Professor Moriarty Omnibus Page 7

  The Captain of the Guard stroked his mustache. "I am," he announced finally. "You say you have an authority?"

  The monk handed the parchment to the captain, who spread it open and studied it. "This is an authority to visit prisons in the service of your religious practice?" the captain asked.

  "That is correct."

  "It is signed by Sultan Bayezid II?"

  "Correct."

  "Four hundred years ago?"

  "Just a trifle more than that."

  "This is still good?"

  "It has never been rescinded."

  "You have, perhaps, something more recent?" the captain pleaded, seeing the promised gold dissolving before he had even a chance to taste it. "I cannot permit you to enter the Prison of Mustafa II on a four-hundred-year-old authority."

  "Well, then," the monk said, reaching doubtfully into his robes, "there is this." He handed through the bars an official-looking document with etched red borders, stamped, sealed, notarized, embossed, impressed, and triply signed.

  "Why, this is signed by the Grand Vizier, the Commander of Prisoners, and the Djerrah Pasha!" the Captain of the Guard said. "There'll be no trouble about your shriving the prisoners."

  "Ah, well," the monk said, "if you prefer these recent signatures to that of a four-hundred-year-old sultan, so be it."

  The captain shook his head. "You religious people," he said tolerantly. "Wait, I will get four guards to accompany you. We cannot afford any trouble. Some of these men are desperate."

  "Very good of you," the monk said.

  The captain called forth four guards and then opened the gate. "Enter," he said.

  "May we be admitted?" the monk asked. "Didn't I just tell you to enter?" the captain said. "May we be admitted?" the monk asked.

  "What's the matter, don't you understand Turkish?" the captain said. "Now, look—"

  "May we be admitted?" the monk asked again.

  A great light dawned on the gate guard. "Only if you pay the fee," he said, winking at the captain.

  "Here you are," the monk said; "two gold medjidié."

  "Enter," the gate guard said. "Ah!" the captain said.

  -

  The five monks entered the prison in a close group, with two guards in front of them and two behind. The captain led the group across the courtyard and into the corridors which housed the prisoners. Then he fell behind and watched as the group went from cell door to cell door calling in Turkish and Greek, "Are you Christian? Do you wish to be cleansed of your sins?" Occasionally the call was made in French and English, and if the captain thought that strange he said nothing. Every time a prisoner responded and the cell door was opened, he mentally added one more gold medjidié to the growing count.

  Because the prisoners were bored and any activity was a welcome novelty, many of them conceived a sudden desire to be cleansed of their sins. The monks slowly worked their way down the corridor, stopping at door after door, shriving the damned. Devout Musselmen and Zoroastrians did not admit them, neither did the paranoid nor the catatonic, but most of the prisoners welcomed the monks and the diversion they represented.

  Two or three of the monks would enter the cell when bidden by the prisoner and close the door behind them. The other monks would kneel outside the cell door and pray for the prisoner's soul. The monks spent between three and ten minutes inside each cell they entered.

  For the first hour the guards kept a close watch on the monks, one of them going into each cell along with the shrivers; but as time passed and nothing remarkable happened, they relaxed their vigilance and grew bored, squatting together to talk when the monks entered a cell.

  It was well along in the third hour before the Simonites reached Benjamin Barnett's cell. "Do you want to be cleansed of your sins?" came the call from the corridor.

  Barnett, who had been dozing, woke with a start as the ghostly voice boomed through the cell: "Do you want to be cleansed of your sins?" this time in French. He looked around wildly before realizing that the voice came from someone with his mouth close up against the cell door.

  "What do you want?" Barnett called.

  There was a rattling and thumping, and the cell door opened to admit three men in brown robes who seemed to glide into the room joined at the shoulders. Barnett had a glimpse of another two kneeling in front of the cell before the door swung closed.

  "Quick!" the nearest monk whispered in French. "Remove your garments!"

  "What?"

  "The Professor Moriarty sent us. Remove quickly your garments. We are to exit you from this place."

