The Return of Moriarty

by John Gardner

  He was quickly pulled out of his reverie by the arrival of Idle Jack and his party, Jack Idell clumping to his seat, flat-footed and slack-jawed. Tonight there were two bodyguards with him, Moriarty noted: a big, argumentative bruiser he knew as Bobby Boax and the short, pudgy Rouster Bates, whom he had expected. As Bates appeared, next to Boax, a childhood rhyme coursed through his memory:

  Long legs and short thighs,

  Little head and no eyes.

  That pretty much summed up little Rouster, whose eyes all but disappeared into his pudgy face.

  Somewhat to Moriarty’s surprise, Idle Jack was tonight escorting a lady, and he recognized her instantly: the Honourable Nellie Fletcher, youngest daughter of Viscount Pitlochry, said to be worth millions and none too concerned about the kind of company he kept, a great one for the gaming tables and the fast life. Now that would be a match, Moriarty considered. What an ideal thing that Danny was to take care of Jack that night, for the girl looked to be an innocent, and he had heard of Idle Jack’s sexual proclivities, which he would not wish on any young maid. Certainly one of Idle Jack’s many unprepossessing traits was his known penchant for rape. Jack was not the kind of man you could leave with your daughter, he had been told. “Nor your young son, either,” a particular friend had remarked. “Likes his greens violent,” Sal had heard.

  Indeed, Jack Idell had few scruples about his urges and desires; other people’s susceptibilities were never held much to the fore by him. Just as he was light-fingered regarding other folks’ wealth, so he was light-handed in another sense. “A liar, a cheat, a thief, a womanizer, and a sacrilegious bugger to boot,” had been the way one cheated banker had summed him up. Moriarty had recently told Albert Spear, “I am a veritable Goldilocks compared to that liver-faced trossano.”

  Yet it was the fifth member of Idle Jack’s party who interested the Professor most, for he had never actually seen Broad Darryl Wood in the flesh, the large, balding broad-shouldered, and undoubtedly highly intelligent ramper said to be Jack Idell’s right-hand man. Another person of low morals and ruthless cunning, it was said of him that he had more pockets in his clothes than a normal man, for he needed them to hide the spoils he picked up while walking through any gathering. Ember said he had India-rubber pockets so he could filch from the soup kitchens; and the saying was that Darryl Wood could thieve the keys from St. Peter, while Idle Jack would never even wait for the keys—he would force the locks of the Pearly Gates to get in, and would bring a forged life history with him.

  As he watched the arrival of Idle Jack’s party, Moriarty was aware of the orchestra tuning up, and it was obvious that for tonight, the pit had been enlarged: Many new players, particularly among the brass, had augmented the usual pit band. He also caught a glimpse of two extra drummers, one settled behind a full set of timpani. There was obviously going to be a joyful noise put up tonight.

  He took in a deep lungful of air and smelled the heavy redolence of tobacco, mixed with the scent of the many bottled bouquets the ladies liked to use—“their perfumes of Arabia,” as he had heard them called. The Professor had a good nose, and so he also detected the remnants of human sweat that joined with the other aromas hanging and jostling with one another.

  Moriarty cast an eye over the entire house, putting names to faces, watching the audience settle and seeing the thin blue haze of tobacco smoke hanging a few feet above their heads, swirling and thickening in the rays from the spotlights operated from behind the dress circle.

  Now, as the excited buzz and ripple of the audience reached its peak, the conductor finally took his place, tapped on his music stand, and raised his baton. The house lights dimmed and slowly the chatter died out, leaving in its wake the expectant hush of an audience brought to readiness. Then, the brass bellowed out Tan-ta-ra-ra-ta-ta-tum-ta-ra-ra —

  The curtain rose on a hundred men and women dressed in military red coats, blue trousers, and busbies, seemingly marching in time toward the footlights as they sang the simplistic jingoism of an opening song written especially for tonight’s benefit, sending thoughts toward the war in South Africa, the brass blaring loud above the strings and the drums keeping up a persistent military beat—

  Ta-ra-ta-ta-rat-ta-ta-rum-ti-tum-ti-ta!

