by John Gardner
“I didn’t say that. I said I was asked to leave the room.” A tiny part of the old Billy Jacobs’s sparkle was back.
“Go on then.”
“As I was leaving, I heard her say that she had something that would be of great interest. It was about some girl she had working in her house.”
“In Sal’s house, in the Haymarket?”
“That was the meaning, and I saw Sir Jack stiffen. He’s been finding ways of getting into your houses, Professor. Begging your pardon, he’s taken over some of them. Little gold mines, he says they are, and he’s been trying to find a way into the Haymarket house. I know that to my certain knowledge.”
“So you stayed, listening, outside the door?” Moriarty raised a hand to cover the lower part of his face, to hide his smile at Billy knowing to his certain knowledge.
“I did my best. Those doors are fearsome solid, Professor. I could hear little.”
“Just what did you hear?”
“She said she had this secret, but it would cost pretty.”
“You heard that clearly. That Sal wanted money?”
“I don’t think just money. I think she wanted money and favours. Position, I would guess. She was after a good place in Jack’s family.”
The Professor nodded. “And they fell out over this?”
“She wouldn’t tell him what it was, her secret. And he wouldn’t set a fee or the promise of whatever she wished. They were at loggerheads, screaming at each other within fifteen minutes.”
Spear saw Billy Jacobs’s fear again: His hands were shaking so much he had to cover one with the other and hold them down, hard, on the table.
“And what were they screaming?”
“She called him a louse, a brandy-nosed counter-jumper—you know, Sir Jack has two grocer’s shops, one in Hackney and another in Pimlico; he’s very touchy about that, being in trade. He was calling her a Drury Lane vestal and they were going at it hammer and tongs. I become concerned.”
“At the shouting?”
“Sir, Idle Jack’s temper is …how can I put it…?”
“Volatile?”
“That would be one way”—unsure of what volatile meant—“Then I heard blows. I think she struck his face. That worried me greatly. Then there was this ghastly noise. A choking …I didn’t think, just put my shoulder to the door, barged in …”
Billy Jacobs, eyes downcast, shook his tousled head violently, and, Spear noted, clenched his fists so that the knuckles were drained of blood.
“And, Billy?” Moriarty asked, still quiet, pitched low, in almost a throaty whisper.
“And I was too late, Professor. Jack was enraged, face scarlet and the veins on his neck standing out, contorted. He had her at arm’s length, holding her by the throat, her on her knees, Sal. When he looked towards me I thought he’d do me an’ all. His look was terrible. Then he just took his hands off her throat and she fell like a child’s tupp’ny rag doll. Crumpled on the floor.”
“And you still didn’t know what the quarrel was about?”
“It was about neither one giving way to the other. She wanted to sell her secret about a girl in her house; and he wouldn’t make any promises of payment, or whatever else she wanted.”
“And he told you to get rid of the body?”
“He turned to look at me and let her fall—she flopped down like a sack of feathers chucked on the floor. He looked suffused with anger, if that’s the right word; it was coming out of his face, out of the skin. And he said to me, ‘Clear up the mess, Billy. Now. Do it now. Clear it out. The rubbish.’”
“So you got Rouster Bates and Sidney Streeter to go out and lay her in a lodging? The lodging dodge?”
“That was about it.”
“You obeyed him?”
“You don’t argue with Sir Jack, Professor. Jack’s mighty persuasive.”
It seemed that death had come to Sal’s half sister in a crawling, even trivial way, unexpected and unsought. Sal had said that Sarah was hot-tempered, and he knew of Jack Idell’s reputation. “Jack will go mad at people at the drop of a coin,” someone had once told him.
“You don’t argue with me, either, Billy.” He looked hard and severely at Jacobs.
“Just give me the chance, Professor. You’ll not regret it. Just one more chance.”
Moriarty looked up at Spear and gave him a nod, as if to say “we’ll talk later”; then he put back his head and called, “Sal! Sally Hodges,” so Sal drifted into the room, coming from the bedroom, her hair down and hanging over her shoulders, this lovely red-gold canopy, as though she carried a burning flame down her back, wearing the white working dress she had hung up on her return from Rugby, her face ruddy and full of life.
