‘Of course, dear. That’s what he does for a living. He’s an art dealer.’
The news hit him like a physical blow. He had been tricked. He would receive no payment for what he had done unless he could find the professor before noon. That sense of power he’d experienced was slowly draining away. But he was determined that it would soon return. He had killed. He was not a man to cross.
He retraced his steps and ran all the way to the nearest tram stop. If he could get to the docks, he would tackle Moriarty and make him pay him what he owed. He was hurt by the thought that the professor hadn’t planned to take him to America as his protégé. But he would make the man change his mind or he would have his revenge. The young lion would challenge the ageing master of the pride.
The artist spotted the professor walking on the quayside and called out. Moriarty swung round. He was dressed in his usual immaculate black with his tall silk hat and ebony cane. He looked like a large and predatory spider.
He stood his ground as the younger man approached, his face an expressionless mask.
The artist stopped a few feet away. ‘You said you’d pay me.’ The words sounded more desperate and pleading than he’d intended.
‘We cannot discuss the matter here,’ the professor hissed, grasping the young man’s elbow and leading him to a quiet corner of the dock, well away from the bustle of passengers and goods being loaded on to the huge ship.
‘Where’s the painting? Is it on the ship?’
‘It is in a place of safety with the other works I have acquired over the years.’
‘Where?’
Moriarty smiled and said nothing.
‘Tell me.’
‘Why on earth should I do that, little man? It is none of your concern. Just be thankful I saw something in you that made me spare your life. Your predecessor wasn’t so fortunate.’
‘Answer my question. Where are the paintings?’
Moriarty tilted his head to one side, an amused smile on his lips. ‘They might be in England. Or I might have sent them to France. Or maybe Belgium. But one thing is sure, a nonentity like you could never amass such a collection. Now leave me. I have important business to attend to.’
The young man saw the contempt on the professor’s face. The contempt and distaste one might reserve for a particularly repellent insect. He felt fury rising inside him and his self-control began to slip away. All those hopes, all that power that had been dangled before him was vanishing now like mist on the river. Without thinking, he reached out his arm, gave the older man a mighty shove and watched as he staggered on the dockside cobbles before losing his balance and tumbling with a high-pitched scream into the grey water.
For a few seconds, he stood there frozen with horror. Then he suddenly became aware of shouts and running feet and he knew he had to escape before he was seen. He yielded to the temptation to take a last look at the old man struggling in the water, surfacing to take a desperate breath then sinking beneath the surface.
Once the old man was dead, the artist thought as he hurried away, someone would be able to take his place.
He arrived at his brother’s flat at one o’clock after running all the way from the dock.
‘Where’s Alois?’ He bent double, gasping for breath and only just managed to get the question out.
His sister-in-law looked at him suspiciously. ‘At work. Why? What’s happened?’
‘I’m leaving.’
‘I wish you’d learn to speak English properly. You’ve been here since November. It’s sheer laziness, that’s what it is.’
The young man regarded the woman with hatred. Maybe he should kill her and experience that thrill of god-like power again. But he knew that would be foolish. Once her body was discovered and they found that he’d fled, it would trigger a manhunt. And his plans didn’t include submitting to the hangman’s noose.
He put his face close to hers. ‘I am going to Germany. Munchen.’
‘The sooner the better,’ she spat. ‘I’m fed up with you. I just hope you work harder in Germany than you have done here. I’ve never known such a useless layabout.’
He felt his fists clench. One day he would show this woman his terrifying strength. ‘This time it’s going to be different. I’m going to paint … and I’m going to collect art. Great art. I’m going to be important. People are going to listen to me. Point at me and say what a great man I am.’
Bridget Hitler shook her head. ‘You’re deluded, Adolph. Like your brother says, you’ll come to a bad end. Now get out of this house. I never want to hear your name again.’
Author’s note:
It is widely believed that Adolph Hitler spent five months in Liverpool in 1910–11, living with his brother, Alois, and sister-in-law, Bridget, in their Toxteth flat. The house where he was said to have lived was destroyed by bombing during World War II.
And When Did You Last See Your Father is one of the most popular paintings in the Walker Art Gallery – and can be seen there to this day.
A Scandal in Arabia
Claude Lalumière
To the Professor he is always the Detective. In dreams, in thought, or in conversation, he seldom refers to him under any other name. In the Professor’s mind, he eclipses and predominates the whole of his profession. It is not that he feels any emotion akin to affection for the Detective. All emotions, and that one particularly, are abhorrent to his cold, precise and mathematical mind. The Professor knows himself to be the most perfect calculating machine in the history of the world; no one would ever mistake him for a caring human being. He never speaks of the softer passions, save with a jibe and a sneer. Such emotions are quantifiable variables to be measured by the objective observer – elements in the equations that predict and manipulate the movements and actions of individuals and populations. For the trained mathematician to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely tuned psyche would be to introduce distracting factors that might throw a doubt upon all his calculations. Yet there has ever been but one significant opponent to him, and that opponent was the Detective, of dubious and questionable motives.
