Throughout this performance, I took in Professor James Moriarty. Tall, stooped, hair thin at the temples, cheeks sunken, wearing a dusty (no, chalky) frock coat, sallow as only an indoorsman can be; yellow cigarette stain between his first and second fingers, teeth to match. And, obviously, very pleased with himself.
He reminded me of Gladstone gone wrong. With just a touch of a hill-chief who had tortured me with fire ants.
But I had no patience with his lecture. I’d eaten enough of that from the pater for a lifetime.
‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ I interrupted…
The Professor was unpleasantly surprised. It was as if no one had ever dared break into one of his speeches before. He halted in his tracks, swivelled his skull and levelled those shotgun-barrel-hole eyes at me.
‘I’ve had this done at a bazaar,’ I continued. ‘It’s no great trick. The fortuneteller notices tiny little things and makes dead-eye guesses — you can tell I gamble from the marks on my cuffs, and was in Afghanistan by the colour of my tan. If you spout with enough confidence, you score so many hits the bits you get wrong — like that tommyrot about being addicted to danger — are swallowed and forgotten. I’d expected a better show from your advance notices, “Professor”.’
He slapped me across the face, swiftly, with a hand like wet leather.
Now, I was amazed.
I knew I was vermilion again, and my dukes went up.
Moriarty whirled, coat-tails flying, and his boot-toe struck me in the groin, belly and chest. I found myself sat in a deep chair, too shocked to hurt, pinned down by wiry, strong hands which pressed my wrists to the armrests. That dead face was close up to mine and those eyes horribly filled the view.
That calm he mentioned came on me. And I knew I should just sit still and listen.
‘Only an idiot guesses or reasons or deduces,’ the Professor said, patiently. He withdrew, which meant I could breathe again and become aware of how much pain I was in. ‘No one comes into these rooms unless I know everything about him that can be found out through the simple means of asking behind his back. The public record is easily filled in by looking in any one of a number of reference books, from the Army Guide to Who’s Who. But all the interesting material comes from a man’s enemies. I am not a conjurer, Colonel Moran. I am a scientist.’
There was a large telescope in the room, aimed out of the window. On the walls were astronomical charts and a collection of impaled insects. A long side table was piled with brass, copper and glass contraptions I took for parts of instruments used in the study of the stars or navigation at sea. That shows I wasn’t yet used to the Professor. Everything about him was lethal, and that included his assorted bric-a-brac.
It was hard to miss the small kitten pinned to the mantelpiece by a jackknife. The skewering had been skilfully done, through the velvety skinfolds of the haunches. The animal mewled from time to time, not in any especial pain.
‘An experiment with morphine derivatives,’ he explained, following my gaze. ‘Tibbles will let us know when the effect wears off.’
Moriarty posed by his telescope, bony fingers gripping his lapel.
I remembered Stamford’s manner, puffed up with a feeling he was protected but tinged with terror. At any moment, the great power to which he had sworn allegiance might capriciously or justifiably turn on him with destructive ferocity. I remembered the Criterion barman digging into his own pocket to settle our bill — which, I now realised, was as natural as the Duke of Clarence gumming his own stamps or Florence Nightingale giving sixpenny knee-tremblers in D’Arblay Street.
Beside the Professor, that ant-man was genteel.
‘Who are you?’ I asked, unaccustomed to the reverential tone I heard in my own voice. ‘What are you?’
Moriarty smiled his adder’s smile.
And I relaxed. I knew. My destiny and his wound together. It was a sensation I’d never got before upon meeting a man. When I’d had it from women, the upshot ranged from disappointment to attempted murder. Understand me, Professor James Moriarty was a hateful man, the most hateful, hateable, creature I have ever known, not excluding Sir Augustus and Kali’s Kitten and the Abominable Bloody Snow-Bastard and the Reverend Henry James Prince[8]. He was something man-shaped that had crawled out from under a rock and moved into the manor house. But, at that moment, I was his, and I remain his forever. If I am remembered, it will be because I knew him. From that day on, he was my father, my commanding officer, my heathen idol, my fortune and terror and rapture.
God, I could have done with a stiff drink.
Instead, the Professor tinkled a silly little bell and Mrs Halifax trotted in with a tray of tea. One look and I could tell she was his, too. Stamford had understated the case when he said half the folk in the Criterion Bar worked for Moriarty. My guess is that, at bottom, the whole world worked for him. They’ve called him the Napoleon of Crime, but that’s just putting what he is, what he does, in a cage. He’s not a criminal, he is crime itself, sin raised to an art form, a church with no religion but rapine, a God of Evil. Pardon my purple prose, but there it is. Moriarty brings things out in people, things from their depths.
He poured me tea.
‘I have had an eye on you for some time, Colonel Moran. Some little time. Your dossier is thick, in here…’
He tapped his concave temple.
This was literally true. He kept no notes, no files, no address book or appointment diary. It was all in his head. Someone who knows more than I do about sums told me that Moriarty’s greatest feat was to write The Dynamics of an Asteroid, his magnum opus, in perfect first draft. From his mind to paper, with no preliminary notations or pencilled workings, never thinking forward to plan or skipping back to correct. As if he were singing ‘one long, pure note of astro-mathematics, like a castrato nightingale delivering a hundred-thousand-word telegram from Prometheus.’
‘You have come to these rooms and have already seen too much to leave…’
An ice-blade slid through my ribs into my heart.
‘…except as, we might say, one of the family’.
The ice melted, and I felt tingly and warm. With the phrase, ‘one of the family’, he had arched his eyebrow invitingly.
He stroked Tibbles, who was starting to leak and make nasty little noises.
‘We are a large family, many cells with no knowledge of each other, devoted to varied pursuits. Most, though not all, are concerned with money. I own that other elements of our enterprise interest me far more. We are alike in that. You only think you gamble for money. In fact, you gamble to lose. You even hunt to lose, knowing you must eventually be eaten by a predator more fearsome than yourself. For you, it is an emotional, instinctual, sensual thrill. For me, there are intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual rewards. But, inconveniently, money must come into it. A great deal of money.’
8
Henry James Prince (1811–99), excommunicated from the Church of England for ‘radical teachings’, founded a pseudo-religious order, the Agapemone (Abode of Love), in Spaxton, Somerset, in 1845. His most fervent disciples were women with money. The Agapemone was one of several nineteenth-century communions run along the lines of the groups later established by Sun Myung Moon or L. Ron Hubbard. The circumstances of Moran’s encounter or encounters with Prince are not known at this time. See: