The Great Game

by Michael Kurland

  Madame Verlaine shrugged her slender shoulders.

  "Can you suggest something?" Moriarty asked Chennery. "Something that will stick in your mind?"

  Chennery paused and stared out the window. " 'The moving finger writes'?" he suggested.

  "Ah, yes," Moriarty said. " 'And having writ, moves on.' Very good. Easy to remember and not apt to come out by accident."

  "I hope it is not prophetic," Madame Verlaine said, and continued the quote: " 'Nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.' "

  "There is truth in Omar," Moriarty commented, "but not always a cheerful truth."

  The maid entered with a large tray bearing a coffee pot, pastries, and the necessary china and silver and set it on the sideboard. "Thank you, Eleanor," Madame Verlaine told her. "We'll serve ourselves."

  Peter Chennery sat in one of the high-back chairs with a cup of coffee and a plate of pastry on the table to his left and regarded the two sitting across from him. Professor Moriarty he had heard about, but the stories were conflicting. He had looked the professor up in the embassy's small reference library and discovered that James Moriarty, Sc.D., FRAS, had lectured in mathematics at the Victoria University of Manchester in the 1870s and was the author of several monographs on astronomical subjects that were highly regarded by the few who could understand them. He was also, by some at Scotland Yard, believed to be a master criminal who was responsible for every major unsolved crime since the Great Bank Robbery of 1866. On the other hand there was the fact that, according to a confidential report he had foiled a plot to assassinate Queen Victoria some years before, and when asked what reward he would like had replied, "to be left alone," or words to that effect.

  Of Madame Madeleine Verlaine he had discovered nothing except the strong possibility that that was not her real name. Not sharing the Viennese preference for chubby women, he found her exceedingly beautiful.

  Of the usual gossip that followed even the most secret assignments there was none, except a word from the courier that this particular note, which he handed to the ambassador himself, was to be taken exceedingly seriously and kept exceedingly secret. The courier's warning was reinforced when the communication was found to be in the diplomatic service's most secure code; one to be reserved for matters of national importance. It was a puzzle, but one thing was sure: the ambassador had turned it over to him to handle, and if the handle slipped from his grasp, he would be spending the remainder of his time in the Foreign Service stamping passport applications in the closest approach to Hell that the foreign minister could devise.

  "What I require at the moment," Moriarty told him, "is a house or apartment with some particular qualifications."

  Chennery took out a small, leather-covered pocket notebook.

  "No notes!" Moriarty said firmly. "If you have trouble remembering the list, I'll teach you a mnemonic system that works well and is not difficult to learn."

  Chennery put the notebook away. "Sorry," he said. "I think I can remember what I need to remember. What sort of house or flat?"

  "Good. First, it should be occupied by someone you trust completely, but who is not known to be connected to the embassy."

  "Why not an empty house?"

  "Because if a house or apartment is known to be empty, it might create undue interest if someone is seen entering it."

  "Ah!"

  "If the tenant is known to be a woman," Madame Verlaine offered, "it might cause talk if men were seen to be entering it."

  "A point," Moriarty admitted.

  "Have your guests dress like servants," Chennery offered. "Servants are, after all, merely servants, and tend to be invisible except to other servants."

  "Excellent," Moriarty said. "Even so, if it is an apartment, it should be in a building without a doorman or concierge. Located somewhere within a half-hour carriage ride from let's say, the Burgplatz. Also it would be convenient if it had more than one entrance, possibly on different streets."

  Chennery nodded. "It probably will have to be a flat of some sort if you want it in the city," he said. "Is there anything else?"

  "Yes. Have it well stocked with food."

  "Yes. I see. Of course." Chennery nodded.

  "I think that's all for now. Deliver the keys, and of course the address, to me here tomorrow. Please inform the tenant of the apartment that some complete strangers are liable to show up at any time, and make sure that he or she understands that he is not to say anything to anyone about this."

  "Tomorrow? Yes, I guess we can do it by tomorrow."

  Brom, the valet, knocked and entered. "Excuse me, Count Sandarel, but Mr. Tolliver would like to speak with you."

  "Tolliver?"

  "He is in the breakfast room, sir."

  Moriarty stood. "Very good. I'll be back in a minute, Mr. Chennery, please enjoy your coffee."

  Chennery put his coffee cup down and stood up. "Actually, I'd best be leaving if I'm to locate an appropriate flat for you."

  "That's so. I expect to hear from you tomorrow. You are doing well."

  Madame Verlaine accompanied Chennery to the front door. " 'You are doing well,' " she said to him. "That is high praise from the professor."

  "Is it?" Chennery asked. "Will I see you again?"

  "No doubt," she told him. "But keep your mind on your work—for now."

