Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [130]
Remember I said other crooks hated Moriarty? This was one of the reasons. When he was on a thinking jag, he couldn’t be bothered with anything else. Business as usual went out the window. While the Professor was tending his squid, John Clay, the noted gold-lifter (another old Etonian, as it happens), popped round to Conduit Street to lay out a tasty earner involving the City and Suburban Bank. He wanted to rope in the Professor’s services as consulting criminal and have him take a look-see at his proposed scam, spot any trapfalls which might lead him into police custody and suggest any improvements that would circumvent said unhappy outcome.
For this, no more than five minutes’ work, the firm of Moriarty, Moran & Company, could expect a healthy tithe in gold bullion. The Professor said he was too busy. I had some thoughts about that, but kept my mouth shut. I’d no desire to wake up with a palpitating hellish vampire squid on the next pillow. Clay went off in a huff, shouting that he’d pull the blag on his lonesome and we’d not see a farthing. “Even without your dashed Professor, I shall get away clean, with thirty thousand napoleons! I shall laugh at the law, and crow over Moriarty!”
You know how the City and Suburban crack worked out. Clay is now sewing mailbags, demonstrating the finest needle-work in all Her Majesty’s prisons. A flash, smug thief, he’d been an asset on several occasions. We’d never have got the Rajah’s Rubies without him. If Moriarty kept this up, we wouldn’t have an organization left.
One caller the Professor did deign to receive was a shifty-eyed walloper named George Ogilvy. I took him straight off for a back-alley chiv-man, but he turned out to be another bally telescope tosser. First thing he did was whip out a well-worn copy of The Dynamics of an Asteroid (with all its leaves cut) and beg Moriarty for a personal inscription. I think the thing the Professor did with his mouth at that was his stab at a smile. Trust me, you’d rather a vampyroteuthis infernalis clacked its beak — buccal orifice, properly — at you than see those thin lips part a crack to give a glimpse of teeth.
Moriarty got Ogilvy on the subject of Stent, and the astronomer poured forth a tirade. Seems the Prof wasn’t the only member of the We Hate N. A. Stent Society. I drifted off during the seventh paragraph of bile, but — near as I can recollect — Ogilvy felt passages of On an Inequality of Long Period owed a jot to his own observations, and that credit for same had been perfidiously withheld. It was becoming apparent that mathematician-astronomers, as a breed, were more treacherous, determined and murder-minded than the wounded tigers, Thuggee stranglers, card-sharps and frisky husband-poisoners who formed my usual circle of acquaintance.
Ogilvy happily signed up as the first recruit for the Red Planet League and left, happily clutching his now-sacred Dynamics.
I ventured a question. “I say, Moriarty, what is the Red Planet League?”
His head oscillated, a familiar mannerism when he was pondering something dreadful. He looked out of our window, up into the pinkish-brown evening sky over London.
“The League is a manufacturer of paper hats,” he said. “Suitable apparel for our friends from beyond the vast chasm of interplanetary space.”
Then Moriarty laughed.
Pigeons fell dead three streets away. Hitherto-enthusiastic customers in Mrs. Halifax’s rooms suddenly lost ardor at the worst possible moment. Vampire squid waved their tentacles. I quelled an urge to bring up my mutton lunch.
Frederick Nietzsche witters on about ‘how terrible is the laughter of the übermensch’ — yes, I have read a book without pics of naked bints or big game! — and establishes there is blood and ice in the slightest chuckle of these superior beings. If Fathead Fred ever heard the laugh of Professor Moriarty, he would have