The man dropped the waistcoat and for the first time turned to Chauvelin. "Where is it?" he asked, in the measured, reasonable tone of one who sees nothing unusual about his question. It might have been "What is the time?" or "Unreasonably chilly, isn't it?" from an acquaintance at the track. But it wasn't. It was a cloaked stranger, in his bedroom at four o'clock in the morning.
"Where is it?" the man repeated.
"What?" Chauvelin asked. "Look, my man." He took two steps forward and prodded at the apparition with his chair. "I don't know how you got in here, or what it is you think you're doing, but I am not amused. Come to think of it, how did you get in here, anyway?"
The man knocked the chair aside as a thing of no consequence and grabbed Chauvelin by the shirtfront with his left hand. "The bauble," he said, forcing Chauvelin to his knees. "Where do you keep it?"
Chauvelin's bowels knotted with fear. He felt a great desire to be calm, to be reasonable, to keep the conversation with his uninvited guest on a friendly level. "Bauble?" he asked. "What's mine is yours, I assure you. You have but to ask. What bauble? I don't go in for baubles. I have an extensive collection of cravats—"
"The bauble," the man repeated. "The device, the signet, the devil's sign."
"Devil's—" A strange look crossed the face of Desmond Chauvelin; a look of comprehension, and of fear. Of its own volition his right hand reached down and touched the fob pocket sewn into the top of his trouser waistband.
"So!" the man said. Slapping Chauvelin's hand aside, he reached into the small pocket and pulled out a circular gold locket designed like a miniature pocket watch. He flipped open the lid and looked inside, and the devil, arms akimbo, stared back at him. Spaced evenly around the outside of the engraving, circling and confining the devil, were the capital letters D C L X V I.
"Oh, that bauble," Chauvelin said.
The man picked Chauvelin up and threw him across the room. Chauvelin hit the floor and slid and tumbled, coming up hard against the high oaken sides of the four-poster bed. He felt something wrench and snap inside of him, and an intense pain centered itself on the left side of his chest. He did not lose consciousness, but the bubble of reason popped inside his brain and he began to whimper like a frightened baby.
There was, deep inside Chauvelin, a point of awareness, an observer that remained detached, and quizzical, and faintly amused, while his body retched with fear and curled into a tight little ball on the floor. That was interesting; he had always surmised that it would be so.
"I am going to kill you," the dark man said, striding across the room. "Don't vomit; none of the others have vomited."
Chauvelin raised his right arm defensively before his face.
From somewhere the tall dark man produced a cane. He looked down at Chauvelin almost compassionately. "I must do this, you understand," he said. "I am the wind."
Chauvelin gagged and puked all over his white shirtfront.
The tall man twisted the cane and pulled out a slim knife with a razor-sharp nine-inch blade. "The wind," he said. He bent over Chauvelin.
THIRTEEN — THE PROBLEM
Laws were made to be broken.
— Christopher North
For the past five days, since the evening of his return from the observatory, Professor Moriarty had remained in his room. Surrounded by a great pile of books, mostly on loan from one of the libraries of the British Museum, he spent each day wrapped in his blue dressing gown, stretched out on his bed reading, or pacing back and forth across the small rectangle of floor between the bed and the dressing table, drinking tea, and smoking a particularly acrid brand of Turkish cigarettes.
"It is the cigarettes I object to mostly," Mrs. H told Barnett over breakfast the next Friday. "It will take months to get the smell out of the drapes and bed curtains. And when he is not smoking the wretched things himself, he cannot abide the smell."
"I find these periodic retreats of the professor's to be very trying," Barnett said. "This is the fifth time in the two years I've been here that he has disappeared into his bedroom for an extended period, and it always happens at the most awkward times. Everything has to grind to a halt around here while Moriarty takes to his bed and reads about aardvarks."
"You misunderstand," Mrs. H said, leaning forward and waving a buttered muffin in Barnett's face. "He is not retreating, no indeed! The professor is working this time. I've been with him for a good many years, and I can tell. It's his smoking those cigarettes that makes the difference. When it's lethargy or lassitude, Mr. Barnett, he smokes a pipe. When it's work, it's those vile cigarettes. And then he's asking for specific books to be brought to him. When he's in one of his sulks and in seclusion from the world, he merely works his way alphabetically through the collections in the Grenville Library or the King's Library of the British Museum."
"So the professor's hard at work up there, pacing back and forth," Barnett said.
" 'At's right enough," Mummer Tolliver said from his perch in the large armchair at the head of the dining table, where he was gorging himself from the platter of fresh, hot muffins and the stoneware jug of marmalade. "And it's a fine thing to see. Not that you can see the process — the wheels turning, so to speak — it's the results! Professor Moriarty is in his room, thinking; and the world had better watch its step!"
Barnett poured some fresh cream into his coffee and stirred it with one of the delicate lace-pattern Queen Anne spoons from what Mrs. H insisted upon referring to as "the old service."
"What do you suppose he spends his time thinking about while he's pacing back and forth and puffing Turkish smoke?" he asked.
"Once it was about gravity," Mrs. H said. "About how it keeps all the stars and planets circling in their proper places. He was watching this asteroid through his telescope, what he calls a 'bit of rock flinging itself around the sun,' and it was just the slightest bit late in getting to where it was supposed to be. Well, the professor went up to his room and stayed there for weeks, pacing up and down and thinking about it. Other scientists might have just decided that their observations had been faulty, but not the professor! He wrote a paper on it when he came down that tells how all the parts of the universe relate to each other. Just from watching this tiny ball of rock out in space."
"The Dynamics of an Asteroid," Barnett said. "I've seen it."
"Another time he designed a safety gas mantle that would shut off the gas supply if the flame blew out. And then once he composed an epic poem in classical Greek in honor of a German archaeologist named Schliemann."
"Was it any good?" Barnett asked.
Mrs. H smiled. She carefully chewed and swallowed a bite of buttered muffin before replying, "It was Greek to me." Tolliver chortled. Barnett frowned.
"It's when 'e 'as a real problem that the professor, 'e goes off like this," Tolliver offered. "Why, I remember one time when 'e figured out 'ow to make a whole building disappear without a trace."
"Why would he want to do that?" Barnett asked.
"It were a bank," Tolliver explained.
"Ah!" Barnett said. "I wonder what sort of problem it is this time — a heavenly equation or an earthly conundrum."
"I think it's something what might be considered in the line of business," the Mummer offered. "That Indian gent, says 'is name is Singh, has been to see the professor two afternoons this week. He's the only bloke what the professor will see."