At the end of the speech, auditors were dismissed. Three men and a woman came out of the inner room, purposeful. They had taken no notes, but apparently committed the plan to memory. Paying us little attention, they left about their business. After a moment’s pause, the voice addressed ‘Operator number six and operator number fifty-one’. We were ordered to come in.
We had only moments before Mabuse saw we were not his delivery men.
Moriarty opened the inner door and I went through, with my Gibbs up. The room was dim. The only source of light was hidden behind a thick gauze screen which hung over an alcove. A silhouette was presented: a man sat at a desk. I shot him in the head and he keeled over. The kill made, I turned about-face and levelled my gun at the green baize door. No one came to investigate. This section of the bank was built like a vault. Soundproof.
The Professor tore away the curtain.
Triumph died. The voice of Dr Mabuse told his operators to come in, again. And again, repeating.
The dead man wore a gagging hood and a straitjacket. In falling, he had set an Edison phonograph revolving. Mabuse’s voice was on wax and came from a trumpet. I lifted the needle and shut the contraption up.
Moriarty unstuck the dead man’s hood from the mess of his head, and peeled it off.
I’d shot Ueli Munster.
‘F-k,’ Professor Moriarty said.
I agreed.
The bastard had tweaked our noses again, properly. Mabuse had sat wearing another face — after Moriarty had said he’d always recognise him if he saw him! — and enjoyed his chocolate at the next table.
The green-baize door was locked, but easily kicked open. The uniformed giant and the smart young lady had cleared off. So far as we could tell, the premises were untenanted but for the two of us and four corpses.
We got out of the Lavenza Bank quickly.
XIV
The Thin Man acquitted himself no better than us at the Lavenza Bank. I presume he found the bodies, noted an irregular curl of apple-peel in the waste-paper basket as significant and picked up a fresh scent. He didn’t alert the clean, efficient Swiss police of any crimes or mention the Mystery of the Four Dead Swiss Bankers, the Phonograph and the Wardrobe to his tag-along biographer. Claiming to be weary of cities, he proposed a bracing schedule of hiking, sightseeing and scrambling up mountains.
This is what Watson said: ‘For a charming week we wandered up the valley of the Rhone, and then, branching off at Leuk, we made our way over the Gemmi Pass, still deep with snow, and so, by way of Interlaken, to Meiringen. It was a lovely trip, the dainty green of the spring below, the virgin white of the winter above.’
Back at the hotel, we found Sophy waiting. After recent events, I was minded to look at her teeth to make sure she really was herself. I doubt Mabuse could have pulled off the imposture, despite seemingly supernatural abilities, but a female disguise merchant was floating around Europe. I’d not forgotten what a nuisance Irene Adler could be if she put her mind to it. In theory, she was in Ruritania with Rupert. There was a god-awful mess about the succession, with Rudi, Michael and a red headed dark horse named Rassendyll making bids while the crown was in play [58]. Still, I’d not put it past her to visit Switzerland to see the endgame out. At this point, I didn’t even know who that bitch was betraying. She’d done us dirty by winding around Madame Sara, but I never found out if she was a paid Mabuse confederate or just kicking our teeth on the principle that we were smiling and she had on her steel-toed pumps. We had the real Miss Kratides, though she had nothing fresh to report.
Moriarty was in a cold fury. I was in a hot one. We’d bagged a brace of Swiss apiece, but were no better for it. I imagine murder charges could have been involved. Worse, according to Swiss morés, we’d left an untidy mess. Adolphe Lavenza was a shed snakeskin. All we could do was mark the Thin Man while he sniffed over the countryside. I was no longer confident he had a hope of running down Mabuse.
Geneva is not Paris. There’s nothing to do at night.
Sophy was packed off on her travels again, following the Thin Man’s traipse through verdant snowiness or whatever. She sent back mostly incident-less reports. The only thing that suggested we might have a trail left was that some lederhosen yodeller tried to shove her out of a boat on the Interlaken. She got a knife into his neck several times, and pitched him overboard. He sank through wonderfully clear waters, ribbons of red unrolling from the gills she’d put in him. Tedium had got to her and she was waxing poetic. Not a healthy thing for a woman or a murderer. An early sign of the vapours or a perverse impulse to confess.
To remind our bloodhound of his duty, we had Sophy roll a rock off a ridge at him as he ambled along the shore of the Daubensee. His deerstalker soaked by the splash, his nerves showed. She said he jumped like a grasshopper. Moriarty was not in a much better condition. In those days, he oscillated so badly I thought he’d do himself an injury. He ground his teeth and his vertebrae creaked. He covered sheets of hotel notepaper with numbers and symbols.
The staff at the Beau-Rivage were afraid of him. He was showing his skull too much. I was just red-faced and irritable. Day-old numbers of The Times and the Gazette, with further revelations from Inspector Patterson, did nothing for my humour. The Yard was clearing its books, pinning decades of unsolved crimes on ‘the Conduit Street Ring’. I admit most of the ones from the last ten years were ours, but the 1809 disappearance of Benjamin Bathurst was almost certainly not Moriarty’s doing since he’d not yet been born. Constance Kent killed her brother without our help, though the Professor owned a mosaic — Perseus, brandishing the head of Medusa — the young murderess executed while doing her stretch in Millbank.
On the 2nd of May, Sophy’s regular cipher telegram came from the Englischer Hof in Meiringen, a small Alpine village. The Thin Man was expected to arrive on the morrow and travel on to Rosenlaui, an even smaller Alpine village, going a little out of the way to visit a tourist attraction, the Reichenbach Falls. Not one of her more interesting communiqués. On the same tray was a telegram from Peter Steiler, who represented himself as landlord of the Englischer Hof. He broke sad news. Miss Kratides had been found dead in her locked room, a knife in her breast. She was believed to have taken her own life. In her papers was found our address in Geneva. He trusted we would accept his condolences and wondered in a polite Swiss way whether we would make (i.e. pay for) funeral arrangements. He assured us there was no urgency: even at this stage of the year, there was plentiful ice for the staving off of decay.
Ah, Sophy. I considered the loss. Dead, and never the recipient of a Basher Special.
‘The Thin Man must have tumbled her,’ I said. ‘He knew she blamed him for her brother and got his blade in first. I’d have done the same. I’d not have tricked up that locked-room mystery, though. Damn ostentatious. Detectives can’t resist going melodramatic when they turn murderer.’
‘No, Moran,’ Moriarty said, eyes shining. ‘The Thin Man won’t be in Meiringen until tomorrow. Another hand did this.’
‘Not that cretin Watson!’
Moriarty breathed the name, by now an incantation: ‘Mabuse’.
He was already paging through Baedeker’s Guide to Switzerland and the Alps, calculating the fastest route by scheduled train and hired trap. He was obsessed, again. Moriarty didn’t take kindly to nemeses.
‘What about the detective?’
Moriarty was impatient with details. ‘A minor matter. His usefulness is at an end. It would be untidy to leave him alive, though. Once business with Mabuse is concluded, we shall pitch him off the waterfall. A frothing torrent at its base will make a suitable last resting place for the Thin Man of Baker Street. What say you to that, Moran?’
58
History says Prince Rudolf of Elphberg was crowned King of Ruritania in 1891. Shortly after the coronation, it was rumoured that Rudolf’s cousin, the Englishman Rassendyll, occupied the throne in his place. Any argument was ended when Prince Michael was murdered by the Count of Hentzau at Zenda Castle, reputedly in an argument over a woman.