young lady entered. Barnett watched her come in, then stood up politely. And then he fell in love. This was not unusual, although it was the first time since he had reached London. Barnett had fallen in love every other day in Paris, and at least once a week in New York. But each time it was a new and unique emotion, and not at all to be compared with any of the times before. Still, it had happened enough that he was able to control the emotion and not allow it to interfere with his conduct. If his heart was beating a little faster than a moment before, if he was breathing a little deeper, well, it was a hot day.
"Excuse me," she said, "are you Mr. Barnett?"
"Indeed I am, Madam," he said. "How may I assist you?" It wasn't what he wanted to say, he told himself, wishing for poetic words and romantic images to come springing to his lips. But none sprang, and even if one had, there were conventions that would prevent him from uttering, one-tenth-part of one syllable. So he merely smiled foolishly at the young lady and waited for her to speak.
"I have brought your mail," she said, holding forth a packet of letters in her daintily gloved hand, "from the Daily Telegraph."
"Oh," Barnett said. He took the letters and dropped them on top of the others. "Thank you."
The girl set herself firmly before the desk, took a deep breath, and said, "I should like to apply for the position myself. Of secretary. In this office."
"Oh," Barnett said. "I mean, ah, I see. Here, take a seat, why don't you? How interesting. Ah ..." He plopped back down into his chair as she sat herself in the straightback wooden chair by the side of the desk. "I'm sorry if I seem surprised," he said, "but I'm not really prepared to interview anyone yet. I mean, I hadn't expected to see anyone until tomorrow. At the earliest. How did you get here, by the way? And what is your name?"
"I am sorry if I surprised you," the girl said. "My name is Perrine, Miss Cecily Perrine. I was quite determined, when I saw your advertisement, to apply for the position before anyone else had a chance to. To get the jump on them, as they say. So I took the liberty of ascertaining who had placed the advertisement. And then I came here under the pretext of bringing you your mail."
Barnett looked at the girl, trying to pierce the depths of the clear blue eyes that met his gaze without coyness or shyness. Her oval face was framed with light-brown curls under her straw bonnet. And she seemed totally without artifice. Which, Barnett reflected, was probably the highest form of artifice of all.
"Why?" he asked.
"Why did I come? Why do I want the position?"
"That's right, Miss Perrine," he said. "Why are you here?"
"I want to be a journalist," she said. "I want to work for a newspaper. But none of them will take me seriously. So when I saw the advertisement for a position in a small news-office, I decided to try for it. I thought that if I could get a start—even as a secretary—I might get a chance ... I might be able to make a chance ... I suppose it was silly ..." Her voice trailed off and she looked away. Barnett could see that her hands were clenched and white, although her face was flushed. She was in the grip of some strong emotion, and she was not acting.
"There are lady journalists," Barnett said.
She looked back up at him, the scorn evident in the glare in her eyes and the set of her jaw. "Journalists!" she scoffed. "There are ladies, sir, who write dainty little pieces about social teas, and soirees, and whether the Dowager Duchess of Titipu wore mauve or lavender to the last garden party at Balmoral. That, sir, is not journalism, and you know it!" Then she put her gloved hand to her mouth and looked suddenly stricken. "Oh," she said. "I'm sorry. I am sorry. I can't help it. But none of the daily papers will hire a woman even as a secretary. If you knew how many times I've heard that a newsroom is no place for a lady."
"You will have to learn to control your emotions," Barnett said gently.
"You're right, of course," Miss Perrine said, taking a deep breath and standing up. "Thank you for your time."
"I have three more questions for you, Miss Perrine, if you don't mind," Barnett said.
It was a second before she realized what he had said and then she sat slowly back down. "Yes?"
"Why do you want to be a reporter?"
She thought about it for a moment. "I don't exactly know," she said. "No one's ever asked me that before. Not in years. When I was twelve—I think it was twelve—I told my father I wanted to be a journalist and he laughed and asked me why. And I said something like, 'Because they find out the truth and then they tell people.' I had just read one of Mr. Dickens's novels, I don't even remember which one, and one of the characters was a journalist and I was impressed. It was a man, of course, but at the time that barrier didn't seem insurmountable."
"That's as good a reason as I've heard," Barnett said. "The only one better was advanced by a man named McSorley who covered the police beat for the New York Daily American."
"And what did Mr. McSorley say?" the girl asked.
"He said they were paying him twelve dollars a week," Barnett told her, "and that was more than he could make shoveling coal."
Miss Perrine thought about that for a minute, possibly trying to decide whether or not Barnett was making fun of her. "This man McSorley," she said, "didn't have to fight for his job."
Barnett smiled.
"What is your second question?" Miss Perrine asked.
"How did you manage to get here to apply for the position. The address, after all, is a box number, and the Telegraph is not supposed to give out the name or address of the box holder."
"I suppose technically it was wrong, Mr. Barnett," she said. "I've tried to explain to you why—"
"Not why, Miss Perrine," Barnett said. "How. Tell me how."
"It was simple enough," she told him. "I went to the window and told the clerk I was picking up the mail for Box Two-Three-Two. He said he understood it was to be sent on. I told him that that was the problem. I said we had expected far more replies than we had received and I wanted to make sure they were going to the right address. So he pulled the card and read me the name and address printed thereon. I assured him that it was right, took the few letters that had come since the last messenger, and here I am."
"I see," Barnett said. "Very effective. And my third question is: Can you spell?"
"Quite precisely," she said.
"Very good. Now tell me, do you still want the job?"
"Well," Miss Perrine
looked around the office. "Quite frankly, Mr. Barnett, this is not how I pictured my introduction to journalism. This office, at the moment, seems quite innocent of any connection with any newspaper. Would you mind telling me, Mr. Barnett, exactly what the American News Service does, and what my duties would be?"
"We are a brand new company, Miss Perrine," Barnett said. "So new, in fact, that I use the editorial 'we,' as I am, at present, the sole proprietor and only employee of the American News Service. But from such humble beginnings, Miss Perrine, may come a great news organization.
"We gather news for our clients, which are American newspapers. Therefore, we try to anticipate what sort of news would appeal to the American reader. Once a day we will cable a query sheet with a précis of each story to our clients. They then specify which stories they are willing to pay for, and we send them."
The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus Page 13
