Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) (22 page)

“You don’t seem to have been strongly affected by any of this,” Barnett observed.

“I was not raised to be a lady,” she told him, “nor to ape them. I was raised to be the daughter of an eclectic professor of philology who believed that my mind was more important than my gender or my social class.”

Barnett smiled. “What a dangerous idea.”

“Indeed,” Cecily replied seriously.

“So one becomes a lady by a process of osmosis, is that it?”

“I would say so. Also if one, or one’s parents, are insecure as to how much of the knowledge has seeped in, there are always the Swiss ‘finishing schools.’ After a year or two at one of those it could be said that a young lady is well and truly finished.”

“And a lady’s maid?”

“Usually starts her career as a lowly domestic and, after some years in service, may achieve the rank of upstairs maid. If she is quick and fortunate and suits the needs of the mistress of the house or one of the daughters, and a position opens up, she may attain the exalted status of lady’s maid. But, as I say, I can teach Pamela how to stand and curtsey and such in a week, if she’s a quick study. She does seem to be quite bright once she allows herself to be.”

Barnett watched as Cecily held two more identical white shirts up to the light, selected one for his suitcase, and put the other back in the bureau drawer. “Will that suffice?”

“It will have to, won’t it? The idea is to be able to take her into places and situations where the miscreants—if that’s a sufficiently harsh word for these evil men—might be found, and see if she can recognize anyone. All we’ll have to do is find a lady whom she can seem to be tending, and I assume that the professor’s new friends should be able to accomplish that.”

“Ah!” said Barnett. “And did the professor say in what sort of places or situations he expects the villain to be found?”

“I assume that’s what you’re going to Paris to find out,” his wife told him.

He nodded. “I suppose it is,” he said.

She selected two cravats from the rack, rejecting a third, and folded them over the bar in the bag placed there especially to fold cravats over.

“I like the red one,” he said.

“No you don’t,” she said. “Not with either of the suits you’re taking.”

“I don’t?”

“No.” Firmly.

“Ah! Clearly I was mistaken. Good of you to point these things out to me.”

“What,” she asked, smiling sweetly, “is a wife for?”

When he was completely packed to Cecily’s satisfaction, he kissed her firmly and completely and stood back. “I have to leave,” he said. “Catch the train.”

She suddenly clutched at his sleeve and pulled him to her. “Take care of yourself,” she said. “Please. Be careful.”

“I shall be very careful,” he assured her. “Besides, I’ll have the mummer to look after me. He spent a few years in Paris and Marseilles before he came to work for the professor. His French is better than mine.”

“
My
French is better than yours,” she told him, “and I’ve never lived there.”

“There is that,” he admitted.

“Do your best to stay out of trouble, my dear,” she said.

“I shall, you have my word. Besides, you know I’m a confirmed coward.”

“I know what you are,” she said. “Please take care.”

He hugged her close. “How could any man,” he murmured into her hair, “with you to return to, risk losing one moment of the future?”

She said something muffled into his shirt front.

“I shall,” he replied, hoping that was the proper response. “I’ll be back as soon as—as soon as I can.”

*   *   *

Only a few decades earlier it would have taken a traveler ten days or more to make the journey from London to Paris, Barnett mused as he and the mummer settled themselves into their first-class seats on the Continental Express in Victoria Station, and the coach ride would have been fraught with the possibility of peril or at least minor adventure. Today, with a bit of luck, one could leave London in the morning and eat dinner in Paris. Three hours from Victoria to Dover, an hour and a half on the ferry to Calais, and another three hours to the Gare du Nord. If the train isn’t delayed. If you make all your connections. If the Channel isn’t too rough. If the French customs man doesn’t spend too much time poking about in your luggage.

Barnett pulled out his pocket notebook and jotted down these notions as they came to him, pausing as the prefatory jolt of the train getting under way rocked the compartment, and then continuing as useful images came to him: difference between British coach and American stagecoach; the cry of “Stand and deliver!” and the perils of the highwayman and bands of outlaws on one side of the Atlantic and the other compared; the hazards of crossing the Channel under sail; the idea of digging a tunnel from Dover to Calais—and then the fear that Napoleon was actually having one dug, causing the British Army to post men in Dover to listen for the sound of tunnel digging and
Punch
magazine to get several useful cartoons from the image.

