Part 1 (2/2)
The man stroked his hawk-like nose, removing a last trace of putty from it.
Moriarty's voice was hoa.r.s.e and shaking. ”Sherlock Holmes!”
The tall man looked at him almost benignly. ”At your service, Professor. I should be vexed that you did not recognize me, although it has been ten years since we met at the Reichenbach Falls. Your features, I a.s.sure you, have been graven on the tablets of my mind ever since, though I thought you dead in that plunge over the cliff. Well, well, I dare say that may be remedied in due course, with a shorter drop at the end of the hangman's rope!”
Holmes, now completely divested of his disguise, continued, ”I can imagine the profundity of your disappointment. You cannot possibly fail to realize that there can be only one explanation for my having successfully penetrated the most carefully concealed lodgings in the whole of London.” He looked around the elaborately furnished room with an expression of distaste. ”I observe that your choice of decoration is fully as disagreeable as your choice of profession.”
Professor Moriarty was past taking exception to criticism of his taste by a man who adorned his own walls with designs in bullet-pocks and kept his tobacco in an old Persian slipper. He was nearly hissing with rage as he moved closer to Holmes.
”Where is Colonel Moran!”
”He is in custody.” Holmes strode to the blackboard, and, with a mocking imitation of a pedagogue correcting a pupil's botched work, slashed heavy lines through each chalked item thereon. ”As are Quint, Adelspate, Nickers, and Stryker!” He turned to Moriarty. ”In short, your entire organization here in London is now occupying cells at the Bow Street Police Station-and the a.s.sa.s.sination of Lord Brackish has failed!”
He whirled to face the blackboard once more, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the erasing cloth that lay on the stand, and swept it across the chalked surface twice diagonally, leaving an X slashed through the Professor's meticulous time-table.
”d.a.m.n and blast you for the meddler you are, sir!” Moriarty sawed the air impotently with white-knuckled fists, and his voice, rising to a near scream, drew unconsciously on the mode of speech of a long-forgotten past. ”With your West End ways, talkin' down your upper-cla.s.s nose, and only happy when you're dressin' up as someone else-as though life was some schoolboy lark! Blast you, Holmes! Blast you!”
”I suggest you make an effort to take hold of yourself,” said Sherlock Holmes. ”Your rage is beginning to affect your speech.”
Moriarty drew a deep breath and, with a visible effort, stilled the trembling that agitated his form. His eyes narrowed, and stayed fixed on Holmes as he himself moved sideways, in gait unpleasantly resembling a crab, to the chair behind his desk. Picking up a needle-sharp bra.s.s letter-opener, he toyed with it. When he spoke, his voice was once more controlled, even, and cultured.
”Did you come alone tonight?”
”Since you ask, yes.”
”I thought as much. I know your methods by now. Your inability to resist the tour de force, the coup de grace, the necessity of nouris.h.i.+ng your egotism una.s.sisted.”
Holmes, seemingly indifferent to this diagnosis of his character, had picked up from the mantel a vase decorated in the Chinese manner, with acid-green and ox-blood dominating the color scheme.
”Atrocious,” he murmured, inspecting it closely. He looked from it to its owner, and added, ”As is your French. I fancy the term you were reaching for is coup de main. What I truly regret is that I must also leave alone. Your cohorts refuse to implicate you, and Moran, indeed, fears for his life-justly so, I imagine-should he do so. And, troublesome though it is, I thank G.o.d that British justice requires the strongest evidence to bring to book even such scoundrels as yourself.”
His face stern, he pointed the vase toward Moriarty as though it were a cannon. ”But be warned, Professor! Your people have been captured, and you are alone! Alone and helpless, and I will have you yet!”
Holmes emphatically set the vase down on a table; it shattered into a pile of gaudy shards. He looked at it as though feeling its present state was better than its last.
Moriarty's hooded eyes glared at him with unwinking malice.
