Moriarty sat. His pale face didn’t move. Then he smiled. ‘You have me there, sire.’
‘You find it amusing that you have failed me? That your so-called “professionalism” should be called to account? Do you not even have the urge to defend yourself?’
‘Against what?’
The old man looked down at his desk, at the bell that should call his chief eunuch to his side. Could Moriarty be right that he had fled? There was only one way to find out, which he resisted.
‘I am still absolute monarch of my empire.’
‘A Colonel Rustem Bey opened the gates for me,’ Moriarty said. ‘Blond, French-speaking, charming man. He’d ridden all the way from Macedonia to be here. Tomorrow he’ll probably stand beside that lovely lake you had dug out in your park and wonder what a man who claims to be the Shadow of God on Earth was doing hiding himself away in a fantasy world. When did you last leave this palace, Abdulhamid? I don’t just mean to attend the mosque at the bottom of the hill, I mean leave the complex completely?’
Had Moriarty’s use of his name passed the sultan by?
Thin, arthritic fingers steepled underneath his chin. ‘So now we come to be candid with one another, do we, James?’
‘It’s why I’m here.’
‘To tell me that you have tricked me?’ He shook his head.
‘Maybe you did. Maybe you have come to gloat over my inevitable demise. I know it’s almost here. But it, and you, are no surprise. Do you honestly think I never knew that the baker from Diyabakir, the imam from Adana and all the other little people you brought to my attention were innocent? Of course they were. Or rather what they said was said in ignorance and without malice. But power, Moriarty, as you know, has to be demonstrated. Often. It has never given me pleasure to sign an order to put a man to death, but I know that in order to remain in control and do what is best for one’s people, it is essential. My empire responds to the sword. These young officers with all their dreams about equality and democracy will learn. They call themselves the Young Turks.’ He laughed. ‘What does that even mean? This empire is named after my family. We are Ottomans. They will learn. When they have hung me from their gallows and my people have risen up against them and they have killed them in their thousands, they will learn.’
‘Maybe.’ Moriarty smiled. ‘But at the moment they have history on their side. In fact that’s been the case for some time.’
The sultan put one cigarette out and then lit another.
Moriarty took his own cigarettes out of his pocket and held his case up for the old man to see. ‘May I?’
‘Of course.’
‘Thank you.’ Moriarty lit a black Sobranie. ‘In all my journeys around your empire, sire, I have learned many things. I have learned that the Armenians want their own country, that the Jews desire only to be left alone and that there are more diverse and bizarre sects and societies in eastern Anatolia than there are jewels in the Austro-Hungarian emperor’s crown. But what these groups all have in common, and I include Turkic Muslims too, is their desire for a life that does not begin in filth and hunger and ends the same way. Your people, Abdulhamid, want exactly what the poor all over Europe want. They want education, money, electricity …’
‘They only have need of God!’
‘I’m not talking about what they need, but what they want,’ Moriarty said. ‘Oh, they will fight for you and your religion but what sort of chance do you think they will have against foreigners with flying machines? I take it, sire, you know that man can now fly?’
‘I do. But he should not. It is against God.’
‘And if your empire goes to war with a country like France, which has flying machines, it will have to train men to go against God if it is to stand any chance of winning. Your time is over, sire, it has been for a very long time.’
‘During which you have made a lot of money out of me.’
‘Because, if you recall, sire, you begged me to help you rid your empire of dissent,’ Moriarty said. ‘You didn’t want another incident involving your imprisoned brother. And with my help you didn’t get one. When did Murad die?’
‘Five years ago.’
Moriarty leaned forward in his chair and whispered, ‘I’d be prepared to bet you know the day, the hour …’
The sultan didn’t reply. His older brother, Murad V, had been a thorn in his side all his life. Older and some felt more rightfully due the title of sultan, Murad had been declared insane within weeks of ascending to the throne. Abdulhamid had been put in his place. But, deranged as Murad was, the sultan had never stopped thinking about him and neither had many of his people. Now all that remained were his younger brothers. Also old men, they had lived their entire lives in states of terror. Of him.
‘I knew all along that to kill dissent entirely is impossible,’ Moriarty said.
‘I beg to differ.’
‘Which was why my organisation was such an easy sell to you,’ Moriarty said. ‘You wanted the impossible. And I gave you that illusion for thirty years. But, as I’m sure you must have realised, my very presence here now tells you that I was always looking for the tide to turn. Anachronisms have no future.’
‘So now you work for these “Young Turks”?’
‘No and yes. I have helped them in the past. I plan to again.’
‘You have betrayed me.’
Moriarty put his cigarette out. He shook his head. ‘Your Majesty is one of the most intelligent men I have ever met,’ he said. ‘But, sire, your fears for your own life have always held you back. When I met you, you shook. Do you remember? Mavroyeni had to hold your hand. Then, in the years that followed, I watched every charlatan – astrologer, dervish – whatever they chose to call themselves, exploit those fears and manipulate you to their own advantage. I knew you couldn’t last. I am amazed you are still here now.’
‘You underestimate my family’s influence over the religious life of the empire.’
