The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus

by Michael Kurland

  To the left of the door, by the large casement windows, stood his dressing table; and it was to this that he repaired, casting his garments to the right and left as he entered the bedroom. He paused only to light the gas mantle on the wall and the two beeswax candles in simple porcelain holders on the dressing table. The plum velvet jacket he hung on a drawer handle, the gold brocade waistcoat he draped over the back of a chair, the cravat he suspended from a brass hook on the gas fixture. The night's exertions had left Chauvelin happy. When he was depressed he was excessively neat.

  He investigated his face in the large looking glass on the dressing table. He had heard it said that the health of the body and the soundness of the spirit could be determined by examining the eyes. Opening his eyelids wide, he stared through the glass at himself. The pupils seemed to have an unnatural luster, he thought, suggestive more of putrefaction than of health. He shook his head as if to clear it of the unnatural thought. It must be an effect of the candlelight; or the lateness of the hour. He examined his cheeks. They seemed red and puffy to him, and he could make out the tiny blue threads of broken veins beneath the skin. He pushed away from the mirror. I lead an unhealthy life, he thought. The idea seemed to amuse him.

  What was that? A motion in the mirror? Something behind him, some great black object, flickered across his field of view in the shadowy light of the gas lamp.

  There was someone in the room with him. He had not heard the door open or close, but nonetheless—

  Chauvelin did not believe in ghosts, but it was with an almost supernatural dread that he leaped to his feet and turned to face the unknown intruder. He clutched at the hardbacked chair he had been sitting in and raised it chest-high, thrusting the chair legs aggressively out in front of him, examining the room through the cane bottom.

  At first he thought he had been mistaken, so hard was the man to see, but after a few seconds the man's actions made him visible. It was not one of his servants, Chauvelin realized, but a tall, bulking man, he had never seen before, dressed in what seemed to be evening clothes covered by a full black cape that swirled in a full circle around him, his face shrouded beneath a wide-brimmed hat of a strange design. The man appeared to be going through the pockets of Chauvelin's discarded jacket. It was incredible! Right here in Chauvelin's own bedroom, with Chauvelin fifteen feet away waving a heavy chair at him!

  "Who are you?" Chauvelin demanded, noting with some pride the calmness of his voice. "How did you get in here? And what in the name of all that's holy do you think you are doing?"

  The man cast the jacket aside with a grunt of annoyance, and began deftly going through the pockets of the waistcoat. The presence of Desmond Chauvelin, who was advancing slowly toward him with the wooden chair held waist-high, did not seem to deter him in the slightest.

  It was certainly a lunatic, Chauvelin decided, escaped from some local asylum. Any burglar would have run at his presence, and anyone with designs on his person would not pause to rifle his jacket pockets. Chauvelin debated calling for assistance. It seemed a good plan, except for the fact that almost certainly nobody would hear him. If he could get past the man to his bed, he could use the bellpull. There was nobody presently in the butler's pantry to hear the ting of the bell, but in four and a half hours, when the butler came downstairs to start his day he would see the little telltale flag on the call board and come to investigate.

  The man dropped the waistcoat and for the first time turned to Chauvelin. "Where is it?" he asked, in the measured, reasonable tone of one who sees nothing unusual about his question. It might have been "What is the time?" or "Unreasonably chilly, isn't it?" from an acquaintance at the track. But it wasn't. It was a cloaked stranger, in his bedroom at four o'clock in the morning.

  "Where is it?" the man repeated.

  "What?" Chauvelin asked. "Look, my man." He took two steps forward and prodded at the apparition with his chair. "I don't know how you got in here, or what it is you think you're doing, but I am not amused. Come to think of it, how did you get in here, anyway?"

  The man knocked the chair aside as a thing of no consequence and grabbed Chauvelin by the shirtfront with his left hand. "The bauble," he said, forcing Chauvelin to his knees. "Where do you keep it?"

  Chauvelin's bowels knotted with fear. He felt a great desire to be calm, to be reasonable, to keep the conversation with his uninvited guest on a friendly level. "Bauble?" he asked. "What's mine is yours, I assure you. You have but to ask. What bauble? I don't go in for baubles. I have an extensive collection of cravats—"

  "The bauble," the man repeated. "The device, the signet, the devil's sign."

  "Devil's—" A strange look crossed the face of Desmond Chauvelin; a look of comprehension, and of fear. Of its own volition his right hand reached down and touched the fob pocket sewn into the top of his trouser waistband.

  "So!" the man said. Slapping Chauvelin's hand aside, he reached into the small pocket and pulled out a circular gold locket designed like a miniature pocket watch. He flipped open the lid and looked inside, and the devil, arms akimbo, stared back at him. Spaced evenly around the outside of the engraving, circling and confining the devil, were the capital letters D C L X V I.

  "Oh, that bauble," Chauvelin said.

  The man picked Chauvelin up and threw him across the room. Chauvelin hit the floor and slid and tumbled, coming up hard against the high oaken sides of the four-poster bed. He felt something wrench and snap inside of him, and an intense pain centered itself on the left side of his chest. He did not lose consciousness, but the bubble of reason popped inside his brain and he began to whimper like a frightened baby.

