The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls (12 page)

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Authors: John R. King

BOOK: The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls
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I opened the door, stole past berths with tickets, chose one
lower berth that was empty, and climbed in. Turning, I peered out to watch for Anna. She appeared a moment later, and I stuck out my hand to motion her toward the berth. She clambered in beside me. Silence came staggering through the door shortly afterward, and Anna motioned him in.
“Here we are,” I whispered. “Three peas in a pod.”
“Three bugs in a rug,” Anna said, sounding pleased at last.
“Three men in a tub,” Silence volunteered faintly.
“Billets!”
cried the conductor, and he ripped back the curtain.
As the gaslight of the aisle broke over me, I ducked my head beneath the covers and wished that Anna would do the same. Instead, she sat there rigidly beside Silence, a man more than twice her age.
“Mon Dieu! Qu’est-ce qui se passe ici?”
asked the conductor.
“Ah, we are traveling companions,” Anna said.
The conductor began to switch to English:
“Tous les deux
of you in the lavatory at once?”
“I’m incontinent!” Silence proclaimed. I could not see the reaction from Anna or the conductor, but I had to exercise a great deal of restraint to keep from laughing. “This is my nurse, and she helps me in the lavatory.”
“He makes a terrible mess otherwise,” Anna volunteered. “And he stops breathing at night, which is why I must tend him even as he sleeps.”
“Well,” the conductor said, “it all makes sense now. I feared somehow this geezer had robbed the cradle.”
“Oh, no,” said Silence.
“I have a much younger beau,” Anna piped in.
“And I suppose I was looking just at your face before,” the conductor said. “But judging by your dress, well—you’re nearly thirty, aren’t you, mademoiselle?”
“Nearly,” she said.
The conductor laughed. “All right then. Still, I need to see your tickets.”
“Well, ah,” Anna said nervously, “where did you put the tickets, Mr. Thomas?”
“I, well,” Silence answered, hands rustling though his shirt. “I … thought I …” He stopped, and I heard the sound of paper in his fingers. “I don’t seem to have tickets, but will this do?”
What have you done, Silence—pulled out more erotica?
“That will do nicely, sir. Twenty Swiss francs for a sleeping berth to Paris.”
“Paris!” Anna exclaimed before she could help herself.
As the conductor punched a pair of tickets for them, he said in a rueful voice, “Yes, I’m sorry. It was just fifteen francs to Paris until last month, but—such is the price of progress.”
“A high price, indeed!” blustered Silence.
“Don’t get worked up,” Anna said. “You know how that affects you.”
“Thank you both. And enjoy your time in the City of Lights.”
I heard the curtain draw closed again. Silence nudged me: “He’s gone.”
I came up for air. “That was a close shave. Where did you get the cash, Silence?”
“Apparently, I pilfered more than celery back there.”
The three of us allowed ourselves a little laugh, which subsided soon into quiet. We lay side by side, staring at the ceiling and counting our fortunes. We had a berth to Paris on an all-night train, a pair of tickets in the clip outside to keep anyone from disturbing us, and the certainty that we had left Anna’s father far behind.
“Hey.” I looked at Anna. “All this time—in all this craziness, you’ve never even told us who your father is.”
She breathed deeply, steeling herself. “My father’s name is … Professor James Moriarty.”
I let that name sink in before asking, “Who?”
Anna laughed. “We have a long trip. Why don’t I tell you the story of me and my father?”
A PROBLEM FINALLY SOLVED
THE THIRD TONE
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY:
 
A
man does not become great: He is born as he is—great or petty. Men do not get to choose the magnitude of their lives, but only the direction, whether they will be good or evil.
From birth, I, James Moriarty, have been great. For the majority of my life, I had chosen to be a great good man. Three years ago, though, my choices began to change, a change that the mild reader will come to understand.
Let me begin at the beginning—or what I remember as the beginning. My first memory comes from 1849, when I was four. My father, Matthias Moriarty, took me to a vespers service in Jesus College, Cambridge. Father was not a religious man, but he sought solace after the loss of my mother to whooping cough. During that vespers service, the organist performed a Bach fugue in C. While Father sat in the pew, steeped in grief, I slipped off, sneaked along the nave, and took up a post behind the organist. There, I stood—mesmerized.
“C,” I murmured.
Father had shown me the note on the clavier in our apartments and had told me it was the key to unlocking all of music. From that day forward, I could find any C on any keyboard—even on the six stacked keyboards of the organ console and the foot pedals beneath. I tried to make out the
movements of the organist’s hands, climbing the keys like a pair of demon-possessed spiders, but I could not. The movements of his feet, however, were clear:
When his foot rested on C, the music was grand, broad—stable.
When his foot leaped
down
five notes from C, the music was new and hopeful.
When his foot leaped
up
five notes from C, the music sounded like it was on the verge of changing—pregnant with possibility.