Barnett wrote an occasional column, “Mutterings from the Continent,” for the
New York World,
and this topic looked as if it could be mined for a cluster of them. “Only Fifty Years Ago: London to Paris in Two Weeks.” Two weeks sounded about right. He would have to do some research to pin down facts. There was always some pedantic curmudgeon who knew the exact times and distances, and essayed an erudite letter of shocked indignation if you got it wrong. Usually with the phrase “everybody knows” somewhere in the missive. “Everybody knows that the
carosse de diligence
from Calais to Paris took an average time of three days and four hours, except for that time in May ’64…”

*   *   *

The crossing was, indeed, uneventful, and Barnett and the mummer checked into the hotel Pépin le Bref in Montmartre in time for dinner. It wasn’t a fashionable area of the city, being infested with artists, writers, poets, playwrights, actors, models, Bohemians, and other untouchables. But it was close by the flat Barnett had for two years as a correspondent for the
World
, before the trip to Constantinople to witness the sea trials of the Garrett-Harris submersible had put him in prison, introduced him to Professor James Moriarty, and forever changed his life.

After a light dinner of
ris d’agneau Provençal avec this and that
for Barnett and an omelet
avec
smelly cheese for Tolliver in the Café Figaro around the corner from the hotel, which reminded Barnett once again that the English, for all their other virtues, can’t cook, the mummer took off to renew his acquaintance with
les méchants d’antan.
Barnett, lingering over his cassis, decided that now was as good a time as any to begin his own quest. The journey had been tiring, but the air of Paris was invigorating, and the memories that came flooding back to him at his outdoor table, the very one where he had spent countless hours in those bygone days, were almost overwhelming. Old friends: journalists, artists, novelists, poets, playwrights, perpetual students; earnest intellectuals to a man and, yes, to a woman, solving the world’s problems and trying to figure out how to get next month’s rent. Was it really eight years ago? He had half expected them to be waiting, frozen in time, to appear ambling down the street or popping from a doorway, to join him at his table.

Benjamin, mon ami, it is good to see you. It has been too long.

It must be—no!—eight years? It can’t be. You haven’t changed not a bit.

Benjamin, Benjamin—I heard you had gone to Constantinople. For so long? It must have all the delights of the other world to have kept you away from Paris! Oh, London, I see. But—London is so cold. And the British—they are so cold.

Since no one from his past appeared, from doorways or otherwise, he was left to sip his cassis and ponder. What was wanted was information, and he knew just the sort he would be looking for, but he had only the vaguest idea of where to find it. Professor Moriarty’s thesis was that the madman, whoever he was, came from France, and thus the plot had originated in France. There were other places in the world where they spoke French, but only in France was the enmity against Britain strong enough to have spawned a plot of this complexity and expense. Ergo it was in France that traces of it might be found, and if it originated in France, then it probably came from Paris.

Barnett took out his pocket notebook and reexamined the notes he had made during the journey. Presumptions: The killer was recruited for this job because he looked sufficiently like the prince to fool at least anyone who didn’t know the prince personally, and because he was a killer—that is, he had previously shown some interest in and prowess at the murder and gruesome dissection of his victims. So somewhere in France—assuming Moriarty was right—there should be some record of a tall, thin, aristocratic-looking homicidal maniac.

Where to look?

“It is usually futile to speculate,” the professor had said, “when you don’t have all the facts, but if there’s no way to assemble the needed facts, a bit of speculation might at least point you in a favorable direction.” The professor had ventured, admitting that it was a step into the dark, that the trace of the killer might be found in the demimonde—the world where the faux prince would have found his first victims. If he had aimed higher, among respectable women, the outcry would have been huge. The city—or whatever area of France in which he perpetrated his horrors—would have crept about in fear, and the headlines in
les journaux
would have spoken of nothing else for weeks. If he had merely attacked random women in the streets, whether streetwalkers or the bourgeoisie, the resulting panic would have been the same, as witness the impact of Jack the Ripper on the streets of London a few years before.