  There was, deep inside Chauvelin, a point of awareness, an observer that remained detached, and quizzical, and faintly amused, while his body retched with fear and curled into a tight little ball on the floor. That was interesting; he had always surmised that it would be so.

  "I am going to kill you," the dark man said, striding across the room. "Don't vomit; none of the others have vomited."

  Chauvelin raised his right arm defensively before his face.

  From somewhere the tall dark man produced a cane. He looked down at Chauvelin almost compassionately. "I must do this, you understand," he said. "I am the wind."

  Chauvelin gagged and puked all over his white shirtfront.

  The tall man twisted the cane and pulled out a slim knife with a razor-sharp nine-inch blade. "The wind," he said. He bent over Chauvelin.

  THIRTEEN — THE PROBLEM

  Laws were made to be broken.

  — Christopher North

  For the past five days, since the evening of his return from the observatory, Professor Moriarty had remained in his room. Surrounded by a great pile of books, mostly on loan from one of the libraries of the British Museum, he spent each day wrapped in his blue dressing gown, stretched out on his bed reading, or pacing back and forth across the small rectangle of floor between the bed and the dressing table, drinking tea, and smoking a particularly acrid brand of Turkish cigarettes.

  "It is the cigarettes I object to mostly," Mrs. H told Barnett over breakfast the next Friday. "It will take months to get the smell out of the drapes and bed curtains. And when he is not smoking the wretched things himself, he cannot abide the smell."

  "I find these periodic retreats of the professor's to be very trying," Barnett said. "This is the fifth time in the two years I've been here that he has disappeared into his bedroom for an extended period, and it always happens at the most awkward times. Everything has to grind to a halt around here while Moriarty takes to his bed and reads about aardvarks."

  "You misunderstand," Mrs. H said, leaning forward and waving a buttered muffin in Barnett's face. "He is not retreating, no indeed! The professor is working this time. I've been with him for a good many years, and I can tell. It's his smoking those cigarettes that makes the difference. When it's lethargy or lassitude, Mr. Barnett, he smokes a pipe. When it's work, it's those vile cigarettes. And then he's asking for speci
fic books to be brought to him. When he's in one of his sulks and in seclusion from the world, he merely works his way alphabetically through the collections in the Grenville Library or the King's Library of the British Museum."

  "So the professor's hard at work up there, pacing back and forth," Barnett said.

  " 'At's right enough," Mummer Tolliver said from his perch in the large armchair at the head of the dining table, where he was gorging himself from the platter of fresh, hot muffins and the stoneware jug of marmalade. "And it's a fine thing to see. Not that you can see the process—the wheels turning, so to speak—it's the results! Professor Moriarty is in his room, thinking; and the world had better watch its step!"

  Barnett poured some fresh cream into his coffee and stirred it with one of the delicate lace-pattern Queen Anne spoons from what Mrs. H insisted upon referring to as "the old service."

  "What do you suppose he spends his time thinking about while he's pacing back and forth and puffing Turkish smoke?" he asked.

  "Once it was about gravity," Mrs. H said. "About how it keeps all the stars and planets circling in their proper places. He was watching this asteroid through his telescope, what he calls a 'bit of rock flinging itself around the sun,' and it was just the slightest bit late in getting to where it was supposed to be. Well, the professor went up to his room and stayed there for weeks, pacing up and down and thinking about it. Other scientists might have just decided that their observations had been faulty, but not the professor! He wrote a paper on it when he came down that tells how all the parts of the universe relate to each other. Just from watching this tiny ball of rock out in space."

  "The Dynamics of an Asteroid," Barnett said. "I've seen it."

  "Another time he designed a safety gas mantle that would shut off the gas supply if the flame blew out. And then once he composed an epic poem in classical Greek in honor of a German archaeologist named Schliemann."

  "Was it any good?" Barnett asked.

  Mrs. H smiled. She carefully chewed and swallowed a bite of buttered muffin before replying, "It was Greek to me." Tolliver chortled. Barnett frowned.

  "It's when 'e 'as a real problem that the professor, 'e goes off like this," Tolliver offered. "Why, I remember one time when 'e figured out 'ow to make a whole building disappear without a trace."

  "Why would he want to do that?" Barnett asked.

  "It were a bank," Tolliver explained.

  "Ah!" Barnett said. "I wonder what sort of problem it is this time—a heavenly equation or an earthly conundrum."

  "I think it's something what might be considered in the line of business," the Mummer offered. "That Indian gent, says 'is name is Singh, has been to see the professor two afternoons this week. He's the only bloke what the professor will see."

  "Oh, yes," Barnett said. "The author of that strange note. What sort of fellow is he? Do you think he has a commission for Professor Moriarty?"

  Mrs. H rose from her seat, sniffed, murmured, "I must get about my work now," and left the room.

