Professor Moriarty Omnibus

by Michael Kurland

  "Listen," Barnett said, "it's going to be okay."

  "No," she said. "No, it isn't. I can't even scratch my own nose. It's horrible. And those people — they're going to kill us! They've kept me here for six weeks, cooped up in that little room. And now they're going to kill me. It isn't fair! And you, too."

  Barnett didn't know what to say. He couldn't argue against it without her thinking him feebleminded, and he couldn't agree to it without depressing her even more.

  -

  Further speech was rendered pointless when the man behind the mask came into the room. "Greetings," he said.

  "What do you want with me?" the girl sobbed.

  "Patience, woman," the man said. "In five minutes it will be seven o'clock."

  "Thank you," Barnett said sarcastically. "I had been wondering."

  The man behind the mask gestured behind him and the man with wire-rim glasses came in carrying the musical box that had lured Barnett to that house. "This is somehow fitting," the man with the mask said. "I hope, Mr. Barnett, that you enjoy classical music, and that you don't mind the rather tinny sound of the musical box."

  "Why?" Barnett asked.

  "Because it will be the last thing you hear on this earth," the man told him.

  The other man placed the musical box on a table and, taking a large brace-and-bit from his belt, drilled a hole in the floor by that table.

  "What's happening?" Barnett demanded.

  "I think you should know," the man behind the mask told him. "In the room directly below this one there are several hundred pounds of explosive. Much more than we need, actually, but we can't cart it away with us anyway."

  The bit went through the flooring and the man with the glasses knelt down and peered through the hole.

  "The explosives," the man behind the mask said, warming to his subject, "are tightly packed around a central core in such a fashion as to direct the main force of the explosion up, rather than out. With any luck we shouldn't demolish more than two or three buildings on either side of this one."

  The man with the wire-rim glasses said something in a guttural foreign language and left the room. The man behind the mask snapped something at him in the same language as he went, and then pulled out his pocket-watch and shook his head in annoyance.

  "A problem there, Trepoff?" Barnett asked.

  The man behind the mask looked up at him. "No man may say that name and live," he said. "Which, in your case, is not the most powerful threat I can imagine."

  A muffled shout sounded from the room below, and Trepoff walked over to the drilled hole and thumped his cane on the floor by the hole. "They have to drill a hole in the ceiling below to line up with the one in this floor," he told Barnett. "Although why they couldn't have thought of that before… This is liable to put us off schedule."

  "There are incompetents in every line of work," Barnett told him. "Even in yours."

  Trepoff turned to him. "A shame you won't be able to write this up in your best humorous style, Mr. Barnett," he said. "A companion piece to your miraculous escape from the Turkish prison."

  "You are going to kill us!" the girl cried, twisting in her bonds to face Trepoff. "Why? What have I ever done to you?"

  "You were born," Trepoff said. "Think of it this way, woman: your death is to be useful in a great cause. How many people go through their entire dull, drab lives and die meaningless deaths without ever having been useful to anything beyond themselves? But you, mademoiselle—" There was an impatient rapping from below, and Trepoff broke off to bend down and grasp two wires that had appeared in the newly drilled hole. He pulled the wires up through the hole and attached them to two brass screws that had recently been screwed into the wood of the musical box.

  "You are about to participate in a great experiment," Trepoff said. "When I start the musical box, the little pianist on top will turn to his piano and play sixteen tunes, each one precisely three minutes and forty-five seconds long. Thus, in exactly one hour he will be finished, the machine will turn itself off, and the pianist will once again turn away from the piano. In doing so, he will complete an electrical connection between these two wires, and a current will pass from the galvanic batteries in the room below through a voltaic arc apparatus inserted into a tube of compressed guncotton. This will serve to detonate the explosive mass. At that moment the two of you will cease to exist. Have you any last words?"

  "It does seem a shame, Mr. Trepoff," Barnett said, "to destroy that beautiful musical box."

  "Ah, yes," Trepoff said. "But let us console ourselves with the thought that art must die so that ideals may live." He thumped his cane on the floor three times and received a three-thump reply from below. "It is time to leave you now," he said, turning back to the musical box and releasing a catch on the side. The metallic notes of J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier wove a pattern of sound around him as he left.

