‘Bravo,’ Moberly’s high-pitched bray echoed through the Salon, and the Director, sensing an embarrassing speech by this unknown visitor, took hold of Degas’ arm.
‘We must let our English friend continue with his work. You have made your point, and you can make it again to the Committee this afternoon.’
The great artist allowed himself to be turned slowly back towards the d’Apollon.
‘I am almost blind, photographer,’ he called back. ‘But not as stone blind as the cretins who look after the heritage of mankind.’
Moriarty breathed a sigh, standing stock still behind the camera, his eyes fixed on Leonardo’s small masterpiece. So, they were still thinking of cleaning her. It was a risk he had to take.
The family which had been so impressed with The Angels’ Kitchen, were now coming back through the Salon, and one other visitor had entered, together with an attendant. He looked as though he was going to settle down and examine each painting in minute detail.
‘You saw the great man then?’ asked the attendant.
Moriarty nodded. ‘An honour, a considerable honour.’
‘He makes things warm for the Director and the Committee,’ chuckled the attendant. ‘Me? I do not know if they should clean her or not. I only work here. I know nothing of art,’ and he shrugged, heading for the Gallery d’Apollon.
Five minutes later the coast was again clear. To his surprise, Moriarty found himself sweating heavily. He held up his hands and noticed that they trembled slightly. Surely his nerve was not failing him? He glanced around, hearing once more stretched to the limit as he reached for the camera box and again released the hidden partition. There was a dry smell in his nostrils, and in the archway between the Salon and the Gallery d’Apollon he was conscious of dustmotes drifting downwards in the light. Far away, someone dropped something with a loud clatter. He was at the picture now, hands on the frame, lifting it from the wall hooks, heart thumping in his ears, perhaps distorting the sounds elsewhere in the museum. The frame was heavy, much heavier than he expected, but it came away from the wall easily enough.
Moriarty lowered it to the floor, leaning it against the wall, turning it as he did so, exposing the back, where the fourteen clasps held the original painting in place. He stopped working for a split second, hearing something unusual in the air, only to realize that it was his own breathing. Then, the pliers down onto the clasps, swinging each of them outwards, towards the frame, one at a time until Leonardo’s poplar panel was free. Grasping the top of the frame, the Professor tipped it forward from the wall, his other hand behind the picture, allowing it to drop from the frame.
To hold it was almost a sexual experience. He had to will himself to move quickly, taking the three strides back to the camera box; holding the real Mona Lisa with one hand while he lifted the Labrosse version from its recess; sliding the Leonardo into the secret hiding place: a perfect fit.
Now he found himself counting as he moved back to the frame, positioning the copy’s bottom edge onto its ledge. For a second, Moriarty felt an obstruction in his throat as the copy did not seem to fit snugly. Then a slight juggling and it dropped into place. The pliers again on the clasps, and the exertion of lifting the whole thing back into place on the hooks.
As he returned the pliers back to their niche in the camera box there was the scrape of a footstep from the fresco room. He slammed the false side closed, went down on one knee and began to rummage in the box. An attendant had come in behind him. He wondered how long the man had been there? How long had he taken to complete the exchange? The dustmotes still drifted in the air and the background noises were still distant.
‘Charlot tells me you are not coming back tomorrow,’ said the attendant.
Moriarty let his breath out slowly, controlling it, fighting the pounding in his ears.
‘No, no,’ he replied – Moberly’s bray of laughter. ‘I have completed my work here.’
It remained only for him to spend a little more time in the Salon Carré, not rushing his departure, before walking from the Louvre with the black camera box over his shoulder. Nobody seeing the gangling figure, lopsided with the weight of his equipment, crabbing his way across the Place du Carroussel, could ever have imagined that he carried with him one of Leonardo da Vinci’s great legacies.