So his victims, Moriarty surmised, would have been women—or men—who took men home for fun and profit and who had a flat to take them to, since whatever happened didn’t happen on the streets. It was estimated, by the authorities that estimate such things, that there were well over ten thousand such women in Paris, and if on occasion one got sliced up the
flics
would not be eager to call attention to the event.

There were several possible sources of information about these women: the doctors who treated the various ailments common to such women, the police who kept an eye on such women, the reformers who went among the ladies of the evening to entreat them to turn their footsteps from the paths of sin and vice and spend their days knitting and starving to death in a genteel and ladylike manner, and the women themselves, if they could be enticed to talk.
Les filles de joie
told their customers what they thought the men wanted to hear, and it would be difficult to elicit from them the secrets that they whispered and shuddered at among themselves.

Barnett pulled the gold pocket watch from his vest pocket, and his eyes went to the motto engraved on the face before he clicked it open.
Tempus fugit non autem memoria: Time is fleeting but memories remain
. The watch had been given to him by the widow of a British officer who had died in the massacre at Khartoum some five years before. She said that he’d be doing her a favor by taking it, as the watch, with that motto, was not what she chose to remember her husband by.

It was a bit past ten o’clock. Barnett rose, threw some coins on the table, and headed in the general direction of Pigalle, where the night’s activities were just beginning and a man could find a friend at a reasonable price. Or, often, merely a kind word, a meal, and a place to sleep.

Three hours later he returned to the hotel, having resisted temptation in its manifold forms and learned nothing of any use. Perhaps in the morning something would suggest itself. He lay in bed tossing and turning fretfully for perhaps a full thirty seconds before sleep overtook him.

*   *   *

At nine the next morning, feeling very virtuous for having managed to shower, shave, and dress before noon, he headed downstairs to find some quiet nook where he could have a spot of breakfast and a café au lait or two and read a morning paper.

As he rounded the final bend in the staircase he came upon a man, or at least the tall, thin, angular back of a man, dressed in good Scottish tweeds and an air of ineffable correctitude, accosting the concierge at the front desk, and heard the unexpected words, “My name is Holmes, Sherlock Holmes.”

Barnett paused.

“Send a boy up to Monsieur Benjamin Barnett’s room,
s’il vous plaît,
and tell him I await him in the lobby.”

“I shall have Monsieur Barneet informed of your presence,” the concierge agreed.

“Fine. I shall sit over there.” The tall man pointed to one of a pair of overstuffed chairs in the corner and proceeded to cross the lobby and sit.

For a moment Barnett wasn’t sure what he should do. Holmes and Moriarty were, to put it politely, not the best of friends. What was Holmes doing in Paris? Was Barnett once again to be accosted and charged with being a minion of the professor in some undefined nefarious scheme? Had Holmes suddenly appeared to put some barrier in the way of Barnett’s efforts, not understanding what was actually happening?

There was nothing to it, Barnett realized, but to confront Holmes and see what he had to say. Barnett couldn’t go skulking around Paris for the next few days avoiding the man and at the same time trying to do his job. He put on his best nonchalant expression and strode across the lobby. “Well, Mr. Holmes, what an unexpected pleasure.”

Holmes rose. “Ah, there you are,” he said. “Good morning.” He extended his hand.

Well, at least it wasn’t to be open warfare. Barnett exchanged a firm but brief handshake. “What on earth brought you here,” he asked, “and how did you know where to find me?”

“Easily explained,” Holmes said, waving Barnett to the seat next to his and sitting back down. Barnett noted that the detective was thinner than he remembered, and his face was drawn, as though he had not been eating well.

“I returned from the little task that has occupied me for the last few months,” Holmes told him, “and determined that I would relax in Paris for a fortnight before getting back to the chores of London. I sent a cable to Dr. Watson to inform him of my reemergence and enquire as to the state of things at home. An hour later—an hour later, mind you—I received a response from my brother, Mycroft.