  Without further discussion Barnett stripped off the few gray rags that the prison authorities had given him. "What are you going to do?" he asked. "I am chained to the wall."

  "We have prepared ourselves for that eventuality," the monk told him. "However, we must hasten ourselves."

  The three monks separated from each other, and an amazing thing happened; the monk in the middle silently folded up and collapsed until there was nothing left of him except a bundle of brown clothes on the floor.

  Barnett gasped and took an involuntary step backward. He didn't know what he had expected to happen, but it surely wasn't this.

  "Hush!" the monk on his left whispered sharply, putting his forefinger to his lips.

  "Mon Dieu! but I am sorry," the other monk said. "I should have paused to realize how startling that would appear if unwarned."

  "What happened to him?" Barnett demanded, pointing to the empty robes.

  "Ah, but you see there was no 'him,' " the monk said. "He was merely simulated by wires in the robes artfully manipulated by my comrade here and myself. Now he and you are about to merge."

  "No time for talk," the left-hand monk said, whipping a pocket razor out from his robes and twisting it open. "To work!"

  The other monk took two small phials from inside his robes and handed one of them to Barnett. "This is a vegetable oil," he said. "Apply it to all parts of your beard and rub it in. This will facilitate the shaving of your face."

  Barnett carefully and thoroughly anointed his three weeks of stubble with the oil while the monk stropped the razor on a small piece of leather sewn to his sleeve. Then he tested the blade on the back of his hand, nodded approval, and approached Barnett. "Move not your face," he warned.

  Barnett held his face motionless while the monk artfully applied the razor. The other monk crouched on the floor and unstoppered his second phial. "Hold still your feet," he said.

  "What are you doing?" Barnett demanded, trying to peer down his nose without moving his face.

  "Applying oil of vitriol to the link connecting your foot to this chain," the monk told him. "It will take a few minutes. Hold still!"

  Barnett kept completely still, from face to feet, and let the two monks work on him. When the one had finished shaving him he took a rag and spread grease over Barnett's face. "Darken your skin," he said. "Remove prison whiteness."

  Two minutes later, Barnett, in brown robes, his face deeply concealed by the cowl, his feet in worn monk's sandals thoughtfully provided by his escorts, walked out of his cell. For another ten minutes, the group continued through the prison, chanting and praying and shriving. Then, the circle completed, they arrived back at the East Gate and paid the head tax to the Captain of the Guard, carefully counting out each gold medjidié into the palm of his hand.

  "In Simon's name we bless you," the speaking-monk said.

  "Come back soon," the guard captain replied, transferring the gold to a leather purse.

  "Next Shrove Friday," the monk said. "You have my word."

  SEVEN — 64 RUSSELL SQUARE

  To trust is good; not to trust is better.

  — Verdi

  Barnett arrived at 64 Russell Square rolled inside a 600-year-old Kharvan rug. He was unrolled in the butler's pantry by the two men who had brought him, working under the direction of a tall woman in a severe black dress. "Very good," she told the men as Barnett unfolded from the rug. "Now take it into th
e front parlor. Mr. Maws will tell you what to do with it."

  Barnett stood up and did a couple of knee-bends to get the blood circulating in his legs again. "Hello," he said.

  The woman extended a slender hand. "I am Mrs. H," she said. "Professor Moriarty's housekeeper. You are Mr. Benjamin Barnett."

  "That's right," Barnett said, taking the hand.

  "You'll be wanting a bath. Come with me." She led him up two flights of stairs. "This will be your room," she said, opening a door in the hall to the left of the landing. "The bath is across the way. Fresh linens on the bed and towels on the washstand. There's hot water. I'll have a bath drawn for you while you get out of those garments. Leave them outside the door and I'll see that they're disposed of."

  Barnett looked down at the filthy laborer's garb the monks had supplied him with before he left Constantinople. It had not gained anything in cleanliness in the weeks he had been crossing Europe. "But Mrs. H," he said, "I have nothing else to wear."

  "Your clothing," she told him, "is in that wardrobe and in this chest of drawers."

