by Kim Newman
All nice and neat and dandy, I supposed. I still didn’t see what was so wrong with the clutter. Fifi was part of the clutter. Come to that, so was I.
The next telegram informed us the Thin Man was in Strasbourg.
‘Mabuse has a face in Strasbourg,’ the Prof explained. ‘As proprietor of a salle à manger. He was wearing that disguise a day after his visit to London. Many a courier of diplomatic pouches has been drugged and searched in that humble hostel by the main railway station. Our bloodhound has the scent!’
It was time to quit Paris. Our hosts knew what had happened in London, and we must have seemed like wounded beasts, fleeing. If ever there was a chance to kill us off without fear of reprisal, it was now. Irma invited me to dine in a private salon, more or less promising intimacies... even on the slim chance this was a genuine offer rather than a trap, I was inclined to make the play. Moriarty told me not to be a fool and produced tickets to Geneva.
It was our turn to leave luggage behind, but I carried the Von Herder with me.
XIII
Ever been to Geneva? It’s a clean city. The gutters are swept three times a day. On the streets the cobblestones are individually polished. The public conveniences are the most hygienic in the world. The tarts are scrubbed, efficient and copulate like the mechanical girl who comes out of the cuckoo clock. Even the rats have neat whiskers. The only thing dirty is the money.
If the Thin Man was following the money, the trail led here.
As we checked into the Hotel Beau-Rivage, Moriarty was handed a telegram. It fell to me to tip the bellboy – a French franc, hard Swiss cheese for him – while the Professor decoded the numbers and Greek letters he’d worked up as a special cipher for Sophy.
We had come to town ahead of the Thin Man, but he was on his way from Germany. Sophy reported that the detective, picking up clues found in that Strasbourg café, was interested in a Swiss banker, Adolphe Lavenza.
Without even looking at our suite, Moriarty hired a carriage to take us to the financial district – which, in Geneva, is three-quarters of the city. Zurich is worse, or better if you’ve an urge for that most overrated of criminal endeavours, bank robbery. That’s either out-and-out bandit foolishness which leads to getting shot by well-paid vigilante officers (if any institution can afford hired killers, it’s a bank – I’ve taken that shilling myself) or involves as much digging, blasting and carrying as any other kind of prospecting, with a consequent high risk of perishing in a cave-in or a mistimed detonation. Swiss banks don’t even have much negotiable loot on the premises: they bury their gold, and keep ledgers and IOUs to prove how rich their customers are.
From a coffee house across the road, we watched the Lavenza Bank for an hour. People came and went, most so respectable it was plain to the practiced eye that they were crooks, a few as close a Genevoise could be to low and shabby.
A clerical fellow took a seat at the next table, gulped a cup of molten dark chocolate, and departed without acknowledging us. I recognised Ueli Munster, the Swiss representative of Box Brothers. Whenever business brought him to London, Munster called upon Mistress Strict for a chastisement earned many times over in his financial dealings. The naughty banker left behind a copy of yesterday’s Times, which I snaffled as any Britisher curious for news from home might have. I turned with leaden heart to a notice of the Patterson raids, while the Professor slit open a packet of documents which had been concealed in the folded newspaper.
‘Adolphe Lavenza is Mabuse’s Swiss façade,’ Moriarty said, looking over Munster’s report. ‘His bank is the Great Unknown’s treasury. It played a part in the collapse of Baron Maupertuis. My disciple has ambitions to influence the economies of nations. He envisions a great bubble and crash after crash, an apocalypse of money. He sees further into the future than my brother, and marks out the real battlefields of the twentieth century: brokerages and banking houses. No armies or wonderful engines of war, but numbers. He has taken my methods, Moran. But he does not respect them. I see order. He wants chaos. Irreconcilable formulae.’
‘Bastard’s a damn anarchist!’
‘A poor label for what Mabuse is becoming. It will be almost a shame to stifle the monster in the crib. He might achieve a new kind of mathematics. But he is on the slate, Moran. The slate we shall wipe clean.’
‘Where’s the bloodhound? We’ve got to the quarry before him.’
‘I calculate the Thin Man will call on this address – without his travelling companion – in fifty minutes. We will cheat him of the kill.’
The Von Herder – our only luggage – was at the Beau-Rivage. I had my Gibbs pistol with me, though. And bare hands. The Times had put me in the mood to strangle a banker.
First, we needed to secure entry.
A respectable burgher, all pinstripes and pince-nez, emerged from the bank and strolled smartly round the corner. I held him against a wall by his throat while Moriarty determined which language to question him in. He spoke precise English. An Afghan tribal trick persuaded him to explain that a distinctive carte de visite was necessary to get past the front desk and secure audience with M. Lavenza. The card was surrendered by the caller, so he no longer had his pass. He said he could help us no more. Moriarty disagreed. We hauled him back to the main thoroughfare.
