The Napoleon of Crime

Sing Sing, New York: Thursday April 23 1914

‘Professor Moriarty, thank you for agreeing to see me today. My name is Ted Pilsworth from the New York Tribune.’

‘Time is of the essence. Tomorrow will be too late’ said Moriarty. 

Pilsworth took a hard seat in the Death Room of Sing Sing, swiped the pencil from behind his ear and opened his notebook to the first page. Moriarty was gratified to note that a new book had been procured especially for him. This was quite the assignment, he thought.  Pilsworth must be good. 

‘Shorthand up to scratch, is it?’ 

‘Good enough, sir. Good enough!’

The prisoner was an ugly man, with a large forehead, grey, thinning, Dickensian locks, and a slim, stooped frame. It was hard to imagine him as a criminal mastermind: a pickpocket, a loafer, a corrupt clerk, yes - that was easier to conjure - but a professor of mathematics, born in Baltimore, homes in New York, Paris and London; an untold fortune amassed through a global network of deceit, fraud, murder in which he was the spider at the centre of every web; the architect of misery and calamity - that was harder to figure. 

‘When I begin,’ Moriarty said, ‘I would not like you to interrupt me. I am getting old and even I, the great consulting criminal, the ‘Napoleon of Crime,’ am suffering some nervous excitement at the thought of my death. The manner of it. I would not like to lose my train of thought.’

‘Understood, sir. It is the story of your upbringing that our readers are interested in. Your .. crimes are well known —'

‘Hah! You know nothing, Pilsworth. Nothing of the evils I have committed. I was born bad, without conscience. But even Holmes failed on occasion, and I too was remiss in some of the intricacies of my last enterprise, which has inevitably led me to this place. It has not been the same since his retirement. Is the sauvant still bee-keeping on the South Downs?’

Pilsworth cleared his throat and leant forward. ‘Professor, you should know that Sherlock Holmes died three days ago.’

The changes in Moriarty’s features were unfathomable. At first, his face creased in a mask of shock, and then it was as though genuine remorse played at his eyes and mouth, and then, in a manner which startled Pilsworth, he began to laugh. He slapped his palms down on his bony knees and said: ‘I have outlived him! I win! I win!’ 

‘Should we begin, sir?’ said Pilsworth. 

‘Indeed,’ said Moriarty, still wiping the tears from his eyes. He settled in his chair, straightened his trousers and cleared his throat. ‘I am ready.’ 

And he smiled, like a choirboy. 

*

‘I was born in Baltimore. My parents were in shipping. Of my ancestors I know little, but I was led to assume that we had always been a wealthy family. Whether that had been amassed by fair means or foul, I have no way of knowing. The bad seed must have germinated somewhere. Certainly in England, which is where we are from. 

My mother bore four sons, and I was the last of them. The spoiled one. My older brothers were hale. They excelled in sports and were polite and obliging. I, on the other hand, was small and sallow and a great disappointment to all but my mother. She was the first person I learned to manipulate. 

We had staff, and I would occasionally overhear them talking about me when I was still a small boy. They would shudder at the mention of my name, and recount all the things I had done that they were not as blind to as my mother. And I enjoyed their dislike of me:

 James is a bad child, my nurse would tell the cook. He is unlike any child I have ever known. He steals and blames it on the lower servants. The mistress dismisses them without reference. The master can’t stand him. I wonder if he’s even his! Even when he was a whelp in his crib, his little eyes would follow me around the nursery, as if he were calculating some harm to me. And then, when he got to walking, he starts to pinch me and slap me, and then deny it to the mistress like I was a liar. 

Needless to say, I got them both dismissed. For the next two weeks I would steal from my mother’s visitors, to the point where it became a social problem for her. People were reluctant to return to our home. I told my mother that I suspected the nurse and the cook, and when their rooms were searched they were fired, again without reference. 