“Hallo, Billy,” she said, her eyes lighting up—sparkling.
“Jesus!” Billy Jacobs hissed. “Oh, Jesus Christ.” There was a general intake of breath.
“It was her half sister you saw topped by Idle Jack.” And Moriarty laughed, a full-bellied laugh, then looked at Terremant and told him to take young Jacobs downstairs. “Give him a pistol shot,” he said, which meant give him a drink. “Make him comfortable for the night. Keep him close.” He told Lee Chow to go as well, but bade Albert Spear to stay behind.
“We will give him one chance, Albert. Feed him, make him happy, then tomorrow send him off to find his brother.” He nodded. “I’ll need to talk with him again. But in the meantime, tell him to get his brother and return to the fold. Talk to him. Talk about what else he knows. How Jack gets information concerning me and our family.” This was, of course, a double-edged command, for Spear, like the others, was also suspect as a spy in their midst. So Moriarty added, “Keep tabs on him, mind. We don’t want him among us spying for Idle Jack.”
When Spear had gone, the Professor returned to his bedroom where Sal waited for him and they had much sport, both out of bed and in—a joyous and rewarding night, and they drank the best part of a bottle of brandy between them, which kept them warm. During a rest from their lovemaking, Sal read the Tarot for him and couldn’t understand why the Hanged Man came up in each of her three readings.
When at last they slept, Sal dreamed of strong men working, digging the ground with spades, while birds sang contentedly. But Moriarty dreamed he was out on a heath in a huge and dreadful storm, like the one experienced by King Lear in Shakespeare’s play; and he was enshrined in teeming rain, to the sound of cracking thunder, and rent by forked lightning gouging at the black sky. And he shouted Shakespeare’s words—“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout, Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!”
He danced in the storm, and with him were six young girls, dressed only in cotton shifts, soaked, dancing with him, wrestling him into the short sopping grass.
And when he woke, Moriarty found his manhood huge and strong, like a bold neddy cudgel, so that he had to wake Sal to ease the pain of it.
AT BREAKFAST, MORIARTY explained to Sal that he would have to be out all day, though he didn’t tell her he was to lunch with Joey Coax the photographer. Moriarty was always careful and rarely discussed his family business in front of others; the two boys were there, in the room, serving the chops and eggs, pouring the strong tea, and passing around bread and toast, making sure Moriarty had the Gentleman’s Relish to hand—very partial to the Gentleman’s Relish was Moriarty, particularly with chops.
Only after they went out did Moriarty tell Sal that he would be back here at the house by six in the evening when he had a meeting with Carbonardo, Ben Harkness, and others, “to discuss Idle Jack’s future,” as he put it. “But say nothing,” he cautioned her, not wanting his closest lieutenants to know his immediate plans.
Sal said she would probably go down to the Haymarket house, and he told her to have a care, to take someone with her, maybe that Harry Judge, Spear’s man.
He sipped another cup of tea. Then—
“Sal, my dear, your half sister, Sarah. Do you want
a proper burial for her? Perhaps have her taken back to Hendred to be buried in the churchyard there? If you’d like that, I can arrange it, and for you to be at the funeral.”
Sal asked if she could think about it, and he nodded, knowing at moments like this, relatives needed time to adjust to the grief of parting.
“While we are talking of Sarah,” he went on casually, like an aside, “Billy Jacobs had this story—you may have heard him—that Sarah had come posing as you and told Jack Idell there was some secret to do with a girl in the Haymarket house. Your house, Sal. What d’you make of that? What would be worth passing on to the rapscallion Idle Jack from your house? A girl? Something not quite right, possibly? Any ideas?”
Of course she had no idea. “Sarah was good at making up stories. She had a romantic turn of mind. Sly with it, mind you. I wouldn’t put it past her making up some tale about a lost well-born, moneyed girl in the house, worth thousands, trying to sell it to Jack. She listened a lot, must have heard the stories going round about you leaving, having to flee the country from that Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Crow.
