Текст книги "Cold Vengeance"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

CHAPTER 42

Penumbra Plantation, St. Charles Parish

WELCOME HOME, MR. PENDERGAST,” SAID MAURICE, as if Pendergast had only been away a few minutes instead of two months, when he opened the front door. “Will you be wanting supper, sir?”

Pendergast entered the house, Maurice shutting the door against the chill fog of the winter air. “No, thank you. But a glass of amontillado in the second-floor parlor would be lovely, if you don’t mind.”

“The fire is laid.”

“Marvelous.” Pendergast climbed the stairs to the parlor, where a small fire blazed on the hearth, banishing the habitual dampness of the house. He took a seat in a wing chair beside it, and a moment later Maurice came in carrying a silver tray, with a small glass of sherry balanced on it.

“Thank you, Maurice.”

As the white-haired servant turned to leave, Pendergast said, “I know you’ve been worried about me.”

Maurice paused but did not respond.

“When I first discovered the circumstances of my wife’s death,” Pendergast continued, “I was not myself. I imagine you must have been alarmed.”

“I was concerned,” said Maurice.

“Thank you. I know you were. But I’m my own man once again, and there’s no need to monitor my comings or goings or mention them to my brother-in-law…” He paused. “You were in contact with Judson about my situation, I assume?”

Maurice colored. “He is a doctor, sir, and he asked me to help, specifically with regard to your movements. He was fearful that you might do something rash. I thought, given the family history…” His voice trailed off.

“Quite so, quite so. However, it turns out that Judson may not have had my best interests in mind. We’ve had a bit of a falling-out, I’m afraid. And as I mentioned, I’m quite recovered. So you see there is no reason to share anything further with him.”

“Of course. I hope my confidences to Dr. Esterhazy did not cause you any inconvenience?”

“None at all.”

“Will there be anything else?”

“No, thank you. Good night, Maurice.”

“Good night, sir.”

One hour later, Pendergast sat motionless in a small space that had once been his mother’s dressing room. The door was closed and locked. The heavy, old-fashioned furniture had been removed and replaced with a single wing chair, a mahogany table set before it. The elegant William Morris wallpaper had been stripped away and dark blue soundproofing installed in its place. There was nothing in the room to distract or to arouse interest. The only illumination in the windowless space came from a single beeswax taper placed on the small table, which cast a flickering light over the patternless walls. It was the most private and insular room in the mansion.

In the perfect silence, Pendergast turned his gaze to the candle flame, slowing both his respiration and pulse with great deliberation. Through the esoteric meditative discipline of Chongg Ran, which he had studied in the Himalayas many years before, he was preparing to enter the heightened mental state of stong pa nyid. Pendergast had combined this ancient Buddhist practice with the idea of the memory palace contained in Giordano Bruno’s Ars Memoriato create his own unique form of mental concentration.

He stared at the flame and – slowly, very slowly – let his gaze pierce its flickering heart. As he sat, motionless, he allowed his consciousness to enter into the flame, to be consumed by it, to join with it first as an organic whole, and then – as the minutes passed – at an even more fundamental level, until it was as if the very molecules of his sentient being mingled with those of the flame.

The flickering heat grew to fill his mind’s eye with endless, unquenchable fire. And then – quite suddenly – it winked out. Unrelieved blackness took its place.

Pendergast waited, in perfect equanimity, for his memory palace – the storehouse of knowledge and recollection to which he could retreat when in need of guidance – to appear. But the familiar marble walls did not rise up from the blackness. Instead, Pendergast found himself in a dim, closet-like area with a ceiling that sloped low over his head. Before him stood a latticed doorway looking out onto a service hallway; behind him was a wall covered with Rube Goldberg – like diagrams and treasure maps, scrawled by youthful hands.

This was the hideout known as Plato’s Cave, under the back stairs of the old house on Dauphine Street, where he and his brother, Diogenes, had gone to hatch childish schemes and plots… before the Event that sundered their comradeship forever.

This was the second time a memory crossing of Pendergast’s had taken an unexpected turn to this place. With a sudden apprehension, he peered into the dark space at the rear of Plato’s Cave. Sure enough: there was his brother, aged about nine or ten, wearing the navy blazer and shorts that were the uniform of Lusher, the school they attended. He was browsing through a book of Caravaggio’s paintings. He glanced up at Pendergast, gave a sardonic smile, and returned to the book.

“It’s you again,” Diogenes said, the boy strangely speaking in the adult’s voice. “Just in time. Maurice just saw a rabid dog running down the street near the Le Prêtres’ house. Let’s see if we can’t goad it into entering the Convent of St. Maria, shall we? It’s just noon, they’re probably all assembled at mass.”

When Pendergast did not reply, Diogenes turned over a page. “This is one of my favorites,” he said. “ The Beheading of St. John the Baptist. Notice how the woman on the left is lowering the basket to receive the head. How accommodating! And the nobleman standing over John, directing the proceedings – such an air of calm command! That’s just how I want to look when I…” He abruptly fell silent and turned another page.

