Michael Kurland - Professor Moriarty Omnibus

Very slowly he hopped the chair around to face the wires. He had to be extremely careful not to tip over; if he fell on his face he might not be able to get up again.

Slowly he hopped his way across the floor. Handel gave way to Couperin, and he had gone almost two feet. Couperin was replaced by Liszt, and he had gone four feet. His shoulders and pelvis ached from the strain.

There was a banging from below, and the sound of running on the stairs, and Trepoff reappeared in the doorway. "Something was nagging at my mind," he said. "And I see that I was right! Inexcusable carelessness on my part."

He stepped aside and two men entered the room and dragged Barnett back to the bed. Using a length of thick rope, they tied him and his chair securely to the heavy post at the foot of the bed. Then they left.

Trepoff stood in the doorway for a second, surveying the room. He nodded. "Adieu," he said. And then he was gone.

The miniature pianist atop the musical box continued running his doll-fingers over the keys, and composition after composition was rendered in tinny tones. Barnett lost count. The girl was now silent. Perhaps she had fainted. It would be a good thing, Barnett thought, if she had; he would have made no attempt to revive her even if he could. He twisted and struggled until his arms were raw under the jacket, but the ropes held.

Suddenly, as a Rossini overture began either the fourteenth or fifteenth piece, a pounding noise sounded faintly and far-off from below. Someone was at the front door.

Barnett yelled, but to no effect. Nobody outside on the street could hear him from upstairs. Shortly the pounding stopped.

Rossini ended with a click and whirr, and Scarlatti began the fifteenth — or sixteenth — selection.

The pounding at the front door began again. It was too late now. Even if someone did get in, they would never make it upstairs in time if this were the sixteenth selection.

But if it were only the fifteenth, there might be time. "Help!" Barnett yelled. "Help! Upstairs!"

The door flew open and Sherlock Holmes strode into the room, a great revolver in his hand. "Well," he said. "What have we here?"

"Quick, man!" Barnett screamed. "There are two wires affixed to that musical box. Unfasten one of them immediately. And, for the love of God, don't let it touch the other wire!"

Holmes raced over to the box and pulled one of the wires from its screw. As he did so, the Scarlatti drew to a close and, with a whirr and click, the little doll-figure turned away from the piano. Silence.

Barnett looked from the musical box to Holmes and, for once, words failed him. His lips moved but no words came out.

"You have just saved all pur lives, Mr. Holmes," Barnett managed to say at last. "I don't know how to thank you."

"If that young lady on the bed is Lady Catherine," Holmes said, "I am sufficiently recompensed."

"She is," Barnett said.

"Is she all right?"

"I believe she has just fainted."

Holmes took a clasp-knife from his pocket and severed their bonds. "Wasn't that Scarlatti?" he asked.

"I believe so," Barnett said. "I was rather preoccupied."

Holmes nodded. "Scarlatti." He eyed the musical box. "An exquisite thing, that."

The banging on the front door began again, and Holmes looked up. "If you'll excuse me for a second," he said, "I will go downstairs and admit my colleague, Dr. Watson. While he revives Lady Catherine, we can talk."

TWENTY — ELEMENTARY

My friend, judge not me, Thou seest I judge not thee.

— William Comden

Two days passed before Sherlock Holmes came to Moriarty's front door and demanded entrance. Mr. Maws showed him into the study. "You're to wait," he said. "The professor is expecting you."

Ten minutes later Moriarty entered the study and crossed to his desk. "Good afternoon, Sherlock," he said.

"You expected me?" Holmes demanded, turning from the cabinet he was examining.

Moriarty glanced up at the complex face of the brass chronometer which hung over the door. It was six twenty-nine. "Not quite so soon," he said. "I apologize for leaving you in here alone, and thus putting temptation across your path. The drawers and cabinets, as I'm sure you found, are all locked."

"I had never imagined anything else, my dear Moriarty," Holmes said, moving over to the high-back chair and sitting down. "Still, one can always hope."

Moriarty leaned forward over his desk, his deepset gray eyes contemplating Sherlock Holmes unblinkingly for many seconds. Then he shrugged slightly and leaned back in his black leather chair. "The girl is all right?" he asked.

"The duke had two of Harley Street's most lettered specialists to examine her," Holmes said. "She didn't seem to need them. An amazingly resilient creature."

"You spoke to her?"

"A bit. Not as much as I would have liked. It is clear that you had nothing to do with the abduction."

"Thank you."

"You expect me to apologize?"

"I expect nothing."

Holmes struck his right fist into his open left hand. "I am mortified, Professor," he said. "Not for having suspected you; we both know that you are capable of any act." He looked earnestly at Moriarty, who did not change his expression in the slightest, but merely waited patiently. "No, I am mortified at having allowed this suspicion to become an overwhelming obsession. It is true, I admit it. I allowed my emotion to color my rational processes, without which I am nothing. I should have known almost immediately that you were not involved. There was no demand for money."

"The first communication?" Moriarty suggested.

Holmes nodded. "It was indicated in the first note the duke received that money would not be required. I confess that rather than come to the proper deduction, I formulated fifteen different schemes you could have been devising."

"Ah, Holmes. After all this time. Surely you should know me better. I won't pretend, here in this room, that I don't satisfy my incessant need for funds by abetting, or even indulging in, acts you might term criminal. But you must know that I would see a difference between quietly emptying a safe and abducting a seventeen-year-old girl."

"I see no difference," Holmes said stubbornly. "Surely—"

"An apparent difference in scale, yes," Holmes said. "But you cannot measure the results of either act. And they are both against the law. Who are you to decide which is right and which wrong?"

"And who, pray tell, is the state to decide for me?" Moriarty demanded. "If I steal fifty pounds from a safe, I may go in for seven years' penal servitude. If I steal fifty thousand pounds by selling watered stock, I may make the honors list. If I murder a man on the streets of London and take his watch, I will be hung by the neck until I am dead. If I murder a hundred men on the Gold Coast to take their land, Her Majesty's government will send a gunboat to bring me back in triumph."

"I do not claim that the laws are uniform or just," Holmes said. "But they are what we have. They are better — infinitely better — than the chaos that would result without law."

-

Moriarty stood and began to pace behind his desk, his chin sunk onto his chest. Then he stopped and laughed. "We argue law and we argue right and wrong," he said, "yet we are what we are, you and I, for reasons that lie deeper in us than can be reached by writs of the court or by statutes. I think it is good that we are both satisfied with what we are, for I do not think argument will change us. And I must say that this discussion, enjoyable as it is becoming, is drifting off the subject."

"The subject?"

"Trepoff."

"Ah, yes; Trepoff. The masked man."

"Yes," said Moriarty. "He is planning some major outrage?" Moriarty nodded. "So I believe."