Two days later, Moberly was gone from France – in fact from the face of the earth – and Moriarty returned to the house in Albert Square in order to put the treasure in a safe hiding place. It was a strange sensation for him to sit in the study and look upon the original painting, knowing that it was now his. Yet there was also a sense of anticlimax. Only he was now certain about the location of the Gioconda, La Joconde, the Mona Lisa – whatever they wished to call it. He also knew that nobody but himself would set eyes on it until the final settlement with Jean Grisombre, who had betrayed him so badly. To set that part of the plot in motion, however, he had to return to Paris – and quickly. This time he went as yet another character from his repertoire of disguise – an American gentleman of great and undisputed wealth.*
The American was not loud or flash in any sense. He wore his riches with the ease of one born to them, without the aggressive and brash manners of so many who came to Europe from the American continent these days, having made their money quickly in gold or railroads, and who splashed, bullied and ordered as though their new-found opulence was the key to life – as, unhappily, it so often was.
He appeared to be a portly man in his late forties, pudgy of cheek, florid of countenance, dark-haired and soft-voiced. It was one of Moriarty’s most simple transformations, accomplished with skilfully-made padding under his clothes and in his cheeks, a cosmetic preparation to increase his colour, and dye for his hair. To this he added horn-rimmed spectacles, his own not inconsiderable talent for assumed vocal illusions, and papers, including letters of credit, which showed that he was Jarvis Morningdale from Boston, Mass. With him travelled a secretary whom he referred to as Harry. They were both booked into a suite at the Crillon.
The reputation of Paris as the city of pleasure grew directly out of the Montmartre area of the early nineties, and it was to the streets and lanes around Pigalle that the visitors and tourists came, intent on seeing the scandalous sights which had been the whispered talk of the western world since the end of the 1880s. On his first night in Paris, Jarvis Morningdale, from Boston, headed directly into Montmartre, seeking, not so much sin, as one person whom he knew would almost certainly be where sin blossomed most prolifically.
It was a cold and raw winter in 1897, yet the cabarets and cafés were still packed to the doors. By eleven o’clock, the American sat at a table near the dance floor of the Moulin Rouge, watching the girls perform the cancan with athletic enthusiasm; twirling, flashing their skirts high, whirling in the port d’armes and jarring with wild whoops into the grand écart.
Jarvis Morningdale, sipping champagne, his face more flushed than usual, turned to his secretary and spoke low.
‘My dear Harry, you really should have been here a few years back,’ he smiled. ‘This is all for show. In those days it was for sex. These girls have clean underclothes even, and I have yet to glimpse a naked thigh. When Zidler ran this place, the women were women – La Goulue, Jane Avril, Cri-Cri, Rayon d’Or, La Sauterelle and Nini Patte-en-l’air. You could see their womanhood drip from them with their sweat, and smell it clean across this room.’*
‘I still find this puts me on highly,’ replied Harry Allen, not taking his eyes from the row of white-frilled bottoms which were being presented to the audience as the brassy orchestra came to a ragged finale.
They joined in the applause as heartily as the rest of the throng, and Moriarty nudged his companion.
‘Here comes one of the genuine ones now,’ he whispered, nodding his head towards a slim, dark, gypsy-looking girl who slid and hipped her way between the tables as though looking for someone. Moriarty’s eyes followed the girl, as though willing her to look in his direction. ‘I know this one from
other times,’ he murmured to Allen, ‘though I presume she will not recognize me in my current persona.’
The girl paused, looking straight at Moriarty, who nodded. She smiled, a flash in her dark eyes, and then progressed in a blatantly sensual long stride towards his table. She was even dressed in a fashion which had bohemian overtones, a loose skirt which did not reach the ground, and a tight blouse showing that she wore little underneath.
‘You wish to buy me a drink, Monsieur?’ The voice raw, as though she spoke the language with a foreign accent.
The American nodded and replied in fluent French, ‘Sit down. Champagne?’
‘Is there any other drink?’
A waiter was at the table before Moriarty even lifted his hand.
The girl appraised them both almost with contempt.
‘You wish …?’ she began.
‘What I wish is no concern of yours,’ the soft voice hinted possible danger. ‘You are Suzanne, yes?’
Her nostrils flared. ‘I have not seen you here before. How do you know me?’
