“I hope the wine is to your liking,” said Moriarty.
“Have you poisoned it?” asked Holmes. “I hesitate even to touch the glass, in case you have treated it with some infernal compound of your own devising.”
“Why would I do that?” asked Moriarty. He appeared genuinely puzzled by the suggestion.
“You are my archnemesis,” Holmes replied. “You have hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain runs in your blood. Could I but free society of you, I should feel that my career had reached its summit.”
“Yes, about that archnemesis business . . .”
“What about it?” asked Holmes.
“Well, isn’t it a bit strange that it’s never come up before? I mean, if I’m your archnemesis, the Napoleon of crime, a spider at the heart of an infernal web with a thousand radiations, responsible for half that is evil in London—all that kind of thing—and you’ve been tracking me for years, then why haven’t you mentioned me before? You know, it would surely have popped up in conversation at some point. It’s not the kind of thing one tends to forget, really, is it, a criminal mastermind at the heart of some great conspiracy? If I were in your shoes, I’d never stop talking about me.”
“I—” Holmes paused. “I’ve never really thought about it in that way. I must admit that you did pop into my mind quite recently, and distinctly fully formed. Perhaps I took a blow to the head at some stage, although I’m sure Doctor Watson would have noted such an injury.”
“He writes down everything else,” said Moriarty. “Hard to see him missing something like that.”
“Indeed. I am lucky to have him.”
“I’d find it a little annoying myself,” said Moriarty. “It’s rather like being Samuel Johnson and finding that, every time you lift a coffee cup, Boswell is scribbling details of the position of your fingers and asking you to say something witty about it all.”
“Well, that is where we differ. It’s why I am not a scoundrel.”
“Hard to be a scoundrel when someone is always writing down what one is doing,” said Moriarty. “One might as well just toddle along to Scotland Yard and make a full confession, thus saving the forces of law and order a lot of fuss. But that’s beside the point. We need to return to the matter in hand, which is my sudden arrival on the scene.”
“It is somewhat perturbing,” agreed Holmes.
“You should see it from my side,” said Moriarty. “Perturbing isn’t the half of it. For a start, I have an awareness of being mathematically gifted.”
“Indeed you are,” said Holmes. “At the age of twenty-one you wrote a treatise on the binomial theorem, which has had a European vogue.”
“Look, I don’t even know what the binomial theorem is, never mind what it might resemble with a European vogue—a description that makes no sense at all, by the way, when you think about it. Surely it’s either the binomial theorem or it isn’t, even if it’s described in a French accent.”
“But on the strength of it you won a chair at one of our smaller universities!” Holmes protested.
“If I did, then name the university,” said Moriarty.
Holmes shifted in his chair. He was clearly struggling. “The identity of the institution doesn’t immediately spring to mind,” he admitted.
“That’s because I was never chair of anything,” said Moriarty. “I’m not even very good at basic addition. I struggle to pay the milkman.”
Holmes frowned. “That can’t be right.”
“My point exactly. Maybe that’s how I became an ex-professor, although even that doesn’t sound plausible, given that I can’t remember how I was supposed to have become a professor in the first place, especially in a subject about which I know absolutely nothing. Which brings me to the next matter: how did you come to be so expert in all that stuff about poisons and types of dirt and whatnot? Did you take a course?”
Holmes considered the question.
“I don’t profess to be an expert in every field,” he replied. “I have little interest in literature, philosophy, or astronomy, and a negligible regard for the political sphere. I remain confident in the fields of chemistry and the anatomical sciences, and, as you have pointed out, can hold my own in geology and botany, with particular reference to poisons.”
“That’s all well and good,” said Moriarty. “The question remains: how did you come by this knowledge?”
“I own a lot of books,” said Holmes, awkwardly. He thought that he could almost hear a slight question mark at the end of his answer, which caused him to wince involuntarily.
“Have you read them all, then?”
“Must have done, I suppose.”
“Either you did or you didn’t. You have to recall reading them.”
“Er, not so much.”
“You don’t just pick up that kind of knowledge off the street. There are people who’ve studied dirt for decades who don’t know as much about it as you seem to.”