  "He's gone," Barnett said.

  The girl did not reply. Barnett turned to her and saw that she had her face turned away and was crying softly into the pillow.

  Bach faded away, to be replaced by Handel, and the girl screamed, putting into that one sound all the fear, frustration, and anguish of six weeks of imprisonment ending in an afternoon of death.

  "Here, now!" Barnett cried, hopping his chair closer to the bed by jerking his body forward. "You mustn't—" Suddenly he realized what he had just done. He had moved the chair! If he could do it to go three inches closer to the bed, then, with work, he could do it across eight feet of floor to get to the two wires.

  Very slowly he hopped the chair around to face the wires. He had to be extremely careful not to tip over; if he fell on his face he might not be able to get up again.

  Slowly he hopped his way across the floor. Handel gave way to Couperin, and he had gone almost two feet. Couperin was replaced by Liszt, and he had gone four feet. His shoulders and pelvis ached from the strain.

  There was a banging from below, and the sound of running on the stairs, and Trepoff reappeared in the doorway. "Something was nagging at my mind," he said. "And I see that I was right! Inexcusable carelessness on my part."

  He stepped aside and two men entered the room and dragged Barnett back to the bed. Using a length of thick rope, they tied him and his chair securely to the heavy post at the foot of the bed. Then they left.

  Trepoff stood in the doorway for a second, surveying the room. He nodded. "Adieu," he said. And then he was gone.

  The miniature pianist atop the musical box continued running his doll-fingers over the keys, and composition after composition was rendered in tinny tones. Barnett lost count. The girl was now silent. Perhaps she had fainted. It would be a good thing, Barnett thought, if she had; he would have made no attempt to revive her even if he could. He twisted and struggled until his arms were raw under the jacket, but the ropes held.

  Suddenly, as a Rossini overture began either the fourteenth or fifteenth piece, a pounding noise sounded faintly and far-off from below. Someone was at the front door.

  Barnett yelled, but to no effect. Nobody outside on the street could hear him from upstairs. Shortly the pounding stopped.

  Rossini ended with a click and whirr, and Scarlatti began the fifteenth — or sixteenth — selection.

  The pounding at the front door began again. It was too late now. Even if someone did get in, they would never make it upstairs in time if this were the sixteenth selection.

  But if it were only the fifteenth, there might be time. "Help!" Barnett yelled. "Help! Upstairs!"

  The door flew open and Sherlock Holmes strode into the room, a great revolver in his hand. "Well," he said. "What have we here?"

  "Quick, man!" Barnett screamed. "There are two wires affixed to that musical box. Unfasten one of them immediately. And, for the love of God, don't let it touch the other wire!"

  Holmes raced over to the box and pulled one of the wires from its screw. As he did so, the Scarlatti drew to a close and, with a whirr and click, the little doll-figure tur
ned away from the piano. Silence.

  Barnett looked from the musical box to Holmes and, for once, words failed him. His lips moved but no words came out.

  "You have just saved all pur lives, Mr. Holmes," Barnett managed to say at last. "I don't know how to thank you."

  "If that young lady on the bed is Lady Catherine," Holmes said, "I am sufficiently recompensed."

  "She is," Barnett said.

  "Is she all right?"

  "I believe she has just fainted."

  Holmes took a clasp-knife from his pocket and severed their bonds. "Wasn't that Scarlatti?" he asked.

  "I believe so," Barnett said. "I was rather preoccupied."

  Holmes nodded. "Scarlatti." He eyed the musical box. "An exquisite thing, that."

  The banging on the front door began again, and Holmes looked up. "If you'll excuse me for a second," he said, "I will go downstairs and admit my colleague, Dr. Watson. While he revives Lady Catherine, we can talk."

  TWENTY — ELEMENTARY

  My friend, judge not me, Thou seest I judge not thee.

