The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus (21 page)

             
"No matter. It would be best if they did not speak at all, but that is too much to be hoped. How long?"

             
"Before they arrive, you mean? I don't know. It didn't say. Soon enough, I imagine."

             
"It cannot be soon enough. Training should have begun already. We cannot leave anything to chance. My plans are complete, and we commence the operation at once."

             
"What of Moriarty?"

             
"He is one of the only two men in London—in England—that could stand in our way. The police—bah! They are ill-trained incompetents. The infamous British Secret Service is otherwise occupied at present. But Professor James Moriarty, whom our brothers have seen fit to employ against us, and that notorious busybody, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, are very real threats. At the least they threaten to expose us, and discovery is tantamount to failure."

             
"Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective?"

             
"Yes."

             
"He is aware of us?"

             
"Mr. Holmes has stumbled across one or two of our activities without realizing what they were. Curiously enough, he insists upon attributing them to Professor Moriarty. They seem to dislike each other. But Mr. Holmes is an astute observer, usually with an uncanny ability to draw the correct inference from a mass of seemingly unrelated data. He is sure to be called in to investigate certain aspects, certain outward manifestations, of our great plot as it progresses toward fruition. If so, it is possible that he will ascertain the truth. And if he fails, then we shall still have the professor of mathematics dogging our heels."

             
The tall man nodded thoughtfully. "It is clear that these two threats must be removed," he said.

             
"A successful commander," the other said, "uses his enemy's strengths against him. These two men represent our enemy's greatest strength; and I think I have devised a way to use them against each other. It requires but minor revisions in the great plan."

             
"Perhaps we should just have them removed," the tall man said. "Dead men cannot cause trouble."

             
"Dead men also cannot help," the other replied. "In my new plan the professor of mathematics and the consulting detective will unwittingly aid us. And
then
they will die. It will be humorous, no?"

             
"Show me!" the tall man demanded.

             
The other took out a small notebook. "Follow the scheme," he said. "See how the pieces fit together and one follows naturally from the one before. All culminating in the Supreme Act. It is elegant."

             
"Trace the steps," the tall man said.

             
"Listen!" the other commanded.

             
And he talked long into the night.

The moving finger writes ...

— Omar Khayyam

             
London wears her history on her streets: the buildings, the facades, the monuments, the heroic statuary, the ornamental ironwork, the street signs, and even the paving stones. But especially the street signs. In any given mile, an average London street has only twelve blocks, but it can change names three times. As Oxford Street, for example, heads east, it becomes in turn New Oxford Street, Holborn, High Holborn, Holborn Viaduct, Newgate Street, Cheapside, and Poultry. And all of this in under two miles.

             
Benjamin Barnett, used to the grid-pattern uniformity of New York or the great boulevards of Paris, found the zigzag maze of London streets a constant delight. Each street, sometimes each block, had its own character, its own air, its own voice. Barnett walked the streets as much as he could over the next few weeks, trying to attain that distinctive intimacy with the city that would make him a good reporter. To know London intimately, of course, would take years, and even then he would really know only that part of the city which had become his "beat."

             
But if he was going to do his job, to help the professor in his search for the abnormal, he was going to have to learn what was normal in this, the largest city in the world and the center of the world's greatest empire.

             
Learning what was accepted was not difficult: the standards were pretty much the same over the civilized world these last decades of the nineteenth century. But the uncivilized world did not begin in Asia or darkest Africa; it peered around the corner in Lambeth, it waited in alleys in the East End, it skulked along the wharves and
docks fronting the Thames. So Barnett had to go beyond what was accepted; he had to know what was condoned, condemned, controlled, misunderstood, overlooked, winked at, persecuted, prosecuted, and ignored. In these places lies the job of a reporter. It is in the interconnection of these elements that news is created.

             
Barnett found office space on the top floor of a small building on Whitefriars Street, just south of Fleet Street. He equipped it with a desk, a Grandall typewriter, a box of pencils, two reams of yellow paper, and a wastepaper basket, and felt at home. After much thought he found a sign painter and had him inscribe
American News Service
across the door with
B. Barnett
in much smaller letters under it.

