Ted Riccardi - Between the Thames and the Tiber

“Good Lord, Holmes, can it be—that a young woman of her abilities would run off with a total charlatan like Spenser?”

Holmes smiled ruefully.

“Darwin, old fellow. He has changed his name again. To paraphrase the Sage of KÖnigsberg,” he said, with a smile, ‘two things fill me with wonder: the starry heavens above, and the idiocies below.’ I trust that Mr. Darwin is not very far away.”

Grimaldi smiled and held up his glass.

“To innocence—and madness,” he said.

PORLOCK’S DEMISE

AMONG THE MEMBERS OF THE CRIMINAL GANG WITH whom the late professor James Moriarty surrounded himself, none was more formidable than the man who ventured forth under the nom de plume of Fred Porlock. The reader may recall my brief references to him in “The Valley of Fear,” one of the longer accounts that I have dedicated to the exploits of Sherlock Holmes.

Porlock was Moriarty’s right hand. More than Sondberg, the cruel and avaricious murderer, and Vitsle, the extortionist, Porlock showed not only the sinister intelligence required to survive in a world inhabited by such villains, but a contorted spirit surpassed only by that of Moriarty himself. In comparison, even the highly touted Sebastian Moran was no more than a common ruffian.

Unlike such loyal but obsequious minions, however, Porlock maneuvered his position so deftly that he became essential to Moriarty’s success. It was he who transformed the theoretical crimes conceived by the Master into the ever increasing number of disasters that baffled all but my dear friend. It was, as Holmes was wont to say, Porlock’s genius that enabled the evil professor to realize his ambition of criminal supremacy in Britain, if not in all of Europe. Indeed, so fine was Porlock’s touch in concealing his teacher’s presence, that some sincerely came to believe Moriarty to be a figment of Holmes’s overworked imagination. It was as if Moriarty’s invisibility increased as his power grew each day.

And yet, as Holmes was wont to remark on occasion, Porlock too had his weaknesses, the chief of which was his moral ambivalence toward crime. A large part of him desired to be a man like other men. Despite the riches which came his way, he considered the world of crime beneath him, at best a quagmire of fraud and misery, and he both despised and admired Moriarty for having bestowed upon him his career of ill-gotten wealth, but wealth nevertheless.

I laid eyes on Porlock only once in all the years Holmes knew him. It was in early December of 1891 on a snowy morning towards the beginning of the month that I met Holmes at the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum. He had arranged to examine a recently acquired papyrus which contained the earliest Greek treatise on poisons and their antidotes. We were about to follow the attendant to the reading room when Holmes turned and said, “This, my dear friend, is the wizard to the king.”

Holmes bowed in a mocking sort of way to a gentleman who suddenly stood next to him.

“And this, no doubt, the learned chronicler of the great master detective,” said Porlock quietly. Neither of us proffered our hand, and Holmes did not attempt to cover the momentary awkwardness. He merely said, “Please wait for me here, old boy, I shan’t be but a moment.”

A few minutes later, he returned alone, a sombre expression on his face.

“Come, Watson, we haven’t a moment to lose.”

“Where to?” I asked as we hopped into a cab.

“Home,” he said quietly.

Holmes made it a point now never to discuss his work when we were in a public conveyance, and “home” as it turned out, required a walk back of several blocks so that our cabby, if interrogated, could only give a destination other than Baker Street.

As we entered our quarters, my friend became even more pensive. He went to his room, opened the window, and returned to the sitting room. He sat on the sofa without removing his coat and closed his eyes.

I took the opportunity to mull over the little I had seen of Porlock. He was not impressive physically. He wore a grey fedora, wet and stained from the dirty rain now so common in London. A dark blue woollen coat, frayed badly at the sleeves, covered his frame. His shoes and trousers were spattered with mud, and a muffler hid most of his face. What I could see of it was pale and unshaven. I had the impression of someone who was employed in a printer’s shop or perhaps a clerk in an old book store. He was also indistinguishable from the great lot of human kind who toiled ceaselessly reading at the long tables of the museum.

“A rather strange bird, that Porlock,” said I when I saw Holmes’s eyes open.

“Far stranger than you might think if you knew him as I do, and my knowledge of him is quite fragmentary. He was about to tell me something of the greatest importance when a young boy, perhaps eleven or twelve, walked into the room. Porlock bolted like a rabbit. He clearly thought that he was in grave danger. The boy did not follow him but walked out into the hall. That is when I returned to you. Porlock is probably quite correct in that he feels endangered—most assuredly by Moriarty himself. Like all the vile characters around Moriarty, he is a victim as well as the beneficiary of the great master of crime. Born into a dirt-poor family in Liverpool fifty years ago, he ran from home at the age of eight, and survived in the street until he was by great luck picked up by a wealthy Scotsman who took him home and saw to his education. These contrasting experiences—the gutter and the castle—immediately set up in his mind an ambivalence that has penetrated and vitiated every move he makes.

“You seem to know quite a bit about him.”

“Not as much as I would like. Look at it this way, old boy. A youngster, no more than a child really, is forced into crime to survive, his body encrusted with coal dust and the dirt of our most neglected city. He is taken in by a wealthy man, who gives him a new life. Then at the university his mathematical talents are immediately recognized by Professor Moriarty and a new life begins for the young student. He becomes Moriarty’s assistant, then the custodian of Moriarty’s wealth, unaware until later of its criminal origins. Later, he is surprised but not displeased at Moriarty’s revelations, and throws his lot in totally with the great genius. At present his is the brain through which Moriarty’s ideas are consummated.”

“Really, Holmes, I can’t believe that Moriarty has given over so much to such a nondescript character,” said I.

“Nonsense, my dear fellow, do not be deceived. I have entered a room more than once and have not recognized Porlock until he informed me of who he was. That rather inconsequential figure that you saw today is only one of several roles he has created for himself. He is like a slightly battered book that fills the dusty space on the shelf, a pair of old slippers forgotten in the corner of a closet, an old lampshade waiting to be discarded. He is there but unnoticed, especially to the untrained eye. He is Dupin’s purloined letter, in plain view but hidden by the obvious. His greatest pleasure is to appear at the scene of one of his crimes and to go unnoticed. You would be surprised, as I have been, to see the old scholar in the frayed blue coat appear as a bon vivant, a gourmet, a womaniser, a notorious gambler, an aristocrat of great wealth and culture, a patron of the arts, and one of London’s most generous philanthropists; the list is endless. Whatever the problem, he is loyal to the members of the gang, who look to him to save them from the law. I will leave to another time his skill with Lestrade and Hopkins, so extraordinary it is that neither of them are aware of his existence.”

Holmes smiled as he uttered the last few words, and lit his pipe.