My brothers loathed me. They went to a day school in Baltimore, but when I was ten, my father demanded that I was sent away to a boarding school. In England. They chose the Merchants Taylors Day School in the City of London, but I was to be a boarder, as were many other boys. I took the voyage alone, in the care of the purser, who evicted me from his cabin due to my goading him about his physical size and attributes as a seaman. I was placed in steerage, where I continued to make life difficult. I stole what little they had and bullied the children of my age and older. I was then, as I remain, an unpleasant human being.

At the boarding school, I began to polish my skills in blackmail. There were plenty of opportunities amongst the tutors, who were not as careful as they could have been, shall we say. I continued to steal, although I had no need to. My father sent me a generous allowance in the hopes that I would save it; that when I was released from the school I would not return to Baltimore. I accused other boys of the thefts. One boy killed himself from the shame, although he was, of course, entirely innocent of the crime. 

I excelled in all subjects, but I was particularly gifted in mathematics. I learned several languages and applied myself studiously. Apart from the tutors I was blackmailing, I was beyond reproach. Amongst the boys, I was someone to be feared. That is until a boy called Sherlock Holmes arrived at the school. He saw through me immediately. He was tall boy with great nervous energy; long-limbed, and his voice then was rather high and strident. He learned to modulate it as he grew older. He was not as industrious as myself, but he was a polymath with powers of recall that even I could not match. He was like me in many respects but one: I was bad and he was good. I had to curtail my activities under his analytical eye because when it came to the tutors and the masters, he was more forceful than I. He had beaten me.’

Moriarty leaned forward and pointed at me: ‘But I made it my goal to thwart him whenever I could. And I had one thing over him - not important but still something I cherished. In our later encounters, Sherlock never recognised me. He does not - did not - ever realise that I was the sneak-thief James Worth from boarding school. I changed my name when I left that institution and began to develop my career in the underworld. Moriarty has more of criminal flavour, don’t you think! I went to Cambridge, got my first in mathematics and became a professor, although I have never taught the subject. It was merely a useful honorific which helped me to rub shoulders with the corruptible in society, of which there are many.’

Moriarty stopped to take a sip of water. ‘We must stick with my younger self, if that is what your readers crave,’ he said. 'The rest is well known by now. My mother died when I was nineteen. Apart from the odd letter, I had not seen her for nine years and I was not invited to attend her funeral. My father continued to send me a remittance, although it was a pittance in comparison to my theft and my rackets. I have not seen my father or my brothers since the day I left. 

I cannot tell you why I am drawn to crime, Mr Pilsworth. I have studied phrenology and psychology, I have spoken with monsters like me, tried to understand their origins, but there is no common thread which connects the rotten apples in the world. It is true that extreme poverty or a harsh childhood can produce a brute, but I have known angels born into worse. I can only say that I was simply made this way, in the same way a man can have a clubfoot or a harelip. I feel nothing for anyone beyond what I can get out of them. The only person who has ever provoked me to emotion is Holmes. And I have outlived him. I have bested him.

There is one more matter before you leave. By the time I was thirty-five, I had amassed shares in the newspaper industry, amongst others. One particular newspaper, The Illustrated London News, showed great promise - but I wanted to give it a tickle. I needed a news story that would increase the circulation ten-fold —‘

‘Please no,’ said Pilsforth. ‘No, no ..’ 

Moriarty laughed; a dry, unsettling sound. ‘Oh, I did not commit the crimes myself,’ he eventually said. ‘My personal habits are not that low, I assure you. But it was easy enough to procure an immigrant, a low brute in need of money and a passage to America. My friends told me he was skilled in abattoir work, and so I set him forth on the prostitutes of Whitechapel, and watched my bank accounts swell. The London Illustrated became the biggest-selling paper, albeit a weekly publication, in the entire country.’

Pilsforth whistled. ‘This is remarkable!’ he said. ‘You are Jack the Ripper?’

‘The Ripper’s puppet master,’ the professor corrected. ‘I have always been the puppet master.’

