Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes

But — never fear — I’ll release the feline from the reticule. On our St. Helena excursion, Moriarty took the trouble to validate a rumor. As you know, Napoleon’s imperial bones were exhumed in 1840 and returned to France and — after twenty years of lying in a cardboard box as the frogs argued and raised subscriptions — interred in a hideous porphyry sarcophagus under the dome at Les Invalides. You can buy a ticket and gawp at it. However, as you don’t know, Napoleon isn’t inside. For a joke, the British gave France the remains of an anonymous, pox-ridden, undersized sailor. The Duke of Wellington didn’t stop laughing for a month. On the island, the Prof found the original unmarked grave, dug up what was left of the Corsican Crapper and stole Boney’s bonce. That relic was now on its way to Paris by special messenger, fated to become a drinking cup for the leader of France’s premier criminal gang. A bit of a conversation piece, I expect. Les Vamps run to that line of the dramatic the Frenchies call Grand-Guignol. It’s supposed to make their foes shiver in their beds, but is hard to take seriously. Grand Vampires don’t last long. There’s a whole cupboard full of drinking cups made out of their skulls.

“Moran, you’re au fait with the Jewel of Seven Stars, I believe?”

I admitted it. Just for a jolly, while idly considering the locations of the most valuable prizes in London, I’d cased Trelawny House in Kensington Palace Gardens and thought it fair-to-middling difficult. But, see above, my remarks on Famous Gems: Thorny Problem of Converting Same Into Anonymous Cash. Also, the place had a sour air. I’m not prey to superstition, but I know a likely ambush from a mile off. Trelawny House was one of those iffy locations — best kept away from. Might I now have to take the plunge and regret the fancy of planning capers one didn’t really wish to commit?

“The jewels of the Madonna are of less intrinsic interest,” continued Moriarty. “These gems — mediocre stones, poorly set, but valuable enough — bedecked a statue hoisted and paraded about Naples during religious festivals. I see I have your interest. A notion got put about that they were too sacred to steal. No one would dare inflict such insult on Mary — who, as a carpenter’s wife in Judea, was unlikely to have sported such ornament in her lifetime. As it happens, the real reason no one tried for the jewels was that the Camorra, the Neapolitan criminal fraternity, decreed they not be touched. Italian banditti who would sell their own mothers retain a superstitious regard for Mother Mary. They wash the blood off their hands and go to mass on Sunday to present pious countenances. However, as ever, someone would not listen. Gennaro, a blacksmith, stole the jewels to impress his girlfriend. They have been ‘in play’ ever since. Foolish Gennaro is long dead, but the Camorra haven’t got the booty back. At this moment, after a trans-European game of pass-the- parcel-with-corpses, the gems are hidden after the fashion of Poe’s purloined letter. One Giovanni Lombardo, a carpenter whose death notice appears in this morning’s papers, substituted them for the paste jewels in the prop store of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Signorina Bianca Castafiore, ‘the Milenese Nightingale’, rattles them nightly, with matinees Wednesday and Saturday, in the “jewel scene” from Gounod’s Faust. It is of scientific interest that the diva’s high notes are said to set off sympathetic vibrations which burst bottles and kill rats. I should be interested in observing such a phenomenon, which might have applications in our line of endeavour.”

“What about the eye-tyes?” asked Alf Bassick, a reliable fetch-and-carry man. “They’ve been a headache lately.”

“Ah, yes, the Neapolitans,” said the Professor. “The London address of the Camorra, as you know, is Beppo’s Ice Cream parlour in Old Compton Street. They present the aspect of comical buffoons but, by my estimation, the activities of their Soho Merchants’ Protective Society have cut into our income by seven and a half per cent.”

The S. M. P. S. was a band of Moustache Petes selling insurance policies to pub-keepers and restauranteurs. Don’t agree to cough up the weekly payments and your place of business has trouble with rowdy, window-breaking customers. Stop paying and you start smiling the Italian smile. That’s a deep cut in your throat, from ear to ear. It really does look like a red clown’s grin.

