He consulted his watch.
“I’m flattered. And a ‘generous salary’ would solve certain of my problems, not to mention the use of a London flat. But, Moriarty, what is this division you wish me to head? Why am I such a perfect fit for it? What, specifically, is its business?”
Moriarty smiled again.
“Did I omit to mention that?”
“You know damn well you did!”
“Murder, my dear Moran. Its business is Murder.”
* * * *
Barely ten minutes after my appointment as Chief Executive Director of Homicide, Ltd., I was awaiting our first customer.
I mused humorously that I might offer an introductory special, say a garrotting thrown in gratis with every five poisonings. Perhaps there should be a half-rate for servants? A sliding scale of fees, depending on the number of years a prospective victim might reasonably expect to have lived had a client not retained our services?
Again, I was not yet thinking the Moriarty way. Hunting I knew to be a serious avocation. Murder was for bounders and cosh-men, hardly even killing at all. It wasn’t that I was squeamish about taking human life. Quakers don’t get decorated after punitive actions against Afghan tribesmen. It was simply that not one of the heap of unwashed heathens I’d laid in the dust in the service of Queen and Empire had given me a quarter the sport of the feeblest tiger I ever bagged.
Shows you how much I knew.
The Professor chose not to receive Elder Drebber in his own rooms, but made use of the brothel parlour, which was well supplied with plushly upholstered divans, laden at this early evening hour with plushly upholstered tarts. It occurred to me that my newfound position with the firm might entitle me to handle the goods. I even took the trouble mentally to pick out two or three bints who looked ripe for what ladies the world over have come to know as the Basher Moran Special. Imagine the Charge of the Light Brigade between silk sheets, or over a dresser table, or in an alcove of a Ranee’s Palace, or up the Old Kent Road, or…well, any place really. As our pioneer padre said: When the urge surges, it must be purged.
As soon as I sat down, the whores paid attention, cooing and fluttering like doves, positioning themselves to their best advantage. As soon as the Professor walked in, the flock stood down, finding minute imperfections in fingernails or hair that needed to be rectified. Moriarty looked at the dollies and then at me, constructing something on his face that might have passed for a salacious, comradely leer but came out wrong. The bare-teeth grin of a chimpanzee, taken for a cheery smile by sentimental zoo visitors, is really a frustrated snarl of penned, homicidal fury. The Professor also had an alien range of expression, which others misinterpreted at their peril.
Mrs Halifax ushered in our American callers.
Enoch J Drebber—why d’you think Yankees are so keen on those blasted middle initials?—was a barrel-shaped fellow, sans moustache but with a fringe of tight black curls all the way round his face. He wore simple, expensive black clothes and a look of fixed stern disapproval.
The girls ignored him. I sensed he was on the point of fulminating.
I didn’t need one of the Professor’s “background checks” to get Drebber’s measure. He was one of those odd-godly bods who get voluptuous pleasure from condemning the fleshly failings of others. As a Mormon, he could bag as many wives as he wanted—on-tap whores and unpaid skivvies coralled together. His right eye roamed around the room, on the scout for the eighth or ninth Mrs Drebber, while his left was fixed straight ahead at the Professor.
With him came a shifty cove by the name of Brother Stangerson who kept quiet but paid attention.
“Elder Drebber, I am Professor Moriarty, and this is Colonel Sebastian Moran, late of the First Bengalore…”
Drebber coughed, interrupting the niceties.
“You’re who to see in this city if a Higher Law is called for?”
Moriarty showed empty hands.
“A man must die, and that’s the story,” said Drebber. “He should have died in South Utah, years ago. He’s a murderer, plain and flat, and an abductor of women. Hauled out his six-gun and shot Bishop Dyer, in front of the whole town. That’s a crime against God. Then fetched away Jane Withersteen, a good Mormon woman, and her adopted child, Little Fay. He threw down a mountain on his pursuers, crushing Elder Tull and many good Mormon men. Took away gold that was rightful property of the Church, stole it right out of the ground. The Danite Band have been pursuing him ever since…”
“The Danites are a cabal within the Church of Latter-Day Saints,” explained Moriarty.
