Margaret Trelawny’s white hand, all but two fingers broken off, lay in a pool of congealed, melted ice- cream.
A few of the jewels of the Madonna were about too, amid the crushed ruin of one of Moriarty’s trick boxes. Their settings were bent and broken.
Moriarty spotted the Green Eye of the Little Yellow God and the Black Pearl of the Borgias, rolling together in a gutter like peas in a pod. Someone’s real eye, red tangle of string still attached, lay with them.
“Pick those up, would you, Moran? We’ve still a client to service.”
“Just the Green Eye?”
“We’ll have the Black Pearl, too.”
“We’d better hope the Creeper drowned.”
“I’m sure he didn’t. Excessive lung capacity. An entirely natural, if freakish attribute, before you ask. For the moment, there’s little risk.”
Moriarty was pleased with his handiwork.
“This wasn’t about Archie Carew, was it?”
“Not entirely, Moran. Very perspicacious of you to notice. I never get your limits. You have them, of course. No, the Green Eye was the least of our items of interest.”
“A lot of trouble for an item of little interest.”
“There is always a lot of trouble in situations like these. I can’t abide a fanatic, Moran. They are variables. They do not fit into calculations. The mumbo-jumbo is infinitely annoying. Consider the Camorra — a perfectly sound criminal enterprise, poisoned by infantile Marianism. Really, why should a bandit care about a statue’s finery? Likewise, the Fenians and their hopeless Cause. They may free themselves from British rule, but for what? The Irish will still have priests to rob and rape them and bleat that it’s for their own good, and they never think to shrug off the yoke of Rome. The Templars — who knows what they are for? They’ve forgotten themselves. At bottom, none are any better than the Creeper. Baby-brains fixated on shiny things. It is best for us, for the interests of the Firm, that these cretins be taken off the board. The Italians and Irish and pseudo-Egyptians shall trouble us no longer. The Soho Merchants’ Protective Society is smashed. Our tithes will be paid without complaint. Navvies and poets who might have been tempted to sink monies in the Irish Invincible Republicans will gamble and drink and whore in establishments we have an interest in. The wealthy and powerful who need to be blackmailed will not have to dress up as pharaohs to do it.”
For the only time I can remember, Moriarty smiled without showing teeth.
This morning, as on few others, he was content. His sums added up.
“What about the little brown priests?” I ventured. “They’ll still come for us. We have the emerald.”
“If I do not pay the remainder of the purchase price today, ownership reverts to Major Carew. Moran, do you have a penny about you?”
“Why, yes, I…” I began, fishing in my watch-pocket. I caught Moriarty’s eye, and my fingers froze. “No, Moriarty,” I said, “I’m short of funds.”
“Pity. We shall have to return Carew’s property, with apologies.”
The man himself was in the street, blinking in the daylight. He took in the carnage and destruction.
“Is it over? Am I safe?”
“That’s for you to decide. I can guarantee that you will not be murdered by the priests of the Little Yellow God.”
Carew laughed, still mad — but happy, too.
He walked down to the dead priest and kicked him. The Nepalese rolled over. He had been shot neatly through the dot in his forehead. Serve him right for painting on a target.
“That’s what I think of your blasted yellow dog of a God,” he said.
Moriarty gave Carew back his emerald, and he waved it in the dead priest’s face. A laughing daredevil again, he cast around for ladies to impress with his flash.
“I’ll have this green carbuncle cut up in Amsterdam, and sold to the corners of the Earth. Then I’ll have the last laugh! Hah!”
“My bill will be sent to your club,” said Moriarty. “I suggest you settle it promptly.”
“Yes, yes, whatever … but, hang it, I’m alive and this brown blighter’s dead. All the brown blighters are dead. You’re a miracle worker.”
I knew — with an instinct that the Professor wouldn’t call supernatural — Mad Carew would gyp us. He was that sort. Couldn’t help himself. One implacable foe was off his back — for the moment, at least — yet he was thoughtlessly on the point of making another.
Carew pumped my hand and pumped Moriarty’s hand. The Professor gave our client’s shoulder a friendly squeeze and pushed him away. Carew walked off with a bounce in his stride, whistling a barrack-room ballad.
We watched him leave.
“One thing, Moriarty,” I said.
“Yes, Moran.”
“You promised Carew he wouldn’t be murdered by priests of the Little Yellow God. Even if the London nest is wiped out and their hairy pet is on the run, there are others back home in the mountains. An army of them, just like this fanatic. Sworn to get back the emerald. They’ll know of this mess soon enough, and they’ll send other priests across the globe for Carew and the Eye.”
“True.”
“So you lied to him?”
“No. I seldom lie. It spoils the equations. When I clapped his shoulder, I gave him a present…”
He opened his hand. The Black Pearl of the Borgias wasn’t in it.
“It will take the next assassins months to get here from Nepal, Moran. It will take but hours for the Hoxton Creeper to get out of the river.”
XVII
So, now you know how it came out. According to Carew’s will, he was to be buried at his last posting. They fit him in a coffin, face up but toes down, and some obliging Nepalese who happened to be visiting London transported him all the way there. The emerald went with him and was stolen from his body before burial. So, the poet had the truth of it, after all — with the exception that Amaryllis Framington married a tea-trader and retired to Margate.
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
* * * * *
KIM NEWMAN is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes
Gaslight Arcanum
Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes
Copyright © 2011
All individual contributions copyright