“Knowing Sarah, she always had an eye for the main chance. If she believed Jack was really the coming man, going to take over your family, James, maybe she was trying to side with him. Get a good position in his family.” She gave a little two-note laugh, her voice like a little phrase played on a cello. “It would be like her to want what was mine. If she saw it was an opportunity to get the Haymarket place for herself, she’d tell any tale.” Sal laughed again. “I shouldn’t say it, but I’m pleased she’s out of it. Always a trouble, Sarah.”
Moriarty gave a quiet nod of understanding, but he scribbled a note in his mind to make a few enquiries concerning the house in the Haymarket. Look about and see if there was anything unsatisfactory. Sal was efficient, but she was a woman, so, like all women, she was prone to making mistakes.
The Professor did not normally go out and about on family business as either his real self or his alter ego Professor Moriarty—he of the tall stooping walk, the sunken mesmeristic eyes, and the reptilian movement of the head. As well as his great power to organize, James Moriarty was an actor—a man of a thousand faces, and two thousand voices. Today he decided to meet Joey Coax as the character he christened “the banker.” This was a disguise he had used many times and knew well, a part he could take on with ease, a role he disliked but one that he could fit inside, like a second skin. He even had a name for him: Tovey Smollet, financial genius and parsimonious pedant.
So, around eleven o’clock that morning he began to prepare, first clearing his mind of all other problems and taking on the personality of Smollet. Then came the makeup, starting with the excellent wig, made by the same wigmaker who had supplied his amazing Moriarty wig.
Smollet’s hair was dark and thinning, combed straight back, slick and smooth, with a touch of grey at the temples and behind the ears. The role also demanded him to straighten his nose, lengthening it a fraction and making it a straight Roman beak, using the nose putty he found so useful; also, he had long ago purchased a special pair of spectacles that distorted the eyes so that they appeared to others to be much smaller and closer together. The resulting image was of a man without humour, whose mind was centred on money; a one-dimensional man, pernickety and unattractive, just the sort of person to bore Joey Coax stupid, he imagined.
Just as Moriarty was preparing to leave, Spear came up to see him with the news that Billy Jacobs had been out and about and had brought his brother, Bertram, back with him. “Says he has plenty to tell you, Professor.” Spear looked as though he doubted the fact.
“Bertram Jacobs?” Moriarty asked.
“No, sir. Billy.”
“Wants to talk to me?”
“Says it is urgent.”
“Well, he’ll have to wait until after my meeting this afternoon. Is he behaving himself?”
“Good as gold. Helped with everything. Was polite and obedient—better than the two boys, ’cos they’re young rips, the pair on ’em. Anyway, Billy toddled off and came back with Bertram, who’s looking a picture, healthier than brother Bill.”
“I’ll see him later, then, Albert,” and so the Professor went off in the hansom with Harkness at the whip, too busy to hang around. Something that was later to give him pause.
11
The Hanged Man
LONDON: JANUARY 19, 1900
OF ALL THE PUBLIC dining rooms, restaurants, and chophouses he owned, Moriarty liked The Press above the rest. It was sumptuous, yet somehow managed to capture the air of a private club. Possibly this was because its clientele was made up mainly from people who worked in the business of writing and publishing newspapers.
Located on the second floor of a building tucked away in an as-yet unadopted, narrow road running off Fleet Street, parallel to Chancery Lane, The Press Dining Room was ideal for journalists and editors working nearby, who could eat there in some style and much better than they could at home in Wimbledon, Woolwich, or Putney. Certainly, some of these good people used The Press like a club and they would often bring names to have luncheon or dine there—the kind of names that were well known, and who made the news: Politicians, men of business, actors, writers, captains of industry, and men of the cloth would all be taken to this large, elegant room on the second floor of a building owned outright by Moriarty, upon which he got a good return for letting all but that floor, mainly to newspapers and their publishers, or those working for firms adjunct to the papers.
