The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(14)
“Forgive me if I get the dates wrong,” Leander said, sipping his tea, “but. 1918. Fiona Moriarty, dressed as a man, secures a position as a guard at Sing Sing. The costume, as I understand it, involved flour bags tied around her waist for bulk. Apparently it was splendid. After spending two months beating up the most hardened criminals in the world and, one assumes, gathering data, she quits her job. Two weeks later, she gets herself arrested for robbing a bank in broad daylight, disguised as a different man, and is thrown behind bars. Within the night, she has escorted twenty prisoners out of Sing Sing through a tunnel she’d spent the last ten days digging. A tunnel that went under the Hudson River.”
I let out a low whistle. “Did she get away with it?”
He grinned. “Tunnels have two openings, don’t they? My great-grandfather had built a bonfire at the exit. Those poor prisoners all ran yelling back to their cells. Thought they’d found their freedom . . . found lots of smoke, instead. And she was put behind bars herself. Her scheme had been clever, you know. A good five of those prisoners were her father’s lieutenants. Men who had helped raise her. Who, after her father’s death, escaped to America looking to avoid the long arm of Sherlock Holmes.” Leander raised an eyebrow. “Sentiment. It always gets you in the end.”
He had on his quoting voice for that part. “You can’t believe that,” I said.
“She certainly did, by the end of it. The funny thing is that Fiona was loaded. She had enough money to bribe the local judges. To bribe the police force. To bribe the Tammany Hall mobsters. And she tried, but none of them would touch her money. Too afraid of the consequences, on our end. Ultimately, one of them wrote his old friend Henry Holmes, who got on the next ship for America, just in time to uncover her scheme and put a stop to it.”
“And that wasn’t the end of it, I guess.”
“No. It goes on like that. 1930. Bank vault heist. Glasgow. All the culprits caught, but the jewels missing. Guess who shows up in society wearing a million pounds’ worth of rubies?” He laughed at my expression. “Jamie, you’ve been in America too long. Pounds sterling. The currency. Apparently one of their hired cons had delivered the rubies to them through the sewer, using a pulley system. Quentin Moriarty claimed his wife’s jewels came from an inheritance, but Jonathan Holmes disproved that through a pair of rats, a scalpel, and a lady’s handkerchief. 1944, and the Moriartys are raiding the museums of Europe during the second World War; 1968, and they’re chairing the Nobel Prize Committee; 1972, and my older sister Araminta was asked to decode a series of messages that used Francis Bacon’s substitution cipher. They were being used to negotiate the sale of nuclear warheads. To Walter Moriarty. What on earth would a Moriarty do with a warhead? Sell it again, probably, and at a profit. He went to trial. Two jurors developed rare forms of cancer. The judge’s wife went missing. All quiet. All out of the news. And then someone killed all three of Araminta’s cats.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s awful.”
“Walter Moriarty was out of jail sixteen weeks later. A travesty. And still—you must remember this—the family wasn’t all bad.” He refilled his cup. “Really there was only one bad apple in a generation. The rest . . . well. I knew a Patrick Moriarty when I was younger. We ran into each other at a party at Oxford, got drunk enough to duck into a corner and compare notes. We got to talking about the bad blood between our families—though it was nothing like it is now—and he said that the fundamental difference between us was that Holmeses were heartless optimists, and they were hedonist pessimists.”
“Heartless optimists?” My Holmes didn’t seem particularly optimistic. “Meaning?”
“Do you know that old image of Lady Justice? All done up with the blindfold and the scales. Made of shiny copper, not to be touched. I’ve thought of us that way. In order to pass judgment on other men, you remove yourself from them. Not all Holmeses are detectives, you know. Far from it. Mostly we end up in government. Some scientists, some lawyers. One really dry stick of a cousin sells insurance. But when we do detective work, we tend to work outside the law. We have our own resources. And, at times, when the law won’t prosecute, we are our own jury. To wield that kind of power . . . it makes sense that you wouldn’t let yourself be blinded by your emotions. Would it really help you to put a man away to know he’d leave behind a starving child? And, to top it all off, it’s not in our natures to be effusive. We’re mostly brains, you know. The body’s just something to get us from place to place. But over time, we calcified. Went brittle, staring at ourselves for so long. Maybe it made us better at our jobs. Because you don’t do this kind of work unless you think it’ll really make a difference, really make the world better. And you don’t think you can make the world better unless you are a tremendous egomaniac.”
“And the Moriartys?”
Leander considered me over his teacup. “They have gobs of money, and a family name that made them pariahs, and quite a few of them grow up to be geniuses. So they feel entitled to the best parts of the world. Extrapolate from there, my dear Watson. But it wasn’t really until this current crop that there were so many marvelously depraved specimens all at once. I miss the ones like Patrick,” he said with a laugh. “He grew up to be a hedge fund manager. We’re talking minor evil. Ran a couple Ponzi schemes. This lot . . . well, August was a nice kid, much nicer than Patrick could ever be. August was patient with Charlotte. Smart as a whip. When Emma and Alistair hired him, it was because Alistair was about two seconds from being the eye of a media hurricane, and we needed to build up some public goodwill. We hadn’t had a run-in with the Moriartys in twenty years. Memories fade. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”