Within a few minutes, fortuitously, two men approached, carrying a wardrobe between them. One was fat, one thin. Our unwilling informant admitted he knew the men to be in Lavenza’s circle... then unwisely cried out for help. By the time the carriers had set down their burden to come to his aid, he was dead. Seconds after that, so were they. I broke the burgher’s neck and was stuck with a dead weight. Moriarty scientifically killed the workmen with his penknife. They were finished before they started bleeding. The Professor went through the fat man’s pockets and found two plain white cards punched with different queer-shaped holes.
This was all accomplished on a busy street, inside a minute. Passers-by paid no attention as we hustled slack bodies into the wardrobe – which was large and empty enough to accommodate them. Of different stations in society, they would not have sought or wished such intimacy in life. I reckoned them equals now.
A policeman marched up and I feared we’d have to cram in another, but his only interest was in making sure we did not leave furniture on the street.
‘It is untidy, an obstruction,’ he insisted.
I nodded to the Swiss constable and we hefted the wardrobe – not without difficulty, for obvious reasons – up to the entrance of the Lavenza Bank. The doors were opened by a liveried colossus. Moriarty presented the cards to a smart young lady, who posted them into a slit in a small, mechanical box. Gears ground and a red electric lamp flashed. We were told to leave the wardrobe and pass through a green-baize door.
In a small antechamber, we found upholstered chairs and a selection of German, French, Italian and English periodicals. All dull and financial. Nothing spicy. A voice boomed from the room beyond an inner door. Instructions were being issued in deep, rasping German. Someone – Mabuse as Lavenza, I supposed – outlined a plan for a daring robbery. Jewels from the Royal Collection of Ruritania, kept in Swiss vaults, were to make a rare public appearance at the coronation. An opportunity existed to seize them in transit from Geneva to Strelsau. Language aside, it could have been Moriarty talking. I sensed the Professor steaming. I was affronted on his behalf – Mabuse was plagiarising a classic Moriarty gambit. The sooner the copycat was in a bag and drowned, the better.
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 di
m. 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 [13]. 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?’
I laid a hand on the Von Herder case. It was long past time the air rifle saw use.
XV
Two days later, just after dawn, we entered Meiringen, a stopover for alpinists on their way to Trollenberg, waterfall aficionados on their way to Reichenbach and consumptives on their way to the grave.
The Professor called a halt just inside the village limits, and got down from the trap. He would rouse the local constabulary to enquire about the Grecian lady’s death – Moriarty going to the police! – while I was to look up this Steiler at the Englischer Hof. The Thin Man and the Thick Head were likely in residence, and Moriarty had to avoid the detective. It was less likely I would be recognised, though I’d not forgotten than impertinent index card.
‘What about Mabuse?’
‘He is either here
, or he has gone,’ said the Professor, not being much help. ‘Be wary, Moran. He has proved himself incalculable.’
You can’t be as fond of dangerous pursuits as me and keep your skin without being habitually wary. Bravery is not the same as stupidity. Indeed, if you’ve the nerve to dance with the big cats you must always be alert. I resented Moriarty giving written instructions, with fifteen separate diagrams, on how to suck eggs. He should know Basher Moran better by now.
Leaving Moriarty to trudge towards the polizei, the trap rattled up the steep main road of Meiringen. Even this late in the season, snow piled on the pavements. It had been there since last autumn. The dirty, grey banks were studded with lumps of dog shit. Baedeker’s misses that detail.
Every building in sight was a hof of some sort. They competed for custom with themes and gimmicks. The Englischer Hof hoped to attract visitors from our shores with a Union Jack hung upside down, conveniences labelled ‘Victorias’ and ‘Alberts’ and a menu offering such British fare as ‘fish and chits’, ‘squeak and bubble’ and ‘plump duff’.
After the night’s travel, I was hungry. But not enough to risk Swiss chits for breakfast.
Leaving the trap, I realised another reason why Moriarty had got off first: he had stuck me with paying the coachman. Funds were becoming an issue. We’d left England with bandoliers full of sovereigns under our combinations. Unavoidable expenses had mounted. We’d skipped out of the Beau-Rivage, where we were registered as ‘Gilbert Smyth’ and ‘Sullivan Jones’, without settling the bill. Our London accounts (and cash stashes) were beyond reach. Our line of credit with any continental Box Brothers associate was cut off when someone shot Ueli Munster in the head. We were in danger of running out of money. If this holiday went on much longer, I might have to resort to picking pockets, getting up card games with strangers in hotels or lifting the wallets from any corpses we might leave in our wake.