  — William Comden

  Two days passed before Sherlock Holmes came to Moriarty's front door and demanded entrance. Mr. Maws showed him into the study. "You're to wait," he said. "The professor is expecting you."

  Ten minutes later Moriarty entered the study and crossed to his desk. "Good afternoon, Sherlock," he said.

  "You expected me?" Holmes demanded, turning from the cabinet he was examining.

  Moriarty glanced up at the complex face of the brass chronometer which hung over the door. It was six twenty-nine. "Not quite so soon," he said. "I apologize for leaving you in here alone, and thus putting temptation across your path. The drawers and cabinets, as I'm sure you found, are all locked."

  "I had never imagined anything else, my dear Moriarty," Holmes said, moving over to the high-back chair and sitting down. "Still, one can always hope."

  Moriarty leaned forward over his desk, his deepset gray eyes contemplating Sherlock Holmes unblinkingly for many seconds. Then he shrugged slightly and leaned back in his black leather chair. "The girl is all right?" he asked.

  "The duke had two of Harley Street's most lettered specialists to examine her," Holmes said. "She didn't seem to need them. An amazingly resilient creature."

  "You spoke to her?"

  "A bit. Not as much as I would have liked. It is clear that you had nothing to do with the abduction."

  "Thank you."

  "You expect me to apologize?"

  "I expect nothing."

  Holmes struck his right fist into his open left hand. "I am mortified, Professor," he said. "Not for having suspected you; we both know that you are capable of any act." He looked earnestly at Moriarty, who did not change his expression in the slightest, but merely waited patiently. "No, I am mortified at having allowed this suspicion to become an overwhelming obsession. It is true, I admit it. I allowed my emotion to color my rational processes, without which I am nothing. I should have known almost immediately that you were not involved. There was no demand for money."

  "The first communication?" Moriarty suggested.

  Holmes nodded. "It was indicated in the first note the duke received that money would not be required. I confess that rather than come to the proper deduction, I formulated fifteen different schemes you could have been devising."

  "Ah, Holmes. After all this time. Surely you should know me better. I won't pretend, here in this room, that I don't satisfy my incessant need for funds by abetting, or even indulging in, acts you might term criminal. But you must know that I would see a difference between quietly emptying a safe and abducting a seventeen-year-old girl."

  "I see no difference," Holmes said stubbornly. "Surely—"

  "An apparent difference in scale, yes," Holmes said. "But you cannot measure the results of either act. And they are both against the law. Who are you to decide which is right and which wrong?"

  "And who, pray tell, is the state to decide for me?" Moriarty demanded. "If I steal fifty pounds from a safe, I may go in for seven years' penal servitude. If I steal fifty thousand pounds by selling watered stock, I may make the honors list. If I murder a man on the streets of London and take his watch, I will be hung by the neck until I am dead. If I murder a hundred men on the Gold Coast to take their land, Her Majesty's government will send a gunboat to bring me back in triumph."

  "I do not claim that the laws are uniform or just," Holmes said. "But they are what we have. They are better — infinitely better — than the chaos that would result without law."

  -

  Moriarty stood and began to pace behind his desk, his chin sunk onto his chest. Then he stopped and laughed. "We argue law and we argue right and wrong," he said, "yet we are what we are, you and I, for reasons that lie deeper in us than can be reached by writs of the court or by statutes. I think it is good that we are both satisfied with what we are, for I do not think argument will change us. And I must say that this discussion, enjoyable as it is becoming, is drifting off the subject."

  "The subject?"

  "Trepoff."

  "Ah, yes; Trepoff. The masked man."

  "Yes," said Moriarty. "He is planning some major outrage?" Moriarty nodded. "So I believe."

  "He told Lady Catherine something to that effect," Holmes said. "Her abduction was to be prefatory to the main abomination." Holmes shook his head. "The murder of innocents to draw attention to the plight of anarchists."

  "So he would have you think," Moriarty said.

  Mr. Maws knocked on the study door and then stuck his head in. "Count Gobolski," he announced.

  "Ah!" Moriarty said. "Show him in. Count, how good to see you. You have something for me? Allow me to introduce Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Holmes, His Excellency Count Gobolski, the Russian ambassador to St. James."