‘You are struggling to contain yourself,’ Moriarty said, his voice suddenly cold and dismissive. ‘The Great Pilsworth! The Scoop of the Century! I do not like to be the black bear which swipes the cub, but I doubt your exposé will gain much traction.’

‘Are you kidding me?’

‘No. People like me rarely joke, Pilsworth.’ The old man raised a bony fist and flicked his thumb in the air. ‘Firstly, there is a war coming and the civilised nations who indulge in it will not be so interested in old Jack when their sons come home in boxes.’ He raised his index finger: ‘Secondly, the public will not accept it. They want a monster, not the prosaic, banal actions of a Polish butcher who slaughtered women at the behest of a criminal mastermind for no other reason than filthy lucre.’

‘It’s worth a shot,’ said Pilsforth. 

‘By all means proceed,’ said Moriarty, now leaning back in his chair. ‘What have I to lose?’ 

*

It was the custom at Sing Sing to execute prisoners at 11pm on Thursdays. Having previously used the noose, the current method was Old Sparky, which for efficacy, relied on as many variables as the skilled hangmen who preceded it. In his remaining hours, Moriarty penned an addendum-note to Pilsworth in which he sought to raise a third point about the Ripper murders. He is dead, he wrote. I was not about to pay for his passage to New York, so there really is no habeas corpus. His remains fed the scavengers of Old Father Thames, and his very existence on this earth is without record. Good bye, Mr Pilsworth. I wish you well with your endeavours. Prof. James Moriarty. 

In the early evening, the professor drank a bottle of red wine and ate a porterhouse steak with trimmings. He then slept for several hours, until he was awoken by two guards with razor blades, who proceeded to shave his scalp and what remained of the hairs on his legs. He then asked for a priest, who spent an hour with the old man. It was clear that Moriarty’s sole purpose in asking him was to let forth a tirade against religion and to mock his celibacy and his fervently held beliefs. The priest was shaking as he left, and remarked that he would rather have attempted an exorcism of the devil himself. 

*

At ten-thirty pm, the witnesses began gathering in the Death Chamber. Such was the multi-nationality of Moriarty’s crimes, there were representatives from the North Pole to the South and all that lay between. There was even talk that Roosevelt himself would attend, but that was idle speculation. 

At a quarter to the hour, Professor James Moriarty made his entrance. He was securely strapped to the chair, and was asked by the warden to make his last words known, if indeed, he had any. The condemned man coughed, and raised his head. He had eschewed the mask or the blindfold he was offered. His bald scalp, soon to be wetted, emphasised the protuberance of his brow.

‘You appear to have me at a disadvantage,’ he said, looking down at his constraints. And then, after a pause in which he might have hoped for an unguarded chuckle, he continued. ‘I do not regret anything I have done.' His voice, although cracked, was lucid. ‘I make no apologies and I do not submit my soul to God. And although I must leave my material comforts behind, I go to my maker knowing that I, a man reeking of corruption, has yet outlived my greatest adversary, Sherlock Holmes!’

In the silence of the chamber, Moriarty heard a voice, which appeared to come from the third row. 

‘The game’s afoot!’ 

And there, pulling off his facial prosthetics, stood the famous detective, who had been seated between Pilsforth and his old friend Wilson Hargreaves, a retired member of the New York Police Bureau. 

‘You are dead,’ said Moriarty. 

‘Not quite,’ said Holmes. ‘You will forgive the ruse', (and here he acknowledged Pilsforth), 'but I could not go to my maker without the certainty of your death. It would seem,’ he said, with the smallest of smiles, ‘that I have the better of you again, Moriarty. Or should I call you Worth!’

*

On Tuesday the 28th of July 1914, the day war was declared in Europe, and just three months after the events described, Pilsworth received a telegram at the Tribune. It announced the sad death of Sherlock Holmes, who was discovered in his favourite armchair in a posture of peaceful repose. 

It is true to say that the following day’s headline was not of war, but of the death of the greatest detective who had ever lived.