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"And that wasn’t the end of it, I guess"

"No It goes on like that 1930 Bank vault heist Glasgow All the culprits caught, but the jewelsa hed atPounds sterling The currency Apparently one of their hired cons had delivered the rubies to the a pulley system Quentin Moriarty claimed his wife’s jewels came froh a pair of rats, a scalpel, and a lady’s handkerchief 1944, and the Moriartys are raiding thethe second World War; 1968, and they’re chairing the Nobel Prize Committee; 1972, and my older sister Araes that used Francis Bacon’s substitution cipher They were being used to negotiate the sale of nuclear warheads To Walter Moriarty What on earth would a Moriarty do with a warhead? Sell it again, probably, and at a profit He went to trial Two jurors developed rare for All quiet All out of the news And then someone killed all three of Araminta’s cats"

"Jesus," I said "That’s awful"

"Walter Moriarty was out of jail sixteen weeks later A travesty And still--you must remember this--the family wasn’t all bad" He refilled his cup "Really there was only one bad apple in a generation The restwell I knew a Patrick Moriarty when I was younger We ran into each other at a party at Oxford, got drunk enough to duck into a corner and co about the bad blood between our fa like it is now--and he said that the fundamental difference between us was that Holmeses were heartless optimists, and they were hedonist pessimists"

"Heartless optimists?" My Hol?"

"Do you know that old ie of Lady Justice? All done up with the blindfold and the scales Made of shiny copper, not to be touched I’ve thought of us that way In order to pass judgment on other men, you remove yourself from them Not all Holmeses are detectives, you know Far froovernment Some scientists, some lawyers One really dry stick of a cousin sells insurance But e do detective work, we tend to work outside the law We have our own resources And, at times, when the laon’t prosecute, we are our own jury To wield that kind of powerit makes sense that you wouldn’t let yourself be blinded by your emotions Would it really help you to put achild? And, to top it all off, it’s not in our natures to be effusive We’re et us from place to place But over ti at ourselves for so long Maybe it made us better at our jobs Because you don’t do this kind of work unless you think it’ll really make a difference, really make the world better And you don’t think you can omaniac"

"And the Moriartys?"

Leander considered obs of money, and a farow up to be geniuses So they feel entitled to the best parts of the world Extrapolate from there, my dear Watson But it wasn’t really until this current crop that there were so many marvelously depraved specimens all at once I rew up to be a hedge fundminor evil Ran a couple Ponzi scheust was a nice kid, ust was patient with Charlotte Smart as a whip When Emma and Alistair hired hi the eye of a oodwill We hadn’t had a run-in with the Moriartys in twenty years Meood idea at the time"

"That’ll be written on a few tombstones before this is over," I said

"You have quite the mordant sense of huht The cycle’s beginning all over again"

"And my family?" I asked him "We didn’t play a role in any of this?" I sounded like a child, I knew I did, but I’d been raised on the Sherlock Holmes stories My father styled hiined that we’d been in the thick of it all this tiht

"Not in a long while," Leander said "Too many of us were automatons, maybe Too distant Our families were friendly, to be sure, but not friends Not in pairs Not until I hed I couldn’t help it

He leaned forward to clap ive her a bit of space I don’t think she’s ever had a friend before you"

SO I GAVE HER SOME SPACE

My Faulkner novel in the h their library, pulling down the books I wanted to read and wouldn’t, because they were all first editions, gilt leaf and delicate pages, things meant to be looked at and never opened I was afraid I’d ruin them I was afraid for so many pathetic reasons, scared that, in a feeeks, I’d be back at school and without Holmes’s friendship, that the dread that prickled the back of my neck was the sensation of loss before it ca even at our dinners, sitting next to Leander, who had taken Emma Holmes’s place beside me In an attempt to cheer me up, he told me ribald, ridiculous stories aboutthe other out of jail