Still Pendergast did not speak.

“Let me guess,” said Diogenes. “This has to do with your dear departed wife.”

Pendergast nodded.

“I saw her once, you know,” Diogenes continued, not looking up from the book. “You two were in the gazebo in the back garden, playing backgammon. I was watching from behind the wisteria bushes. Priapus in the shrubbery, and all that sort of thing. It was an idyllic scene. She had such poise, such elegance of movement. She reminded me of the Madonna in Murillo’s Immaculate Conception.” He paused. “So you think she’s still alive, frater?”

Pendergast spoke for the first time. “Judson told me so, and he had no motive to lie.”

Diogenes did not look up from the book. “Motive? That’s easy. He wanted to inflict the maximum amount of pain at the moment of your death. You have that effect on people.” He turned another page. “I suppose you dug her up?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“The DNA matched.”

“And yet you still think she’s alive?” Another snicker.

“The dental records also matched.”

“Was the corpse also missing a hand?”

A long pause. “Yes. But the fingerprint evidence was inconclusive.”

“The body must’ve been in quite a state. How terrible for you to have that image lodged in your mind – your lastimage of her. Have you found the birth certificate yet?”

Pendergast paused, struck by the question. Now that the subject came up, he did not recall ever having seen her birth certificate. It hadn’t seemed important. He had always assumed she had been born in Maine, but that was now clearly a lie.

Diogenes tapped an image on the page: Crucifixion of Saint Peter. “I wonder how being hung upside down on a cross affects the continuity of one’s thought processes.” He looked up. “ Frater. You’re the one who was – not to put too fine a point on it – in possession of her loins. You were her soul mate, were you not?”

“I thought so.”

“Well, sift your feelings. What do they tell you?”

“That she’s alive.”

Diogenes broke into a peal of laughter, his pink boyish mouth thrown back and open, the laugh grotesquely adult. Pendergast waited for it to subside. Finally Diogenes stopped, smoothed his hair, and laid the book aside. “This is so rich. Like the coming in of a foul tide, those bad old Pendergastian genes are finally rising to the fore in you. You now have a crazy obsession of your very own. Congratulations and welcome to the family!”

“It isn’t an obsession if it’s the truth.”

“Oh, ho!”

“You’re dead. What do you know?”

“Am I really dead? Et in Arcadia ego!The day will come when we shall, all of us Pendergasts, join hands in a great family reunion in the lowest circle of hell. What a party that will be! Ha ha ha—!”

With a sudden, violent burst of will, Pendergast sundered the memory crossing. Once again he was back in the old dressing room, sitting in the leather wing chair, with only the flickering candle for company.

CHAPTER 43

RETURNING TO THE SECOND-FLOOR PARLOR, Pendergast sipped his sherry in thoughtful silence. Although he’d told Maurice he was quite recovered, it was at heart a lie – and in no way was this clearer than in the oversight he now realized he had made.

In his earlier searches of Helen’s papers, he had neglected to note the one important document that was missing: her birth certificate. He had everything else. The news that she had entered the second grade speaking only Portuguese had been so astonishing that he had completely failed to consider the vexing question it raised about her birth certificate – or lack thereof. She must have hidden it in a place that was accessible and yet secure. Which suggested it was still somewhere in the last house she’d inhabited.

He took another sip of sherry, pausing to examine its rich amber color. Penumbra was a large, rambling mansion, and there would be an almost limitless number of places to hide a single piece of paper. Helen was clever. He would have to think it out.

Slowly, he began eliminating potential hiding places. It had to be in an area she spent time in, so that her presence there would not be considered unusual. A place she felt comfortable. A place where she would not be disturbed. And it would have to be in some corner, or within some piece of furniture, that would never be moved, emptied, dusted out, aired, or searched by someone else.

He remained in the parlor for several hours, deep in thought, mentally searching every room and corner of the mansion. Then – once he had definitively narrowed his search to a single room – he silently rose and descended the stairs to the library. He stood at its threshold, eyes traveling across the room, taking in the trophy heads, the great refectory table, the bookshelves and objets d’art, considering – then rejecting – dozens of possible hiding places in turn.

After thirty more minutes of thought, he had narrowed his mental search to a single piece of furniture.

The massive armoire that held the Audubon double elephant folio – Helen’s favorite book – stood against the left-hand wall. He entered the library, shut the sliding doors, and walked over to the armoire. After staring at it for some time, he slid open the bottom drawer that held the two massive books of the folio. He carried each book to the refectory table in the middle of the room and laid them carefully side by side. Then he went back to the armoire, took the drawer all the way out, and turned it over.

Nothing.

Pendergast allowed himself the faintest of smiles. There were only two logical hiding places within the armoire. The first had been empty. That meant the birth certificate would definitely be hidden in the other.