‘I make that my business. It should not worry you. Like you, I am here to do business.’
‘Yes?’
‘Whatever your price I’ll double it and you can take my friend here off to your place.’
Suzanne looked at Harry Allen as though she was examining a horse for stud. ‘And what else?’
‘I have come a long way with a proposition for a friend of yours – never mind how I know, but he is famous even in America. How can I reach Grisombre?’
‘Is that all? Grisombre you will find easily. Off the Rue Veron there is a cabaret – just a small one, like all the others up there. It’s called La Maison Vide. Grisombre is usually there at this time, in fact I think the place belongs to him, as do so many in Montmartre.’ Without showing any more interest she turned to Harry Allen. ‘You have a good friend to buy you a present like me.’
The American, Morningdale, gave a quiet laugh, almost slipping back into his real self, for his head moved to and fro in that familiar reptilian manner.
‘Go ahead, Harry. I will not tell your little skivvy at Albert Square. They tell me that Suzanne the Gypsy is worth every sou you spend.’ He chuckled at his pun and tossed a small jingle of coins on the table, threw back his champagne and prepared to leave.
‘You will manage on your own?’ Harry Allen shot a covert, concerned glance at his master.
‘Harry, I have managed on my own in more dangerous and corrupting places than Montmartre. Enjoy yourself and I will see you at the hotel in the morning.’
Outside in the Place Blanche it was bitterly cold. Across the road a group of cabbies stamped their feet, warming their hands around the braziers of a pair of chestnut sellers. A streetwalker detached herself from a small huddle of ladies of the night on the corner, seeking the Professor as an easy mark.
‘Hallo, chéri,’ she began brightly. ‘I can show you the time of your life.’ Her little nose was blue with cold and her teeth chattered.
For a moment, Moriarty allowed the role of Jarvis Morningdale to slip.
‘Touch me, harlot, and I’ll have your heart,’ he mouthed.
The girl spat, directly at him, and Moriarty reached out, taking a bunch of her cheap coat in his fist, pulling her close and speaking a quiet fast French – in the argot of the alleys and back streets.
‘Ferme ton bec, ma petite marmite, ou je casse ton aileron.’*
He flung her back so that she staggered and fell into the gutter, Moriarty’s manner rather than his words crushing her into silence. By the time she had picked herself up, he was already in a cab, ordering the driver to take him up to the Rue Veron.
La Maison Vide had a small frontage – a door with a cut-out oriental design in the porch, and a window decorated from inside with a candle in a red glass shade and several small posters advertising performers who were either appearing at the place currently, or had made past appearances there.
A heavy-jowled man took a small tip from Moriarty when he applied for admission, passing him on to a bowing waiter in stained and rumpled evening clothes. The interior was no different from most of the cabarets of its kind: rough tables jammed together, separated from the dance floor by a wooden rail. At the far end a band was crushed into one corner next to a small stage. The place was crowded, and obviously popular, and Moriarty had to blink once or twice to accustom his eyes to the heavy pall of cigar and cigarette smoke. The waiter, with uncanny accuracy, led him in a complicated threading dance through the tables to a place just vacated by a man and woman. The chair was still warm from the woman’s rump and the glass that was set before the Professor could well have been the one which she had just used, the dregs tossed out onto the floor. He did not have to order, for the waiter produced a bottle of champagne as though from mid-air, uncorked it and poured a glass, before there was any chance of demanding other refreshment. The champagne was flat.
Now that he was seated, there was still no time to look around. The band blared a chord, the drummer rattling a short roll, his instrument sounding like a biscuit tin, and the curtains of the little stage divided revealing a small divan. To another crash from the drum, a plump, coquettish girl appeared from behind the drapes, winking and ogling the patrons who, by their shouts and whistles, showed that they were agreeably predisposed to her performance.