  Barnett pulled open the top drawer of the chest. Inside were a row of starched white shirts. A brief inspection convinced him that they were his own, from his Paris flat. "How did these get here?" he demanded.

  "Express," she said. "I'll see to your bath." And with a satisfied nod, she turned and left.

  Barnett closed the door and happily stripped off the rags he was wearing. His red velvet dressing-gown was on a hook in the wardrobe, and he gratefully enveloped himself in it. This Professor Moriarty, he reflected, seemed to be a gentleman not only of extraordinary capabilities but of immense attention to detail. Barnett only now noticed that there, on the dressing table, across from the bureau, was the silver comb and brush set that had been his sole inheritance from his father. By the door rested the three sticks and two umbrellas that had been in his umbrella stand. The framed portrait of his mother that had been on his writing-desk now sat on the night table by the solid four-poster bed. There was an envelope on the dressing table next to the brushes with BARNETT printed on it in block letters. Inside was a second envelope — which he recognized. The tape marks still crossed it where it had been fastened to the underside of the third drawer down in the armoire of his Paris flat. And inside that were still the five hundred-franc notes that served as his emergency money supply.

  Barnett dropped the envelope back on the dressing table and thoughtfully crossed the hall to the bathroom. A maid — a black-haired girl who couldn't have been over sixteen — was pouring the last of a pail of hot water into the large scoopback porcelain tub. She tittered when she saw Barnett and backed out of the small room. Barnett stared after her. Are red velvet dressing-gowns a bit too advanced for staid old London, he wondered, or is she one of those girls who titters at everything? He'd have to find out. It wouldn't do to have an outrageous dressing-gown. Shutting and bolting the door, the force of a habit from long years of living in rooming houses, he hung up the offending garment and eased himself slowly into the steaming hot water.

  An hour later, scrubbed, clean-shaven, and immaculately dressed for the first time in over a month, Barnett was taken by Mrs. H to see Professor Moriarty. "He's in his basement laboratory," she told him, leading the way. "We do not disturb him there unless it is important, but I have instructions concerning you."

  "What sort of instructions, Mrs. H?" he asked.

  "As soon as you're presentable," Mrs. H told him, "I'm to bring you in."

  "You know," Barnett said, following behind her as she opened the door to a narrow staircase on the main floor, "it feels very awkward calling you 'Mrs. H.' I feel as though I'm taking undue familiarity."

  "It's what I'm called," she said.

  "What sort of a name is that — just the initial?" Barnett asked. "Short," she replied.

  After two turns in the narrow stairs they crossed a door that led onto a landing overlooking a large, cement-floored basement room which had been turned into a modern laboratory. Low wooden tables were spread in a circle about the room, leaving the central area bare. On one table, a series of retorts and gathering-tubes were clamped in place over small Bunsen lamps. On another, a complex arrangement of lenses and mirrors was fastened to a revolvable wooden stand ready to twist into motion at the turn of a crank. The cabinets along the walls were furnished with every conceivable sort of chemical and physical apparatus that Barnett was familiar with, and many that he was not.

  "Do not distract him," Mrs. H instructed Barnett in a whisper, nodding at the tall figure of Professor Moriarty sitting stooped over a large journal at a writing table in the corner. "Wait here until he speaks to you. He dislikes having his train of thought interrupted, particularly when he is in the laboratory." Nodding again, she went back upstairs, leaving Barnett on the landing.

  After a while Moriarty looked up from his writing. Then he stoppered the inkwell and put down the pen. "You look a good deal better than the last time I saw you," he told Barnett. "Welcome to London. Welcome to my household. I trust you had an acceptable trip."

  "Not very," Barnett said, going down the last few steps and crossing the room to Moriarty's desk. "I was smuggled across the Bohemian border in a caravan of wagons loaded with fresh-clipped wool being taken to be combed and washed. The smell was indescribable."

  "It kept away the border guards," Moriarty said.

  "I was carted across Rumelia with four other people in a pox-wagon," Barnett said.

