The Great Game (2 page)

             
"Indeed. About two hours ago. Now I intend to sleep for as long as nature allows me, and then indulge in a soak, and then prepare for our trip. I shall not touch the needle again until after our forthcoming adventure is over, if then. You have my word."

             
"Truly, Holmes?"

             
Holmes shook his head. "I told you, old friend, that I resort to drugs only to relieve the considerable ennui of existence. When I observe that the practice seems to be clouding my judgment, particularly in regard to my old nemesis Professor Moriarty—when I find myself peering under the bureau to see if he is lurking there—then it would seem to be time to stop."

             
"Wisdom indeed, if a long time coming," Moriarty commented. "You realize now that I am not the villain you have made me out to be?"

             
"Not at all, Professor," Holmes averred, "I merely realized that you would never fit under the bureau."

             
Moriarty raised an eyebrow. "You keep accusing me of committing the most heinous crimes, and you seem positively disappointed when you discover you are mistaken, Holmes. I freely admit—in the confines of this room—that some of my activities are not what this straitlaced society would consider proper, even that I have broken the laws of this country on occasion. But I am not the monstrous master criminal you make me out to be."

             
"If so," Holmes said, shaking a finger in Moriarty's general direction, "it is not for lack of trying."

             
"Bah!" Moriarty turned to Dr. Watson. "It is not merely the
cocaine," he said, "
his
brain is addled. Take care of him, Doctor." He nodded to both of them and strode out of the room and down the stairs.

             
Holmes shook his head.
"A telegram to Professor Moriarty.
What an idea. Watson, sometimes you amaze me." He stood up. "I shall sleep now, Watson."

             
"Good idea, Holmes."

Ah Vienna, city of Dreams!

There's no place like Vienna!

— Robert Musil,

The Man
Without
Qualities

             
It was Tuesday the third of March, in the year 1891, the fifty-fourth year in the reign of Victoria Saxe-Coburg, queen of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland and empress of India, and the forty-third year in the reign of Franz Josef Habsburg-Lorraine, king of the dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary and emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that the incidents here recorded might properly be said to have begun. Although, as any reasoning person knows, beginnings are rooted deeply in the past, as endings resound into the future.

             
The Habsburg rulers traced their ancestry back to the ninth-century Count Werner of Habichtsburg, and their dynasty back to 1273, when Rudolf Habsburg was chosen emperor of Germany. Their dynastic fortunes put the Habsburgs on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, which for a time covered much of Europe, including Spain and northern Italy. It had been reduced in size for the past century, and no longer claimed to be either holy or Roman; but now, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it still embraced Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Rumelia, Herzegovina, Carniola, Galacia, Silesia, Bukowina, Croatia, and bits and pieces of Poland and Rumania. But its size was no longer an indication of either strength or stability, and heirs to ancient dynasties do not necessarily make wise or competent rulers.

             
With the start of this closing decade of the nineteenth century an almost palpable feeling of imminent great change was in the air. The coming century promised continuing invention and exploration, and a renewed sense of novelty and innovation. These last years of the old century were already being called the
fin de si
è
cle—
the end of the century—as though they were a time apart. There were those, as there are at the end of every century, who thought that it marked the coming end of the world: that a great cataclysm would wipe out the human race and all its works, or that the Christ was destined to reappear and walk among us and save the elect, and leave the rest of us to our predestined horrible fate. The years 1898 and 1903 were two favorite predictions for this event, as well as the change-of-century year itself; although there was considerable disagreement as to whether this would occur in 1900 or 1901.

             
For many people, particularly in the great cosmopolitan centers of Vienna, Paris, and London, the
fin de si
è
cle
marked not the end of time, but the beginning of everything new. A new and creative spirit was already at work. New thoughts and ideas in fashion, in the arts, and in politics occupied those young enough to look forward to spending their lives in a new century and horrified those firmly entrenched in the age that Victoria had made her own.

             
Political change was as a tempest upon the land, and a score of political philosophies, some old and reborn, and some new and still only partly formed, fought for dominance in the minds of the intellectuals and the students and the hearts of the petite bourgeoisie and the poor.
Some were materialistic, some authoritarian, some socialistic, some pacifistic—and some were nihilistic and violent.

-

             
In another time and place he was Charles Dupresque Murray Bredlon Summerdane, the younger son of the Duke of Albermar, with an income in his own right of some thirty thousand pounds a year. For the first decade of his adult life he had drifted, going where the tides and his appetites and interests took him. After Eton he had attended Oxford, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Bologna, and had studied what he felt like studying, coming away with a smattering of knowledge about this and that, and a talent for languages. Then for a while he had returned to his residence in Belgrave Square, taken up his membership in White's, Pitt's, the Diogenes, and other clubs where the men who rule Britain sip their whiskies-and-sodas and complain of the state of the world. He had done, as the rich and titled have felt privileged to do from time immemorial, very little. He had spent money on his own pleasures, but not nearly as much as he could have; his pleasures being restricted to collecting rare books on history and biography, singing and acting (incognito) in the chorus of several of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan's operettas, and occasional discreet trips to Paris for reasons of his own. For the last decade he had been on every list, in those places where they make up such lists, as one of the most eligible bachelors in London.

