Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) (17 page)

Giles Paternoster, master of the château, sat across the table from Moriarty and Chief Inspector Epp. He was a tall, gaunt man with a long, bony, cleft chin and prominent ears, one of which was pierced for a large gold earring in the shape of an eight-pointed star, and he appeared to be somewhere between forty and ageless. He wore a loose-fitting black suit with a thin clerical collar, highly polished black shoes, and a red fez with a gold tassel. A massive gold ankh hung from a thick gold chain around his neck.

Leaning back with his arms folded across his chest, Paternoster surveyed his two guests. “It would be fitting for me and my organization to receive a modicum of credit for calling in the gendarmes without so much as touching the poor lad’s body,” he said, his voice deep, his words measured, and his accent thick, broad, sibilant, and nasal. “Most of my helpers were of the opinion that, were we to just toss the wretched thing in the Thames or leave it in a dustbin in Eastchapel, all our troubles would disappear. Yet I said no, that would not be just or, as you say, proper. We should treat the lad’s earthly remains with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances, and we’d best call in the constabulary. So, thusly, we did that.”

“You didn’t exactly call in the Yard,” Epp pointed out. “You called in Inspectors Danzip and Warth, both, as it happens, members of your little club.”

“And both,” Paternoster amended, “officers in the Yard’s Criminal Investigation Division.”

“You thought they’d hush it up, now,
anguis in herba.
Didn’t you?”

Paternoster looked around, a puzzled expression on his face. “What right have you to be displeased?” he asked after a moment. “I assumed Danzip and Warth would do whatever it was that they properly had to do. I had no way of knowing what that would be.”

“But you had hopes,” Epp insisted.

“Every man’s entitled to a little hope,” replied Paternoster, “or I ask of you, what’s a heaven for?”

Moriarty leaned forward and tapped the table with his forefinger. “Come off it,” he said.

“Excuse?”

“Your accent is quite delightful, but it does not owe its intonations to any language that I am familiar with.”

Paternoster raised his head and looked at Moriarty down the length of his nose. “Truly?” he asked. “This is what you think? And of how many languages do you profess the familiarity?”

“I speak nine languages fluently,” Moriarty told him, “and can understand perhaps half a dozen more.”

“Really?” Paternoster asked. “Whatever for?”

“A fair question,” said Moriarty.

“A waste of time,” said Epp.

Moriarty looked at him. “Perhaps,” he said and then turned back to Paternoster. “I believe that the use of any language forms a pattern—a matrix, as my friend Reverend Dodgson would call it—in the brain that makes it possible to gather and retrieve other information more easily. The pattern formed by each language is different, and thus the brain acquires subtly different information depending on the language in which an object or event is described. Or perhaps a better way to put it is that it allows one to examine the facts presented to it in a subtly different way. Thus a Frenchman, a German, or a Spaniard, presented with the same information would form a different mental image of it and would react to it in a different way. It has yet to be rigorously determined whether a man fluent in all three of those languages would react differently depending on in which language the information was given him. I’m gathering notes for a possible monograph on the subject.”

“Really?” Paternoster reiterated.

Moriarty took out his pince-nez and affixed them to the bridge of his nose. “A familiarity with the tonal distinctions of various languages—the pitch of the vowels, the snap of the consonants—also makes it possible to ascertain with fair accuracy what the native language of the speaker is regardless of what language he is currently using.”

“So?” Paternoster asked.

“So, despite the fact that you speak English with what you fondly regard as an Eastern European accent, your speech patterns make it clear that your native tongue is, indeed, English. I daresay, you were brought up somewhere within the sound of the Bow Bells. Only a Cockney treats his vowels with such disdain.”

Paternoster leaned back and stared at the ceiling while he thought this over.

“It’s a fair cop,” he said finally, his speech now sounding more East London than Eastern Europe.

“Go on!” Epp said. “You mean you ain’t—whatever it is you’re supposed to be? Well, I never.
Non liquet,
as they say.”

“And your, um, society,” Moriarty said. “Something about this house, these surroundings, inspires in me a lack of confidence as to their authenticity. There is a certain theatrical quality in all of this. Would I be right in assuming that Le Château d’Espagne is neither as ancient nor as exotic as it seems?”