  “The Queen’s soldiers are marching,

  To keep our Empire free,

  The Queen’s soldiers are fighting,

  Fighting for you and me.

  Bar-ra-bapa-ta-bapa-ta-tum-riti-tum-titi-tum!

  “The Queen’s soldiers are marching,

  Fighting,

  Marching for glory,

  And fighting and riding and shooting

  And clashing,

  And fighting the Empire’s foes.”

  Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-ra-taaaaaaaar!

  “I feared for the roof,” Moriarty said later, and the audience loved it as the singers and dancers seemed to form fours and march in time to the banal song. They clapped and cheered, Idle Jack’s party yelling with the rest, Jack leaning over toward Boax, exchanging a joke, heads back, mouths open in laughter.

  Let him have his fun, the Professor thought. He has little time left.

  The chorus ended, the stage cleared, and the tempo changed for Eugene Stratton, The Dandy-Coloured Coon,* black-faced with white lips and eyes and a magnificent style in his soft-shoe shuffle as he quietly danced on—

  “She’s my lady love,

  She is my dove, my baby love,

  She’s no girl for sitting down to dream,

  She’s the only queen Laguna knows,

  I know she likes me, I know she likes me,

  Because she says so,

  She is my lily of Laguna,

  She is my lily and my rose.”

  And on with his expert dancing—certainly better than his singing—the drummers giving the soft-shoe a counterpoint on the skulls.

  There followed a plethora of popular acts: Kaufman’s Trick Cyclists, billed as “Twelve Cycling Beauties,” circling the stage performing impossible bicycle tricks, very eye-catching in their pink two-piece costumes, form-fitting to show off their figures and excite the gentlemen, the lower half hugging the thighs but ending just above the knees; the amazing juggling Cinquevalli, “The Human Billiard Table”; and to close the first half, the much-loved Fred Karno and His Speechless Comedians with their manic slapstick sketches.*

  The Professor had arranged to have a glass of brandy brought to his box in the interval and he sipped it with relish, watching half hidden by the decorating drapes as Idle Jack moved about in the audience, greeting acquaintances, always with the roguish Boax a foot or so behind him like a leech. As he became animated, it seemed to Moriarty that Idle Jack lost his slack-jawed Farmer Giles look, becoming almost suave as he moved around, introducing the Honourable Nellie Fletcher to friends. Moriarty had heard that much of Jack Idell’s outward appearance, the walk and drooping jaw, was put on to throw people off his actual astuteness. He wondered now if this could be true.

  The most difficult position on the variety bill was always the second-half opener, and tonight the job fell to an immaculately dressed—white tie and tails—good-looking, slight young man who walked on carrying only his opera hat and cane, introducing himself, “Good evening. I am Martin Chapender.”† He crushed the hat and laid it on a small table, then proceeded to amaze the house with effects that seemed to be true magic. He swallowed his stick and produced it from his pocket, conjured full-sized billiard balls from the air; freely selected cards from a shuffled deck rose eerily from the deck placed in a glass.

  Chapender then flicked open his opera hat, looked slyly at the audience, and asked, “Were you expecting a rabbit?”—immediately pulling a kicking bunny from the hat. He then wrapped the rabbit in newspaper and tore the newspaper into small pieces to show that the animal had gone.

  Chapender next went into the audience and borrowed none but Idle Jack’s handsome heavy gold watch and chain, which crumbled to nothing in his hands, startling Jack Idell. T
hen, drawing attention to a box that had been suspended from the flies throughout, Chapender asked for the box to be lowered and unlocked it to reveal the rabbit, with Jack Idell’s watch around its neck.

  Now the huge old music-hall names were beginning to arrive, fresh from a night’s work somewhere else in London, and the first to be greeted with a roof-lifting cheer and applause was Mr. Dan Leno, “The Chief of Comedians,” indisputably the greatest comedian of his day and “Champion Clog Dancer of the World.” Tonight, the little, comic-faced, sad-eyed man introduced one of his beloved characters, Mr. Pipkins, recognizable by many a man in the audience:

  “How we met, ’twas quite romantic, in the Maze of Hampton Court;

  Love, I thought, would drive me frantic, in three weeks the ring I’d bought.

