Kim Newman - Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

‘Moran, you’re au fait with the Jewel of Seven Stars.’

I had heard of item five. It was an Egyptian ruby with sparkling flaws in the pattern of the constellation of the plough, set in a golden scarab ring, dug out of a Witch Queen’s Tomb. Most of the archaeologists involved had died of Nile fever or Cairo clap. The sensation press wrote these ailments up as ‘the curse of the Pharaohs’. I knew the bauble to be in London, property of one Margaret Trelawny — daughter of a deceased tomb robber. [38] See: Malcolm Ross and Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars, Heinemann, 1903.

Just for a jolly, while idly considering the locations of the most valuable prizes in London, I’d cased Trelawny House in Kensington Palace Gardens. Fair-to-middling difficult. But, see above, my remarks on famous gems: Thorny Problem of Converting Same into Anonymous Cash. Also, the place had a sour air. I’m not prey to superstition, but know a likely ambush from a mile off. Trelawny House was one of those iffy locations — best kept away from. Might I now have to take the plunge and regret the fancy of planning capers one didn’t really wish to commit?

‘The Jewels of the Madonna are of less intrinsic interest,’ continued Moriarty. ‘These gems — mediocre stones, poorly set, but valuable enough — bedecked a statue hoisted and paraded about Naples during religious festivals. I see I have your interest. A notion got put about that they were too sacred to steal. No one would dare inflict such insult on Mary — who, as a carpenter’s wife in Judea, was unlikely to have sported such ornament in her lifetime.

‘As it happens, the real reason no one tried for the jewels was that the Camorra decreed they not be touched. Italian banditti who would sell their own mothers retain a superstitious regard for Mother Mary. They wash the blood off their hands and present pious countenances at mass on Sunday. However, as ever, someone would not listen. Gennaro, a blacksmith, stole the jewels to impress his girlfriend. They have been “in play” ever since.

‘Foolish Gennaro is long dead, but the Camorra haven’t got the booty back. [39] Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s I gioielli della Madonna (libretto by Carlo Zangarini and Enrico Golisciani) is drawn from news reports of these events. The opera premiered in Berlin in 1911 under the title Der Schmuck der Madonna but did not play in Italy until 1953. At this moment, after a trans-European game of pass the parcel with corpses, the gems are hidden after the fashion of Poe’s purloined letter. One Giovanni Lombardo, a carpenter whose death notice appears in this morning’s papers, substituted them for the paste jewels in the prop store of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Signorina Bianca Castafiore, “the Milenese Nightingale”, rattles them nightly, with matinees Wednesday and Saturday, in the “jewel scene” from Gounod’s Faust. It is of scientific interest that the diva’s high notes are said to set off sympathetic vibrations which burst bottles and kill rats. I should be interested in observing such a phenomenon, which might have applications in our line of endeavour.’

‘What about the eye-tyes?’ asked Alf Bassick, a reliable fetch-and-carry man. ‘They’ve been a headache lately.’

‘Ah, yes, the Neapolitans,’ the Professor said. ‘The London address of the Camorra, as you know, is Beppo’s Ice Cream Parlour in Old Compton Street. They present the aspect of comical buffoons but, by my estimation, the activities of their Soho Merchants’ Protective Society have cut into our income by seven and a half per cent.’

The SMPS was a band of Moustache Petes selling insurance policies to pub-keepers and restauranteurs: don’t agree to cough up the weekly payments and your place of business has trouble with rowdy, window-breaking customers; stop paying and you start smiling the Italian smile. That’s a deep cut in your throat, from ear to ear; it really does look like a red clown’s grin.

‘Hitherto, the London Camorra has merely been an inconvenience. Now they know their blessed jewels are in the city, they will be more troublesome. It is a cardinal error to classify the Camorra as a criminal organisation, an Italian equivalent to Les Vampires…’

Or us, he didn’t say. He liked to think of the Firm as an academic exercise: abstruse economics, sub rosa mathematics.

‘…at bottom, the Camorra — and their Sicilian and Calabrian equivalents, the Mafia and the ’Ndrangheta — are a romantic, fanatic religious-nationalist movement, as remorseless and unreasonable as the priests of the yellow god. They care not about dying, as individuals. This makes them exceedingly dangerous.’

He let that sink in.

‘Don Rafaele Corbucci, chief of chiefs of the Camorra, has vowed to return the jewels to the Madonna. He has taken an oath on the life of his own mother. He has personally followed the jewels across Europe and is presently in London. He paid a call on the late Signor Lombardo at his place of business yesterday. Measures must be taken to pluck the fruit before he can get his hands on it.’

To scare each other, criminals told stories about Don Rafaele. You can imagine how they run. It is said that when a devoted lieutenant thoughtlessly spit out a cigar end in church on a saint’s day, the pious Don had him strangled with his only son’s entrails. He took his culture seriously, too — and had a sense of humour. While infatuated with that bitch Irene Adler — yes, he’s another of her leavings — he took against a critic who ridiculed her performance as Duchess Hélène in I Vespri Siciliani. The man wound up with his own ears cut off and a donkey’s ears nailed onto his head in their place.

I was surprised to learn this monster had a mama. If it were a matter of keeping his word, Don Rafaele would personally sink the old biddy in the Bay of Naples.

‘What about item six?’ Carne chipped in.

‘The Eye of Balor,’ Moriarty said. ‘A gold coin, named for a giant of Irish mythology, reputed to have been taken from a leprechaun’s pot… Lately the “lucky piece” of “Dynamite” Desmond Mountmain, General-in-Chief of the Irish Republican Invincibles, which brought him only poor luck, since last week an infernal device of his own manufacture went off in his face when he thumped the table too hard at a meeting of his Inner Council of Immortals.’

I told you Ireland would come into it.

‘The Eye of Balor is currently among Mountmain’s effects, in the possession of the Special Irish Branch of Scotland Yard. Half a dozen sons, cousins and brothers would like to obtain the coin. It’s said that, if “the wee folk” approve, the owner will ascend to the office of Mage-King of Ireland, whatever that means. The chief contestant for the position is Desmond’s son, Tyrone.’

That was foul news. Another ‘romantic, fanatic religious-nationalist movement’. Your paddy bomber though concerned with his own individual skin is too hot-headed as a rule to preserve it. Dynamite Des wasn’t the first Fenian to blow himself up with his own blasting powder.

Tyrone Mountmain, the heir apparent, figured high on my list of people I hoped never to meet again.

So, now we had to worry about brown priests and marauding mi-go, the Hoxton Creeper, Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, the Knights Templar, the Naples Mob, the little people and the bloody Fenians! It was a wonder Malvoisin’s Mirror, the Monkey’s Paw, Cap’n Flint’s treasure and Sir Michael Sinclair’s Door were off the ‘shopping list’.

How cursed did Professor Moriarty want to be by the end of the week?

VII

Recall my remarks re. nuisance value attendant on one little murder carried out in the service of a trade union?