I stood rapt, listening to the same fugue that everyone else heard but finding in it the sweet mathematics of music itself. Those three notes—C and what I later learned to be F and G—were stability, movement, and transformation … or earth, water, and fire … or body, mind, and soul … or Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva … . It was no wonder that music could fashion landscapes in the air.
“There you are!” Father growled, clutching my collar. “Disrespectful, disobedient, disastrous!” He hauled me down the nave and out of the sanctuary. I tried to gabble out an explanation, to outline the forces in music, but no explanation could prevent the beating.
I’ve held on to that moment for the rest of my life—my first memory. I’ve clutched it to my chest like a memento, and it has defined me. I was doomed to hear the same music that everyone else heard, but to be changed by it, to have the mathematics of it imprint on me. And it would not be simply music that plagued me, but every human endeavor: sculpture, architecture, statecraft, history, phrenology … . I was defenseless against the exquisite mathematics of the world, and whenever I tried to tell others about it, they turned a deaf ear or a sharp hand.
As time went by, my four-year-old self grew into a precocious and irrepressible young man. My father meanwhile grew into an intractable alcoholic. In his sober moments, he made arrangements for me to board at Barswidge public school, and I went gladly, eager to escape my horrible home.
By the time I reached boarding school, I had learned to keep silent about my theories. I confided only in a tattered notebook locked at the bottom of my trunk. In it, I continued my study of the mathematics of music. I discovered other sounds that moved the mind: moods of melancholy or love, ferocity or bliss. I also discovered that there was a devil in music, a note three whole steps above or below C.
Diablos de musicale,
the composers called it. It lurked between the perfect fourth and the perfect fifth—a half step into destruction.
I soon learned there were devils in the world, too. An upperclassman named Gerald Johnstone had begun pounding my shoulder whenever I passed. Gradually, the abuse escalated. One day, Gerald waited until I was in class and then broke into my locked trunk. He paraded my clothes around the dormitory, ate the crackers that I had stored to quiet my stomach at night, and then found my notebook. Gerald gathered a jeering mob around my bunk and staged a dramatic reading. As he finished each page, he tore it out, crumpled it, and tossed it into the fire.
By the time I returned, my tormentors had fled, leaving my shirts, breeches, and knickers tossed all through the dorm room. I ran to the trunk, but my notebook was gone. Snickers came from the hallway as I gathered my belongings.
In the days that followed, my classmates wouldn’t identify the vandal, but Gerald Johnstone’s smug smile made the culprit clear.
Then I would defend myself in my own way. I turned my mathematical mind to a new endeavor: building traps. I wired my trunk so that if a certain switch were not triggered, a small catapult within the trunk would launch a brick at the intruder. I returned the next day to find my clothes thrown in the fire, but also to follow a trail of blood drops to the infirmary, where Gerald Johnstone was recovering from a broken nose and a knocked-out tooth. It was a victory of sorts: I could eventually save up for more clothes, but Gerald would nevermore have that tooth.
When he returned to the dorm, he was full of bluster and threats. I met these with my own quiet warning: that anyone who tried to open my trunk again would regret it deeply. I had already secretly rigged the box, fastening a cleaver within the upper lid and bolting a powerful set of springs on the hinge. I also included a timing device so that the trunk would stand open for ten seconds. At that point, if the trigger was not set, the trunk would slam shut—cleaver and all.
Next day, when I returned to the dorm room, my trunk was closed tight, and the rest of the boys looked at me with a sense of horror. I went to my trunk, pressed the trigger, and opened it. The box was empty except for Gerald Johnstone’s right thumb and forefinger.
I had no more trouble with Gerald Johnstone or anyone else at Barswidge. My traps had earned me something that I had never had before: a reputation. Its power was uncanny. Though no lock could have stopped the likes of Gerald Johnstone, a ferocious reputation could. That devilish demeanor soon became a prized possession of mine, a defense against the bullies of the world. I have maintained and further cultivated that reputation throughout my life.
At sixteen, I had outgrown Barswidge and won a fellowship to Jesus College, Cambridge—the place where I had first discovered the mathematics of music. In the intervening time, I had applied my calculus to a thousand other things—the flight of birds, the intricacies of snowflakes, the branching of arteries, the formation of thunderheads. Out of the ashes of my first notebook rose tome after tome of calculations. My notes were so extensive that one student anonymously reported that I had stolen the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci. A minor tribunal resulted, in which my notebooks were compared to those of the master. The differences were obvious: though we both wrote in Latin, I wrote only in the
forward
direction; for that matter, Leonardo occasionally failed to carry a 1.
All of these doings were only trifles for me, simply ways of passing time. I had not had a truly profound revelation since that night in Jesus College when I was four.
But then I took a Christmas break in London. In a cheap walkup flat in Whitechapel, I sat at the window and stared down at a slushy street called George Yard. Carts clogged it and people tromped along the pavements and filth sluiced down the slop channel—and I suddenly heard the fugue again.
