CHAPTER SIX: THE GREEK INVERTEBRATE
I
‘James,’ the Professor said.
‘James,’ his brother acknowledged.
‘You’ve not met my associate,’ Moriarty said. ‘Colonel Moran, Colonel Moriarty.’
‘Colonel,’ nodded the thin-faced cove.
‘Colonel,’ I responded.
I’ve seldom had cause to mention Moriarty’s family. Read on, and you’ll find out why.
Until that winter, I knew little of the clan. The parents had been lost at sea some years previously. The single odd thing my partner in crime — not just a turn of phrase — had let slip about his people was that Mr and Mrs Moriarty had such a liking for the name ‘James’ they gave it to each and every child of their union.
‘It’s James, James,’ the Colonel said.
Yes, there was a third Moriarty brother. It was fortunate there were no sisters.
The triplicate nonsense would have been even more confusing if any of the three brothers could lay claim to a single intimate acquaintance who might wish to address them by their first name. You’re feeling sorry for them now, aren’t you? No love for the Jameses Moriarty, boo hoo hoo. Just goes to show you never met any of ’em. If you had, you’d suppress a shudder and nod sagely. Only one Moriarty is a villain in the public eye (though not, as it happens, a court of law), but if you ask me the Professor wasn’t the worst of them.
Most of us are saddled with relations. I’ve touched on my own from time to time. Seldom happily. With regret, I discern traits passed down — though not anything useful, like the family loot — from old Sir Augustus to me. He was a terror, a bully and a cool shot in the service of Queen and Country. I’ve worked for myself — or the Prof — but otherwise carry on in pater’s tradition. I’ve also attained that sorry point in life when I look into the shaving mirror after a heavy night in the tap-room and see the old man staring back at me with bloodshot orbs. The propensity for slipperiness with cards, believe it or not, I have from dear Mama, who showed me how to deal from the bottom while I was in velvet knickers and had ringlets.
Somehow, the notion that Professor Moriarty had parents — might have been a child — never sat right. A viper is a snake straight from the egg. I couldn’t help but picture little Jamie as a balding midget in a sailor suit, spying Cook and the baker’s boy rolling in flour on the kitchen table through his toy telescope, and blackmailing them for extra buns.
It had been a profitable season for the Firm. We’d done nicely out of the Mystery of the Essex Werewolf, come out of the lamentable business of the Four Lemon Drops with surprising credit, and salvaged more than could be expected from the disaster of Loki Tunnel. Lately, England was too confining a laboratory for Moriarty’s experiments in crime.
We were expanding on the continent, tactfully skirting — for the moment — territories claimed by others and offering consultant services to blackguards in Spain, Holland and Poland. Moriarty had put his stamp on a series of coups — kidnappings, major thefts, an assassination — which raised his stock as the premier criminal mastermind in Europe.
Queen Victoria could unroll a map of the world and take pride in the extensive red patches which mark the Empire; the Prof had similar ambitions for the globe in his study. Stuck with red-headed needles wherever a Moriarty crime had been accomplished, the globe increasingly resembled a pincushion.
I had recently greatly enjoyed murdering a Member of Parliament with a garrotte of red ribbon, then providing succor to his saucy widow, his blushing twin daughters… and, thanks to a fortuitous midnight encounter, his tweeny maid. I’d have done the prig for the bonuses alone, but that business put twenty thou in the coffers. You’d never believe who paid for that forced bye-election. My only regret was that I couldn’t mount an honourable head on the wall. I contented myself with draping the ribbon on some antlers and keeping intimate trophies from the ladies of the deceased’s household in a private drawer alongside like items.
It was a new year, a new decade: 1891. Life was fine. Crime was paying.
Then, early in January, Professor Moriarty asked me to accompany him to the Xeniades Club to meet with his brother, Colonel Moriarty.
Are you familiar with that breed of novel heroine who prefaces a chapter of awful experiences with ‘had I but known…’? Well, had I but bloody known, I’d have stayed in bed with or without a tweeny foot warmer. But I didn’t and got up. Cheerful as a goose-throttler the week before Christmas, I put on my hat, picked up my cane, and toodled along to Jermyn Street and Colonel Moriarty’s club.
A few words on the Xeniades Club — what a horrible place! I’m a member of the Anglo-Indian and the Tankerville myself, though I tend to let niceties like paying annual fees slide for the odd decade. As a cardplayer, yarn-spinner, hero of the Empire, big-game hunting bore (I admit it) and devotee of manly pursuits, I’ve been in and out of every gent’s club in London, from the Athaneum and the Beefsteak through the Troy Club and Boodle’s to the Club of the Damned and the Mausoleum Club (pronounced Mouse-o-layum, if you ever get the invite). I’m also known at exclusive gathering places catering to fellows who are most decidedly not gentlemen but can afford to pay for their pleasures and the privilege of having those who provide them keep quiet afterwards.
The Xeniades Club was founded by whining bounders who’d been blackballed at any number of established London clubs and decided that at least one should have no barriers at all to membership. You can imagine the shower that let in: grubby-fingered tradesmen, monomaniacs and cranks of every persuasion; plain-speaking provincial aldermen; foreigners, even. Furthermore, the Xeniades encouraged ‘lively debate’, and was thus one of the noisiest big rooms I have ever been in… not excluding the mess hall at Sing Sing Prison during a riot in which twelve inmates and three guards were killed, or the auditorium of the Paris Opéra after a chandelier fell on the audience during (what else?) that bloody jewel song from Faust.
If I were in the habit of thinking things through, I’d have made these deductions: the Xeniades was for blighters so objectionable no other club would have them. Colonel James Moriarty was a member. Colonel James Moriarty. What kind of colonel can’t even get into the Army and Navy, which is open to any serving officer on full or half pay? Any soldier who can rise to the rank of colonel — which is, admittedly, where they leave you when they tumble to what sort of a rotter or loon you are behind the medal ribbons and, yes, I am speaking for experience — ought to have distinguished himself in some manner which would at least get him into Stoats and Weasels.
No, Colonel James was in the Xeniades.
At least, we didn’t have our awkward introductions in the Loud Room but rather in a draughty, underused annexe I gathered was called the Cold Room.
The Professor was vague as to which regiment his brother was a colonel in, but had let on that the fellow was still serving. Somehow — and, again, I of all people should have known better — that made me imagine a younger, straighter-spined, suntanned version of the James Moriarty I knew. More hair on his head and a set of fierce whiskers, in full uniform, bristling with martial fervour. I envisioned a cruel, canny Moriarty brain applied to devastating pre-emptive strikes against the foe (always best to get your reprisals in first, I say).
Instead, the Colonel was a sallow, slouching fellow with a sunken chest, the ill-cared-for clothes of a clerk who no longer has hopes of advancement, a perpetual cold which required odd poultices and compresses which afforded no appreciable benefit, and a little square of moustache like a patch he’d missed with his cutthroat three days ago. He was seven years younger than the Professor, but seemed nearer death.