Paternoster transferred his gaze to the professor. “Say,” he said, “you ain’t
the
Professor Moriarty, are you?”

Moriarty looked upon him mildly. “I am certainly
a
Professor Moriarty,” he said. “Professor James Moriarty of Russell Square, London.”

“Well, fancy meeting you here, like this. I’ve heard a bit or three about you. About your work.”

“I hold doctorates in mathematics and astronomy,” Moriarty suggested. “Although I haven’t lectured in either for a number of years. Are you interested in the sciences? Perchance you’ve read my little monograph on the relation of the Moebius Band to the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra?”

Paternoster shook his head—perhaps just to clear it. “Well, what I’ve heard—well. It surprises me to see you gadding about with the rozzers, is all.”

“Ah,
those
stories,” Moriarty said with a sigh. “They will follow me about. I assure you there’s no more truth to them then, ah, say, some of the things I’ve been hearing about you.”

“The Napoleon of crime,” Paternoster said, an inescapable overtone of awe in his voice.

“Really?” Moriarty asked. “That’s what you heard?” He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together under his chin. “There is one man who calls me that. How did you come to hear it?”

“Well, now—a fella came by here, must have been six or eight months ago, looking for work. A lascar by the look of him. Claimed he jumped ship and daren’t go back. Said he was a cook by trade, skilled at the sort of Indian dishes favored by the British pukka sahibs.

“Well, he wasn’t no cook, that became clear pretty quick, and he wasn’t no lascar neither. A bit of the nut-brown color of his skin rubbed off on the back of his shirt. I didn’t mind that too much—we all got secrets—but I had taken him on as a cook, and it was a cook I needed. So I gave him the sack.”

“I have no doubt that I know the gentleman in question,” Moriarty said. “Do you have any inkling as to what he was actually doing in your establishment since, as you surmised, he assuredly is no cook?”

“He came here looking for you,” Paternoster said. “That is, if you is indeed the Professor Moriarty he was gabbing about. He didn’t say nothing about astronomy or any moby’s band.”

“Looking for me?” Moriarty took his pince-nez from his nose and began polishing the lenses with a scrap of red flannel. “That’s odd. He certainly knows where I live. He has spent countless hours loitering about my house in some puerile disguise or another.”

“Well,” Paternoster considered. “Before he found his way out the door he gave me to understand that he was ‘wise’ to my ‘nefarious schemes,’ and that they could have been devised by no one other than Professor Moriarty. I said as how I didn’t know any Professor Moriarty, and he said not to try his patience.”

“And what were these nefarious schemes of yours?”

“He never did say.”

“Perhaps something about how you run this establishment?”

Paternoster snorted. “There ain’t nothing nefarious about this place. Just a bit of the old slap and tickle, and a little mumbo-jumbo and some fancy costumes for, as it were, atmosphere.”

“And the name,” said Moriarty. “Le Château d’Espagne.”

“Yes, well. I had to call it something, didn’t I?”

“You chose well, it would seem by your membership list.”

“Well, the château’s oh-so-patrician membership wouldn’t have been so eager to sign up if I’d called it the Bubble and Squeak, or if they’d known that the mysterious master of the establishment was plain old Charley Washburn of Canning Town, would they now?”

“It would have been a bit off-putting,” granted Moriarty.

“What piqued their interest was the odor of the mysterious East,” said Washburn. “Metaphorically speaking, as you might say. So that’s what I gave them. That and the ritual and appurtenances, which I dragged in to add that air of verisimilitude, as Mr. Gilbert might put it. And of course the smut. Nothing draws a toff in like high-class smut, or so I’ve found.”

Epp sniffed. “And children,” he added.

“Ah, well,” said Washburn. “Most of the lads are not as young as they look, some of them by quite a bit. The lasses, too, for that matter. Slum kids tend to be smaller and younger-looking for some years due to the wondrous nutritional opportunities they are afforded, and then, all at once, into their twenties, they look older, much older. It’s the way we have in this civilized country we inhabit.”

Epp gave him a stern glare. “You sound bitter, my man.”

“Not I,” Washburn said. “I, who was given the splendid opportunity to travel around to various parts of the world, courtesy of Her Majesty’s forces, and even remunerated for my troubles at the rate of one and six a day, minus reimbursements for this and that. And all I was required to do in exchange was shoot at people I didn’t know while they were shooting back at me.”

Epp stiffened. “That, sir, is hardly the way to describe honorable service to queen and country,” he said with a sneer in his voice. “
Ipso facto.
You must have been something of a credit to your regiment, I have no doubt.”

A smile flickered across Washburn’s face and disappeared, briefly revealing a row of uneven, discolored teeth. “They thought so,” he said. “I was awarded a medal for what I would now describe as extreme stupidity in the face of the enemy, another for obeying the orders of the idiot who was my superior officer—he got himself killed in that one—and a third for saving the life of the idiot who took command after the first idiot was killed. Then a jezail bullet took a nick out of my femur, and a grateful government declared me unfit for duty and kicked me out.”

“So you found—no, created—a new line of work for yourself,” suggested Moriarty.

“I did that,” Washburn agreed. “By a series of fortuitous circumstances, and a bit of timely assistance from here and there, I worked my way up the ladder of the demimonde of the erotica until, two years ago, I set up this establishment.”

“And the ‘odor of the mysterious East’?”

Washburn shrugged. “Mostly just a smell. A hint of the Levant can be found in many of London’s less distinguished areas, along with a touch of Egypt, a heady dose of the Celestial Empire, and a smattering of Balkan this and Russian that. Many of my children are, indeed, from strange and exotic corners of the earth, but for the most part I found them much closer to home.”

“What of the child that was killed?” Moriarty asked.

“Istefan,” Washburn said. “He was, I think, sixteen. Looked fourteen perhaps. I wondered when you were going to get around to asking about him. He may have been a child of the Jago, but nobody deserves to die like that.”

“My sympathies for the lad,” Moriarty said. “Tell me about the gentleman he was with.”

“The one what sliced him apart?” Washburn grimaced. “I’ve been wondering about him, too.”

“What about him?” demanded Epp.

“Well,” Washburn said, “you should know, shouldn’t you? What with your people in and out of here for the whole day, looking here, sniffing there, peering into this and opening that.”

“A murder investigation, my good man, is no respecter of privacy,” Epp told him.

“Up to a point it ain’t,” Washburn agreed. “Then, suddenly, everything changes, and privacy is what we got too much of. We ain’t to talk to anyone about what happened, and there’s a gent in plain clothes and flat feet at the door, which ain’t so good for custom, all things considered. Ain’t no member come through the door in the past two days.”

“We have our reasons, my man,” said Epp, “and they ain’t for you to question.”

“What can you tell me about the killer?” Moriarty asked. “Who was he, if you know, and how long had he been a member?”

Washburn grimaced. “I told the Scotland Yard blokes all this already.”

“Yes, well, then,” Epp said, “you should have it fresh to mind, shouldn’t you?”

“I just don’t like talking about it,” Washburn said. “I mean, with what happened and all.”

“You want us to catch the man who did it, don’t you?” Moriarty asked.

“Of course,” Washburn asserted, “but are you sure you want to do the catching?”

Epp leaned forward pugnaciously. “What does that mean?” he demanded.

“Well, it stands to reason. If you wanted to catch him you’d have done it already. Just marched up to his house, wherever it may be, and knocked on the door and taken him away. And if you’d done that, you wouldn’t be here asking me all these questions, now would you? It stands to reason.”

“So you told the inspectors who the man was?” Moriarty asked.

“Not me. I didn’t see him, did I? It could have been any of our guests for all of me. It was Natyana who got a glom at him when he came out of that room.”

“Natyana?” Moriarty asked.

“She’s the chatelaine, as we call her. Same title as me but with an
e
on the end. It’s a way the French have with names. My partner, she is, and I was lucky to find her. In truth, she pretty much runs the place.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. I strut about and impress the clientele with my dark secrets and manage any squabbles that come up, and I see to admitting new clients and make sure that we get our proper remuneration for services rendered. Natyana actually keeps the books and manages the household and such.”