“Hitherto, the London Camorra have merely been an inconvenience. Now they know their blessed jewels are in the city, they will be more troublesome. It is a cardinal error to classify the Camorra as a criminal organization, an Italian equivalent to Les Vampires…”

Or us, he didn’t say. He liked to think of our firm as an academic exercise. Abstruse economics. Sub rosa mathematics.

“…at bottom, the Camorra — and their Sicilian and Calabrian equivalents, the Mafia and the ‘Ndrangheta — are a romantic, fanatic religious-nationalist movement, as remorseless and unreasonable as the priests of the Yellow God. They care not about dying, as individuals. This makes them exceedingly dangerous.”

He let that sink in.

“Don Rafaele Lupo-Ferrari, Chief of Chiefs of the Camorra, has vowed to return the jewels to the Madonna. He has taken an oath on the life of his own mother. He has personally followed the jewels across Europe and is presently in London. He paid a call on the late Signor Lombardo at his place of business yesterday. Measures must be taken to pluck the fruit before he can get his hands on it.”

To scare each other, criminals told stories about Don Rafaele. You can imagine how they run. It is said that when a devoted lieutenant thoughtlessly spit out a cigar-end in church on a saint’s day, the pious Don had him strangled with his only son’s entrails. He took his culture seriously, too, and had a sense of humour. When a critic ridiculed the performance of Don Rafaele’s current inamorata as the Duchess Helene in I Vespri Siciliani, the man wound up with his ears cut off and a donkey’s nailed onto his head in their place. I was surprised to learn this monster had a mama. If it were a matter of keeping his word, Don Rafaele would personally sink the old biddy in the Bay of Naples.

“What about Item Six?” chipped Carne.

“The Eye of Balor,” said Moriarty. “A gold coin, named for a giant of Irish mythology, reputed to have been taken from a leprechaun’s pot … lately the ‘lucky piece’ of ‘Dynamite’ Desmond Mountmain, General-in-Chief of the Irish Republican Invincibles. Which brought him only poor luck, since last week an infernal device of his own manufacture went off in his face when he thumped the table too hard at a meeting of his Inner Council of Immortals.”

I told you Ireland would come into it.

“The Eye of Balor is currently among Mountmain’s effects, in the possession of the Special Irish Branch of Scotland Yard. Half a dozen sons and cousins and brothers would like to obtain the coin. It’s said that, if ‘the Wee Folk’ approve, the owner will ascend to the office of Mage-King of Ireland. Whatever that means. The chief contestant for the position is Desmond’s son, Tyrone.”

That was foul news. Another ‘romantic, fanatic religious-nationalist movement’. Your paddy bomber is a mite more concerned with his own individual skin than your wog throttler or guido knifeman, though too hot-headed as a rule to preserve it. Dynamite Des wasn’t the first Fenian to blow himself up with his own blasting powder.

Tyrone Mountmain, the heir-apparent, figured high on my list of people I hoped never to meet again.

So, now we had to worry about brown priests and marauding Mi-Go, the Hoxton Creeper, Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, the Knights Templar, the Naples Mob, the little people and the bloody Fenians! It was a wonder Malvoisin’s Mirror, the Monkey’s Paw, Cap’n Flint’s treasure and Sir Michael Sinclair’s Door were off the ‘shopping list’.

How cursed did Professor Moriarty want to be by the end of the week?

VII

Recall my remarks, in re: nuisance value attendant on one little murder carried out in the service of a trade union?

Ask anyone who knows us (and is still in a position to talk) and you’ll be told we are a mercenary concern. We kill anyone, of whatever political stripe or social standing. For a price. It’s not true that money is all that interests us. The thrill of the chase is involved. If nothing else is on, I’d cheerfully pot someone or steal something just to keep my hand in. Moriarty claims pure intellectual interest in the problem at hand and can be inveigled into an enterprise if it strikes him as out of the ordinary. I believe he feels pepper in the blood too, in the planning, if not the execution. The moment of clear thrill which burns cold — as a perfect shot brings down a tiger or an Archduke — is the closest I can get to the fireworks which whoosh off in the Prof’s brain when his reptile head stops oscillating … and he suddenly knows how an impossible trick can be brought off.

We have no Cause but ourselves. We have no politics. We have no religion. I believe in Sensation. Moriarty believes in Sums. That’s about as deep as it needs run.