Those primal forces of stability, movement, and transformation weren’t just in music. They were in the world. They
moved
the world.
I began sketching the trajectories of the cabs as they raced along, the policemen as they walked their beats, the nannies as they led their gosling broods, the whores as they staggered from gin to John. I plotted the motions of all the people who happened along George Yard and graphed them against the three great tones.
First was the pedal tone of stability. Everyone followed that sound: the need for food and clothing and shelter, the desire for safety and love. This was the foundation of civilization. Leaders played that tone to fill mines and pews and trenches.
The second tone was that of newness and movement. It extended the wish of self-preservation to sons and daughters, to those who would carry on. The bosses of men played this tone also to move the masses, and the mothers and the teachers followed its path.
The third tone was the pitch of transformation—of transfiguration. It promised escape from the world and the flesh and the limits of life, escape into something altogether new. No ruler had learned that tone, no boss of men; they themselves were deaf to it.
But I heard it. I had been hearing it all my life. It was the sort of tone that makes a young man sit at a window for a week and map the trajectories of passersby. But who else could hear that tone?
On my fourth day of charting, I found someone—a baker who led his wife and seven children on an afternoon stroll to the closed bakery. They would feast on day-old pastries. For that reason, I had ascribed the man’s actions to the second tone and would not have given him a second thought except that a scamp decided to pick his pocket.
The baker swung about and clamped his fist down on the boy’s wrist and stared at him furiously. “What’re you up to then, eh?” the baker growled, the words rising through my open window. “Takin’ hard-earned keep out of the hands what bled to make it? Me rising before dawn and workin’ a full day before you even roll over in that gutter you’re in? See them, there? Eight mouths plus mine. You snatch the bread out of ’em? Since when’ve you been adopted? Since when’re
you my son?” The scamp cringed back and twisted to get his arm free but couldn’t. The baker grabbed the coins out of the boy’s hand, struck him a blistering slap across the cheek, and sent him sprawling to the pavement. He leaped up, bawling, and bolted into the street.
Then, the third tone struck—for this baker who had just lectured the scamp about his hard work and about his wife and children forsook them all. He dropped the coins and charged out into traffic and hurled the scamp away just as the four-horse carriage thundered up. Sixteen steel-shod hooves punched through the baker, and four steel-rimmed wheels mashed him. In an instant, he had left the world, had made his wife a widow and his seven children orphans. The scamp, meanwhile, scampered away.
That man had heard the third tone. At least for the briefest second, he heard its call to transcend, and he answered. He was mortal no more.
Two days later, there was another such man—a young man with an easel under one arm and a box of paints and a folded-up stool under the other. He positioned himself beside a street lamp with a view down George Yard and began soliciting passersby to have their portraits painted. A dozen solicitations, a dozen rejections, and then at last a black-suited businessman lingered. He reached into his waistcoat pocket, handed over a crown, and sat down on the stool, as stiff as a tailor’s dummy.
The artist took the measure of the man and set to work.
Strangely, though, the young artist did not paint the man, but instead a portrait of the sun—a brilliant white disk emanating rays through a swollen red sky. The sense of vitality in the canvas was overwhelming, a furious outpouring of life like that in Blake’s
Ancient of Days
. This was not a portrait of the man’s outside, but of his inside—the blazing soul buttoned up
in the business suit. It was as if by painting this portrait, the artist was transforming the man himself.
At last, the painter finished his work. Pitching brushes into a pot of kerosene, he rubbed his hands on a rag, lifted the painting from the easel, and turned it with slow savor to show to his subject.
The businessman snatched the canvas out of the painter’s grip and began to shout. His hand jabbed into the artist’s pocket and wrenched out the crown. Then the businessman lifted the portrait—the eternal image of himself—and broke the frame over his knee. Some of that white-golden paint smeared his trousers. He stalked away.
I sat, cold sweat dappling me, and watched the artist grieve his work. For a long while, the young man did nothing but crouch beside that broken canvas, trying to straighten the frame, trying to dab out the knee print. At last, he sorrowfully set the painting in the gutter.
Then he did something remarkable: He pulled out another canvas, set it up, and began to ask passersby if they wanted a portrait. Twenty solicitations and twenty rejections—and then a dowager with a magnificent oval hat and a minuscule lapdog sat on the stool. The drama played out just as it had before. Again the painter painted a radiant portrait, again the woman cried her outrage … . Another crown lost, another painting defiled, another time to mourn … .
And the painter set up a new canvas and began again.
By the time the lamplighter had come, there were five ruined canvases in the gutter, and the painter’s easel and paints were smashed beside them. The painter was gone, clapped in irons by the police and led away to jail—or perhaps to an asylum.
Gone was another soul who heard the third tone.
“Next time I see such a soul,” I pledged to myself, “I’ll go
to the gentleman and meet him before he can be killed or jailed.”

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