Character background for Mercedes Moriarty. There is more to this -- now that I've got a bit more time I'll see to finishing up the rest of it in her voice.

March 6th, 1938

The cable came encrypted through secure channels, FBI wanting an official ID on one Mercedes Moriarty. The name caught my attention, sounded vaguely familiar like something from a long time ago, but I couldn't place it. The local Feds were much too busy listening to Jack Benny on the radio and taking coffee breaks to handle such a low-priority assignment, so they did what they always did and passed it on to local law enforcement. Since I was on the duty sergeant's shit list for busting his favorite hooker last week, I got sent out to track her down. They gave me her last known address and the name she'd been using -- M. Moore -- and told me to get her to answer some questions. I couldn't see why they'd be so interested in a frail, what with things being the way the way they were with the Krauts and all, but it don't pay to get known as the guy who questions orders. I hit the pavement and headed down to South Central, past the railroad tracks, into a neighborhood that most cops didn't enter after dark.

It took me two weeks to finally catch her in her "office," if you can call it that, just a dingy room with a desk, two chairs, and a couch that looked like it had been slept on for too many nights in a row. She ID'd me on sight as a cop and I saw the tension flow out of her shoulders, like relief that the chase was finally over. I didn't get it, but I didn't let her know that. I introduced myself, Officer Lester Jenkins, Arizona State Police. She nodded, gestured to the second chair, sat in the first, staring at me with the palest blue eyes I've ever seen.

Even hungry and hunted, Mercedes Moriarty had the kind of blonde that made you ache inside, made you want to think about satin sheets damp with her sweat. I shook off the thought, told her I had some questions from the Bureau for her. That seemed to surprise her, but she nodded.

"Your name is Moriarty?"

"Moore." The name was short, clipped. "M. Moore."

"That ain't what the Bureau says," I told her. "They say you're really Moriarty. Mercedes Moriarty."

Slow and cool she was, a mountain breeze on a hot summer's day. "What do you want?" There was something in her words, the slightest hint of a foreign accent, so slight I couldn't place it.

"Just some answers, Miss," I told her. "Your father was Professor James Moriarty? The criminal mastermind?"

Her expression didn't change. Not even the flicker of an eyelash, but I been a cop for ten years, I know when a "no" turns into a "yes."

"He was supposed to have died at Reichenbach Falls in... 1893," I said, shuffling through my notes to confirm the date.

She shook a Kool out of its package with one hand, flipped open her Zippo with the other, the practiced motions of the habitual smoker that turned lighting a butt into a ritual. When the filter tip was between those luscious, full lips and the other was burning cherry red, she leaned back in her chair and looked at me, ice blue eyes penetrating the smoky haze.

"Nobody died at Reichenbach Falls," she said.

*****

April 1893

The description by which my father is known to the world is hardly a flattering one, loaded as it is with words which evoke the very worst sentiments in the human mind. But once the melodrama is stripped from it, it is an accurate summation.

"...a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. [...] He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order."

All these things were traits I also observed, having lived with him for the first fourteen years of my life. Like his nemesis, he was ruled by his mind, not his heart or his body. My mother wrote of him:

"...James Moriarty never loved me in the way most women wished to be loved, but I had neither time nor wish for this. It was my intellect which permitted him to engage in a relationship with me, a relationship of the mind. And, if his heart never followed, his body on occasion did."

Camille Loranne was a woman of rare beauty and crystalline intelligence, reclusive, enigmatic. She was never happier than with a pen and paper in hand, scratching out endless mathematical formulae to describe Bach cantatas, Ming vases, the proportions for the sounding box of a Stradivarius violin.

My birth was registered in the canton of Schwyz on February 10th, 1911 as Mercedes Moriarty.

I will not stoop to refute the rest of Mr. Holmes', ah, shall we say colorful description of the man. His quaint assertions of "hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind" and a "criminal strain" in the blood are laughable in the light of modern science. I can say with certainty that my father was a man who understood power and attracted it, like iron filings are drawn to a magnet.

Men of genius often do not subscribe to the monkey customs of their lessers, customs designed to rein in and curtail the common man's common impulses. Genius writes its own rules designed to govern not the ordinary, but the extraordinary, a level of existence which most by the limitations of their natures can never understand.

Men of power are much the same. If he succeeds, the man of genius and power will often change history and live long enough to write it, attributed the laurels of the hero and all it entails. Obviously, James Moriarty "failed" and to him was instead given the role of villain, when the history of those times was recorded -- in this case, by the lackey of the victor. From my mother's memories of that time, the man who emerged from the labyrinthine caves under the Swiss Alps did not regard himself as a failure.

The last time I saw Moriarty was in 1925. Without hard data I induce that he was approximately 80 years old though he appeared no older than a man in his 50's.

*****

"You were... 14." I sat back in my chair, waved off the butt she offered me and lit up one of my own. "And since then you've never had contact with him of any kind?"

She blinked, but it wasn't the tell of a player at a card table who was raising on a busted flush. It was a slow, inscrutable closing of the eyes, a preamble to leaning forward to stub out the last of her smoke. She knew why the Bureau wanted to know, had known it all along even though I was only just then figuring it out.

"So far as I know," she said. "We were never what you might call a `close' family."

"Were you an only child?"

She gave another of those slow blinks, and half a smile. "So far as I know."

"You went to school in Switzerland, then?"

"You might say that."

The dame was getting more annoying by the minute. "What might you say, Miss Moriarty?"

