The Infernal Device & Others: A Professor Moriarty Omnibus by Michael Kurland Page A

himself in it. This Professor Moriarty, he reflected, seemed to be a gentleman not only of extraordinary capabilities but of immense attention to detail. Barnett only now noticed that there, on the dressing table, across from the bureau, was the silver comb and brush set that had been his sole inheritance from his father. By the door rested the three sticks and two umbrellas that had been in his umbrella stand. The framed portrait of his mother that had been on his writing-desk now sat on the night table by the solid four-poster bed. There was an envelope on the dressing table next to the brushes with BARNETT printed on it in block letters. Inside was a second envelope—which he recognized. The tape marks still crossed it where it had been fastened to the underside of the third drawer down in the armoire of his Paris flat. And inside that were still the five hundred-franc notes that served as his emergency money supply.
     
                  Barnett dropped the envelope back on the dressing table and thoughtfully crossed the hall to the bathroom. A maid—a black-haired girl who couldn't have been over sixteen—was pouring the last of a pail of hot water into the large scoopback porcelain tub. She tittered when she saw Barnett and backed out of the small room. Barnett stared after her. Are red velvet dressing-gowns a bit too advanced for staid old London, he wondered, or is she one of those girls who titters at everything? He'd have to find out. It wouldn't do to have an outrageous dressing-gown. Shutting and bolting the door, the force of a habit from long years of living in rooming houses, he hung up the offending garment and eased himself slowly into the steaming hot water.
     
                  An hour later, scrubbed, clean-shaven, and immaculately dressed for the first time in over a month, Barnett was taken by Mrs. H to see Professor Moriarty. "He's in his basement laboratory," she told him, leading the way. "We do not disturb him there unless it is important, but I have instructions concerning you."
     
                  "What sort of instructions, Mrs. H?" he asked.
     
                  "As soon as you're presentable," Mrs. H told him, "I'm to bring you in."
     
                  "You know," Barnett said, following behind her as she opened the door to a narrow staircase on the main floor, "it feels very awkward calling you 'Mrs. H.' I feel as though I'm taking undue familiarity."
     
                  "It's what I'm called," she said.
     
                  "What sort of a name is that—just the initial?" Barnett asked. "Short," she replied.
     
                  After two turns in the narrow stairs they crossed a door that led onto a landing overlooking a large, cement-floored basement room which had been turned into a modern laboratory. Low wooden tables were spread in a circle about the room, leaving the central area bare. On one table, a series of retorts and gathering-tubes were clamped in place over small Bunsen lamps. On another, a complex arrangement of lenses and mirrors was fastened to a revolvable wooden stand ready to twist into motion at the turn of a crank. The cabinets along the walls were furnished with every conceivable sort of chemical and physical apparatus that Barnett was familiar with, and many that he was not.
     
                  "Do not distract him," Mrs. H instructed Barnett in a whisper, nodding at the tall figure of Professor Moriarty sitting stooped over a large journal at a writing table in the corner. "Wait here until he speaks to you. He dislikes having his train of thought interrupted, particularly when he is in the laboratory." Nodding again, she went back upstairs, leaving Barnett on the landing.
     
                  After a while Moriarty looked up from his writing. Then he stoppered the inkwell and put down the pen. "You look a good deal better than the last time I saw you," he