The girl, who was fully clothed, minced downstage in an exaggerated Alexandra limp. Paused. Winked, then suddenly reacted as though stung or bitten somewhere near her right breast. The audience, many of whom had obviously seen it all before, howled with mirth. The girl was, without doubt, being caused much inconvenience by a flea. As matters progressed, so she scratched more, and then was forced to divest herself of her gown in order to trap the naughty little insect. As the gown came off so the imaginary flea changed its position, and so on, all necessitating the removal of various undergarments, until she was revealed, coyly, with very few clothes at all.*
The final divestment was as inevitable as night follows day, and the performance ended to delighted applause. The band struck up again, and the Professor began to glance around.
Jean Grisombre sat at a large table set near the dance floor, dispensing hospitality to a pair of hard-looking coves who might just have been bankers. Grisombre was a short, lithe man who looked and moved like a dancer, though his peeked face held none of the necessary charms of that profession. His movements were compact, but he rarely smiled with his whole face, only his mouth moved in an almost simulated reflex. He sat opposite the two businessmen, flanked by his omnipresent bodyguards, who both had about them the look of the apache – slim and deadly with dark faces and constantly moving eyes.
After ten minutes or so, the pair of serious businessmen rose. Grisombre shook hands with each of them in solemn farewell. Some form of compact had been sealed over the wine. Moriarty wondered who had, perhaps, been betrayed, or who was to be robbed, swindled or worse. One of the bodyguards accompanied the guests to the door while Grisombre spoke quietly, as if giving orders, to the other.
As he watched the lips moving, the Professor could almost hear Grisombre’s voice, in his head, on the last occasion of their meeting. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘It is the decision of us all. If one of us has failed and been put into a compromising situation by the police, you would doubtless have done the same. You have failed us as a leader, Professor, and I have to ask you to leave Paris and quit France with as little delay as possible. There is no more to be said, except that I can no longer assure you of my protection here.’
Well, thought Moriarty, you will soon be sniffing at my bait and pleading for my leadership again, my little grey one. He lifted his hand to attract the nearest waiter, who came hurrying over, harassed, but bowing unctuously.
‘Another bottle, monsieur?’
‘I wish to speak with Monsieur Grisombre.’
The man’s attitude changed, the smile vanishing, suspicion lancing his eyes.
‘Who shall I say …???
?
‘My name would mean nothing to him. Be good enough to give him this.’
Moriarty’s hand dived into his coat pocket, bringing out the letter which he had personally dictated to Wilhelm Schleifstein. M. Jean Grisombre. By Hand, it said on the envelope. Inside, the message was simple. Dear Jean, it read. This is to introduce you to an American friend, Jarvis Morningdale. He is extremely wealthy and has a proposal which, I believe, is your right to receive rather than mine. Be certain that whatever financial figure he quotes you will be paid. He does not joke about money. Your obedient friend, Willy.
Grisombre tore open the envelope almost before the waiter presented it, casting a quick look in Moriarty’s direction. He scanned the contents slowly, as though it was a Latin text which he found difficult to construe, and then raised his head. This time he eyed the Professor with more interest. Moriarty raised his glass. Grisombre said something to the bodyguard, and nodded, beckoning the Professor to his table.
‘You are Jarvis Morningdale?’ he asked in French.
‘I am. Herr Schleifstein commended you to me.’
‘You have a good accent for an American.’
‘That is hardly surprising. My mother came from New Orleans. French is my second language.’
‘Good.’
Grisombre motioned him to be seated. One of the bodyguards poured a glass of champagne. This time it was not flat.
‘I have the feeling that we have met before.’ Grisombre was looking at him hard, but Moriarty met the Frenchman’s gaze without a flinch, confident in his disguise.
‘I think not,’ said the Professor. ‘My visits to Paris have, until now, been rare.’
Grisombre still held him with a steady stare.
‘Willy Schleifstein says that I can probably be of help to you.’
Moriarty allowed himself a smile. ‘I do not know, but I would like to think you can.’
‘Tell me then.’
The girls were whooping onto the floor, lining up for the cancan. It was probably going on like this in half the cabarets in Paris, thought Moriarty. Aloud, he said, ‘What I have to say can only be told in private.’