Professor Moriarty: The Hound Of The D’urbervilles (51 page)

Then, a form of pox caught fire in Conduit Street. Every female person in the house came down with it – the symptoms were angry red blotches over the face, persistent voiding of bodily wastes from every orifice, and sleeping spells which lasted from twenty to thirty hours. With Mrs Halifax and every one of her girls out of commission, customers had to be turned away. Those few persistent enough to barge in and insist on regular appointments encountered swollen, puking, shitting, spotted
filles de joie
and beat a hasty retreat.

Dr Velvet, the quack on hand for the girls’ little female complaints, didn’t know this pox, but said it was not venereal in character. He thought it might be an allergic reaction, but really couldn’t say – though he charged his usual fee for not saying. Velvet was especially puzzled that only the women in the house were affected – the sole exception being Slender Simon, the catamite Mrs H. kept on hand for those bucks whose tastes ran to tossing a pretty boy into the mix when taking ’em on two or three at a time.

Chop and Purbright brought up some girls from South of the River – savages with tattoos and bone earrings, to hear the men talk about them – and put them in the empty house across the way, taking care not to let them get anywhere near our sickening tarts. The new soiled doves came down with the pox too, and were disappointed in any hopes they had of meeting a gent from up West.

At the risk of incurring a debt no one wanted to think about, we secured a consultation from the Lord of Strange Deaths – who would, in other years, have been our number one suspect. As the world’s greatest expert in exotic poisons and subtle plagues, he saw straight off how it had been done. A mixture of Peruvian boomslang venom and Tanzanian desert rose sap had been smeared on soap used in the laundry where the bed sheets were washed. The Lord was, in his inscrutable way, irked that the attack against us had been made from a Chinese establishment in which he, naturally, had a controlling interest. By way of apology, he had the laundry manager crushed in his own steam press. An outsider, of course, was responsible.

A sudden rash of efficiency erupted in police forces across the nation. A crime Moriarty had carefully planned for an Edinburgh mob – the theft and ransom of a collection of horrible Highland landscape paintings which happened to be favourites of the Queen – was a fizzle. The lay was cracked exactly as the Professor dictated, but a posse of jock constables lay in wait with truncheons. In several towns, bought-and-paid-for coppers were mysteriously reassigned to menial duties and replaced by newly appointed hotheads with private incomes and a burning zeal to fight crime. A long-standing blackmail operation in Leeds was smashed when a dozen worthies simultaneously grew spines and took their lumps by owning up to indiscretions, misappropriations and other sins to wives, employers or the petty sessions court. Thus rendering an extensive archive of letters, photographs and statements gathered over a decade entirely valueless. Five myopic customs officers in Dover were given a choice between resignation or arrest, shutting down a handy black-market trade route to and from Europe. An all-comers bare-knuckles contest in Epping Forest was raided. Some of the greatest sports in the land, who liked a flutter on the pugilists, had to be politely reminded such pursuits were technically against the law. A courier was arrested in Amsterdam. When punched in the gut, he sicked up a lavender bag of uncut diamonds. Three ringleaders of the Conduit Street Comanche were seized from their dens, scrubbed with lye and packed off to schools in remote rural areas run by muscular Christian brothers with gruel, the lash and compulsory prayers at four in the morning.

All this was inconvenient. The next phase was more bothersome, and struck closer to home. We were hampered.

I’ve not dwelled much on the day-to-day business of the Firm. My duties were elevated, and as a consequence I had little to do with the collection of tithes from outfits operating under our aegis. Various London businesses – public houses, restaurants, sweet shops, opium dens, theatres, music halls, casinos, dog tracks, pie stalls – paid handsomely for the privilege of not having their premises raided by the Comanche. They also allowed the Firm the use of services from time to time, and provided household necessities and luxuries gratis. A great part of the economy of the city, even the
legitimate
economy, depends upon criminal custom, and Moriarty had painstakingly spun his web so we profited from our associations. Then, there was a hiccough.

