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

beckoned to one of the lads, seemingly at random. “You,” he said. “Come!” He turned around and pulled open the door, leaving the room without a backward glance, and the boy followed. The second man pushed himself slightly back on the couch, but otherwise remained where he was, motionless and unsmiling.
    The tall man climbed the wide staircase to the floor above and nodded at Natyana, who sat in a heavily brocaded chair at the head of the stairs. She looked at him and his boy companion and returned the nod. “Room six is empty and freshly made up,” she said. “To the left.”
    He nodded again and winked and giggled a brief giggle, then, taking the lad by the hand, crossed to the room and entered, closing the door gently behind him.
    The hall porter, a skinny, wiry old man with a wandering eye, a twisted lip, and a freshly starched white jacket, emerged from a closet behind Natyana and stared with his good eye at the closing door. “ Peccavi, that gent calls hisself.” he observed. “I wonder which of our high-and-mighty clientele he would be when he’s at home. Quite a toff, but there’s sommat strange about him.”
    Natyana shrugged. “There’s something strange about all our clients,” she said. “Or hadn’t you noticed?”
    “I do my noticing elsewhere,” the porter told her.
    After a short while sounds of squealing, laughing, giggling, thumping, whipping, and high-pitched screaming could be heard faintly through the well-insulated walls of the room. No more than could be expected, given the nature of the establishment. Sometime later all sounds ceased.
    Some forty minutes or so after he had entered the room, the tall man opened the door and exited, closing it behind him. Nodding to Natyana and giggling a final giggle, he went down the stairs, bouncing slightly from step to step as though unable to contain whatever emotion it was that he felt. His companion joined him almost immediately and, retrieving their cloaks with wide smiles and a more than appropriate pourboire, they left the premises.
    It was some time before it occurred to Natyana that the lad had not emerged from the room. She crossed the hall and knocked sharply on the door to rouse him. “No shillying or shallying,” she called. “The night isn’t over. Come on out, Istefan.” Hearing no response, she opened the door.
    A sharp intake of breath, and then her hand flew to her mouth. “Lyi tann!”
    “Pardon?” The hall porter looked up from the pastry that he had produced from one of the many pockets of his white jacket.
    Natyana used the door to hold herself up. “It’s … There’s been … Don’t look, there’s no reason for you to look. I think you’d better gather the staff, and see if you can locate Master Paternoster.”
    The porter put the tartlet aside, pushed himself to his feet, and joined Natyana at the door. He glanced into the room and then, with a sharp intake of breath, took two steps farther in and peered at the object on the floor. Then he turned away and put his hand to his mouth. “Cor blimey!”
    “I told you not to look,” Natyana said.
    “I wish I hadn’t,” he agreed. “Is he—no, never mind the question—’course he is. What are we going to do?”
    Down the hall a door opened and a fat man with puffy gray side whiskers and a red nose trotted out with his arms around the shoulders of a short, very blond young girl in a red camisole. She had her arms as far as they would go around his middle, clutching on to his tattersall waistcoat front and back, and was staring up at his face. “Oh my!” he said, perhaps to the girl, perhaps to himself. “Oh, but certainly that was invigorating. Give and take, I always say. Yes indeed, give and take.” He trotted toward Natyana, the girl shuffling along with him, and before Natyana thought of closing the door to conceal the horror inside, the fat man was nodding cheerfully to her and pausing to look into the room.
    He froze in midstride and his mouth