Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (46 page)

Solemn duties done, the morticians tactfully withdrew. Beebe hung about soliciting donations to a restoration fund or home for indigent seamstresses or somesuch. A pay-off mollified him and he left too.

Inside the tomb, mourners stood around glass-topped coffins. Some doffed hats, some raised hankies, some lit cigars and muttered, impatient with the performance. The beloved dead looked like Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, for the very good reason that the same artisans made both. Benjamin Thoroughgood was a spare head of General Gordon.

Moriarty told Grimes to seal the tomb doors behind us, and return in an hour. The sexton – who had never been able to account for the Dutch guilders he tried to pay for drink with on the night Van Helsing was arrested – had complied with stranger requests. I wish I could say this was the only time I’d heard the rasp and scrape of heavy stone tomb doors closing with me still on the inside and corpses for company.

‘Gentlemen, ladies, I bid you welcome,’ Moriarty addressed the mourners. ‘You know why I’ve invited you here. Several of you have travelled great distances, at no little inconvenience to your continuing interests. Your presence betokens the seriousness with which you take this matter. Most of you are familiar with each other, but some are new to this rarely convened circle. We all know who we are. Do I need to make introductions? Some of us prefer titles to names... so, the Lord of Strange Deaths and the Daughter of the Dragon... the Grand Vampire of Paris and Mademoiselle Irma Vep... Doctor Nikola of Australia and Madame Sara of the Strand... Miss Margaret Trelawny and the Hoxton Creeper... Doctor Mabuse of Berlin and Fraulein Alraune ten Brincken... Arthur Raffles of the Albany and his, ah, friend, Mr Manders... Théophraste Lupin and Josephine, Countess Cagliostro... Doctor Jack Quartz of New York and Princess Zanoni... Rupert, Count of Hentzau, and... Miss Irene Adler.’

One of the veiled ladies lifted her black gauze.

‘Hello, boys,’ said
that bitch.

So there you have it. The worst people in the world. All in the same tomb. If Grimes fell down a manhole and left us there to rot, or – more likely – eat each other, well... every detective, do-gooder and right-thinking prig in Christendom could get sloshed and break out their party hats.

I wouldn’t know how to send a telegram to someone like Dr Nikola, who favoured Asian mountain fastnesses and Pacific island hideaways, and I’m not deranged enough to invite the Lord of Strange Deaths to tea. As the loyal reader knows, I’m afraid of very little, but if anyone gives me pause it’s that dome-headed, bloody clever Chinaman. Being not afraid of death isn’t the same thing as not caring about hours – in some cases, weeks – of preliminary discomfort. The cellars of the Si-Fan were known as places to avoid. The mad mandarin had a marmoset on his shoulder, if you can believe it. His Eurasian companion – supposedly his daughter, as if that spared her anything – occasionally fed the chittering beast nuts from a packet. The Celestial pair wore white robes, because they do everything sideways out East and that’s the custom for attending the funerals of folks who aren’t in your immediate family.

As for the others... by now, you’ve heard of most of them. Those you don’t know you’re better off for it, but I’ll fill in the dance card anyway.

The second biggest surprise was the presence of my old friend Mad Margaret – Queen Tera as was – and her pet goon. The bandages were off. She now wore a smooth white alabaster mask which matched her replacement hand – eyebrows and lips picked out in gold. God knew what she looked like underneath, though her luxuriant raven hair had either re-grown or was a wig left over from the Princess Theatre’s last
Antony and Cleopatra.
She’d retrieved the Jewel of Seven Stars and wore it on her meat hand. The Black Pearl of the Borgias – which I happen to know Countess Cagliostro once coveted – winked from a brooch on her lapel. I doubted she’d forgiven or forgotten our previous encounter and she can’t have felt kindly towards the Professor after the mêlée in Conduit Street and the dismantling of her Kensington Temple. If she was here, keeping her resentments to herself, then she must have a very good, or very insane, reason to join the circle.

I’d never seen Jack Quartz before. Can’t say I was impressed. He sported an ostentatious cigar and the flashiest girlfriend. Princess Zanoni had more paint, powder and wax on her face than the fake heads in the coffins. The American mad doctor was tubby round the middle and running to jowls that made him look as if he were hiding cotton balls in his cheeks. Yanks never know when to stop, whether their passion is vivisecting beautiful women – which was how Dr Jack passed his leisure hours when running New York’s criminal underworld became too burdensome – or eating yard-across slabs of beef with fried potatoes washed down with brown carbonated health tonic. Nikola sliced people and animals up alive too, with obscure scientific end – the Prof tried to explain it to me once – but Quartz played with scalpels just for larks.