“God’s good right hand is what we are,” insisted Drebber. “When the laws of men fail, the unworthy must be smitten, as if by lightning.”
I got the drift. The Danites were cossacks, assassins, and vigilantes wrapped up in a Bible name. Churches, like nations, all seem to need a secret police force to keep the faithful in line.
“Who is this, ah, murderer and abductor?” I asked.
“His name, if such a fiend deserves a name, is Lassiter. Jim Lassiter.”
This was clearly supposed to get a reaction. The Professor kept his own council. I admitted I’d never heard of the fellow.
“Why, he was the fastest gun in the South-West. Around Cottonwoods, they said he struck like a serpent, drawing and discharging in one smooth, deadly motion. Men he killed were dead before they heard the sound of the shot. Lassiter could take a man’s eye out at three hundred yards with a pistol.”
That’s a fairy story. Take it from someone who knows shooting. A side-arm is handy for close-work, as when, for example, a tiger has her talons in your tit. With anything further away than a dozen yards, you might as well throw the gun as fire it.
I kept my scepticism to myself. The customer is always right, even in the murder business.
“This Lassiter fellow,” I ventured. “Where might he be found?”
“In this very city,” Drebber decreed. “We are here, ah, on the business of the Church. The Danites have many enemies, and each of us knows them all. Oddly, I was half-expecting to come across another such pestilence, a cur named Jefferson Hope who need not concern you, but it was Lassiter I happened upon, walking in your Ly-cester Square on Sunday afternoon. It was the Withersteen woman I saw first, then the girl, chattering for hot chestnuts. I knew the apostate for who she was at once. She has been thrice condemned and outcast…”
“You said she was abducted,” put in the Professor. “Now you imply she is with Lassiter of her own will?”
“He’s a Devil of persuasion, to make a woman refuse an Elder of the Church and run off with a damned Gentile. She has no mind of her own, like all women, and cannot fully be blamed for her sins.…”
If Drebber had a horde of wives around the house and still believed that, he was either very privileged or very unobservant.
“Still, she must come to heel. Though the girl will do as well. A warm body must be taken back to Utah, to come into her inheritance.”
“Cottonwoods,” said Moriarty. “The ranch; the outlying farms; the cattle; the race-horses; and—thanks to those inconveniently-upheld claims—the fabulous gold-mines of Surprise Valley.”
“The Withersteen property, indeed. When it was willed to her by her father, a great man, it was on the understanding she would become the wife of Elder Tull, and Cottonwoods would come into the Church. Were it not for this Lassiter, that would have been the situation.”
It was profit, not parsons, behind this business.
“Are we to understand, Elder, that the Withersteen property will come to the girl, Fay, upon the death of the adoptive mother?”
“That is the case.”
“But one or other of the females must be alive to suit the Church?”
“Indeed so.”
“Which would you prefer? T
he woman or the girl?”
“Jane Withersteen is the more steeped in sin, so there would be a certain justice…”
“…if she were topped, too,” I finished his thought.
Elder Drebber wasn’t comfortable with that, but nodded.
“Are these three going by their own names?”
“They are not,” said Drebber, happier to condemn enemies than contemplate his own schemes against them. “This Lassiter has steeped his women in falsehood, making them bear repeated false witness, over and over. That such crimes should go unpunished is an offence to God Himself…”
“Yes, yes, yes,” I said. “But what names are they using, and where do they live?”
Drebber was tugged out of his tirade, and thought hard. “I caught only the false name of Little Fay. The Withersteen woman called her ‘Rache,’ doubtless a diminutive for the godly name ‘Rachel’…”
“Didn’t you think to tail these, ah, varmints, to their lair?”
Drebber was offended. “Lassiter is the best tracker the South-West has ever birthed. And that’s including Apaches. If I dogged him, he’d be on me faster’n a rattler on a coon.”
