The Empress of India (18 page)

“Well, then,” said McAdams, “just what are we doing here? I got better things to do than to hang about in a stinking barge.”

“Stinking is right,” the Codger agreed. “There’s a smell of bilge water about this place that all the perfumes of Araby couldn’t cover up.”

“Ah, such ingratitude,” Dr. Pin said. “And I thought it would make you gentlemen feel right at home.”

“How come you got so many little hidey-holes, Pin?” the Codger asked. “Every time you call a meeting, it ain’t for the last place we met at, it’s for some new place altogether. Why is that?”

“Yeah, that’s a good question,” McAdams agreed.

“You would think so, McAdams,” Pin said, smiling a gentle smile. “It must be very frustrating to have your minions keep watch on that old clothes shop in Mincing Lane, or the Friends of the Benighted Heathen Missionary Society warehouse for days on end, through rain, sleet, or snow, as the expression goes, and catch not a glimpse of myself or my companions.”

“So you got companions, do you?” the Codger asked. “My friends and I, we were kind of wondering.”

“Perhaps I speak metaphorically,” said Pin. He held his hands in front of him, palms up. “My ten fingers and my brain are all the companions I need, and all you need to know about.”

“And what information do you and your ten fingers wish to impart?”
asked the Codger. “You going to open up a bit more on the gold shipment? When is it coming in? Just how are we going to take it away from them as are undoubtedly sitting on top of it with loaded blunderbusses?”

“The gold has not left Calcutta yet,” Pin told them, “but it is due to be loaded aboard the steamship
Empress of India
shortly for its voyage to the vaults of the Bank of England.”

“That’s good, that’s good,” McAdams said, rubbing his massive hands together. “My boys have been growing a bit impatient, what with me trying to keep them out of trouble until the big moment.”

“Wait just a blooming minute,” Cooley the Pup interrupted. “If the ship is just getting ready to leave India, why, then, it won’t be here for at least—what?—five weeks. Is that right?”

Pin nodded. “I could not fail to disagree with you less,” he said.

McAdams thought that over for a long moment. “Say,” he said finally, “is that a yes or a no?”

“It will be about a week before the
Empress
arrives in Calcutta, then a week or so there, and then five weeks, or perhaps a bit more, before the gold arrives in Southampton,” Dr. Pin said, “if it arrives at all.”

“If it arrives?” asked the Pup.

“Say, what do you mean by that?” asked McAdams. “You been stringing us?”

“I don’t like the sound of that
if,
” commented the Artful Codger. “Perhaps you’d better go on.”

“Yeah,” said the Pup. “Go on. Do go on.”

Dr. Pin Dok Low leaned back in his chair and surveyed his companions. “Professor Moriarty has left London,” he told them.

“We know that,” said McAdams. “The Yob is following him, ain’t he?”

“The Twopenny Yob is indeed on his, ah, tail,” Pin agreed. “Four attempts have been made on the professor’s life. None have been successful. Not that I expected that any of them would succeed. If Professor
Moriarty could be stopped that easily, he would have been stopped long since.”

“I don’t hold with killing unnecessarily,” said Angelic Tim McAdams unexpectedly. The others around the table turned to look at him.

“Well,” he insisted, “I don’t.”

The Artful Codger turned back to Pin Dok Low. “So?” he asked. “The professor is out of the way. You can’t use him as a—what?—as a decoy for the rozzers anymore, but by the same chance, he ain’t around to get in our way or foul up our plans.”

Pin Dok Low scowled. “Moriarty is making his way across Europe,” he told them. “The Twopenny Yob was close behind him but, at the moment, this is no longer so. As far as we can tell, he’s on his way to India.”

McAdams slapped his hand on the table. “Good,” he said. “The farther away the better for that cove. He’s a mite too wise for playing him the way you wanted to, and that’s what I think.”

“I’m glad it relieves your anxiety,” Pin said smoothly, “and I hate to be the one to raise it in another quarter, but, as I’m sure you will realize after a moment’s thought, there is one most interesting possibility that we must not overlook.”

“And what’s that?” asked the Pup.

The Artful Codger half rose from his chair, and then fell back down. “Calcutta!” he exclaimed. “Calcutta!”

“Exactly,” Pin Dok Low agreed. “Why would Professor Moriarty, the most brilliant criminal mind in England, possibly in all Europe—present company excepted, of course—be headed to India at just this moment? Could it be a coincidence that a large shipment of gold is being prepared to leave Calcutta in about two weeks? I think not.”

“So,” McAdams said, a fierce scowl growing across his face, “the professor’s going to beat us to the gold.”

Pin Dok Low smiled at him, a beatific smile. “I think not,” he repeated.

“So,” the Codger said, leaning his elbows on the table and staring across at the wily Oriental. “What’s your plan, Pin?”

“Simple,” Pin said. “We are going to prevent the gold being stolen until we are ready to steal it ourselves.”

“How’s that?” asked McAdams.

“You”—Pin pointed a long finger at McAdams—“are going to stay here in London, and you and your boys are going to be ready to remove the gold according to the original plan.”

“All very good,” McAdams agreed, “only you ain’t never told me the original plan.”

“A man must have his little secrets,” Pin said, chuckling. “But I will explain it now, at the end of this meeting.” He turned to Cooley the Pup. “You are going to go to Amsterdam and make the preparations for disposing of two tons of gold.”

“Sounds good,” the Pup agreed.

“And returning with the money,” Pin added.

“Of course,” said the Pup, sounding hurt. “What do you take me for?”

“I’ll be taking your head,” McAdams remarked, “if you attempt to ab-bloody-scond with what’s mine.”

“I’m not afraid of your threats,” said Cooley the Pup, “but I have my sense of honor.”

That remark shocked the others into silence, and they stared at the Pup until he started shifting nervously in his chair. “Well,” he insisted, “I do.”

Pin sighed a long-suffering sigh, and continued. “Codger, you’re going to come with me.”

“Right-oh. Where to?”

“India,” Pin told him.

“India? What’s the play?”

“If we’re going to steal the gold for ourselves,” Pin told him, “we’re going to have to make sure that nobody else gets it first.”

The Artful Codger rubbed his left ear thoughtfully. “It makes sense,” he allowed finally. “It’s right-on weird, but it makes sense when you think about it. We’re to guard the gold so’s we can steal the gold.”

“How’re you going to get there in two weeks?” McAdams demanded.

“We can’t get to Calcutta in two weeks,” Pin admitted. “But we can get to Bombay in a bit over that. And the
Empress
should arrive a day or so after we do. We will book passage on
The Empress of India,
and accompany our gold back to England, to make sure that nothing happens to it.”

The Codger thought it over for a second. “I fancy a sea voyage wouldn’t be amiss,” he said. “How are we to get to Bombay?”

“By special train to Naples, and then by a fast steamer through the canal.”

“Special train, is it?” asked McAdams. “And how do we pay for it? I hope we ain’t expected to lay out the expenses for this venture.”

“Pay for it?” Pin Dok Low smiled his inscrutable smile. “What a thought. We’ll bill it to the government of Bavaria.”

“Bavaria?”

“Yes, and why not Bavaria? I have a printer at work right now making up the necessary official documents and permissions and such. I shall go in disguise as Graf von Falkenberg, cousin to Crown Prince Sigismund. There will be no problems.”

“But,” said Cooley the Pup, pointing a quavering finger at Dr. Pin Dok Low, “you’re Chinese!”

“Am I?” asked Pin. “Why, so I am. But I have always fancied myself a master of disguise. How’s your German, Codger?”

“ ’Bout the same as my French,” the Codger said. “As a matter of fact, my German could easily be mistaken for my French.”

“Ah!” said Pin. “Well, we’ll think of something. Go put on your gentleman’s disguise and pack a bag. Meet me at Victoria Station in, say, two hours. We will leave tonight.”

“Right,” said the Codger. He pushed himself to his feet. “See you gents; I’m off to guard the gold.”

I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl.
—Christopher Marlowe

I
t was late in the afternoon of Friday, March 14, when the steamship
Empress of India
made her way up the Hooghly River and approached Calcutta Harbor. At 652 feet long and 70 wide, the
Empress
was the queen of the Anglo-Asian Star steamship line. Built by John Brown & Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, in 1888, she had a pair of Garrett & Harris quadruple expansion engines to drive her twin screws and, when everything was working perfectly and the sea gods were smiling, was capable of hitting a speed of nineteen knots. She was not quite the longest, nor the heaviest, nor the fastest, nor the most luxurious ship afloat, but she was not far off any of the four.

Two oceangoing steam tugs,
Egbert
and
Ethelred,
had come out to prod the
Empress,
bow and stern, into its berth alongside the Commissariat Jetty, just down from Fort William. Ordinarily one tug would have sufficed, but
The Empress of India
was bringing the new issue of
paper currency, and precautions must be taken. The two tugs were crammed with armed men, ready to fend off any possible attempt to filch the lucre. The
Clive,
the viceroy’s own steam launch, fitted with a pair of twenty-year-old Schoenfeld-Waters breech-loading two-inch guns, was chasing up and down the river, warning off all other boats. As the
Empress
docked, special armored drays pulled up on the wharf to receive the sealed boxes of currency. The jetty was guarded with a full company of Bengali heavy infantry, which formed a
cordon sanitaire
between the usual army of peddlers, hawkers, mendicants, street performers, hustlers, and pickpockets and the disembarking passengers.

“In a week now we’ll be loading the gold for the return trip,” said the viceroy, who was watching the proceedings from a window in the Bengali Military Administration offices on the third floor of Fort William. “This is a sort of dress rehearsal for that.”

General St. Yves stood beside the viceroy and surveyed the scene. “It looks to me as if you’re quite prepared for any sort of t-trouble you might expect,” he commented.

“It’s the unexpected trouble that I’m concerned about,” the viceroy said. “Somebody clever enough to think of something I haven’t thought of, or that I’ve discarded as being too fanciful.”

St. Yves smiled. “And here you’ve been reassuring me that I have nothing to worry about.”

“Ah,” the viceroy said, “but your situation will be quite different. You’ll be on a ship at sea. The
Empress
’s master, Captain Iskansen, is one of the best qualified, most capable ship’s officers I’ve ever known. Anglo-Asian Star is lucky to have him. The
Empress
will be escorted out to sea by the
Clive
and the torpedo gunboat
Sea Lion
. They won’t leave until she’s about twenty miles out, by which time she’s untouchable. Another ship might try to come alongside and board you, but
The Empress of India
is the fastest thing afloat, just about, in this part of the world. There are a couple of naval vessels that can match her for speed, but I can’t picture Her Majesty’s Navy stealing Bank of England gold. And
as for passengers or crew: No one on board the ship will attempt to steal the gold, not after they’ve thought it out. If they do, where are they going to put it?”

St. Yves stared out at the docking ship and thought it over. “What you said before,” he said, “about the unexpected. You know, I think that’s what’s going to keep me up nights; worrying about how to prepare for the unexpected.”

From his vantage point by the ordnance building, a scant few hundred yards from the Commissariat Jetty, Professor James Moriarty leaned on his owl-headed walking stick and watched the two tugs pushing and pulling at
The Empress of India
. “Look at that sight,” he said to Colonel Moran, who stood to his right. “It makes one marvel at the accomplishments of modern engineering. Fifty years ago the wooden sailing ship still ruled the seas, and the few great side-wheel steam ships were dirty, noisy, uncomfortable, and inefficient. Their engines were remarkable more for the fact that they worked at all, rather than anything they were able to accomplish in the manner of speed or reliability. Not a few of them ended up burning up their own furniture and fittings for fuel when delayed by a storm or other natural mishap.”