Drake laughed in a self-effacing way. “Right there in black-and-white.”
“Your attributes put you in the eighty-fifth percentile for correct action. Your score was second only to Higgins, in the ninety-eighth percentile.” She turned to her rescuer. “Though your intellect is not as keen as Drake’s, and though you tend toward depression and are a staunch chauvinist, you’ve no hangover at all—due to your alcoholism.”
Higgins only stared in amazement.
“The combination of these less-than-stellar attributes, though, actually gave you an advantage in this crisis.”
“How could that be?”
“Look at Lord Salisbury,” Drake said, clapping his classmate on the back. “He’s got all the same demons as you, and he’s brilliant in Parliament.”
Higgins allowed himself a small smile. “What of the other two?”
“Well, here’s Andrews—a genius who tends toward mania, a feminist of the highest order, and moderately hungover. He ranks in the tenth percentile.”
“Rape!” Drake shouted mockingly, lifting his hands and pantomiming running from the room.
“While Nelson has a brain of no particular brilliance, a depressive nature, deep chauvinism, and a terrible hangover. He scored in the fifth percentile—and skulked away.”
MY WIFE had returned, and I couldn’t have been more delighted. In fact, I had helped her plan this whole experiment: I am the professor who was late. I’d given her the names of the four other students and had profiled them for her, and all the while that this drama played out, I was waiting beyond the door. Susanna had made me promise not to rush in, though I had no notion she planned to actually inhale that mint.
“One of these days, my dear,” I chided her after that class, “your sociological experiments will get you killed.”
“WOULD YOU like to see my master’s thesis?” Susanna asked me one March morning, just prior to receiving a
summa cum laude
in maths and sociology from Jesus College. It was a provocative question. Of course I wanted to see it. After all, her history of publication had begun with me, though for the
past three years, she had kept her master’s thesis a secret. She had dropped only occasional titillating clues. To ask if I wanted to see her master’s thesis was only slightly less provocative than asking if I wanted to see her naked.
My eyes strolled over the hundred fifty pages of schematics and formulae, and I tried desperately to parse out the meaning of it. Had she mathematically mapped every tissue in a human body? Had she captured the lineage of every royal personage in Europe? As my puzzlement grew, Susanna’s delight grew likewise. At last, I had to admit my ignorance. “What is all this?”
“This, my dear Dr. Moriarty,” she said, “is a map of the criminal underworld of London.”
I gasped involuntarily. “Indeed?”
“Indeed. You see that this map began with my so-called father. He had worked out a very advantageous trade. His prostitutes would occasionally become pregnant. They could work in that condition, of course—some men preferring it—but once they delivered, he donated the babies to the orphanage: little wicker baskets and little desperate Cockney notes, just what the beadle fell for. Well, the orphanage fed and clothed these children until they, too, became ripe, at which point Father appeared and adopted the pubescent girls. He magnanimously took them away, a philanthropist who alleviated the orphanage’s terrible burden while simultaneously sating London’s terrible desires. See? That’s how Father’s scam works.”
“Remarkable,” I said miserably.
“Well, I’d mapped out that whole scam and realized it was connected into a hundred others. I realized that the commonality was human desire. Prostitution satisfied one human desire. What criminal enterprises satisfied others?
“Well, first off, there were the gambling dens. The less
imaginative used craps and poker, cockfights and bear-baiting to draw in their clientele. The more imaginative bet on the prostitutes themselves as if they were horses carrying impounds, striving to deliver a winning time. The fact that gambling hooked so naturally into prostitution intrigued me.”
“Contemplating a career change, are we?” I teased.
“Yes, though not for me. I plan to bring down Father and his prostitution ring, and the gambling that is connected with it, and the illicit usage of opium that forms a third part of this unholy triumvirate.”
I shook my head in disbelief. “Honestly, Susanna, what are you going to do? One woman cannot bring down a citywide crime syndicate.”
“But I can. Archimedes said that, given the right pivot point and the right fulcrum, he could move the world. Well, James Moriarty. I am the pivot point. I am the fulcrum.”
AN EMPIRE CRUMBLES
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF PROFESSOR JAMES MORIARTY:
W
earing her inimitable smile, Susanna drew a piece of common stationery from the rolltop desk. On it, in a brusque hand, she wrote five words: “Take It and Never Return.” She blotted the ink, blew on the page, folded it once unevenly, stuffed it into a plain brown envelope, dribbled candle wax on it, and pressed the wax flat with a potato.
“Now you have gone quite round the bend,” I remarked. “A potato?”
“Not just any potato.” Susanna lifted it to show that she had carved an intricate design into its end—a grinning skull with an
RB
superimposed over the brow. “The signet seal of Regis Bachman, boss of the largest crime syndicate in London.”
This was incredible. “How did you get his signet ring?”
“I didn’t get the ring itself, but its clear impression in black and blue. I copied it off the face of a man that Bachman had punched.”
My mouth dropped open. “But—this man could identify you!”