*****

March 1930

Since I had no formal schooling I was required to pass entrance exams in order to begin studies at the University of Fribourg. They were disappointingly easy, which led me to wonder about the quality of education my fellow students had gotten in the famed private preparatory schools of Europe. Mine had not followed any particular regimen or course of study. My parents simply seemed interested to discover how much information I could ingest, and how quickly I could do it.

I was reading simple texts by age three, resolving algebraic equations by age five. We spoke English at home, but also French and Italian and it was discovered very early that I had a gift for languages. It was my father who later determined that what I actually had was a gift for meaning, for deriving patterned order from what looked at first to be chaos. Deductive puzzles, cryptography, statistics, advanced mathematics, even musical scores -- I could decipher almost any written material, given time enough. My father used to watch me pore over the results from the world's stock exchanges and predict, with growing accuracy, which stocks would rise and which would fall. When I added results from sunspot cycles to my equations they became even more accurate.

As a family, irregular though it most certainly was in all other respects, we decrypted Enigma when I was 12 years old. I think it must have been 1923 or '24. In any event, the Allies managed it just last year, I understand. Of course, they had two Poles working on it...

My father tutored me in history and philosophy, my mother in mathematics and literature. For other subjects, including Russian and Greek, my mother hired temporary tutors, most of whose knowledge I exhausted within mere months of their respective arrivals. After age 14 my mother ordered books for my continued studies of the subjects my father was no longer there to teach. By the time I reached Fribourg in 1930 I was able to pass their entrance exams with ridiculous ease -- one of three women in the entire class.

*****

"I might say `I'm having difficulty determining the line of your investigation, Officer.'"

That was almost an outright lie, I could smell it, but she went on, so I kept my opinions to myself. "I might be of more help to you if you'd simply tell me what you're after."

"Okay, why not." I stubbed out my smoke so I could cross my arms over my chest. It wasn't much of a chest but I thought it might impress her, anyway. "I'm here on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, like I said. They want to know what the daughter of Professor Moriarty is doing out here in the sticks -- high profile crime figures don't typically settle in Arizona. We get the second-raters, not the first string."

"Maybe I am the second string."

"Or maybe you're the advance team. I don't know, my boss doesn't know, the Feds don't know. So I think you're going to tell us."

"Oh, I'll tell you." Mercedes Moriarty agreed to that with a smile the Mona Lisa might have envied. "I'll even tell you the truth, Officer Jenkins. I just don't think you'll believe it."

She paused to light another butt. "Sometimes, I'm not sure I believe it."

*****

They were waiting for me when I arrived at the tiny flat I'd taken in Fribourg, two slabs of stupid whose primary attribute was every muscle except the one between their respective ears. I'd never been handled roughly in my life to that point; one of them grabbed me, the other slapped me and my world spun dizzily for several moments. The next thing I remembered was snapping to acute awareness in the cool air outside and seeing a lone man walking across the street.

I screamed, the thug who held me slapped a dirty hand over my mouth. Infuriated, I kicked back against his legs and screamed again when his hand slipped.

That was when I first met Chow Wu Long. He exploded into those two witless wonders like personal fury and when they went down, they didn't get back up. He gently pushed me to one side and stood between me and the two remaining torpedoes who jumped out of the car.

"Kindly leave before you contract the same illness which has befallen your friends," he said -- in passable German.

They weren't any smarter than their predecessors, and had a more limited vocabulary besides. Wu Long dispatched them both with no wasted motions, then turned to me as mildly as if he were remarking upon the weather.

"I suggest you contact the local authorities to have these beasts properly caged," he said with a bow. "However, I have business here with a local resident of the utmost importance. If you would, please honor my simple request and tell me how I may reach Miss Mercedes Moriarty?"

"Lift up your hand."

Curious, he complied. I took his hand in mine. "You've reached her. And she thanks you very much for your timely intervention."

His eyes lit up at that, making seem much younger than I (though I discovered later that he was several years older) He was the first Chinaman I'd ever seen, and though I suddenly had 14 questions to ask him, one of the slabs of meat began to stir. I knew we didn't have much time.

"You can tell me about it later," I said, kicking the early riser in the head then kneeling to search his pockets. "For now, let's see if the opposition is giving us any real clues as to who he, or she, is."

My father had given me a thorough education in the workings of the criminal mind, and I was almost certain that four men would not abduct one lone young woman unless they'd been ordered to do so by someone with more authority than they had. By the time we'd gathered their wallets, money, and other pocket trivia, it was obvious to me that they were indeed hired help -- and they wouldn't be the last.

Wu Long bowed again. "What do you wish done with these men?"

"Just inside the door there," I nodded toward my apartment building, "there is another door that leads down to the cellar. Toss them down the stairs then set the door to lock when it closes."

He did, giving me a moment's pause when he picked up those inert bodies two at a time to dispose of them. But, by the time he'd finished I'd gone through the the car. It was an older model with an Italian bill of purchase in the glove box, to one "Giancarlo Giuseppe Giannini."

Those men had spoken German, not Italian.

I was not unaware of my father's reputation in Europe at that time, even so many years after his supposed death -- he'd kept copies of every issue of Strand magazine with his old nemesis' exploits in it and I had read them all at his request.

German thugs. An Italian car. And a polite Chinaman who had business with Mercedes Moriarty.

"We need to speak." It was Wu Long, with another bow. "In private if possible. As soon as possible."

I glanced up and down the street. It was quiet enough, but those lace curtains in the windows of nearby homes were twitching. "Come upstairs with me," I told him, nodding in agreement. "I need to pack some things. Then we're getting out of here."