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

The company looked at me. Mrs Halifax said, ‘Aren’t you going to thank the Professor?’

Moriarty looked sour and turned away.

Something was called for, something needed to be said. No words came.

‘I shall be in with my wasps,’ he announced, and abandoned the party for his private study, the windowless room.

The champagne ran out, but there was beer and gin and Scotch. Purbright got squiffy and attempted to sing ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery’ in imitation of Marie Lloyd. Two-Ton Tessie, a fervent admirer of Miss Lloyd, sat on him to shut him up.

I disassembled my present and fit the parts back into the case. Sophy Kratides cast a sceptical eye over it.

‘I prefer knife. For to get up close. To see eyes,’ she said.

Those tiger eyes came back to me. I thought of telling Sophy about it. I had never mentioned how that moment stayed with me to anyone. There had never been anyone to whom I could mention it. I didn’t. It might have made me seem, I don’t know, weak.

‘How old are you, Sophy?’ I asked.

I know, I know… you never ask a lady her age, but it was my party and I had privileges and, lady though she was, Sophy Kratides was foreign and they have other standards.

‘Twenty-seven,’ she said. Her eyes were clear.

It was important to me, in that moment, that she was more than half my age. If only technically.

Of all the women in the room, Sophy was the one who wouldn’t want paying. I know, I know… I’ve said it before: you always end up paying, and with tarts at least you know that beforehand and can be cheerful about it. Sometimes you need the illusion of a thing freely given.

I claimed a birthday kiss. But we fit together wrong.

Another moment passed. Throttler Parker set his Jew’s harp twanging — he’s a virtuoso on the noise-making nuisance, so I’m told by experts — and Mistress Strict hauled Polly about in a regimented foxtrot.

Sophy, kindly if wet-lipped and moustache-scratched, asked me if I’d care to, but I’ve had too many evenings end with women smashing crockery to be tempted by Greek dancing. She was taken away by Simon Carne, nimble and limber despite his fake hunchback.

A while later, I left the party to avail myself of the lavatory on the first-floor landing. I was steady on the stairs, though I’d a lot of drink in me. It’s a Bangalore Pioneer point of pride to be ready for inspection (indeed, for battle), no matter how much firewater was downed in the mess. On my way back, I lingered at the door of Fifi’s boudoir. I heard the rattle of a bedstead and her famous screeches of abandon — louder, I fancied, than ever — all to a rhythmic pulse. The subaltern gasped as if the life were being yanked out of him.

I should have wrenched the door open, dragged the young pup off the girl, tossed him into a corner, and told him to sit quietly and take notes as I demonstrated the Basher Moran Special. I’d make Fifi scream, all right. Scream like the Mountmain banshee having her toenails pulled out. I’d rattle the bedstead till it flew apart, and we were rutting on springs.

I should have.

Instead, I succumbed on the stairs. I sat down for a moment’s rest, and fell asleep. I woke hugging the airgun case like a hard pillow. For some reason, I’d taken Moriarty’s present with me from party to pissoir. Well past midnight, the house was quiet except for someone sobbing in a distant room. It wasn’t my birthday any more.

VIII

After several dozen gins, Mrs Halifax finally cornered Throttler with a demand the little man put his Jew’s harp skill to lower purpose. The next morning, the Madame was indisposed, so Polly brought in breakfast. When bending over to polish the silver and ‘surprised’ by a caller who fancied himself Master of the House, Poll was frolicsome and saucy. Obliged to do actual drudge work, she was sour-tempered and tended to clatter.

I wasn’t fresh as a daisy. I could hardly look at my kedgeree. Moriarty, emerged refreshed from his wasp den, set to decapitating boiled eggs as he looked over a sheaf of telegrams. Some were strings of numbers. His plans proceeded well, I gathered. If thwarted, he’d be in a mood to torture his eggs before topping them. His oscillation was almost cheerful. He cut his toast into soldiers, for dipping in yolks.

The air rifle was on the table, locked in its case.

I was still astonished the Professor had thought to get me a birthday present, even if it was a tool I’d be expected to use in his service. I supposed I should show gratitude, or even interest.

‘The Von Herder, Moriarty… is it to be used in your pre-emptive strikes?’

His head stopped moving and he looked at me queerly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘To dash down the heroes before they set out on their quests. I assume you’ve a list of coconuts for the shy. Which budding genius of detection will first present a target for a silent potshot?’

Moriarty laid down a half-eaten soldier. He had yolk on his lips.

‘Moran, you should know better.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ I said, perplexed. ‘Your lecture to your peers, about the threats we face…’

‘Real enough and we’ll deal with them in time, but what I said in the tomb was mostly yarning. A distraction from the true purpose of the gathering.’

Even for Moriarty, this was rum.

‘You mean you do not propose “a commonwealth of criminal empires?”

‘Of course not. Can you imagine such a thing operating for more than a week? Would you care to be in business with Jack Quartz? The man’s insane, for one thing. An habitual, compulsive betrayer. They all are. Things we might do for expedience, they do out of habit. The Lord of Strange Deaths despises the white races and would always seek primacy. To that Chinaman, you and I and General Gordon and Queen Victoria are all the same barbarian breed. Les Vampires are French, no more need be said of them. Any arrangement such as I seemed to propose would lead to internecine wars and ruin us more swiftly than a dozen police forces acting in concert.’

“‘Seemed to propose”?’

‘A diversion, Moran. A serious enough proposition to be listened to for a short while. None of our guests will have considered it past nightfall. Even the Creeper. No, that was not the purpose of the summit I convened. I had to be sure one man would attend. An invitation to him alone would have been too obvious a trap. His flaw is vanity, you know. He wanted to look me in the face again and feel he had the measure of me… but, even more than that, he wants to be of our party, on a level with Professor Moriarty and Dr Nikola and the Countess Cagliostro. He does not lack ambition.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Mabuse, of course. Dr Mabuse, or whatever else he may call himself. He likes “the Great Unknown”. The man without a real face. The master of disguise. The fake fake Carnacki. The shadow man of the Kallinikos.’

‘Dr Mabuse was the ringer?’

Moriarty clapped, once. ‘Enlightenment dawns. Yes, Moran. Dr Mabuse was the master spy who tried to steal the secret of Greek Fire. Oh, he’s had me marked for some while, observing at a distance, learning my methods. He was in the audience at Stent’s Red Planet League lecture. The droll student who shouted, “I say, Stent, is that the sick squid you owe me?” In the business of the Bensington Rejuvenator, he was one of the researchers in Cologne who falsified the experimental logs. Then, he assumed the guise of a London rough called “Frog Junkin”, and was even — at two or three removes — on our payrolls for a month, doing odd jobs in the East End. The Frog stood lookout when Parker garrotted the Reverend John Jago during the Spitalfields Anti-Vice Crusade. After that, he became a Neapolitan for a year, in the Camorra under Don Rafaele Corbucci. He was at the Battle of the Six Maledictions, and pretended to die with a Templar sword through him. All the while, he has been maintaining multiple lives in Berlin — as an alienist, a financier, a rabble-rouser, a rabbi, a washerwoman, a card shark, a policeman. Plagiarising my methods, he has built up his own gang. I do not know where his mania comes from, for mania it is. He wishes to steal everything from me. He wants to be me.’