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

My jaw was slack, and I dribbled tea.

Why on earth would anyone want to be Moriarty? Of all the people to idolise, to envy, to imitate… Professor James Moriarty! I honestly think the Grand Vampire got more enjoyment out of his calling, and his life expectancy could be calculated in months. Moriarty was what he was because his nature gave him no other option. He had grown crooked from stony ground, leeching what water he could from deep roots. To set out to become such a solitary monster was beyond understanding.

This kraut plainly couldn’t bear to be whoever he originally was. Else, why try on all the other faces? Great impersonators are all the same. Simon Carne and Paul Finglemore were just as cracked — ditchwater dull as themselves, but alive when they could hide under crepe hair, wax noses and trick corsets. Even that bitch dressed up for character parts and flung herself about to put clear blue ocean between Miss Irene Adler, international adventuress, and Mrs Irene Norton, New Jersey bourgeoise.

‘Surely, if the picklehead’s barmy, he’s liable to wake up one morning frothing at the mouth claiming he’s transformed into a giant beetle. You know what these disguise wallahs are like, Moriarty. It’s a short hop, skip and hysterical fit from padded cheeks to padded cell. No need to worry about competition from inside the madhouse.’

‘In the end, you are right, Moran. The strains of living so many lives are too much for one man. Yet, in the short term, Dr Mabuse will prove troublesome.’

‘You’ve only just found this out?’

‘I had to be sure Mabuse was the mastermind of the Kallinikos. Only face to face could I determine beyond doubt he was the creature who interfered with us in that business. Hah! The cheek of it! Playing Finglemore playing Carnacki, and running all those other agents as if they were rivals not minions. He uses mesmerism, of course. Symptomatic of a need to control what cannot be controlled. Very German. He’s no spy, not through conviction or calling. He set out to steal Greek Fire not for profit, though I daresay he could have turned a penny selling the secret on an exclusive basis to five or six governments. No, he took an interest because he knew my brothers — my cursed brothers! — would pull me into the affair. He came at me through my family, Moran.’

‘Low, I admit… but he is a foreigner.’

The Professor thumped the table, rattling the silverware. By his standards, he was impassioned.

‘I cannot tolerate such impudence. It’s to the death, now. There can be no other outcome. Mabuse must fall that Moriarty can endure.’

‘He’s no hero, no detective… ’

‘Try to keep up, Moran. At present, we’ve little to fear from bloodhounds and magnifying glasses. My would-be doppelganger is a direct threat. Mabuse was the most likely, but the Grand Vampire and Hentzau were possibilities. I had to include them to rule them out. Even Théophraste Lupin was suspect. Only a scheme as vast as my balloon about a “commonwealth of criminal empires” could justify the guest list necessary to flush out our foe.’

My head span. It was not yet ten o’clock, and I could have done with a lie-down. The most outrageous aspect of what the Professor had done — the most inadvisable, to my feeble mind — was daring to summon the deadliest men and women on Earth as set-dressing.

It was all about some bloody German.

The likes of the Lord of Strange Deaths and Countess Cagliostro would not care to be ‘also in the cast as courtiers, gentlemen, sailors, gondoliers, etc.’ If they ever found out, they’d seek redress from the Professor. And, by association, everyone in the Firm — including me. These creatures didn’t last as long as they had — and the Lord and the Countess had, by some accounts, lasted for centuries — by being the sorts who don’t find things out. If his scheme went wrong, Moriarty would have his commonwealth of criminal empires all right — an alliance of evil geniuses, master crooks and deadly assassins directed against his oscillating head! Mabuse would only have to hold the others’ coats while they dismantled us piece by piece!

‘So, we hit Mabuse?’

‘How, Moran? He won’t look like he did yesterday.’

‘You said you’d know him however he was disguised.’

‘So I would. But I’d have to see him to know him. He won’t show himself now until he chooses to.’

‘Why didn’t we shoot him yesterday?’

He looked at me, piercingly. I recollected an alligator whose eye I caught while dropping off a New Orleans friend in a bayou. I half thought Moriarty would take up nictitating some day.

‘Moran, I would back you against Rupert of Hentzau, though you are twice his age… I would give you even odds against Irma Vep or Princess Zanoni… and you could best Arthur Raffles despite his boxing blue. But the Daughter of the Dragon? Dr Nikola? The Creeper? All of them together? I fear you would not survive a scrap like that. Which is why I took this from you…’

He returned my small-of-the-back revolver.

‘You do have a plan, Moriarty?’

‘Several.’

He went back to his breakfast and his telegrams. I was not reassured.

IX

What happened over the next three months was in the papers. Oh, the press didn’t make the connections. But the facts were noisy enough.

In the middle of February, someone with a Clontarf accent called Inspector Lukens on the telephone and told him a dynamite outrage was imminent in North London. That night, a terrific explosion in Kingstead Cemetery destroyed the Thoroughgood tomb. So many bodies — and parts of bodies — were flung about Egyptian Avenue that it was four days before they were sorted out. Then, the Special Irish Branch announced this ‘Fenian atrocity’ was not mere vandalism, but foul murder. Walter Grimes had been caught in the blast, prompting amusing ‘man found dead in graveyard’ headlines. The sexton’s widow couldn’t say why he was at the cemetery well after normal service hours.

Of more concern to the Firm, especially when Patterson of the Criminal Investigation Division took an interest, was that examination of supposed Thoroughgood corpses turned up one or two recognisable heads. The senior Mr Bulstrode sweated it out when called in to explain how he had come to mistake the absconded Belgian financier Maupertuis for Uncle Septimus. The undertaker acted befuddled, more concerned that the CID not examine the contents of the coffins in his private parlour than with trifling accessory to murder charges. Inspection of the ruins by those police laboratory bods the Prof had got his peers all steamed up about disclosed some curious facts. The dynamite had been smuggled into the tomb in the coffins of young Will and Harry. The trigger was a very slow-acting fuse, an ingenious — indeed, scientifically admirable — gadget. Acid took weeks to dissolve a metal catch, whereupon two chemicals rushed together in a glass chamber to produce a sudden flame and set off the bomb. It was a very Moriartian device, though I knew better than to say so in his presence.

If the bomber had hoped to provoke yet another sweep against London’s Irish poets and navvies, his purpose was achieved. More Mountmains were roughed up and tossed into cells. Lukens announced that the Invincible Republican Irish were now known to have been behind the cornering of quap, and Baron Maupertuis just the front man. Inspector Patterson counter-announced that the Fenians would have been pretty foolish then to draw attention to the fact with a bombing which returned the Baron to the public eye (so to speak) and reopened the old case. Lukens agreed that the Fenians, on the whole, were pretty foolish. In which case, Patterson idly wondered, why did Scotland Yard need a whole well-funded department to do battle with a bunch of inept clods who thought dynamiting a sexton advanced the cause of Home Rule? This public row did not convince me that the police were ever going to hamper the business of the Firm.