The Great Game (6 page)

             
"Yes, sir, quite possibly.
The gentleman said to tell you that it was in regard to one of your agents in Vienna. That he is in danger."

             
"Really?
How curious."
Moriarty looked up at Mr. Maws. "What does the gentleman look like?"

             
Mr. Maws flexed his thumbs thoughtfully.
"A foreigner.
Not a toff. Straight enough, I'd say. He looks as if he doesn't enjoy eating—or much else, if I'm any judge," he appraised.

             
"Ah!" Moriarty said.
"An aesthete or a worrier?
Well, we'll see. Show the gentleman in."

             
Mr. Maws nodded and left the room. Seconds later he returned.

             
"The gent ain't worrying anymore," he announced in a carefully impassive voice. "He's dead!"

             
Moriarty raised an eyebrow. "Well!" he said. He rounded his desk and strode into the hall. Karl Friedrich Marie Stassenkopp, Litt. D. was lying on his back inside the entranceway, his feet bent to one side, his eyes staring sightlessly upward at the gaslight in the hall. He looked surprised. A pool of blood was growing under his shoulders, and a smeared line of blood led out the closed front door.

             
"I see you brought him inside," Moriarty said, indicating the bloody trail.

             
"I pulled him inside so I could close the door," Mr. Maws explained. "I didn't want people noticing the poor gentleman until you decided what to do. Besides, I didn't think you'd
be wanting
to stand in the doorway with whoever killed him still out there."

             
"Ah! Sound logic." Moriarty felt for a pulse in the man's neck and bent over, his head next to the man's face, to listen for sounds of breathing. After a few seconds he raised his head. "You're right," he said.
"Dead.
Now, as to what caused his sudden demise—" He gingerly rolled the man over.

             
Two inches below Karl Friedrich's shoulder blades, to the left of the spine, a thick, black-feathered shaft could be made out protruding slightly from the bloody hole it had made entering the body. The fabric of the suit jacket had been twisted and pulled into the wound along with the projectile.

             
"Well I'm damned!" Mr. Maws exclaimed.
"A bleedin' arrow!"

             
Moriarty carefully loosened the cloth around the shaft and examined the wound. "Actually it's a crossbow bolt," he told Mr. Maws. "Practically
silent,
and very deadly. It must have pierced the heart, killing him instantly.
Hence the comparatively limited loss of blood."
He laid the body down and stood up. "Interesting," he said.

Adventures are to the adventurous

— Benjamin Disraeli

             
The fat man and his three companions boarded the
Rete Mediterranea
first-class carriage at the Monza station. The train had just braked to a stop with a great letting of steam from the aging engine, when Benjamin Barnett caught a glimpse of them through his compartment window.

             
The fat man was perched precariously on an upended black portmanteau from which he gesticulated to the others. He wore a wide-brimmed gray felt hat and a white suit; a red handkerchief flopped with bohemian abandon from his jacket pocket. His companions, who were paying close attention to his every word and gesture, were a small, round-faced clergyman with thick, circular-lensed eyeglasses, carrying a straw suitcase; a dark youth with big feet and dull eyes, wearing a mud-yellow and brown checked suit at least one size too small for his lanky frame; and a woman of indeterminate age and odd, birdlike movements, clothed in black from the top of her veil to the soles of her patent-leather high-button shoes. Her only impediment was a covered birdcage about the size of a breadbox.

             
Barnett, a stocky, brown-haired expatriate American in his late thirties, watched the quartet with interest. They seemed to him a strangely assorted group. "Italy once again shows us her diversity," he told his wife, who was sitting across from him. "What do you make of those four?"

             
Cecily Barnett looked up from the red-backed Baedeker guidebook of Northern Italy and peered out the window just as the
treni diretti
came to a shuddering stop. She was a slender, blond, self-contained, gently beautiful woman some five years younger than her husband. Her eyes, the lines of her mouth, and the way she bore herself told of determination and, for those who could read the most subtle indications, of an unresolved sadness that she carried with her.

             
"Actually they are quite interesting," she said, after examining the group for a minute as they gathered their baggage and prepared to board the train. "The stout gentleman would seem to be an artist of some sort.
One of those gay bohemians currently infesting Paris and Vienna.
Or, at least, so he would have the world think. The youth is a sporting type of little intellect. The priest—the clerical raiment hides many possibilities. The woman is something of an enigma. She is dressed like a widow, but has no wedding ring on her finger. She carries a birdcage that is so devoid of independent motion that one suspects that it does not contain a bird."

             
"You have a consummate eye for detail," Barnett said. "Why do you say 'He would have us think so
?'
You have begun to suspect everyone you see of being other than he seems."

             
Cecily turned to look at him, and he realized he had said the wrong thing. "Not everyone," she replied sharply. She folded her hands neatly in her lap and stared straight ahead; a look that Barnett knew masked extreme annoyance. "And it's not a question of suspicion. I am
merely relating my observations and deductions. If you don't want my opinion, why do you ask me?"