Lupin and Raffles were just jumped-up thieves, useful enough if you wanted a diamond necklace abstracted, but essentially lightweights. Then again, next to Moriarty, Nikola or the Lord of Strange Deaths, I was just a jumped-up murderer, and only got to sit on a slightly higher chair than the burglars.

Title or not, Rupert Count of Hentzau – a Ruritanian Michaelist, if your memory goes back that far – was just like me. Call him a dashing rogue or laughing daredevil if you must, but he was your basic assassin in comic opera uniform. His moustache was waxed to points which could have your eye out and he seemed forever on the point of bursting out laughing. We were both all-rounders, though he was a sword and I a shot. I daresay if we met under different circumstances, we’d each cede the other supremacy with our favoured tools and look for a third weapon to settle the question of who was the deadliest man in Europe. The jaunty cad reminded me of a young version of myself, which naturally inclined me to hate the fellow. He further antagonised me by showing up with
that bitch
as an arm adornment.

More interesting to the connoisseur of criminal masterminds was the young German the Prof had called Dr Mabuse, though that was only one of his preferred names. I’ve mentioned him before. Remember, the ardent imitator who was wont to present a sham of Moriarty’s own face and manner? He’d come to this party in his Moriarty costume, head bobbing atop an enormous fur collar, chalk on his cuffs and something in his eyes to make them glint. I had a sense I’d met him before, wearing another face or faces, and inwardly cursed this disguise craze... Simon Carne and Colonel Clay had started it, and now it was likely nobody was who they said they were or who you wanted them to be. Except the Hoxton Creeper – he could pass for a Stone Age Man or an Easter Island statue come to life, but otherwise had an extremely limited range. Others weren’t so distinctive. Anyone could wear an alabaster glove and mask, shove footballs down her blouse and claim to be Margaret Trelawny. However, most of the women in the world twisted enough to pull it off were in the present company as their own saucy selves. Mabuse’s moll – who looked no more than twelve, except for eyes that might have seen Babylon fall – was a strange duck, all angles and poses, with dramatic hair. I took her for another dagger-under-the-pillow damsel. It’s a sign of this age of emancipation that so many girls take to the trade.

Countess Cagliostro and Madame Sara were senior adventuresses, who had attained their station by stepping over the corpses of dozens of men who’d not thought to take them seriously. Most women – bless ’em – try to take a couple of years off their age, but Jo-Jo Balsamo put it about that she was decades older than she looked, and privy to the alchemical secrets of le Comte de Saint-Germain and her supposed ancestor the mountebank Cagliostro. Over a long weekend in a Valparaiso boudoir in ’63, she’d put my back out – nearly thirty years on, she seemed not a day older, while my back hurt more with every passing year. What was she doing with a perfumed lout like Lupin?

Sara, no last name given, ran a series of odd little rackets from a beauty shop on the Strand, and had her tithe to the Firm delivered in scented envelopes nestled in gift baskets of salves, unguents and creams the Prof had no use for. I’d tried her hair-restorer on a thinnish patch on my crown, but it hadn’t helped. Lately, her envelopes had been so fat I wondered if she was paying us over the odds in an attempt to persuade us she was a more notable crook than we took her for. Moriarty assured me she really was raking in as much as her payments indicated, and could claim financially to be the most successful female criminal of the age. Though she had Nikola at her side, the Madame generally had no use for masculine company. She worshipped at the altar of Sappho; or, if Sappho were unavailable, a bloomers-wearing, monocle-sporting saleslady in the bicycle department of Derry & Toms.

This Grand Vampire was new to me, successor to the fellow we’d given Napoleon’s brainbox and the fellow who’d retained Sophy’s stabbing prowess. Bald as an egg, he took the gang’s name seriously enough to have his eye-teeth filed to points. Showing up in Kingstead surely put him at risk of getting holy water dashed in his face. No Frenchman likes to wash, so it was just as well Van Helsing had been deported. His young companion – who stuck around as Grand Vampires came and went – was dressed and coiffed as a boy. No one was fooled. Even the light-fingered Raffles and the dimwitted Manders, queer as eight-bob notes, knew Irma Vep was no lad. Madame Sara must also have noticed her tight-cut black knickerbockers and shapely silk-stockinged calves. The ephebic, anagrammatical vampire bore watching... though in this company she had stiff competition, in both the general bounce-worthiness and deadly-as-a-mamba stakes.