The Professor in fact cultivated people connected with the newspaper business and secretly had some journalists, and at least one editor, on a retaining fee, for they were often the first people to get hold of important information. They, naturally, had no idea they were working for the Professor. Just as he had his lieutenants of what he called his Praetorian Guard, he also had lieutenants on a completely different level: men with offices and desks, men in charge; leaders; men with responsibility. It was for them that his spies in the newspaper industry worked, and from them Moriarty gained much knowledge of financial, legal, and political value. “It is better,” he would often say, “to have the gentlemen of The Press with you rather than against you.”
The Press was pleasant, even lavish, in the way it was decorated and organized. When full, it could dine a little over one hundred and fifty people at the forty-odd tables scattered across its wide floor, the tables smart, covered in immaculate starched white linen, with gleaming silverware and glasses and spotless napery, the whole against a background of mahogany panelling set on a deep carpet the colour of fresh thin blood and with rich dark blue velvet curtains sashed aside its four high windows, floor to ceiling, arched at the top, all glinting from the light that splintered, night and day, from three plump crystal chandeliers.
The manager of The Press was a smooth, silky, immaculate little Frenchman by the name of Guy Grenaux, known to friends as G.G., a man whose whole life appeared to be absorbed in the restaurant and its daily course. G.G. was consulted on even the smallest detail: He knew the menu and chef’s limitations backwards, was familiar with all his kitchen staff and waiters, and knew their families, their hopes, fears, and most intimate problems. Some six years down the road, after he died, suddenly of a seizure on a Friday morning as he inspected the freshly bought fish with Chef Emile Dantray, it was revealed that G.G.’s interest in even the trivia of his employees was to a purpose: He had skilfully skimmed some twenty to twenty-five percent off the top of both takings and individual tips, not to mention his side deals with the butchers, fishmongers, and grocers from which the food was bought. Some of this money was shared with the man who turned out to be his lover, the fastidious, perfect head waiter, Armand—the relationship quite unsuspected by all, including the Professor. But that is another story.
Moriarty arrived before Joey Coax, as he had planned; the head waiter, Armand, had already been warned of the Professor’s impending pseudonymous appearance by a note brought over by Billy Walker, he of the u
nruly hair and cheeky grin. Already there were people at the tables, and he was met by the appetizing smell of food, the pleasant murmur of conversation, and the occasional clink of silverware on plates.
It was only when Coax appeared, being shepherded to the table by Armand, that Moriarty was alerted to the possibility of having made a mistake.
He had no trouble with the fact, already known to him, concerning Joey Coax’s sexual persuasion: He was a homosexual. What people did in their private lives did not matter to the Professor. “As long as they don’t expect me to do it with them,” he would laugh. “And as someone else has already said, as long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses, they won’t bother me.” He would always be quick and amusing on the subject, and he would certainly never criticize men for being what in those days they referred to as “queer,” an offence thought to be so serious against both God and man that it was punished by lengthy terms of imprisonment. Indeed, in the early years of the nineteenth century, buggery itself was punishable by death.
What he had not been prepared for was the overt mincing queenery of the man, and he blamed himself; he knew he should have taken a closer look at this person before setting things in motion. The trouble was that Joey Coax was the most able man for the job the Professor had in mind—in fact, he was the only professional who could be relied on; and here he was, this swinging cockatoo, in a public place, and everyone aware of him.
The fact that he did not criticize men like Coax did not mean that the Professor approved. Certainly there were whole areas of some people’s sexual mores that Moriarty loathed; indeed, he may well have allowed Idle Jack’s businesses to exist close to his own, on a live-and-let-live basis, if it had not been for one area of Jack Idell’s work.
Coax was not likeable in looks, but portly, a shade ungainly, and pudgy-faced; he dressed in clothes that were flamboyant, a plum-coloured suit of his own devising, with a lavender-coloured full scarf knotted below an exaggerated wing collar, the scarf flapping about, with four tails making its wearer look like some cartoon of an artist from a humorous paper. The man’s hands floated about him, dipping and fluttering like two uncontrolled birds, his beringed fingers turning this way and that; his shoulders moved back and forth independent of his trunk, while his voice, loud and lisping, could have been heard in the street below—“Over here, dear man? Really, where next, then? Where next? Oh this is too much. Where?”—and was drawing all eyes in the room toward him.