The Elder’s vocabulary was mixed. Most of the time, he remembered to sound like a preacher working up a lather against sin and sodomy, but slipped in was a sprinkling of terms that showed him up for—in picturesque “Wild West” terms—a back-shooting, claim-jumping, cow-rustling, waterhole-poisoning, horse-thieving, side-winding, owlhoot son-of-a-bitch.
“Surely he thinks he’s safe here and will be off his guard?”
“You don’t know Lassiter.”
“No, and, sadly for us all, neither do you. At least, you don’t know where he hangs his hat. Which I presume is one of those ten-gallon things.”
Drebber was quite deflated. I enjoyed that.
“Mr and Mrs James Lassiter and their daughter Fay currently reside at The Laurels, Streatham Hill, under the names Jonathan, Helen, and Rachel Laurence.”
Drebber and I looked at the Professor. He had enjoyed showing off.
Even Stangerson clapped a hand to his sweaty forehead.
“Considering that there’s a fabulous gold mine at issue, I consider fifty thousand pounds sterling a fair price for contriving the death of Mr Laurence,” said Moriarty, as if putting a price on a fish supper. “With an equal sum for his lady wife.”
Drebber nodded again, once.
“And the girl comes with the package?”
“I think a further hundred thousand for her safekeeping, to be redeemed when we give her over into the charge of your church.”
“Another hundred thousand pounds?”
“Guineas, Elder Drebber.”
He thought about it, swallowed, and stuck out his paw.
“Deal, Professor…”
Moriarty regarded the American’s hand. He turned and Mrs Halifax was beside him with a salver bearing a document.
“Such matters aren’t settled with a handshake, Elder Drebber. Here is a contract, suitably circumlocutionary as to the precise nature of the services Colonel Moran will be performing, but meticulously exact in detailing payments entailed and the strict schedule upon which monies are to be transferred. It’s legally binding, for what that’s worth, but a contract with us is mostly enforcible under what you have referred to as a Higher Law…”
The Professor stood by a lectern, which bore an open, explicitly-illustrated volume of the sort often found in establishments like Mrs Halifax’s for occasions when inspiration flags. He unrolled the document over a coloured plate, then plucked a pen from an inkwell and presented it to Drebber.
The Elder made a pretence of reading the rubric, and signed.
Professor Moriarty pressed a signet-ring to the paper, impressing a stylised M below Drebber’s dripping scrawl.
The document was whisked away.
“Good day, Elder Drebber.”
Moriarty dismissed the client, who backed out of the room.
“What are you waiting for?” I said to Stangerson, who stuck on the hat he had been fiddling with and scarpered. One of the girls giggled at his departure, then remembered herself and pretended it was a hiccough. She still paled under her rouge at the Professor’s sidelong glance.
“Colonel Moran, have you given any thought to hunting a Lassiter?”
* * * *
A jungle is a jungle, even if it’s in Streatham and is made up of neat little villas named after shrubs.
In my coat-pocket I had my Webley.
If I were one of those cow-boys, I’d have notched the barrel after filling Kali’s Kitten’s heart with lead. Then again, even if I only counted white men and tigers, I didn’t own any guns with a barrel long enough to keep score. A gentleman doesn’t need to list his accomplishments or his debts, since there are always clerks to keep tally. I might not have turned out to be a pukka gent, but I was flogged and fagged at Eton beside future cabinet ministers and archbishops, and some skins you never shed.
It was bloody cold, as usual in London. Not raining, no fog—which is to say, no handy cover of darkness—but the ground chill rose through my boots and a nasty wind whipped my face like wet pampas grass.
The only people outside this afternoon were hurrying about their business with scarves around their ears, obviously part of the landscape. I had decided to toddle down there and poke around, as a preliminary to the business in hand. Call it a recce.