“Unlikely, since he is lying even now in the morgue on Buck’s Road. This was the final piece of the puzzle. With it, I can set into motion a chain of events that will bring down the whole syndicate.”
A knock came at the door, and Susanna leaped up from her seat to answer it. There stood none other than Rupert Higgins, the young scholar who had saved Susanna from choking on a mint. He was graduating this year, as well. Rupert held out his hand, and Susanna placed the letter in it.
“You understand what to do?”
“’Course.”
“You understand that your life and mine depend on your discretion—get in and get out without being seen.”
“No problem. I know my way around Whitechapel—not that anyone knows me, mind you.”
“I know. That’s why I chose you.”
“Under the door, one knock, and off I go.” Rupert pocketed the note, pivoted, and stepped away.
Baffled, I closed the door. “What was all that, then?”
Susanna crossed the sitting room and luxuriously laid herself out across the settee. “I would have thought it all would be painfully obvious.”
“Painfully obtuse, you mean.”
“It’s an experiment, like all my others, only much grander in scale. And I’m not going to be hurling myself into a river or choking on a mint this time.”
“At last you’ve learned a little sense. But would you take a moment to explain just what the devil you are up to?”
“As you know, I’ve mapped out this sprawling empire of crime in London and profiled each man and woman—yes, there are women—at the key points in the hierarchy. I know their minds, their personalities, their skills, their desires, their histories—all. Thousands of variables have figured into my equation, and I have run calculations hundreds of times in order to discover the lynchpin that will make it all fall apart.”
“All right, so what is the lynchpin?”
“Not
what
, but
who
. You see, Regis Bachman, the czar of
this empire of crime, has a son he has been bringing up in the trade—Jeremy. Young Jeremy does not have the hard-bitten temperament needed for a life of extortion and murder, though. He’s a painter. On many occasions, he has asked his father to send him to Paris to study art, but Regis is determined to make a crime boss of the boy. Regis has named Jeremy his second and requires all his lieutenants—who collect revenues from the brothels and opium dens and union gangs—to submit their weekly takes to Jeremy, who counts it, takes ten percent for himself, and passes the rest on to his father.”
“And Jeremy is about to receive a message from his father telling him to take the money and never return.”
“Precisely.”
“But how will this unravel the whole syndicate?”
Susanna drew a deep, satisfied breath. “Jeremy will run off with the money—the largest take of the year as a new crop of highly addictive opium has just landed at the docks—leaving no trace and changing his name and disappearing onto the Continent. Jeremy has dreamed of just such a day as this, and he will be content to have escaped his life of crime and be bankrolled for the rest of his existence. Tomorrow morning, however, Regis will discover that his payment is gone and his son is missing—”
“And will hunt him down.”
“No. Betrayal will not occur to him.”
“But surely the lieutenants will suggest it.”
“Yes, but the lieutenants all hate Jeremy—always have—and Regis will determine that one of them, or all of them, have killed his son and stolen the money themselves. Regis will take them out, one by one, until the middle level of the organization is gutted and filled anew from below. These new lieutenants, though, will fear Regis. Some will fall in
line, and others will go after the man himself. In the resulting cascade of gangland slayings, even Scotland Yard will take notice and step in—armed with an anonymous list of all the perpetrators and their crimes—and will sweep them all into prison.”
I smiled, shaking my head in amazement and wonder. “You truly are a genius.”
IN THE London
Times
a week later, we received the first evidence that Susanna’s plan was playing out. The operator of a series of dockside opium dens was found murdered in his bed. When police arrived to investigate, they found the place ransacked, the man’s throat cut, and no apparent motive for the crime.
“They haven’t a clue, as usual,” Susanna lamented. She wrote another pithy note, “Speak to Josiahs Kellerman,” and sent it anonymously to Scotland Yard.
The following week, the
Times
reported that police had questioned the cousin of the murdered opium lord—a man named Josiahs Kellerman, who had assiduously kept the books of the drug trade. He had noted everything, from locations of dens to names of suppliers and names of users and even dates, prices, dosages, and deaths. Kellerman was arrested as an accessory to drug trafficking, but his ledgers were carefully carried in to Scotland Yard like some lost gospel.
“Phase One,” Susanna said—though without the triumph that I had expected in her voice.
“What is it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Never before has any of my experiments endangered another life. This time, though, a man was killed.”
“An opium king,” I pointed out. “Killed by his crime boss, not by you. And how many poor souls have you saved by
shutting down those iniquitous dens? How many wives will have their husbands? You did not kill this man. You simply wrote a few words.”
“A small act,” she replied, her voice sounding haunted. “As small as pulling a trigger.”
Over the course of the next few months, the
Times
broke story after story of opium-den raids and shutdowns, of proprietors and traffickers and users all going before the bench.
THE SECOND phase of Susanna’s plan made the paper shortly afterward, and this time she seemed to feel no regret. The headline read “Prostitution Prince Pleads for Protection.” Beneath the headline, beside a front-page story, was a picture of a gaunt, distraught man, his manacled hands clasped before him.