‘No, I don’t think so. I know your Muslim subjects will still fight for Islam. But will they still fight for you? You underestimate what they know, Abdulhamid. Talk to any man in the Grand Bazaar about you and he will tell you lurid tales of cafés built on the side of your lake where you try to convince yourself you are not the only customer, of gardeners shot by you because you mistook them for assassins. And most scandalously and stomachchurningly of all, of the little girl you had tied in a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. Wasn’t that barbarous custom something your ancestors did away with? I thought so.’
The already grey face of the sultan became white.
‘And that too was when I knew for certain that I had to find another horse to back,’ Moriarty said.
‘That child betrayed me,’ the sultan said, ‘with my own son!’
‘Prince Selim, your eldest. Where is he now?’
The sultan lit a new cigarette from the dying ash of his last one. ‘Away.’
‘Since 1898. Mmm. Some backwater of the empire. That must be hard. You know it was in 1898 that I really began to notice these young officers from your Macedonian province. The boys from Salonika. Speaking French, using the word “democracy” … Trouble was they didn’t hate you. They saw you as a poor, isolated creature, desperately reaching out to your people but surrounded by those who sought to undermine you, and them. And that was partly true. But I also knew another you. The one that would sacrifice anything and anyone for his own miserable life.’
The sultan’s face flushed. ‘You are a traitor, Moriarty. What more is there to say? Get to your point.’
‘My point? My point is, sire, I knew that those nice young officers would defeat you one day. I could also see a lot of business opportunities in a relationship with them for myself.’ He smiled. ‘I saw the future. I just had to help it along. And so I paid your Kizlar Agasi, your chief eunuch, a lot of money.’
‘To do what?’
‘To tell you about how that lovely little blonde girl your sister had given you for your birthday was having s
ex with Prince Selim.’
The sultan turned away. ‘You’re lying. My Kizlar Agasi would never betray me.’
‘Well why don’t you ring your little bell and summon him so that he can answer you?’ Moriarty said.
The sultan looked at the bell; a present from his one-time friend, the Emperor of Germany, it was cast in gold. He remembered the day it had been given to him. He had almost felt as if he had a real companion. But the kaiser had better things to do than visit an old man in a hillside fortress these days. He, it was said, was preparing for war. Abdulhamid locked eyes with Moriarty and rang the bell. The professor sat back in his chair and knitted his fingers underneath his chin. Like the sultan himself, he could have, when he wanted it, infinite patience.
Fifteen minutes of silence, save the ticking of a grandfather clock, passed.
The sultan was the first to blink.
‘So shall we say that your Kizlar Agasi is not and was never to be trusted?’ Moriarty said.
The sultan didn’t reply.
‘Well, I will, he was and is not,’ Moriarty continued. ‘I knew this, I exploited this and found that, given the right incentive, he was a very willing confederate. I came here tonight, sire, to tell you that Prince Selim’s protests of innocence were entirely truthful. He did not sleep with that girl, nor was she pregnant with his child when your not so loyal chief eunuch put her in a sack and threw her into the Bosphorus. She’d only slept with you.’
The sultan did not move. He didn’t appear to breathe.
‘She was pregnant …’
‘I’m not a fool! You don’t have to spell it out!’
‘But what a story, eh?’ Moriarty said. ‘Doing the rounds of every bazaar from here to Jerusalem. Didn’t have to be true. But it was and so it travelled much more quickly and easily than it would have done if I’d just made it up. What do you think all these Cleaners of the Imperial Nargile Pipes and Court Dwarves actually do? You smoke cigarettes and you don’t find dwarves amusing. They’re bored, they gossip.’
While he’d been talking, Moriarty hadn’t noticed the sultan take that pistol out of his pocket again.
Then he did.
‘Ah …’
‘You killed my child,’ the sultan said.
‘In utero.’ Moriarty nodded.
‘I have no doubt that your Colonel Rustem Bey is within earshot,’ the sultan said. ‘But why should I care? They will kill me tomorrow. You have finally miscalculated, Moriarty.’
‘You think so?’
It wasn’t easy to look down the barrel of a gun held by a man who had never been known to miss. But it was hardly the first time Moriarty had faced his own death.
He took one deep breath and said, ‘Actually no, sire.’
‘No?’
‘No, Colonel Rustem Bey is with his men outside the palace. They won’t enter Yildiz in the hours of darkness. Would you? With all the strange sounds and peculiar movements around the park of your starving animals? No, they will come in the morning. But they won’t kill you.’
‘You expect me to believe that? Why not?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Moriarty said. ‘Considering you suspended your empire’s constitution for over three decades, killed thousands of your own people and tried to use religion to further your own ends, I can’t rightly work it out. You’d get no mercy from me.’
‘I’ve had no mercy from you.’
‘But these Macedonian boys are quite civilised. They won’t stay like that of course. Power will corrupt them,’ Moriarty said. ‘I’ve high hopes for them. But they won’t kill you. They just can’t bring themselves to do it – yet. They may live to regret that. But it’s their choice. Unless, of course, you kill me now. Then they won’t have a choice. You know it’s eerily silent down with those fresh-faced, earnest democrats outside this palace. They can hear a twig snap. They do hear them when your tiger goes in search of a monkey to eat.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Am I?’ Moriarty shrugged. ‘Pull the trigger and see what happens. I won’t stop you.’
