“Politics will be the ruination of the fine art of crime,” Moriarty continued. “Politics and religion…”
This is the moral, Oh My Best Beloved — never kill anyone for a Cause.
For why not, Uncle Basher?
Because Causes don’t pay, Little Friend of all the World. Adherents expect you to kill just for the righteousness of it. They don’t want to pay you! They don’t understand why you want paying!
Not ten minutes after our return, malcontents were hammering at our door, soliciting aid for the downtrodden working man. Kill one Pinkerton and everyone thinks you’re a bloody Socialist! Happy to risk your precious neck on the promise of a medal in some 20th Century anarchist utopia. I wearied of kicking sponging gits downstairs and chucking their penny-stall editions of Das Kapital into the street.
Reds fracture into a confusion of squabbling factions. The straggle-bearded oiks didn’t even want us to strike at the adders of capital. That would at least offer an angle: rich people are usually worth killing for what they have about their persons or in their safes. No, these firebrands invariably wanted one or other of their comrades assassinated over hair’s-breadth differences of principal. Some thought a Board of Railway Directors should be strung up by their gouty ankles on the Glorious Day of Revolution; others felt plutocrats should be strung up by their fat necks. Only mass slaughter would settle the question. If the G. D. of R. has not yet dawned, it’s because Socialists are too busy exterminating each other to lead the rising masses to victory.
I think this circumstance gave the Prof a notion about Mad Carew’s quandary. Which is where the blessed maledictions I mentioned earlier — you were paying attention, weren’t you? —come in, and not before time.
II
Just after the Prof let loose his deep think about ‘politics and religion’, the shadow of a man slithered into the room. Civvy coat and army boots. Colonially tanned, except for chinstrap-lines showing malarial pallor. Bad case of the shakes.
I knew him straight off. Last I’d seen him was in Nepal. He’d been plumper, smugger and, without shot nerves, attached to the British Resident. Attached to the fundament of the British Resident, as it happens. Never was a one for sucking up like Mad Carew. Everyone said he’d go far if he didn’t fall off a Himalaya first.
Fellah calls himself ‘Mad’ and you know what you’re getting. Apart from someone fed up of being stuck with ‘Archibald’ and dissatisfied with ‘Archie’.
There’s a bloody awful poem about him…
He was known as ‘Mad Carew’ by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel’s daughter smiled on him as well.
Reading between the lines — a lot more edifying than reading the actual lines — you can tell Carew knew how to strut for the juniors, coddle the men, sniff about the ladies of the regiment (bless ‘em) and toady to the higher-ups. Officers like that are generally popular until the native uprising, when they’re found blubbing in cupboards dressed as washer-women. Not Carew, though. He had what they call a streak. Raring off and getting into ‘scrapes’ and collecting medals and shooting beasts and bandits in the name of jolly good fun. I wore the colors — not the sort of Colonel with a daughter, but the sort not to be trusted with other Colonels’ daughters — long enough to know the type. Know the type, I was the type! I’m older now, and see what a dunce I was in my prime. For a start, I used to do all this for army pay!
‘Mad’ sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired turbanheads lie all over the carpet with holes in ‘em that you put there. ‘Mad’ is less impressive written on a form by a Commissioner for Lunacy as you’re turned over to the hospitallers of St. Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice-water because your latest ‘scrape’ was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon.
Major Archibald Carew was both kinds of Mad. He had been one; now, he was close to the other.
“Beelzebub’s Sunday toasting-fork, it’s Carew!” I exclaimed. “How did you get in here?”
The bounder had the temerity to shake his lumpy fist at me.
After a dozen time-wasting Socialist johnnies required heaving out, Moriarty issued strict instructions to Mrs. Halifax. No one was admitted to the consulting room unless she judged them solvent. Women in her profession can glim a swell you’d swear had five thou per annum and enough family silver to plate the HMS Inflexible and know straight off he’s putting up a front and hasn’t a bent sou in his pockets. So, Carew must have shown her capital.
Moriarty craned to examine our visitor.
Carew kept his fist stuck out. He was begging for one on the chin.
Mrs. Halifax crowded the doorway with a couple of her more impressionable girls and the lad who emptied the piss-pots. None were immune to the general sensation which followed Carew about in his high adventures. Indeed, they seemed more excited than the occasion merited.
Slowly, Carew opened his fist.
In his palm lay an emerald the size of a tangerine. When it caught the light, everyone on the landing went green in the face. Avaricious eyes glinted verdant.
Ah, a gem! So much more direct than notes or coins. It’s just a rock, but so pretty. So precious. So negotiable.
Soiled doves cooed. The piss-pot boy let out a heartfelt ‘cor lumme’. Mrs. Halifax simpered, which would terrify a color-sergeant.
Moriarty’s face betrayed little, as per usual.
“Beryllium aluminium cyclosilicate,” he lectured, as if diagnosing an illness, “colored by chromium or perhaps vanadium. A hardness of 7.5 on the Mohs Scale. That is: a gem of the highest water, having consistent color and a high degree of transparency. The cut is indifferent, but could be improved. I should put its worth at…”
He was about to name a high figure.
“Here,” said Mad Carew, “have it, and be done….”
He flung the emerald at the professor. I reached across and caught it with a cry of ‘owzat’ which would not have shamed W. G. Grace, the old cheat. The weight settled in my palm.
For a moment, I heard the wailing of heathen worshippers from a rugged mountain clime across the roof of the world. The emerald sang like a green siren. The urge to keep hold of the thing was nigh irresistible.
Our visitor’s glamour was transferred to me. Mrs. Halifax’s filles de joie regarded my manly qualities with even more admiration than usual. If my piss-pot needed emptying, I wouldn’t have had to ask twice.
The stone’s spell was potent, but I am — as plenty would be happy to tell you if they weren’t dead — not half the fool I sometimes seem.
I crossed the room, dropped the jewel in Carew’s top pocket, and patted it.
“Keep it safe for the moment, old fellow.”
He looked as if I’d just shot him. Which is to say: he looked like some of the people I’ve shot looked after I’d shot them. Shocked, not surprised; resentful, but too tired to make a fuss. Others take it differently, but this is no place for digressions. Without being asked, Carew sank into the chair set aside for clients — spikes in the back-rest could extrude at the touch of a button on Moriarty’s desk, and doesn’t that make the eyes water! —and shoved his face into his hands.