Nathaniel Rawlins, a solicitor with only one client, came reluctantly to Conduit Street to announce that his collectors were coming up short. It was his duty to oversee collections, pay out salaries and bank profits with Box Brothers. He was terrified of earning the boss’ opprobrium, so let the shortfall go unreported for several vital days before bringing the matter to us. The Professor was busy with his wasps and his plans, so I had to deal with the matter. Rawlins assembled his tallymen, and I listened – with growing fury – to their complaints. Some formerly cowed proprietors were withholding payments, claiming that if they were paying for protection they should get it. Windows had been smashed, pot-boys roughed up, some obscene public displays shut down by the police, and a café in Tite Street closed after an outbreak of food poisoning caused by something less exotic than boomslang venom in the soup. Folk who’d been happy to pay and tell themselves that they were subdivisions of the Firm rather than victims of extortion were bleating loudly.

As assassin-in-chief, I was expected to eliminate a plague of minor officials, vandals, constables and annoying customers to pay back all those sovereigns we’d squeezed out of Soho. I was not about to put my new airgun – tested and sighted in, but not yet fired in the field – to such low use, and told the collectors to collect harder. Rawlins wouldn’t have recruited them if they weren’t capable. Over the fat years, they had got too used to an easy life, and let their saps go soft and knuckle-dusters get rusty. For a while, more insistent demands restored the flow of money... but then the Tite Street waiters, unemployed and crotchety, set about Bruiser Downes with table legs and saw him off. New faces sprung up in the street, eager to offer the protection it was whispered that the Firm could no longer deliver. Several of Rawlins’ collectors took beatings, set up in business for themselves (very unwise) or scarpered on long-planned seaside holidays. The Professor shrugged this drip-drip-drip problem off as not sufficiently interesting, and told me to take drastic measures. Unable to think of anyone else who could do the job, I negotiated with Margaret Trelawny – not a lady I was overly keen to dine with
á deux –
to borrow the Hoxton Creeper. His looming presence made the average publican or shop manager find cash they didn’t know they had to make arrears payments, but the Creeper was not subtle. Witnesses tended to remember his face, and couldn’t help giving good descriptions of him. Mad Margaret demanded a greater degree of autonomy for her Temple of Tera, which I was forced to grant her. At that, I fancied her mask smiled nastily.

The Firm was trembling.

Most of the Thoroughgood funeral party had hied back from whence they came – Dr Nikola was rumoured to be in the Congo, perfecting surgical procedures on gorillas – but
that bitch
was still in town. I considered setting the Creeper on her for my peace of mind, but the giant was a mug for a pretty face and I didn’t fancy having a spine-snapping juggernaut lobbed straight back at me. Irene and her beau were everywhere... at the opera, at society balls, giving charity concerts, visiting missions in the East End, dining with cabinet ministers. I wondered what had become of Colonel Sapt, the Ruritanian Secret Police Chief. When
that bitch
first plagued us, he was her companion and secret confederate. Sapt was a Rudolfite and Hentzau a Michaelist, so she’d hopped the fence in the Ruritanian succession debate. I assumed that, as ever, she was on nobody’s side but her own.

I discerned no obvious link between Irene Adler and the troubles besetting us, but she was up to
something.
Even if she was just in London to see the fireworks, she was a nagging pain. In a move which, even if I say so myself, was exceptionally clever, I assigned Sophy to discover
that bitch’s
secrets. Naturally impervious to the diva’s charms, our knife-woman also had experience enough with handsome scoundrels to see through Rupert’s hand-kissing insouciance.

Sophy came back and reported, with a cold smirk, that Irene’s main reason for staying in London was a secret course of beauty treatments at Madame Sara’s – touching up her hair colour, ironing out tiny wrinkles around her eyes. Sophy took great delight in this. Picking up Moriarty’s pet name for Irene, she amended it to
that
old
bitch.
I should have been reassured... but was struck with melancholia. Irene Adler, too, was not as young as she’d once been. Only Jo-Jo Balsamo was eternal, and she looked more marble statue than woman.

A week after Sophy’s intelligence, we received a formal letter from Madame Sara, severing all ties – financial and otherwise – with the Firm. Damn me, but I should have seen it coming. All the while she was having cream worked into her temples, Irene had worked her spell on the Sorceress of the Strand. The Derry & Tom’s androgyne was furiously pedalling off heartbreak on a bicycle tour of Wales while Sara worshipped at the altar of Adler. My instinct was to order an explosive reprisal against the Madame’s premises, prefaced by telephoning Lukens with a begorrah or two, but the papers announced Sara had temporarily shut up shop and would be travelling on the continent with friends. She had been invited to Ruritania to ‘do’ the Princess Flavia’s hair for an upcoming coronation. There might be time to nobble her before she boarded the boat-train, but what with all the other grief the Firm had only a skeleton staff on hand. Sophy volunteered to do the deed, but I didn’t want to chance such valuable asset on a mere pettish killing. A mad vitriol-chucker would do, but they were in short supply that season.