‘Are you armed?’
‘Looking for a gunfight, sire? Of course I’m armed. I would have to be insane to walk through your park with your zoo on the move without a gun. But, if I shot you, I’d just make you stronger. I’d undermine the Macedonians and harm my own business. I’m counting on your own good sense to preserve my life. Because I know that at the end of everything all you care about is yourself. Religion? Your throne? Even your children don’t matter, do they? Only you matter and that’s why you won’t kill me.’
‘My life will be nothing without my throne.’
‘Then shoot me and let them hang you. You know there is a doctor in Vienna called Freud who has this idea that all of our obsessions, our character traits and our foibles are developed in childhood. How one turns out will depend upon what one experiences as a child. Makes me wonder what happened to you, Abdulhamid? What kind of childhood does a royal Ottoman prince have?’
‘That is not your concern, or this man Freud’s.’
‘I bet your father favoured your brother, Murad,’ Moriarty said. ‘His firstborn son. Gregarious, open and jolly as a young man as I recall. The constitutionalists had high hopes for him.’
‘He was a madman.’
‘He was an alcoholic, which was unfortunate. But if you’d stopped his endless supply of champagne and brandy he would have got better. Ah, your gentle father, Sultan Abdulmecid, must have loved such a boy …’
‘Shut up.’ It was said coldly. It was a tone Moriarty knew of old could only be interpreted as the sultan at his most dangerous. He looked at the floor.
Through a small gap at the bottom of the heavy brocade curtains at the sultan’s window, he saw that the sky outside was beginning to lighten. Soon the Macedonians would come. Armed with a fatwa signed by the highest religious authority in the empire, the Sheikh ul Islam, four Ottoman gentlemen, none of them Muslims, would depose this sultan and send him into exile. He would be replaced by his brother, Reshad, who was a pleasant, weak man in Moriarty’s experience. Perfect for a monarch required to be little more than a puppet. The Young Turks were already beginning to think like autocrats in some respects, which was excellent. Autocrats always paid more for information. They were always more worried than most.
Moriarty stood. ‘Well, much as I’d like to stay, I really do have to go,’ he said. ‘I know there’s thousands, probably millions of Ottoman lire in this palace and you do owe me money. But what’s the point, eh?’
‘I owe you nothing, Moriarty.’
‘I’d beg to differ, sire,’ he said. ‘Had you read between the lines of the reports my agents sent you right at the start, it would have been apparent what was happening in your empire. And, in the end, you did see the truth. I mean why would a very religious imam from Adana want you dead? And yet you executed him and thousands like him so that you could rule by fear. You put these Young Turks where they are today and, if I’m right and Germany goes to war with Russia, they will fight alongside the kaiser and I will make a lot of money out of that.’
The sultan aimed. ‘You are the devil, Moriarty!’
Moriarty smiled and then turned his back on God’s Shadow on Earth and began to walk towards the door.
‘I think you’ll find I’m a devil, Abdulhamid,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of us about these days.’
He put his hand on the doorknob and turned it. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that the sultan’s pistol was still aimed at his head.
He said, ‘You know, I will be sorry to see you go, Your Majesty. Your brother Reshad is weak and, although you won’t be the last of your line, you are the last of your kind. For the moment, your empire doesn’t need a divinely appointed autocrat. You time is done.’
He opened the door.
‘You imply a time may come when the Ottomans need an autocrat again?’
‘Maybe.’ Moriarty shrugged. ‘One must never say never about anything, sire. And
while there are men like me about, men like you may be supplied to regimes who need, shall we say, a firm hand. It’s all about betting, you see. On the right horse, at the right time. Quite a science that.’
He walked through the door and pulled it shut behind him.
With a turn of speed he could not normally achieve, the sultan sprang from his chair and ran after him. But, when he opened the door on to the corridor outside, Moriarty had already gone. As had any sign of his chief eunuch. There weren’t even any guards.
Abdulhamid II, Sultan of Sultans and Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, Shadow of God on Earth, last of his kind, was entirely alone for the first time in his life. He put his pistol down on top of all those works of fiction sent from Moriarty’s agents across his vast empire and he waited, alone, for the dawn.
Author’s note:
Abdulhamid II was the last autocratic sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Paranoid and fearful, he operated the largest network of spies in history. He was indeed deposed on 27 April 1909 and was sent into exile. The tale about the harem girl and Abdulhamid’s son is a commonly heard story. This story is simply a take on this monarch’s last night as Sultan of Sultans.
A Problem of Numbers
David N. Smith and Violet Addison
The world was full of victims.
The old man who had just left the bank was a prime example. He had neither the physical strength to put up a fight nor the speed to make an escape. He was easy prey. The high street always had a police presence, but this fool was heading off into the alleyways, far from their protective influence. If he had just withdrawn any money then, after a handful of punches and kicks, those paper notes would shortly become the property of Irving Beck.
The Mammoth Book of the Adventures of Professor Moriarty Page 30