This morning, as the orange light of the Middle Eastern sun hits the glass windows of the Professor’s Dubai penthouse, his thoughts are again of the Detective. For the past decade, now that his centuries of calculations have elevated him beyond any stature he had imagined when he first stepped on to the path of crime and corruption, every night he has dreamed of his illustrious opponent. In these dreams, the two of them spar like they used to, the Detective meticulously untangling every strand of the Professor’s web of conspiracy. In these dreams, the Detective is relentlessly victorious and the Professor is inevitably undone and humiliated.
The Professor believes that the Detective is dead, has been dead for nearly a century, and yet a doubt lingers. The Professor does not like chaotic variables to mar the precise beauty of his equations, is dissatisfied at having to rely on ambiguous opinion, even his own, rather than proven and quantifiable data.
The Detective retired on 7 July 1902. By that time, the Professor and the Detective had been duelling, at times publicly but most often secretly, for two decades. The Professor’s agents kept watch over the Detective during his retirement, but he never showed any signs of interfering with the Professor’s designs. Indeed, the Detective, in those elder years, seemed to lose any interest in meddling with the criminal world. Emboldened, the Professor embarked on what was, at that time, his most ambitious plot yet. Even the British government, who had pulled the Detective out of retirement to aid in the War Effort, did not know what only the Detective had correctly deduced: that the Great War was set into motion by the Professor to further his long-term plans.
The Detective’s belated interference prevented the First World War from achieving its full potential – the Professor’s equations had not accounted for the Detective’s involvement – but the Professor nevertheless profited from its outcome, albeit not as richly as he had initially calculated.
&n
bsp; After the Great War, the Professor lost track of the Detective. Indeed, the historical record was altered in such a deliberate and methodical way by the Detective’s older brother – a shadowy puppet-master operating behind the scenes of the British government – that the world now regards the Detective as a fictional character created by a failed physician with a credulous penchant for spiritualists and fairies.
All in all, the Professor and the Detective matched wits for a mere three decades! That brief period, now more than a century in the past, outshines any other in the Professor’s long life.
Enough! The Professor chides himself for indulging in such nostalgia.
Teenage twins from India – brother and sister – stand naked at their station in his private spa, to minister to his morning needs. Afterwards, there is a full day awaiting him: following breakfast, a teleconference is scheduled with his worldwide network of operatives; after lunch, he has a full slate of brief meetings with financiers and politicians from all over the globe; after dinner, he will read the day’s reports; for the rest of the evening, he will pore through the near-infinite datastreams now available to him thanks to the surveillance society he has manipulated into being; finally, at midnight, synthesizing everything he has learned in the last twenty-four hours, he will revise all his equations and send off fresh instructions to his agents.
But now: the twins. For the body must not be neglected.
The Professor, contrary to what the Detective’s biographer has reported, is not British, although he pretended to be for many years, adopting an Irish name and fabricating an entire life story, calculated to maximize the efficiency and impact of his persona. The Detective eventually saw through the deception, but, as far as the Professor knows (with a probability of 97.86 per cent), never shared the truth with his biographer, or with anybody else; the Detective must have feared (with a probability of 98.34 per cent) being taken for a madman should he try to convince anyone of the truth behind the Professor.
The Professor was born in Shiraz, one of the greatest cities in Persia, in what would now be called the thirteenth century. As a young boy, the Professor already displayed an uncanny aptitude for mathematics. His father, an Arab who had travelled north in his youth and settled in Persia, was a religious scholar employed at the court of Abu Bakr ibn Saad. The ruler took a liking to the young boy and delighted in his mathematical acuity. By grace of Abu Bakr’s patronage, the boy received the best education Persia could provide – and at the time Persia was the most learned of all the world’s nations.
The boy excelled in academics, easily impressing his teachers when mathematics was the subject or deceiving them when philosophy, especially ethics, was the theme at hand.
From an early age, the boy perceived the world differently than those around him. Every moment, every interaction, every thought, every action – everything – expressed itself in his mind as a mathematical equation. Any outcome could be reached if the correct equation could be articulated, solved and applied.
In his mind, the equations grew in complexity and scope, but the reality they described could not be achieved in a single lifetime. According to his calculations, he would not witness the results of his equations in the mere decades of life he could reasonably expect his body to endure.
That, too, he knew could be solved with the application of the proper equation.
All those gullible fools who thought the Fountain of Youth was a place waiting for any idiot to stumble on to! Eternal life was, like everything else, a mathematical equation. Once the Professor decided to apply his formidable mind to the problem, it was only a matter of three years, two months, four days, two hours, fifty-six minutes and thirteen seconds to resolve the mathematical formula that gave him complete control over his body and its processes.