  "She doesn't like to hear about that sort of thing," Tolliver commented, pointing a silver spoon at Mrs. H's retreating back. "She likes to suppose as 'ow we is all living off wealth what we 'as inherited from deceased uncles. The fact that we occasionally break the law in pursuit of our 'ard-earned nickers is a consideration upon which Mrs. H don't like to dwell. A right proper lady, she is."

  "There are those of us who don't like to be constantly reminded of our iniquities, Mummer," Barnett said. "No matter how righteous we may feel about our particular morality, and no matter how strong a logical case we can build up for our actions, if that morality or those actions differ too strongly from those in which we were reared to believe, the struggle to convince ourselves fully will never be completely won."

  Tolliver looked up at Barnett with his head cocked to one side and his mouth opened, a pose that he firmly believed connoted awe. To Barnett it looked more as though the little man had just swallowed something that had unexpectedly turned out to be alive. "You talk pretty sometimes," the Mummer said. "Like the professor."

  "Your speech has a certain fascination also, Mummer," Barnett said. "You have the strangest mixture of dialects and street cant that I've ever heard."

  "That's 'cause of where I were brought up," the Mummer said. "Which were everywhere. My folks was traveling people, they was. Longest we ever stayed in one place, that I can remember, were about three months. And that were when my dad broke 'is arm. We missed the whole steeplechase circuit in the north of England that season."

  "Your father wasn't a jockey, was he?" Barnett asked.

  "Naow, course not. 'E worked the crowds, same as my mum. Real elegant-looking 'e were, too, when 'e were working. 'E were the best dip I ever saw. Didn't work with nobody, neither. Cleaned out the mark all by 'imself 'Lightfingered Harry Tolliver,' they called 'im."

  "I see," Barnett said. "Then you were just carrying on the family tradition when you became a pickpocket."

  "My dad taught me everything I know. 'E were better than what I ever been. 'Course 'e 'ad a natural advantage over me, being somewhat taller in stature."

  "I should think being short would be more desirable. You can sort of melt into the crowd and disappear while the hue and cry is being raised."

  "It don't work that way," Tolliver said. "Consider the respective sizes of the fox and the fox hunter."

  "At first glance," Barnett said doubtfully, "that appears to make sense."

  "Course it were great while I looked like a little innocent," Tolliver said. "Being pushed about in my pram, dipping into hip pockets as we passed the toffs. I mean, even if anyone had caught a glimpse o' the action, who would have believed it? I can hear it now: Lord Cecil turns to his neighbor and 'e says, "I say, Colonel, did you see that?'

  " 'What?' asked the colonel.

  " 'Sir Henry just 'ad 'is pocket picked!'

  " 'By Jove!' says the colonel. 'What a rum show! And where's the blighter what did it?'

  " 'There's the blighter, there,' says Lord Cecil, pointing into the pram.

  " 'What, the little bloke with the sunbonnet what can't be more than three years old?' asks the colonel. And pretty soon, you see, the subject is changed by mutual agreement."

  "You must have been a charming baby," Barnett said.

  "I was," Tolliver agreed. "For years and years."

  -

  Barnett finished his coffee and then went upstairs to see Professor Moriarty before leaving the house. He was meeting Miss Cecily Perrine for luncheon at Hempelmayer's. He had a question to ask her that could make this one of the most important occasions of his life, but there were some details to be taken care of first.

  Moriarty was up and dressed for the day, to Barnett's surprise. His tweed suit suggested a venture into the outside world, and probably in a direction away from the city. Moriarty described clothing as "mere costume," but nonetheless he was usually correctly attired. "One should always be in the right disguise," he had said. And since gentlemen did not wear tweeds to town, the professor was probably headed toward the country.

  "I was just coming down," he told Barnett. "There is a lot of work to be done in a short time. I have spent many years assembling, from among London's criminal classes, a talented and able crew of assistants. What Sherlock Holmes calls my 'henchmen.' These are men and women who, had they been better born or been given any sort of chance in life, would be serving England proudly now as statesmen, soldiers, or artisans. But they have had no such chance, so instead they serve me. And here is the job that is going to require all the talents, all the skills, all the brains that I have so painstakingly assembled."

  "I gather there's a job on," Barnett said.

  "A job!" Moriarty rubbed his hands together and looked satisfied. "My dear Barnett, we are going to commit the crime of the century, you and I."

  "I see, Professor," Barnett said. "Just the two of us?"

  "I fancy we will need a little assistance," Moriarty said. "Twenty-five or thirty
people should suffice. And the artifices of all my skilled artisans. I have a task for Benlevi that should appeal to him; and old Roos the chemist, and Gilchester, the Mummers' gaff. And I need to find someone who makes uniforms."

  "It sounds extensive," Barnett said.

  Moriarty gathered together some drawings on sheets of foolscap that were loose on his bed and put them, together with some drafting and surveying instruments, in a small portfolio. "I venture to say that no other organization but mine could attempt this," he said. "And certainly no other brain than mine could have conceived the plan necessary to penetrate the interwoven nest of formidable defenses guarding our prize."