Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty

He felt his fists clench. One day he would show this woman his terrifying strength. ‘This time it’s going to be different. I’m going to paint … and I’m going to collect art. Great art. I’m going to be important. People are going to listen to me. Point at me and say what a great man I am.’

Bridget Hitler shook her head. ‘You’re deluded, Adolph. Like your brother says, you’ll come to a bad end. Now get out of this house. I never want to hear your name again.’

It is widely believed that Adolph Hitler spent five months in Liverpool in 1910–11, living with his brother, Alois, and sister-in-law, Bridget, in their Toxteth flat. The house where he was said to have lived was destroyed by bombing during World War II.

And When Did You Last See Your Father is one of the most popular paintings in the Walker Art Gallery – and can be seen there to this day.

To the Professor he is always the Detective. In dreams, in thought, or in conversation, he seldom refers to him under any other name. In the Professor’s mind, he eclipses and predominates the whole of his profession. It is not that he feels any emotion akin to affection for the Detective. All emotions, and that one particularly, are abhorrent to his cold, precise and mathematical mind. The Professor knows himself to be the most perfect calculating machine in the history of the world; no one would ever mistake him for a caring human being. He never speaks of the softer passions, save with a jibe and a sneer. Such emotions are quantifiable variables to be measured by the objective observer – elements in the equations that predict and manipulate the movements and actions of individuals and populations. For the trained mathematician to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely tuned psyche would be to introduce distracting factors that might throw a doubt upon all his calculations. Yet there has ever been but one significant opponent to him, and that opponent was the Detective, of dubious and questionable motives.

This morning, as the orange light of the Middle Eastern sun hits the glass windows of the Professor’s Dubai penthouse, his thoughts are again of the Detective. For the past decade, now that his centuries of calculations have elevated him beyond any stature he had imagined when he first stepped on to the path of crime and corruption, every night he has dreamed of his illustrious opponent. In these dreams, the two of them spar like they used to, the Detective meticulously untangling every strand of the Professor’s web of conspiracy. In these dreams, the Detective is relentlessly victorious and the Professor is inevitably undone and humiliated.

The Professor believes that the Detective is dead, has been dead for nearly a century, and yet a doubt lingers. The Professor does not like chaotic variables to mar the precise beauty of his equations, is dissatisfied at having to rely on ambiguous opinion, even his own, rather than proven and quantifiable data.

The Detective retired on 7 July 1902. By that time, the Professor and the Detective had been duelling, at times publicly but most often secretly, for two decades. The Professor’s agents kept watch over the Detective during his retirement, but he never showed any signs of interfering with the Professor’s designs. Indeed, the Detective, in those elder years, seemed to lose any interest in meddling with the criminal world. Emboldened, the Professor embarked on what was, at that time, his most ambitious plot yet. Even the British government, who had pulled the Detective out of retirement to aid in the War Effort, did not know what only the Detective had correctly deduced: that the Great War was set into motion by the Professor to further his long-term plans.

The Detective’s belated interference prevented the First World War from achieving its full potential – the Professor’s equations had not accounted for the Detective’s involvement – but the Professor nevertheless profited from its outcome, albeit not as richly as he had initially calculated.

After the Great War, the Professor lost track of the Detective. Indeed, the historical record was altered in such a deliberate and methodical way by the Detective’s older brother – a shadowy puppet-master operating behind the scenes of the British government – that the world now regards the Detective as a fictional character created by a failed physician with a credulous penchant for spiritualists and fairies.

All in all, the Professor and the Detective matched wits for a mere three decades! That brief period, now more than a century in the past, outshines any other in the Professor’s long life.

Enough! The Professor chides himself for indulging in such nostalgia.

Teenage twins from India – brother and sister – stand naked at their station in his private spa, to minister to his morning needs. Afterwards, there is a full day awaiting him: following breakfast, a teleconference is scheduled with his worldwide network of operatives; after lunch, he has a full slate of brief meetings with financiers and politicians from all over the globe; after dinner, he will read the day’s reports; for the rest of the evening, he will pore through the near-infinite datastreams now available to him thanks to the surveillance society he has manipulated into being; finally, at midnight, synthesizing everything he has learned in the last twenty-four hours, he will revise all his equations and send off fresh instructions to his agents.

But now: the twins. For the body must not be neglected.

The Professor, contrary to what the Detective’s biographer has reported, is not British, although he pretended to be for many years, adopting an Irish name and fabricating an entire life story, calculated to maximize the efficiency and impact of his persona. The Detective eventually saw through the deception, but, as far as the Professor knows (with a probability of 97.86 per cent), never shared the truth with his biographer, or with anybody else; the Detective must have feared (with a probability of 98.34 per cent) being taken for a madman should he try to convince anyone of the truth behind the Professor.

The Professor was born in Shiraz, one of the greatest cities in Persia, in what would now be called the thirteenth century. As a young boy, the Professor already displayed an uncanny aptitude for mathematics. His father, an Arab who had travelled north in his youth and settled in Persia, was a religious scholar employed at the court of Abu Bakr ibn Saad. The ruler took a liking to the young boy and delighted in his mathematical acuity. By grace of Abu Bakr’s patronage, the boy received the best education Persia could provide – and at the time Persia was the most learned of all the world’s nations.

The boy excelled in academics, easily impressing his teachers when mathematics was the subject or deceiving them when philosophy, especially ethics, was the theme at hand.

From an early age, the boy perceived the world differently than those around him. Every moment, every interaction, every thought, every action – everything – expressed itself in his mind as a mathematical equation. Any outcome could be reached if the correct equation could be articulated, solved and applied.

In his mind, the equations grew in complexity and scope, but the reality they described could not be achieved in a single lifetime. According to his calculations, he would not witness the results of his equations in the mere decades of life he could reasonably expect his body to endure.

That, too, he knew could be solved with the application of the proper equation.

All those gullible fools who thought the Fountain of Youth was a place waiting for any idiot to stumble on to! Eternal life was, like everything else, a mathematical equation. Once the Professor decided to apply his formidable mind to the problem, it was only a matter of three years, two months, four days, two hours, fifty-six minutes and thirteen seconds to resolve the mathematical formula that gave him complete control over his body and its processes.