  A peck of rice, a bag of slippers, bought but one small week of bliss.

  Ma-in-law she came to see us; then my hair came out like this—

  “That’s her mother’s doing. ‘Pon my word, I don’t know whether I’m married to the mother or daughter sometimes. Oh they do beat me, and of course you daren’t hit a woman; well, I know I daren’t. I can assure you I’m one mass of bruises; if my coat wasn’t sewn on me I could show you some lovely bruises. I suppose it’s because I enjoy bad health that I bruise so nice. I don’t know what I wanted to get married for. Yet I might have done worse; I might have got run over or poisoned. My life’s one long wretchedness; and it’s

  All through a woman with a coal-black eye,

  All through a woman who was false and sly,

  For when she said she lov’d me,

  She told a wicked lie;

  And her mother’s at the bottom of it all!

  “It was very strange that I should first meet my wife in the Maze. I’d never been in the Maze before. (Well, I’ve never been out of one since.) I think every married man’s a bit mazy, more or less. Well, to make a long story thick, I was walking up and down, and after walking for about two hours I found I hadn’t moved; somehow or other I’d mislaid myself—“

  And so on and on, with the story becoming more ludicrous as well as hilarious, until Dan Leno finally quit the stage to make way for the one-and-only Miss Marie Lloyd, “Queen of Comedy.”

  She advanced to the limes and apologized for being late: “I got blocked in Piccadilly,” she explained with a leer.

  Then she had a problem opening her parasol. Finally the parasol opened and she sighed, “Thank heavens, I haven’t had it up for months.” Another of her winks before she went into one of her old favourites:

  “The boy I love is up in the gallery,

  The boy I love is looking now at me,

  There he is—Can’t you see

  Waving his handkerchief

  As merry as a robin

  That sings in the tree.”

  She did two more songs before the audience reluctantly let her go to be replaced by Miss Vesta Tilley, the great male impersonator* in white tie and tails. With her top hat jaunty on her head and a swagger in her walk, she sang a sad song that touched on the danger of crossing the class barrier:

  “From the sad sea waves back to business in the morning,

  From the sad sea waves to his fifteen bob a week,

  Into a cook shop he goes dashing,

  Who should bring his plate of ‘hash’ in,

  But the girl he’d been mashing

  By the sad sea waves.”

  Vesta Tilley gave way to the night’s top of the bill, Mr. George Robey.

  Looking like an unfrocked parson, with his little black hat at a rakish angle and the black almost cassocklike garment reaching to below his knees, his little cane whirling in his hand, on he bustled to loud applause, which seemed to puzzle him. The audience was certainly a surprise to Mr. Robey, and once he had spotted them he advanced to the footlights, his nose a heavy red and his black eyebrows arched violently, his eyes shining like headlamps.

  As ever, the sight of Mr. Robey produced titters and even guffaws of laughter, which brought him to a halt. “Desist!” he called out. Then a commanding, “Out! Out!” When this did not stop the laughter he declared, “Let there be merriment by all means. Let there be merriment, but let it be tempered with dignity and the reserve which is compatible with the obvious refinement of our environment.” And he would be off in a storm of staccato gags about bullying wives and henpecked husbands’ noisy landlords and interfering relatives. “Kindly temper your hilarity with a modicum of reserve,” he would say, and the audience would giggle and hoot even louder at this pompous comic.

  Tonight he ended with a song telling the sad tale of how he had sought a father’s permission for him to marry his daughter:

  “He told me my society was superfluous,

  That my presence I might well eradicate.

  From his baronial mansion he bade me exit

  And said I might expeditiously migrate.

  In other words, ‘Buzz off!’”

  By the time he finished, the audience was helpless, for he was able to play them like an instrument. Even Moriarty, not the most humorous of men, wiped tears of laughter from his eyes.

