“You’re good at this,” he said as he set the board up again.
“I am not. You just checkmated me in nine turns.”
“That’s three turns more than most people get with me,” Morrie’s wicked grin made my chest turn somersaults.
I picked up a pawn who’d only lasted two turns and waved it in Morrie’s face. “You’ve given this poor guy PTSD. Next time I’m choosing the game, and it’s going to be something dumb that relies purely on luck.”
“There’s no such thing as luck. It’s all a balance of probability—”
I punched him in the arm. “Spoilsport.”
We fell into an easy conversation, speckled with flirtations. Morrie asked me about my life in New York and growing up in ___field. He spoke about his mathematical studies and fascination with asteroids, how he might one day look to return to his studies or teach again or enter the space program.
I asked Morrie why he didn’t just do those things now. He wasn’t bound to the bookshop and the answers it might yield in the same way Heathcliff and Quoth were.
“How do you think Heathcliff would fare without me, or our feathered friend over there?” Morrie entwined his long fingers in mine.
I resent that. I am perfectly capable of catching rodents and foraging for my own berries,Quoth’s voice reverberated inside my skull. I jumped at the intrusion of it. This whole shapeshifting thing would take some getting used to.
Morrie’s icy eyes warmed. “Even someone like me relishes the innately human desire to be needed by my friends.”
I suspected that wasn’t the whole truth of it. Behind the facade of Nevermore Bookshop, James Moriarty was re-establishing his criminal empire for the twenty-first century. On the one hand, his hacking skills had already come in handy, but on the other hand, he did bad things and made no apology for them. He stole money from people and who knew what else…
If he wasn’t so hot, if his fingers in mine weren’t causing electrical impulses to sizzle through my body, would I be able to stomach his presence? I wasn’t sure I liked my answer to that question.
Morrie slid his finger over my knuckles, and all moral postulating flew from my head.
We changed trains twice, running across platforms with Quoth croaking in protest. Before I knew it, the announcement blared for Paddington Station. I hadn’t even opened my book. Morrie had to drop my hand in order to gather up the chessboard and Quoth’s case. My fingers tingled with the ghost of his touch.
We alighted and wound our way out onto the street. Quoth’s head swiveled every which way as he took in the throngs of people, the skyscrapers, the honking cars and bright red buses clogging the streets, the polyglot of languages spewing from mouths and loudspeakers and radios. Smells assailed me – sweat and exhaust fumes and overflowing garbage and fancy soaps from a nearby store and all manner of ethnic foods – disgusting and wonderful in equal measure.
“Is it weird being here?” I asked as we stopped at a traffic light and Morrie consulted the map on his phone.
“Why would it be weird?”
“When you knew London, we didn’t even have automobiles. It must have been a very different city.”
“The London I knew never existed. It was a fiction – one man’s interpretation of what he wanted London to be, a backdrop for his pantomime of good versus evil. Arthur Conan Doyle was right about one thing, though. London has always been and will always be the great meeting place of culture, as well as the nexus of all crime. Everything of interest that happens in this world links back to London.”
I couldn’t tiptoe around this issue any longer. “Morrie, did you really do all those things Sherlock Holmes said of you in the books?”
No hesitation. Morrie grinned. “Of course.”
“You were… youare… the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city?”
“That’s what it says on my business cards,” Morrie held his phone up to rotate the map.
“You realize that makes it difficult for me to like you, to trust you. Why do you have to be a criminal now? You have a new chance at life, a chance to be better. Why fall back into the same pattern?”
Morrie pulled one of the books out of my bag and held it in front of my face. It was a collection of feminist essays I’d grabbed from the shop. “Because of this.”
“I’m confused.”
“I found that book in the shop when I first arrived in this world. This ‘feminism’ was not even a concept when I first built my empire, but it immediately appealed to me. In this author I sense a kindred spirit. The power structures of this world are heavily weighted in favor of a handful of people, many of whom obtained that power by nefarious means while convincing themselves they are morally just. I have no patience for morals, but I do solovechaos. The world this author advocates, this fair and equitable world, itisthechaos. Iamhere to be better, Mina. Instead of reinforcing the power structures I helped to build, I aim to throw a wrench into the works and jiggle things out of place.”
“But you’re a privileged white man!”
“Exactly,” he grinned. We crossed the street and Morrie steered me into a deserted alley. “I’m bringing down the system from within.”