  "Nobody tried to stop you," Moriarty commented.

  "From Bosnia through Austria we became a traveling team of acrobats. I couldn't tumble, so I caught the others and held them up. My shoulders and my legs still ache."

  "Nobody ever looks at the low man," Moriarty said.

  "In Italy we finally caught the train," Barnett said. "It was a fourth-class local. Have you ever traveled fourth class from Trieste to Milan?"

  "You would have attracted attention in first class with your clothing," Moriarty said. "And you would have attracted more attention trying to buy other clothing."

  "In Milan we became part of a circus and spent a couple of weeks reaching Paris. I cleaned the animal cages in the menagerie."

  "It sounds like an enriching experience," Moriarty said.

  "And they wouldn't let me go to my apartment in Paris."

  "Does it strike you as brilliant for an escaped felon, wanted for murder, to stroll over to his apartment to collect his clothes?" Moriarty took a small notebook from his pocket and consulted its pages. "In Rumelia you picked a fight with the wagon driver," he said, "a fact that I find incomprehensible, since you had no language in common. On the train outside of Milan a farm woman accused you of stealing a chicken, and you argued with her until the conductor was called."

  "I didn't steal her chicken," Barnett said. "It squeezed through the wicker cage and flapped its way out of the carriage. It's a wonder she didn't lose the other six."

  "And as I pointed out, in Paris you had to be restrained from going to your apartment to get a change of clothes."

  "You should have told me that you were having all my things brought here," Barnett said. "How did you manage to get by the concierge?"

  "I had a letter from you," Moriarty said dryly, "authorizing my agent to remove your belongings. You paid her an extra month's rent in lieu of notice."

  "I did?" Barnett said. "I see." He looked around for a chair. "May I sit?"

  "Of course," Moriarty said. "There is a stool under that table. Pull it over."

  Barnett retrieved the long-legged work stool which was lying on its side, set it up, and straddled it a few feet from Moriarty's desk. "You were having me watched as I crossed Europe," he said.

  "The three who accompanied you are in my employ, as you should have surmised," Moriarty said. "They conceived it to be part of their function to send me a report on your behavior. Actually, there are many favorable points in the report. I would like to have seen the way you smiled and mumbled inanely at that Austrian
border guard until he gave up and let you through. And you acquitted yourself quite well in dealing with the conductor on that Italian train, although you should have arranged things so that he was never called."

  "That woman called me a thief," Barnett protested.

  "There is no magic in epithets," Moriarty said. "You don't have to ward off their effects by disputing them."

  "I suppose you're right," Barnett said, grudgingly. "Still, it grates."

  Moriarty returned the notebook to his pocket. "I am satisfied that, if induced to exercise discretion, you would be a competent and useful assistant to me. Are you ready to discuss the terms of your employment?"

  "I'd like to know what the job is," Barnett said. "I have gathered over the past few weeks that you are no ordinary professor. What is this consulting business of yours?"

  "First we must have an understanding. All else is open to discussion, save this one thing only: you must never divulge anything that you learn while in my employ — not about me, my associates, my activities, my comings and goings, my possessions, my household, nor indeed anything at all related to your employment. This ban does not terminate when and if your employment terminates, but is to continue throughout the remainder of your life. And beyond."

  "Beyond?"

  "Words outlive people. You must not keep a diary or write an autobiography or memoir that in any way touches upon the time you spend with my organization."

  "That's quite a ban," Barnett said.

  "Can you keep it?"

  "I reckon so."

  "Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with any of my activities, whether you find them in opposition to your religion or ethics or even morally repugnant to you?"

  Barnett gave a low whistle. "That is quite a ban!" he said.

  "Can you keep it? Can you give me your unqualified word?"

  "What if I say no?"

  "I dislike indulging in idle supposition, Mr. Barnett. Say either yes or no, and we shall continue the discussion on that basis."

  "Well, about these, ah, morally repugnant acts — if I find any of your activities to be offensive to me, am I obliged to engage in them myself?"