             
But for now, and for good and sufficient reason, he had put that life aside. He had grown a wide mustache and a small spade beard, and moved into two rooms on the top floor above a draper's shop at No. 62 Reichsratstrasse. They knew him there as Paul Donzhof, a struggling writer of pieces for the
Neue Freie Presse
and other intellectual journals, and a composer of avant-garde orchestral tone poems. "Paul" had occupied these lodgings in Vienna's bohemian Rathaus Quarter for almost a year. Since he arrived he had made many friends among the students and intellectuals, as well as a strange assortment of bohemian poets and playwrights, for he was known to be generous with the allowance of three hundred kronen his father, a Bavarian manufacturer of beer steins, sent him every month.

             
For the past six months "Paul" had been on intimate terms with a young lady named Giselle Schiff; just how intimate is their concern only. She lived conveniently near, in the apartment one floor
below his own
. A tall, lissome blonde of twenty-two, Giselle was an artist's model, and she was saving her kronen so that before the artists traded her in for a younger model she could open a store selling toys for small children. Even now when she was not modeling she made dolls with lovely porcelain faces, designing and sewing the filmy clothing for her miniature princesses herself. Paul suspected that "Giselle" was her own creation much as "Paul" was his; an artist's model
who
produced a French name did more posing than your common garden variety Ursula or Brunhilde. It apparently wasn't necessary to actually speak French, or even have a French accent; Giselle spoke a slightly sibilant, if charmingly lilting, Viennese German, into which she would occasionally toss a delightfully mispronounced French word, particularly when she was discussing either of her two passions: art and food.

             
Paul spent most days dressed in the casual garb of a bohemian artist, sitting in one or another of the various cafes and beer halls that were sprinkled about the city, surrounded by the
notebooks in which he wrote his essays and his music. Each cafe, each beer hall, catered to a different clientele, and the circles intersected only slightly. Paul's acquaintances of one
café
did not associate with his friends from another. The Socialists, who squabbled daily at the Café Mozart on Opernstrasse, seldom even passed by the
Café
Figaro on Neustiftgasse, which the anarchists occupied like an invading army. The Kaiserreich Bierstube on Idarstrasse, where imperial civil servants stared dolefully into a mug or two before heading home, might have been in another world from the Baron Münchhausen Bierhalle around the corner on Prinz Rupert Platz, where the young officers attached to the Imperial General Staff strutted and preened.

             
On the nights when he did not stay home working, Paul dressed like a gentleman and escorted Giselle to the opera or the theater, or on occasion went alone to one of the clubs of questionable legality and dubious morality at which Austrian gentlemen, accompanied by women who were assuredly not their wives, went in for the more earthly pleasures.

             
This afternoon Paul was just completing a leisurely lunch at a table by the window in the
Café
Figaro when a short, hunchbacked man with a large nose, an oversized slouch hat, a dark brown raincoat of the overly-protective sort worn by carriage drivers, and a furtive air came in out of the chill drizzle that had settled over Vienna on Sunday and showed no signs of departing. The man shook himself off, unbuttoned his raincoat, and sidled over to Paul's table. "Good afternoon, Herr Donzhof," he murmured, sliding into the chair across from him.

             
Paul studied the apparition carefully for a minute. "Feodor— Herr Hessenkopf—is that you?"

             
"Please!" The man dropped his voice until he could barely be heard at all. "No names! And keep your voice down. They are always listening!"

             
"You used my name," Paul said mildly. "Why are you got up like Quasimodo? Are you trying for a part in the opera?"

             
"Opera?"
Hessenkopf blinked. "Is there an opera of 'Notre Dame'?"

             
"Certainly," Paul said.
"Why not?"

             
Hessenkopf thought it over for a moment and then shook his head. "I think you are joking," he said. "I am not for the opera. I am in disguise."

             
"A hump?"

             
"Why not a hump?
It is one of the first principles of disguise: a disfigurement or abnormality will cause people to look away from you. Number One explained that to us, if you will remember."

             
"I think he meant an artfully created scar across the face, or something of that sort," Paul suggested.

             
"I do not know how to create such a scar," Quasimodo said.

             
"Ah!" Paul said. "That explains it."

             
"You should not talk. The way you dress—that brown wool pullover, which once surely belonged to a much larger man; that aged and now shapeless army greatcoat; that too-wide brown cap with its too-narrow bill—you can be identified from across the street." Hessenkopf signaled the waiter to bring him a cup of coffee. Paul also made a similar gesture in the waiter's direction.