             
The next step, before he saw any of the British working press, was to establish his
bona fides.
There was no point in faking something that could just as easily be legitimate. He made up a list of New York and Boston newspapers that might take filler material from him—he'd worry about the rest of the country later. To start with, he sent a cable to his last employer, the
New York World:

Now working for American News Service comma London stop will you take news at space rates plus cable charges questionmark we pay for query comma you specify inches

BENJAMIN BARNETT

             
Within four hours, the fastest turnaround time Barnett had ever seen on the transatlantic cable, he had his reply from the
World,
signed by Hardesty Gores, the managing editor himself:

Why arent you in prison

GORES

             
Barnett read the cable and scribbled a short reply for the boy to take back.

I died

BARNETT

             
The next morning, when Barnett arrived at the office to supervise the hanging of curtains and a few other necessary amenities, another cable from the
World
awaited him:

Want exclusive your personal story stop will take to one hundred inches space rates

GORES

             
So there was his first account. And an interesting challenge it would be, too, to write the story of his incarceration and escape without violating the terms of his agreement with the professor. He'd have to work on that one.

             
Barnett sent cables to the other papers on his list and turned his attention to getting to know the editors and journalists of Fleet Street. He started with the morning papers, which traditionally have the better local reporting staff. A morning paper usually has the late-breaking news and has to whip it into shape and dish it out for its readers' breakfast enjoyment. An
evening paper has time to reflect and specializes in perspective and analysis of the news it gets from the morning papers. Or so it was in New York, and so Barnett assumed it would be in London.

             
Within the next two days, Barnett had consulted with the city editors of the
Daily Telegraph,
the
Daily News,
the
Standard,
and the
Times.
Under the pretext of doing a series of articles for the American market on crime in metropolitan London, he arranged to have access to the newspapers' clipping files and to be apprised of current happenings by messenger once a day. Newspapers tend to be very responsive to the requests of outside journalists who are not direct competitors. It was a cheap and effective sort of bread-casting.

             
Within a week, Barnett had replies from eleven East Coast dailies to the effect that they were willing to see his queries and buy from him at space rates if he had anything that interested them. "I have," he told Professor Moriarty over dinner, "quite inadvertently established myself in a business. I'm going to have to go out and hire that secretary you suggested just to keep up with the legitimate stories, not counting the research I'm doing for you. I didn't think it would be so easy."

             
"You must be considered a good journalist by your American peers," Moriarty suggested.

             
"I don't think that's it," Barnett said. "Not that I'm not a good journalist, you understand. I'm the best. But I think what these papers see is the notoriety value of my byline. Something like this: 'Mr. Barnett, our London correspondent, is the man who recently conducted a daring escape from a Turkish prison—no, make that a Turkish dungeon—after being tried and convicted for the murder of a British naval officer. A murder he assures us he did not commit. Full details in our Sunday edition.' "

             
"Fascinating. Clearly shows the advantages of compulsory literacy even in the most primitive cultures."

             
"Remember," Barnett told him, "that where I come from a woman who killed her lover with a nickel-plated revolver last year was acquitted of the crime when she told the jury that he had lied to her. And then she went on a vaudeville singing tour that took her to twenty-seven cities. Despite a voice like a bullfrog, she packed the house at every stop."

             
Moriarty put down his fork and stared at Barnett. "If I followed that properly," he said, "the moral of it would have to be, 'When in America keep nickel-plated revolvers out of the hands of women who can't sing.' " Then he chuckled and returned his attention to his pudding.

-

             
Barnett put an advertisement in the next morning's
Daily Telegraph
for a "secretary for a small news-office, conversant with the operation of typewriting machines. Reply to Box 252, Telegraph." He arranged for a messenger to deliver the replies to his office. By that afternoon's post he had sixteen replies, and by the following morning when he arrived at the office, eighty-seven.

             
He piled them all up on top of his new desk and settled down to go through them, with no clear idea of how to go about culling them down to manageable size. He found that a good many of the applicants eliminated themselves through unacceptable vagaries of grammar, syntax, or spelling. He counted the letters remaining: fifty-two. He had no interest in interviewing fifty-two people, and felt that he'd be even more helpless in deciding when actually faced with them than he was when merely faced with their letters of application. There were seventeen nearly identical letters in the pile. They each began, "I read with interest your advertisement in today's
Daily Telegraph
..."
and continued, with little variation except for the name of the applicant, to precisely one inch from the bottom of the page. Barnett pulled them all out. Obviously copied from some popular letter-writing guide, he decided. Well, if he arbitrarily eliminated these as lacking in imagination, that still left thirty-five.