In different times and eras, it is more advantageous to look a specific age – young, middle-aged, elderly; the mathematical formula that grants him immortality allows for such variables. In England, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it suited his purposes best to exude the gravitas of a man of late middle age with paling skin and greying hair, and so that was the age and appearance he selected when, first, he adopted the persona of the Napoleon of Crime, in those glorious years when the Detective’s keen intellect posed the most serious challenge to his superiority he had yet encountered, and second during the Cold War, when he (using as a codename the same initial that had brought him such notoriety as the Detective’s greatest enemy) headed the Secret Intelligence Service, deploying it and its posse of spies and assassins not to the advantage of the United Kingdom and its allies, as everyone was so easily duped into believing he was doing, but to serve his own agenda.
Now, with the nation of his birth so close – a few kilometres away across the Persian Gulf – he once more resembles a healthy young man in his late twenties, his tan skin and dark hair restored to their natural luxuriance.
No! Why is his mind turning so easily to nostalgia and sentimentality? In anger at himself, he rips his white shirt while attempting to pull it on. In such rare moments, when the Professor’s emotions – how he loathes succumbing to these trivial distractions – make him lose control, the speed with which his head oscillates from side to side in a menacingly reptilian fashion increases, as if he were about to strike his prey and spew deadly venom.
The Professor regains control of himself as he pulls a fresh shirt from his wardrobe and finishes dressing. The oscillation of his head abates somewhat, so that the inattentive observer might not be able to pinpoint exactly what it is about the Professor’s demeanour that is so disquieting.
No, the reason he has once again adopted the appearance of a young man of Middle Eastern origins has nothing to do with nostalgia for his long-ago youth. What rubbish! No, it is a practical and calculated move: in this era, youth is valued over maturity, and in this time and place an Arabic mien smooths his path to dominance and influence.
Fully dressed, he inspects himself in the mirror and notices a splotch of dried blood on his cheek. He returns to the spa adjoining his bedroom, careful to avoid the corpses of the Indian twins, and walks to the sink to carefully wash the stain off his face.
Before exiting his private rooms, he leaves a note for the maid service: tomorrow, he would enjoy the ministrations of three young she-males from Thailand.
The Professor makes his way to his office for this morning’s work. There is a world to dominate. His mind teems with merciless equations.
The Professor is distracted, scarcely able to pay attention or to retain any of the information presented to him. His operatives, beholden to him as they may be, are idiots, unable to parse what is important from what is trivial. The morning teleconference ends, and the Professor cannot bring to mind any fresh data to feed into his equations.
While eating his lunch, he decides to eschew the usual format for the afternoon meetings with financiers and politicians. There will be no string of confidential tête-à-têtes; instead, he issues an order that all of the day’s supplicants convene together in the conference room.
Half an hour later, 156 of the cowardly and opportunistic toadies he has positioned as figureheads in the spheres of finance and politics are crammed nervously in a room that is designed to hold no more than sixty comfortably. None of them dare crowd the Professor, and so he is naturally bestowed the wide berth that allows prey to feel a modicum of false security around an alpha-predator.
For three hours, he allows them to chirp at him, but again his mind retains nothing.
In the entire world he can count on the fingers of his two hands those few financiers and politicians who are not his vassals. Those who serve him, each and every one of them, have profited greatly from his patronage, and yet there is not an ounce of loyalty in any of them. All they understand is fear and profit. Today, they annoy him more than usual.
He lets their sycophantic blather fade into background noise, and he abandons himself to the equations of world domination that cascade through
his mind. He pauses on one equation – one with no discernible profit but rather imbued with petty vindictiveness. Before being aware of having made a conscious decision, he articulates the practical application of that equation.
The assemblage falls immediately silent at the sound of his voice – everyone here is justifiably afraid of offending the Professor in any way.
Not a single one of these men and women can understand the implications of the instructions they have received. If they obey his will – and they shall; they always do; they always must – it will mean the ruin of 58 to 63 per cent of those present, and that of 27 to 31 per cent of their colleagues around the world.
No matter; they are all of them interchangeable puppets: those currently in positions of power; their supposed opponents ostensibly championing other political, economic, or moral paradigms; those waiting in the wings; the defenders of the status quo; the terrorist militias; the progressives; the conservatives; the socialists; the capitalists; the industrialists; the civic crusaders; the revolutionaries; the charities; the religious institutions … Worldwide, 93.72 per cent of those who toil in the halls of economic, political, and social power obey the unyielding influence of the Professor’s equations.
A wave of self-loathing washes over the Professor. He has acted with impulsive emotion, not from the cold and objective perspective of the perfect mathematician he knows himself to be.
Unable to stand their presence a second longer, he dismisses his loathsome congregation.
He sits alone for another hour, realigning the precision of his intellect by focusing on the equations most in need of his attention.
The Professor skips dinner. He shuts himself in his study to parse through the current state and equilibrium of his equations before reading the reports that have accrued throughout the day.
But, within minutes, comfortably nestled in his armchair, he drifts off to sleep, to once more do battle with the Detective.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 24