  Moriarty went into the breakfast room, to find Mummer Tolliver sitting on a chair and two cushions and eating pastry. Moriarty took a chair across the table from him and considered for a minute while the mummer ate. "Barnett and his wife are here in Vienna," he ventured finally.

  "Near enough as makes no difference," the mummer affirmed.

  "They're in some sort of trouble."

  The mummer sat cross-legged on his cushion and looked admiringly at the professor. "Now 'ow'd you know that?" he demanded. "They've been grabbed by some madman as calls himself Graf von Linsz. Graf—that's 'count' in German."

  "Is it? And just what do you mean, 'grabbed'?"

  "We gets off this paddle-wheeler on the Como Lake at a little town called Rezzonico and the graf, what has befriended the mister and missus beforehand, takes them to a inn for lunch. Then he hustles them into a carriage and drives off."

  "Ignoring you?"

  "I wasn't present for the fun and games, I hears about it later when I goes up to the inn to see why they hasn't come back to the boat."

  Madeleine came into the room while the mummer was talking and quietly took a chair next to the professor.

  "I heard all the details from this serving girl at the inn," the mummer explained. "They was speaking English, which it happens is her native language, her having been raised in Surrey before her mom married an Italian stone mason and moved to Como with him. The graf, he says that he's taking them to this house what's nearby, and they gallops off in this carriage. So I asks around, with the help of Vicky—that's this serving girl—'cause my Italian is not of the best, and I finds out that the house in question is about eight kay away, which is less than eight miles 'cause a kay is not nearly as much as a mile. So I foots it over to the house and gives it a dekko."

  "A dekko?" Madeleine asked.

  "A glom, a pry, a look-see. Hello, Molly."

  "Madeleine, at the moment."

  "Madeleine, it is. An high-class name for an high-class lady. You still on the dip?"

  "Picking pockets is only one of my skills now," Molly-Madeleine told him, "thanks to the professor."

  "You always were something special," the mummer said admiringly.

  "Go on with your story," Moriarty interrupted. "Right. So, as I says, I looks the place over to see what I can figure out."

  "And what did you figure out?"

  Mummer blew his nose into the napkin and folded it up into a little ball and shoved it in his jacket pocket. "Well, this place is just a fancy big house. But he's got guards wandering around the grounds, so I has to wait until night before I can get close."


  "Guards," Moriarty said. "That's interesting."

  "I thought so. So I covers myself with mud, of which there's a plentiful supply by the creek, so I won't shine in the moonlight, and I waits until it's as dark as it's going to get, then I slips myself over the wall and to the house. There was one window on the first floor which I thought might be interesting, 'cause it's the only one which has bars on it. I mean, none of the ground floor windows has bars but this one on the first floor does. So I climbs up to the first floor and perches outside the bars, where there's like a little ledge which I could just fit my feet on."

  "Being small sometimes has advantages," Moriarty remarked.

  "Who says it don't?"

  "Was your surmise right?" Madeleine asked. "Were the Barnetts in that room?"

  "They was."

  "Could you speak with them?"

  "I could. I went 'Hist, hist!' a couple of times and attracted them over to the window. They was much surprised to see me. According to what Barnett told me, the graf grabbed them and was keeping them prisoner on account of you."

  "Me?" Moriarty adjusted the monocle that had replaced his pince-nez as part of his Count Sandarel persona and stared at the mummer.

  "That's right. You had disappeared from your usual haunts, it seems, and the graf and his people were most anxious to discover what had happened to you and where you had got to. They had got it through their heads that Mr. Barnett was your confidant and must surely know what you was doing and where and why."

  "Where the Barnetts being—ah—mistreated?"

  "Not so's you'd notice. Not at that time, anyway. Although what they have in mind for them here in Vienna, I'm not so easy about."

  "Ah yes, Vienna. They were brought to Vienna?"

  "They was. The very next day."

  "And you followed?"

  "I did."

  Madeleine leaned forward. "That must have been quite an adventure," she said.

  "It weren't no piece of cake, but I managed," the mummer said, looking pleased that someone had noticed that he'd done something of note.

  "How did you manage it?" she asked.

  "Barnett told me that the graf was planning to move them, but he didn't know where to, so I hid up the road a bit where they couldn't see me from the house and jumped on the back of the carriage when it went by. The graf had a private train waiting for him at the railroad station: an engine and three coaches. I rode under the last car part of the way—there's a sort of shelf under there you can clamber up onto if you're not too big, which you'll observe is what I'm not."

  "Small but clever," Madeleine complimented him.

  "Go on," Moriarty said.

  "Well, at the first stop, which was in the middle of some mountains what were very impressive, I sniggles myself aboard the last coach, which was filled with boxes and baggage, and conceals myself in a convenient corner. I eats and drinks and performs other necessities catch-as-catch-can for the next couple of days, while the train mostly goes but on occasion stops for maybe a few minutes or maybe a few hours."