Ah, yes, Irma, so sorry... also, profuse apologies to elusive Alraune, tempting Tera, experienced Jo-Jo, serpentine Sara (a cursory nod in her case), zestful Zanoni, and the by-no-means-hideous Daughter of the Dragon. Even Sophy Kratides, the woman I’d come with, would have to step aside.

‘Hello, boys,’ indeed.

So, here she was again. I knew I would forget everything I’d learned since Rosie the pot-girl in The Compasses told me she was ‘with child’ to get me to cough over the money I’d been sent from home for my fifteenth birthday. Which she then spent on gin and sailors before giving birth only to the bolster she’d shoved under her pinafore.

I’d rather have met Kali’s Kitten again.

But, even in a tomb, surrounded by arch-fiends... that smile... those eyes... that twist of the end of the lip... that artfully stray curl...

Irene Adler. Damnation.

I’d have turfed Ben Thoroughgood out of his last resting place and stretched out in his stead if she’d asked me to.

I’d have garrotted the Lord of Strange Deaths’ pet marmoset if she’d asked.

I’d have snatched the Black Pearl and swallowed it, daring the Creeper to cut me open to get it back.

I’d have... well, I I’d have made a fool of myself. Again.

Hentzau offered round a hip flask, but his sardonic smirk did not inspire confidence in the gesture. With an ‘oh well, more fool you’ shrug, Rupert took a healthy draught, opened his mouth to show brandy sloshing about inside, gulped and pantomimed satisfaction. He opened his mouth again to show he hadn’t shammed the swallow. The performance put off even those – like yours truly – who could have done with a stiff one. He might have dosed himself daily with minute portions of, say, arsenic, to build up tolerance. Such tricks have been known. Only Madame Sara took him up, taking a dainty swig. She’d probably rendered herself immune to every poison known to nature or science in the course of perfecting her ‘beauty treatments’.

The Daughter of the Dragon made no attempt to share her packet of nuts with anyone but the marmoset. Quartz didn’t hand out his cigars, though he had a fat case in his inside pocket. This prompted Raffles, who was puffing on a Sullivan, to show off his famous manners by passing round his cigarette case. I say
his
case – it had the crest of the Duke of Shires on it.
That bitch,
Irma and Hentzau accepted fags, and in no time at all the tomb smelled like a crematory. The snob thief waited for his Sullivans to come back – robbers always expect other people to steal from them, I know I do. Lupin didn’t take a cigarette, but did hold on to the case for a moment, jokingly making a pretence of slipping it absent-mindedly into his coat pocket before handing it over. Raffles didn’t look as though he found that funny.

So much for the social aspect of the gathering.

‘We are the greatest criminal minds of the nineteenth century,’ began Moriarty. Knowing we were in for a lecture, I settled my behind on a stack of Thoroughgood coffins. ‘And yet, like the century, our days are numbered...’

No one voiced outrage. Closed-mouth crowd, of course. Deep thinkers, on the whole, disinclined to bluster until they’d heard the whole story. Still, I’d have expected an indignant yelp or two of ‘I didn’t come all this way from Kensington... or Pago Pago... or Berlin... to be insulted’.

‘Really, we draw to the end of a golden age in our field of endeavour. Who has there been to oppose us, but ourselves? No police force constituted thus far has been more than a momentary inconvenience to our businesses, easy to thwart and easier to suborn. Not since Jonathan Wild has anyone at our level been brought to a court of law, let alone convicted and hanged. We have had an easy time of it – but it will not last. Already, some dilettantes have set about making war on us. Men – and a few women – of intellect, wealth, resource and character who have set themselves against us, not because they are
supposed
to, but because they
must.
We all know the species of law breaker who steals or murders or violates because he has not the strength of mind to resist the urge...’

The barest flicker of a glance at the Hoxton Creeper made his point.

‘Such impulses exist also in those who will be our enemies. They have a perverse instinct, a compulsion if you will, to bring us down. Plainly put, they do not like what we do and are not prepared to let us continue without hindrance. At present, it’s an easy matter to be rid of a stray honest prosecutor or police inspector. There are more than a sufficiency of
our sort
of public officials to thwart the efforts of such freaks. But, make no mistake, we see the dawn of a new era. Crime fighting is about to change. What will happen when civilised countries opt to devote as much to their police forces as to their armed forces? The sort of cool hand who once sought glory and fame fighting the foreign foe or discovering the source of the Nile will set out to become not a soldier or an explorer but a
detective.
Modern science will be turned against us. The detective of the future will be a thinking machine, as cold and effective as any of us. They will have capabilities to match, or better, our own. Let me give you an example...’