”Mr. Holmes, your interference in my affairs has gradually grown from mild annoyance to insufferable impertinence. And tonight's actions have finally rendered you intolerable to me!”
”Really?” Holmes' voice was a calculated drawl of languid surprise. ”Only tonight? You, sir, have been intolerable to me for much longer than that.”
Moriarty's hand s.h.i.+fted in a sudden tugging motion behind the desk. ”Mr. Holmes, if you'll be good enough to observe-this!”
A square section of flooring next to the wall, four feet on each side, dropped away. From below, a swirl of water around decaying pilings could be heard, and a gust of the dank odor of the Thames entered the room. Sherlock Holmes looked at the open trap door with polite interest.
”And this!”
Professor Moriarty stabbed at a push-b.u.t.ton on the desk. There came a whir and a thock! A heavy dart with half its four-inch point buried in the wall by the force of its flight quivered less than an inch from Holmes' head. He inspected it with raised eyebrows.
”This!”
The Professor pulled a lever set into the side of the desk, and the crystal-festooned chandelier that hung from the center of the ceiling crashed to the floor, scattering glittering shrapnel across the room. Holmes leaned down and flicked a splinter of gla.s.s from his trousers.
”Not to mention-this!”
Moriarty's hand darted into a desk drawer with the speed of a striking snake, and emerged holding a revolver, which he leveled at the detective.
”There are more than a dozen ways to kill a man in this room,” he went on, ”and the trapdoor into the Thames will remove all traces of the man's ever having been here. Have you wondered why I have not employed any of these methods on you?”
”Well, it's not for want of trying,” observed Sherlock Holmes, surveying the opening in the floor, the heavy dart embedded in the wall, the ruin of gla.s.s and wiring on the floor, and the pistol in the Professor's hand.
”No, Mr. Holmes-it's because it doesn't suit my book. I shall destroy you, but in my fas.h.i.+on!”
”Will you, indeed?” said Holmes, much as a man might express interest in a neighbor's plans to cultivate a prize-winning vegetable marrow.
”Yes! I am going to crush you in such a way that your humiliation and downfall will be witnessed by the entire world!”
”How fascinating! And just how do you propose to do that?”
”The crime of the century-the past century, this one, and all centuries yet to come!-is now in preparation. It will go forward as planned, despite the temporary setback your interference tonight has caused me. It will go forward, it will take place, and, Mr. Holmes . . . it will take place before your very eyes! And you will be powerless to prevent it!”
He sat back in his chair, gesturing with the revolver as though driving home a salient point of mathematics in the cla.s.sroom.
”The world will gape at its very immensity! And when the world discovers that it has occurred within arm's length of the incomparable Sherlock Holmes, the world will sneer, the world will ridicule-and the world will hound you into oblivion! That is why I have not used any of the means at my disposal here in this room. I have other plans for you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes!”
The Professor sank back further in his chair, fairly panting with the emotion that had surged through him in the course of his tirade. Holmes looked at him for a moment, then slowly shook his head.
”Have you? I, on the other hand, have the same plan for you that I have always had: to see you swing at the end of the hangman's rope. I have no doubt, Professor, that it is my plan that will prevail.”
He stood above the wizened Professor for a moment, a brooding sternness shadowing his face. He might have been an avenging angel taking the measure of a demon of the Pit for a fated forthcoming struggle.
A piece of crystal crunched under one evening pump as he s.h.i.+fted his stance slightly. He glanced down, and his face lightened with a wry smile.
”Pity about the chandelier. It was the only thing in the room that showed a little style. Don't bother to get up, Professor. I'll see myself out.”
He turned and was gone from the room.
Professor Moriarty sat for many minutes, his claw-like hands cradling the blued metal of the revolver with an almost urgent affection, gazing with a curiously pa.s.sionless abstraction at a point in s.p.a.ce between himself and the wall. Then, moving decisively, he laid down the weapon and strode to the blackboard. Wiping it clean, he picked up the chalk and began charting his next project in large but meticulously neat letters:
<script>