“Father,” Susanna said.
Though I had never seen the man, Susanna testified that he had grown only the more wasted in the ten years since I had rescued her from the street. “His syphilis is ravaging him,” she said, “but at least he got out of the grips of Bachman and into the hands of the police.”
“As you knew he would.”
“As I knew he would,” she responded grimly. She went on to read the article:
William Petit, self-proclaimed “Duke of Doxies” surrendered himself to Scotland Yard and promised a full confession of his crimes in return for protection.
Investigators took the confession three weeks ago but little believed its lurid details. Subsequent investigations, however, have corroborated the facts of the case and have resulted in hundreds of arrests—and a total collapse of the vile industry throughout Whitechapel and much of London.
Petit’s tearful confession can be summarized as follows: He controlled a network of thirteen houses of ill repute, concentrated in Whitechapel with other operations spread throughout London. In total, these houses employed nearly three hundred prostitutes, with an estimated total clientele of over a thousand elicit acts per night.
Worse yet, Petit used local orphanages as breeding grounds for his ladies of the evening. He assumed various names to adopt nubile girls, but he anonymously dropped off any children born within his brothels. He boasted to have had a yearly income equal to Carnegie himself, but said he had to give it all up due to a threat on his life.
Petit indicated that he had become the target of “the Big Boss,” or “Mr. B.”—the overlord not simply of Petit’s flesh trade but also of opium dens, robbery rings, and guilds of thugs and assassins throughout the city. Six months before Petit’s arrest, Mr. B.’s son and the heir to his empire of crime disappeared, and the Big Boss believes that Petit had a hand in the matter.
“I didn’t, though! I didn’t, Mr. B.,” Petit testified adamantly, asking reporters to print at least this one detail. “I’d never turn on you—won’t give you up, even, but only just myself and my life of crime.”
Despite their disgust at this man’s actions, the police have been true to their pledge to Mr. Petit, providing him a cell and armed guard within the fortresslike confines of Scotland Yard.
Susanna let the
Times
droop in her grip, and she stared out bleakly beyond the valley of the paper. “It is a death sentence.”
“Nonsense,” I said, coming to her and sliding my arm around her. “Scotland Yard is the finest crime-fighting organization on the planet.”
She looked askance at me. “You haven’t read my full dissertation.”
“I have,”
I replied defensively. “I’ve checked and rechecked your calculations.”
“Mathematically, perhaps, but you have not paid attention to the variables, to the names of the men. Appendix J is the algorithm that factors in the chief of Scotland Yard and every detective and inspector in it. Simply by introducing Mr. Petit in that equation, I end up with calculations that predict a sudden and not-so-accidental death.”
I tried to laugh this off. “Even you, my dear—genius though you are—cannot prognosticate the inner workings of Scotland Yard.”
Though she did not respond, I knew her thoughts. Often of late, Susanna had called herself a modern Cassandra—empowered to predict the future but powerless to change it.
Next morning, a peek at the front page of the
Times
proved her correct. The headline screamed: “Prince of Prostitution Dead in Police Custody.” As soon as I read the headline, I folded the paper and shoved it under my chair.
“Don’t bother,” Susanna said from the other room. “I don’t need to read it. I wrote that headline six months ago. And now, my dear, comes the downfall of the Big Boss himself.”
THE FINAL part of Susanna’s plan did not play itself out on the front page. Unlike the murder of an opium lord or the dramatic confession of a prostitution king, the disintegration of the cabal of thugs was indistinguishable from its daily operations. As always, bodies bumped along the nighttime Thames, and police fished them out at the accustomed pace. However, for each murdered man who floated at the top, ten murdered thugs sank to the bottom, their ankles bound to lead weights. This was Bachman’s Inquisition. According to
Susanna’s calculations, the man had become paranoid and saw enemies everywhere. He was purging his ranks of infidels, and every day, his definition of fidelity grew more stringent. Over the months of that summer, the always-fetid river grew downright rank—a stew of death. One morning, a fisherman caught a half-decomposed ear. One afternoon, a dredging crew pumped up a bargeful of mud and bones.
When she read this last account, Susanna told me, “They’re reaching the point of collapse.”
“Are they?” I asked in distraction, grading the papers of my first-term students.
“Now it’s just a matter of watching the obituaries.”
All through the execution of her plan, Susanna had monitored the death notices in the
Times
. Whenever a known criminal had died, she would cross his variables from the grand equation and run her calculations again. The formula now bore so many Xs Susanna had to recast it.
A month later, Susanna crossed two more variables off the list and stared at the final one. “Bachman.”
I approached from behind and embraced her. “Too bad. I’d hoped someone else would finish him off. I suppose you’ll have to let the police round him up, instead.”
“They’ll never take him,” Susanna said wearily. I had at last learned not to question her assumptions, but only to check her calculations. It was undeniable. My eyes traced through the equation, and I saw that Bachman’s end was inescapable: suicide.
Two days later, the
Times
confirmed it. In an unassuming corner of the paper ran the narrow obituary: