Free Who Thinks Evil: A Professor Moriarty Novel (Professor Moriarty Novels) by Michael Kurland

were kept in the private rooms of museums, for viewing by serious scholars only.
    There were eight rooms along the hallway, each decorated in a different style. The first on the right was a re-creation of chambers in the seraglio of an Eastern potentate, or at least what a well-read European might imagine such chambers to look like. It had red and green silk drapes descending from the ceiling at seemingly random intervals; the floor was covered with an oversized Isfahan carpet, on which round leather-covered ottomans were scattered with a casual hand. A smattering of habitués were lounging about talking softly and accepting an occasional glass of champagne, hock, madeira, or absinthe from one of the girls in their frilly white chemises, or one of several young lads clad in the uniforms of some of Britain’s better public schools.
    On the left was the library: easy chairs with conveniently placed lamps, desks at which to write or read, racks with current newspapers and magazines, and dark cherrywood bookshelves, ceiling high, filled with books bound in buckram, leather, linen, and silk. Books on history, religion, and natural philosophy filled the shelves, along with classical authors and a smattering of fiction, but the great majority of the works fell into that class known variously as erotica, exotica, and French. There were the works of Ovid, Catullus, Sappho, Boccaccio, Petronius, Mlle. de Sapay, Chevalier Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and the Marquis de Sade. An unbound copy of the rare first edition of Burton’s Kama Shastra, or the Hindoo Art of Love was in a closed case, but a dozen leather-bound copies of the later, expanded Kama Sutra sat on the shelves. There were multiple copies of The Misfortunes of Virtue, Venus in Furs, and The Secret Manual of the House of Jade. There were books on rough paper with flimsy covers and titles like Six Months of Sodom , A Man and a Maid , The Naughty Schoolgirl , What Miss Flaybum Remembers, and The Book of Bad Boys. On the shelves holding artwork there were erotic paintings, etchings, and prints covering a span of many centuries, and a fine assortment of penny postcards that could not conceivably have been sent through the mails.
    One of the housemen, dressed all in black and wearing a domino mask, stood in the hall, and the tall man beckoned to him and murmured a few words in his ear. The houseman nodded and turned. “Follow me, please,” he said.
    The houseman led the tall man and his companion past the delights of these two rooms and the next two, whose doors were closed, and turned in at the third room on the left. It resembled a boys’ locker room, with several rows of lockers and between them wooden benches at which the boys could change. Around the walls of the faux locker room were red and black leather couches, where the adults could sit and watch the boys at play. There were a dozen or so barely pubescent boys in the room, sporting about with towels or wrestling in a friendly manner, as boys will. Particularly if the boys have received instruction in just what sort of sporting about will please such older men as are pleased at the sight of young lads sporting about. The houseman saw his two charges in and bowed briefly to them, and then left the room, closing the door behind him.
    Five men rested on various of the encircling couches, watching the young lads as they flicked each other’s bottoms with towels and scampered about. Several of the men were smiling, savoring their memories and expectations. Several were staring intently, as though there were mystical secrets to be discerned in the flashing limbs and heaving torsos of the wrestling youths.
    The tall man sprawled his angular body on a couch and regarded the youths with interest. His companion sat primly next to him, hands laced together, face—what could be seen of it below the mask—devoid of expression. His posture suggested a blending of vigilance and detachment.
    After a time the tall man rose and