  Gobolski shook Holmes's hand firmly. "The inquiry agent," he said. "I have heard." He turned to Moriarty. "He can listen? No matter, I have nothing to say. I have a paper for you from St. Petersburg. Here. I am no longer being followed. Good day." He thrust his hat back onto his head and stalked out of the room. At the door, he stopped and turned back for a second. "We will play chess again some evening, Professor," he said. "I will be in touch. You owe me a return match." With the merest hint of a bow, he was gone.

  Moriarty stared at the slip of paper and then dropped it on his desk. He rang for Mr. Maws. "Barnett should be returning shortly," he told his butler. "Please inform him that I would like to see him when he arrives."

  Mr. Maws nodded and left.

  The slip of paper held one word, block-printed, and Holmes easily read it where Moriarty had dropped it.

  SUBMARINERS.

  "What does that signify?" Holmes asked.

  Moriarty looked at him. "It concerns Trepoff," he said. "What is your interest?"

  "Trepoff must be stopped! I intend to do so."

  "I, also," Moriarty said.

  "Then I must ask you, in turn," Holmes said, "what is your interest? Surely not pure beneficence."

  Moriarty smiled. "Like you, Holmes, I am for hire."

  Holmes frowned. "The Duke of Ipswich is naturally not satisfied to let matters rest now that he has his daughter back. He has commissioned me to apprehend her abductor, although I would almost certainly continue the investigation anyway. Who has employed you, and why?"

  "I would like nothing better than to discuss it with you," Moriarty said. "But first I must know that we are working together."

  Holmes considered this. "Surely a first for you, Professor," he said, "finding yourself on the side of the law."

  Moriarty nodded his head ponderously. "Indeed, Holmes. And this is surely a first for you, on the side of your old mathematics professor."

  "You are suggesting that we pool our talents?"

  Moriarty nodded. "We haven't much time, I'm afraid. If we both arrive at the same solution, from two separate paths, fifteen minutes late, it would be the height of folly."

  Sherlock Holm
es rose and slowly walked over to the great bookcase that filled one wall of the study and stared absently at the titles. "To work with you—" he said. "You would expect nothing from the duke?"

  "Nothing."

  "The miscreants are to be turned over to the authorities?"

  "Assuredly."

  Holmes strode back to the desk and put out his hand. "Done!"

  Moriarty and Holmes shook hands solemnly. "I pray that this is indicative of the future, Holmes," Moriarty said.

  "I fear that this is unique, Professor," Holmes replied.

  Moriarty sighed. "What a shame," he said; "what a waste." He took his pince-nez from his breast pocket and thrust them onto his nose. "Let's get on with it," he said.

  -

  For the next hour Moriarty told Holmes the Trepoff saga in its entirety, omitting no detail, however trivial, in case Holmes might be able to draw some inference from it that had escaped him. Holmes made no notes, but merely stared intently at the professor as he spoke. Twice he interrupted to ask brief questions and nodded in satisfaction at the answers.

  During this monologue, Barnett came in, and was silently waved to a corner chair by Moriarty. He listened and was properly amazed at the exchange of confidences by the two antagonists.

  When Moriarty had finished, Holmes, in a curiously distracted way, recited what had happened to him since the Duke of Ipswich had sent for him on the night of his daughter's disappearance. It was a tale of false clues, dead-end leads, and provocative accidents. Several of the clues had pointed directly at Professor Moriarty before disappearing in a labyrinth of complications and misdirections. "Of course, the whole occurrence was an elaborately staged misdirection," he said. "I can see it now."

  "It is, in a way, a compliment," Moriarty said.

  "Excuse me," Barnett said from his corner chair, "but what are you two talking about?"

  Holmes swiveled around. "The abduction of Lady Catherine was arranged for our benefit;" he said. "Not the act itself, but the way it was done. Trepoff wanted to keep me busy chasing Moriarty, and the professor busy avoiding me. So he planted clues. And, because they accorded with what I expected to find, I did not examine them too critically. As a result, I wasted a lot of time."