  "Those specials have to stop to allow regularly scheduled trains the right of way," Moriarty commented. "Also, of course fuel and water."

  "Like that," the mummer agreed. "Then two days later we nips into a siding and I sees the Barnetts being removed into a horse cart. At first I am concerned because there is no convenient way for me to conceal myself in or around a horse cart, but then I sees that we are at a private siding, and the horse cart is merely taking the Barnetts up the hill to this here castle what is at the top."

  "And then?"

  "And then I figures that I can't get them out of there by myself, so I send's you a telegram back to Russell Square to ask for advice and reinforcements. And I gets a telegram back saying as how you're already in Vienna. So here I is."

  "So you are. You've done very well," the professor said.

  "Just a combination of skill and my enviable small stature," the mummer replied, looking pleased.

  "This is very interesting," Moriarty said. "I have to think it over." He stood up. "I'm going to take a brisk walk. I find it stimulates the mental processes. If either of you would like to accompany me—"

  "I ain't nohow done eating yet," the mummer said. "And then perhaps I'll sleep a bit."

  "I've tried keeping up with you when you're on one of your brisk walks," Madeleine said. "I'll find something else to keep myself occupied."

  "As you will," the professor said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN — THE CONSULTING DETECTIVE

  Also spielen wir Theater

  Spielen unsre eignen Stücke

  Frühgereift und zart und traurig

  Die Komödie unsrer Seele

  (Thus we play theater/Play our own scenes—

  Premature and tender and sad / The comedy of our soul)

  — Hugo von Hofmannsthal

  His Excellency Herzog (Duke) Rudolf Karl Sigfried von Seligsmann, duke of Hrazpach and Bellenberg, colonel-general of the Second Regiment of Hussars of the Imperial Guard, chairman of the Internal Security Council—a small, most secret group which answered only to His Imperial Majesty Franz Josef—plumped his solid muscular body into a hardback chair and stared across the table at the tall Englishman. With his wide, thick white mustache, the effect was of a pair of sharp blue eyes staring over a uniformed hedge. "Well?" he demanded. "You've had over a month. What have you discovered?"

  Sherlock Holmes returned his gaze unblinkingly. "Much," he said. "I do not have the whole pattern yet, but the threads are in my hand."

  It was six in the evening and they were meeting in a small office on the third floor of the massive Baroque Hofburgtheater, the great showplace building on the Ringstrasse where the comings and goings of any number of random citizens would be relatively unremarkable and hopefully unobserved.

  "The Council meets tomorrow with His Imperial Majesty," Herzog von Seligsmann said. "I cannot give them 'threads.' "

  "I warned you that the investigation would take some time when your man visited me in London," Holmes said.

  "True," the duke agreed, "but events are overtaking us. The heads of state of several of the great powers are meeting here in a little over two weeks to discuss, among other things, what to do about this continuing wave of outrages, and we are to offer them a plan. What sort of plan can we hope to offer them without a clear idea of who—and what—we are facing? Can it be coincidence that so many different groups have sprung into existence with but one goal—the destruction of government and authority throughout Europe? Do they all spring from common soil? Is it the disillusion of the middle classes, or this wave of nationalism that we've been seeing, or the teachings of these radical philosophers like Kant, Marx, and Wittgenstein that have energized the university students? Is it a secret plot of the Jewish Socialists? These are but a few of the questions we must consider. What we have asked of you is to follow just one of these groups and discern for us its roots, its goals, and how it recruits its members. And, most important, how and from whom it gets its information."

  Holmes sat back in his chair and stared steadily at von Seligsmann. "The conditions you have imposed on me make it more difficult than usual, and this sort of investigation is difficult enough to begin with."

  "What conditions?" asked the duke.

  "Your man told me that you—or perhaps I should say the council—suspected that someone high up in the government was an agent for a foreign power."

  "That wasn't a 'condition,' " von Seligsmann said, "that was the reason that we chose to hire you—an outsider—in the first place."

  "Nonetheless, since you didn't know what official or what foreign power, I must conduct my investigation not only without any assistance from the government, but in the difficult position of having to avoid allowing the police, or any authorities, to know what I was doing."

  "My understanding was that you commonly disdain police assistance in any of your cases," the duke said.

  "I prefer to avoid the bungling interference of m
ost Scotland Yard detectives," Holmes admitted, "but I work with their tacit acceptance, if not their approval. The Yard men know that I do not seek publicity for myself, but pass the credit on to them."

  Von Seligsmann put his wide-brimmed kepi on the table in front of him and lined it up carefully with the table edge, as though preparing it for inspection. "And yet, with all the passing of credit, I have heard much of you and your exploits," he commented dryly.