             
"I was merely making conversation," Barnett replied, trying not to sound defensive. "And I do value your opinion. I'm so sorry if you feel otherwise. You are an extremely perceptive person. Even Professor Moriarty has said so. But I thought I was pointing out some interesting native fauna, not another mystery. I admit I think you've been overwrought lately." He reached out to pat her hand, but she drew it back sharply into the folds of her green traveling-cloak.

             
"I believe, as I told you, that we've been watched since we left
London," Cecily said coldly. Whether the studied lack of emotion in her voice masked anger or fear, or both, Barnett couldn't tell. "This is the result of my observations and deductions, which you usually are willing to credit with being fairly accurate. I am no Professor Moriarty, perhaps, but I do seem to have the knack for that sort of thing. The professor himself, you will remember, has valued my opinion on occasion. But just because you can't think of any reason why anyone should be watching us, you give no credence to what I say and think that, because I have not been well of late, I'm either incompetent or insane. That would certainly tend to make one overwrought."

             
"I don't think you're insane," Barnett protested. "I merely think that, in this instance, you're mistaken."

             
"You wouldn't think so if I were a man," Cecily said, and turned pointedly back to her book.

             
That, Barnett thought, was an unfair remark. He repressed the urge to call it "female logic," since he had a feeling that would do more harm than good, and he didn't want to start any more of a fight than they were already in. There is a time for discussion and a time for letting it lie, he thought, leaning back in his seat. He had the virtuous feeling of one who knows he is in the right, but allows another the last word.

             
Barnett had tried in various ways to check on the people Cecily believed were watching them, but it's hard to tell whether someone on the same train or staying at the same hotel is really there just to keep watch on you. None of Cecily's objects of suspicion skulked about peering at them from behind lampposts. And it was an unlikely series of people—an old man with piercing blue eyes at the Majestic in Paris; a little, bulldog-faced man on the train to Rome; a handsome, aristocratic-looking woman who struck up a conversation with Barnett at the Hotel Excelsior in Rome—that Cecily suspected of being in league to keep an eye on the Barnett family. Barnett admitted to himself that he would have found it easier to believe if he could think of any reason why anyone would find them interesting enough to want to follow them about.

             
The
Capostazione,
the master of this Italian railway station, bedecked in a uniform that would not look out of place on the leader of a circus orchestra, appeared on the platform to give the departure signal, and the train heaved itself back into motion. As it gathered speed, the fat man and his companions tramped down the corridor and distributed themselves among the nearly empty first-class compartments. Barnett saw the fat man pass by and peer through the glass in the compartment door at them; he was closely followed by the woman in black. Judging by the
sounds, they settled in the next two compartments. The clergyman and the youth passed not at all; they must have chosen earlier compartments.

             
That, Barnett reflected, was odd. They had certainly known each other on the platform, and here they were settling in different compartments. He was about to mention it to Cecily, but he decided that, in her present mood, she would think he was humoring her.

             
It was now Tuesday the tenth of March, 1891. Benjamin and Cecily Barnett were indulging in an off-season tour of Europe that had already lasted for six weeks and would probably last for as many more. Cecily was recuperating from a late-term miscarriage, her second in two years, which had debilitated her mentally and physically. Their only companion, a midget-of-all-work named "Mummer" Tolliver, was ahead of them with the bulk of their baggage, supervising its installation in the
pensione
on Lake Como that was their next destination.

             
This long overdue vacation was the first either of them had taken that was not combined with a business trip of some sort. Even their two-week honeymoon in Paris had been used to set up a French bureau for the American News Service, Barnett's cable news bureau based in London, which supplied European news to American newspapers. Cecily Barnett had once worked for her husband, but she was now the editor of
Hogbine's Illustrated Weekly,
one of the most successful magazines of the Hogbine group.

             
"I am assured by the conductor," Barnett said after a couple of minutes' silence, "that the train's
carrozza ristorante
will be opened for dinner after the train leaves Monza. Would you care to join me?" Barnett used the Italian phrase for "dining car" in a self-conscious attempt to end his spat with Cecily; she was always amused by the way he pronounced any foreign words. But sometimes the best-laid plans do not work.

             
"If you're not afraid I'll make a scene," Cecily said. "Perhaps waving my arms about and accusing the conductor of spying on us. I wouldn't want to make a scene."

             
Barnett sighed. "I'll trust to your discretion," he said.

             
They went back to the
carrozza ristorante
to eat thin slices of pounded veal and green peppers, thick slices of crusty bread, and a massive salad with olives and anchovies, and drink a fruity red wine. The trains of the
Rete Mediterranea
were in a period of genteel decay, with neglected twenty-year-old cars pulled by patched-together twenty-year-old engines. A trip that might take five hours on a rapid train elsewhere in Europe could take up to twenty hours on the
treni diretti.
Or thrice that, if it was unfortunate enough to break down.
Traveling in Italy, even first class, was an adventure. But the food was good.