The Professor, uncharacteristically, said we should let Sara go and be glad to be rid of her if she took
that bitch
off the table. I hoped the pair of she-cats tore Rupert of Hentzau to pieces. When word got out that Moriarty had accepted letters of resignation and declarations of independence – hitherto unthinkable – there was a queue of messengers from ship-deserting rats of all colours. It was Decline and Fall to the letter, and the Goths and Vandals overrunning our empire sported size-nineteen boots and knob-end helmets.

The Firm ran a printing press in Wapping, running off snide
^[10]
good enough to pass in Threadneedle Street. Not an Archie Stamford botch, but prime quality forgery. In April, the plant was subtly sabotaged. Paper with a face value of £7,000 had to go in the furnace. The rag was excellent, the engraving exceptional and the ink mixed to the proper recipe. Our plates matched the genuine article, down to the rubric ‘For the Gov.r and Comp.a of the Bank of England, Frank May’, but our five-pound notes came out signed ‘James Moriarty’.

This prompted me to a
deduction:
our ‘Great Unknown’, the intelligence behind the strikes against us, couldn’t be Dr Mabuse, or – at least – not Mabuse solo. The nose-tweak with the chief cashier’s signature betrayed that most un-German characteristic:
a sense of humour.
I barged into the Prof’s study with this profound insight, but he’d already worked it out through wear on a vanished night-watchman’s left-behind trousers or the depth rat turds had sunk into the dripping pan on a hot day or somesuch.

‘Mabuse needed only to prick us,’ I was told. ‘He has put blood in the water. To alert the sharks. He himself has left the country. He is not at any of his Berlin addresses, which are watched constantly. He wears a new face. He is gone to earth. But he pays attention, follows the feeding frenzy.’

Moriarty had nervous energy now. For months he had accepted each blow and merely oscillated,
thinking thinking thinking...
I hoped we were at the point of
doing doing doing.

The Professor wiped wasps off his long canvas gloves, brushing them into the funnel of the glass and wood nest-maze he had constructed. He took down his best hat and pulled on his coat.

‘I have a call to pay, Moran,’ he said. ‘In Baker Street. A minor nuisance on the point of becoming a middle-sized obstacle must be bent to our purpose...’

Ah-hah, I thought, the Thin Man! He’d been a bother a time or two. The Birdy Edwards foul-up, for once. The Maupertuis fiasco, for twice. He’d also nabbed a couple of the Firm’s sometime clients: Grimesby Roylott was dead and John Clay gaoled thanks to his unwanted intervention. And... well, he was just a shit... a puffed-up, hectoring, tiresome beaky shit. With a halfway decent line in publicising himself, as witness: all those back numbers of
The Strand
piled up in the jakes.

This brothel-creeping keyhole bandit had popped up at the edges of the picture all spring. In Leeds, just before the smashing of the blackmail ring. At Scotland Yard, in conference with Inspector Patterson. Disguised as a trainer at the Epping Forest tourney. Delivering a box of papers to the Crown prosecutor in Dover. Treating himself to a celebratory beefsteak at Simpson’s in the Strand. He was one of the toothiest of the sharks tearing into our flanks.

‘This is his handiwork, then?’ I said, waving the funny money.

Moriarty allowed it was. ‘Most droll, Moran. Our
consulting detective
has the fingers of a forger. He has my signature to the curlicue. He could cash a cheque at Box Brothers.’

My fire rose. Larks like this got under my skin. I was heating up, and – after all these months of frustration – ready to ‘go off’ like Krakatoa.

‘Hang a dartboard on the fiddler’s back, Moriarty. The Von Herder’s fired in. This pestilential sleuth c--t would make a decent first kill for its bag!’

‘Not yet, Moran. I’ve a use in mind for the Thin Man.’