Before setting out on this safari, I’d had the benefit of a lecture from the Professor. He had devoted a great deal of thought to murder. He could have written the Baedeker’s or Bradshaw’s, though it would probably have to be published anonymously—A Complete Guide to Murder, by “A Distinguished Theorist”—and then be liable to seizure or suppression by the philistines of Scotland Yard.
“Of course, Moran, murder is the easiest of all crimes, if murder is all one has in mind. One simply presents one’s card at the door of the intended murderee, is ushered into his sitting room and blows his or, in these enlightened times her, brains out with a revolver. If one has omitted to bring along a firearm, a handy poker or candlestick will serve. Physiologically, it is not difficult to kill another person, to perform outrages upon a human corpus which will render it a human corpse. Strictly speaking, this is a successful murder. Of course, then comes the second, far more challenging part of the equation, getting away with it.”
I had been stationed across the road from the Laurels for a quarter of an hour, concealed behind bushes, awaiting signs of Lassiter. Then I noticed I was in Streatham Hill Rise not Streatham Hill Road. This was quite another Laurels, with quite another set of residents. This was a boarding house for genteel folk of a certain age. I was annoyed enough with myself and the locality to consider potting the landlady just for the practice.
If I held the deeds to this district and the Black Hole of Calcutta, I’d live in the Black Hole and rent out Streatham. Not only was it beastly cold, but stultifyingly dull. Row upon monotonous row of the Lupins, the Laburnams, the Leilandiae, and the Laurels. No wonder I was in the wrong spot.
“It is a little-known fact that most murderers don’t care about getting away with it. They are possessed by an emotion—at first, perhaps, a mild irritation about the trivial habit of a wife, mother, master, or mistress. This develops over time, sprouting like a seed, to the point when only the death of another person will bring peace to our typical murderer. These poor souls go happy to the gallows, free at last of another’s clacking false teeth or unconscious chuckle or penny-pinching. We shun such as amateurs. They undertake the most profound action one human being can perform upon another, and fail to profit from the enterprise.”
No, I had not thought to purchase one of those penny-maps. Besides, anyone on the street with a map is obviously a stranger. Thus the sort who, after th
e fact, lodges in the mind of witnesses. “Did you see anyone suspicious in the vicinity, Madam Busy-Body?” “Why yes, Sergeant Flat-Foot, a lost-looking fellow, very red in the face, peering at street signs. Come to think of it, he looked like a murderer. And he was the very spit and image of that handsome devil whose picture was in the Illustrated Press after single-handedly seeing off the Afghan hordes that time.”
“Our business is murder for profit, killing for cash,” Moriarty had put it. “We do not care about our clients’ motives, providing they can meet the price. They may wish murder to gain an inheritance, inflict revenge, make a political point, or from sheer spite. In this case, all four conditions are in play. The Danite Band, represented by Elder Drebber, seek to secure the gold mine, avenge the deaths of their fellow conspirators, indicate to others who might defy them that they are a dangerous power to cross, and to see dead a foeman they are not skilled enough to best by themselves.”
What was the use of a fanatical secret society if it couldn’t send a horde of expendable minions to overwhelm the family? These Danite Desperadoes plainly weren’t up there with the Camorra or the Thuggee or the Dacoits when it came to playing that game. If the cabal really sought to usurp the governance of their church, which is what the Professor confided they had in mind, a greater quantity of sand would be required.
“For centuries, the art of murder has stagnated. Edged weapons, blunt instruments and bare hands that would have served for our ancient ancestors are still in use. Even poisons were perfected in classical times. Only in the last hundred and fifty years have fire-arms come to dominate the murder market-place. And for the cruder assassin, the explosive device—whether planted or flung—has made a great deal of noise, though at the expense of accuracy. Of course, guns and bombs are loud, more suited to the indiscriminate slaughter of warfare or massacre than the precision of wilful murder. That, Moran, is something we must change. If guns can be silenced, if the skills you have developed against big game can be employed in the science of man-slaying, then the field will be revolutionised.”
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #3 Page 10