  The stage cleared once again and, as at the start, filled with the chorus and dancers in their military costumes. The orchestra struck up the best-loved popular song of the day, the chorus again seeming to march toward the audience—two steps forward, a step to the side, and two steps back—bellowing out:

  “It’s the Soldiers of the Queen, my lads,

  Who’ve been, my lads,

  Who’ve seen, my lads.

  In the fight for England’s glory, lads,

  When we have to show them what we mean:

  And when we say we’ve always won,

  And when they ask us how it’s done,

  We’ll proudly point to every one

  Of England’s Soldiers of the Queen,

  It’s the Queen!”

  The audience joined in Leslie Stuart’s well-known chorus, and applauded louder than they had done for the entire evening as all the artistes lined up to take their final call, the orchestra quickly changing to waltz time to get the audience out of the building, a cold blast of air signalling that the doors at the front of the house had been opened.

  Moriarty took his time; he did not want to be present when the deed was actually done, so he lingered, putting on his long cloak and gloves, grasping his silver-topped walking cane. He watched from the back of the box as Idle Jack clumped, flat-footed, up the aisle. Moving heavily toward his death, the Professor thought. Jack Idell wouldn’t be walking at all if he knew what waited for him. Moriarty smiled grimly and began to leave the box slowly, not hurrying at all.

  IT WAS BITTER outside, with the wind knifing across Leicester Square and a crowd starting to build up in front of the Alhambra’s elaborate façade, some already crossing to the hansoms that were lined up on the far side of the road. Billy Walker shouted his paperboy cry, a pack of Evening Standards under his arms, his eyes moving, sweeping the interior of the Alhambra’s foyer. Across the road, leaning on the rails bordering Leicester Square Gardens, Wally Taplin kept his eyes on William, occasionally glancing to his left, catching a glimpse of where Harkness had the stolen cab by the side of Cranbourne Street; Apple, the quiet little grey, snuffling, turning slightly, wanting to be off and Daniel Carbonardo sitting back, the Italian pistol held firmly in his right hand and his hat pulled down over the top half of his face.

  Billy saw the big Boax, with Wood by his side, as they emerged from the auditorium. The woman Jack Idell was with was laughing up at him. You’ll laugh the other side of your face before long, Billy thought, and waited until the group had pushed through the crush, almost out of the doors, before he lifted his arm with the newspaper in it.

  Accordingly, across the road, Wally’s arm went up in a kind of salute, his fist closed, and up at the top of the square Ben Harkness thumped on the roof of the cab, and Daniel shifted, bringing up the pistol and looking forward as Apple started to trot quietly dow
n the road.

  This isn’t going to be easy, Daniel thought; there were people and other cabs to his left, a whole crowd of folk out on the freezing pavement, but he could see Idle Jack’s brilliantly white shirtfront as he pushed forward.

  Daniel had Jack in his sights, his left forearm running along the left side of the cab, forward of the hood, which barely kept the flakes of snow off him in the wind. His right hand held the pistol comfortably, the barrel lying across his forearm as he squinted toward Idle Jack and adjusted his aim as the foresight came to bear on the shirtfront.

  Harkness urged Apple forward, and Danny Carbonardo began to squeeze the trigger.

  MATTHEW SHOTTON PULLED on the leash and cursed his little dog, George, a sparky Yorkshire terrier whom he was taking for its nightly walkies lest it would foul one of his good carpets. This was not one of Matthew’s usual jobs. As a rule, when he got home to their little house in Poland Street, George had already been walked by his wife, Ivy. Matthew worked in the ticket office at The Prince of Wales theatre, sometimes doubling as front-of-house manager, which earned him an extra couple of pounds a week. But tonight Ivy had a heavy cold coming on and she had told him he would have to do this late-night chore. Matthew didn’t care for taking George out to do his business, but thought that needs must when the devil drives—and Lord knew, Ivy could be a real devil at times, particularly when one of her head colds was upon her.