He reached inside the empty space where the drawer had been and felt around, running his hand along the bottom of the shelf above, his fingers brushing against the wood in the very back of the deep armoire.

Again, nothing.

Pendergast jerked back from the armoire as if he had been burned. He stood up, staring at it. One hand rose to his lips, the tips of his fingers trembling slightly. Then – after a long moment – he turned away and glanced around the library with an unreadable expression.

Maurice was a habitual early riser. It was always his practice to be out of bed no later than six, tidying up, inspecting the grounds, preparing breakfast. But this morning he stayed in bed until well after eight.

He had hardly slept a wink. Maurice had heard, as he lay in bed, Pendergast making muffled sounds all night: traipsing up and down the stairs, moving things about, dropping things on the floor, shuffling items from one spot to another. He had listened, with mounting concern, while the bumping, scraping, thumping, dragging, and slamming had gone on and on, from attic to parlor to morning room to back bedrooms to basement, hour after hour. And now, although the sun was fully up and morning well under way, Maurice was almost afraid to leave his room and face the house. The mansion must be in a dreadful state of disarray.

Nevertheless, it could not be put off forever. And so, with a sigh, he pushed back the bedcovers and pulled himself up to a sitting position.

He rose and went softly to the door. The house was intensely quiet. He put his hand on the knob, turned. The door creaked open. Gingerly – with mounting trepidation – he leaned his head out past the door frame.

The hallway was spotless.

Quietly, Maurice padded from one room to the next. Everything was in its place; Penumbra was in perfect order. And Pendergast was nowhere to be found.

CHAPTER 44

Thirty-five thousand feet over West Virginia

ANOTHER TOMATO JUICE, SIR?”

“No, thank you. There will be nothing else.”

“Very good.” And the cabin steward continued making her way down the plane’s central aisle.

In the first-class compartment, Pendergast examined the yellowing document he had – after hours of exhaustive and exhausting search – finally retrieved from the queerest place: rolled up inside an old rifle barrel, proving once again how little he really knew his wife. His eye traveled once again down the document.

República Federativa do Brasil

Registro Civil Das Pessoas Naturais

Certidão de Nascimento

Nome

Helen von Fuchs Esterházy

Local de Nacimento:Nova Godói, RIO GRANDE do SUL

Filiação Pai:András Ferenc Esterházy

Filiação Mãi:Leni Faust Schmid

Helen had been born in Brazil – in a place called Nova Godói. Nova Godói– Nova G.He recalled the name from the burnt scrap of paper he and Laura Hayward had come across in the ruins of the Longitude pharmacology laboratory.

Mime had said Helen’s native language was Portuguese. Now it made sense.

Brazil. Pendergast thought for a moment. Helen had spent almost five months in Brazil before they were married, on a mission with Doctors With Wings. Or at least that was what she had said at the time. As he’d learned the hard way, no assumption about Helen was safe.

He glanced again at the birth certificate. At the very bottom was a box labeled OBSERVAÇÕES/A VERBAÇÕES – observations/annotations. He looked at it closely, and then removed a small magnifying glass from his pocket to examine it further.

Whatever had been in this box had not merely been blacked out: the paper itself had been excised and painstakingly replaced with an unmarked piece of paper with the same engraved background pattern, microscopically stitched together with the utmost craft. It was an exceedingly professional piece of work.

He finally accepted, at that moment, that he truly had not known his beloved wife. Like so many other fallible human beings, he had been blinded by love. He had not even begun to crack the ultimate mystery of her identity.

With care bordering on reverence, he refolded the birth certificate and placed it deep in a suit pocket.

CHAPTER 45

New York City

DR. JOHN FELDER SLOWLY CLIMBED THE STAIRS of the Forty-Second Street branch of the New York Public Library. It was late afternoon, and the broad steps were busy with students and camera-wielding tourists. Felder ignored them, passing between the marble lions that guarded the Beaux-Arts façade and pushing his way into the echoing entrance hall.

For years, Felder had used this main branch of the library as a kind of retreat. He loved the way it mixed a sense of elegance and wealth with scholarly research. He’d grown up bookish and poor, the son of a dry-goods salesman and a public-school teacher, and this had always been his haven away from the commotion of Jewel Avenue. Even now, with all the research materials available to him at the Department of Health, he nevertheless found himself returning to the library again and again. Just entering its book-perfumed confines was a comforting act, leaving the squalid world behind for a better place.

Except for today. Today felt different, somehow.

He climbed the two flights of stairs to the Main Reading Room and made the long walk past dozens of long oaken tables to a far corner. Setting his case down on the scarred wooden surface, he pulled a nearby keyboard to him, then paused.

It had been half a year, roughly, since he’d first become involved with the case of Constance Greene. Originally it had been routine: another court-appointed interview with a criminal psychiatric patient. But it had quickly become more than that. She had been like no other patient he’d encountered. He’d found himself mystified, perplexed, intrigued – and aroused.

Aroused. Yes, that too. He’d finally come to admit it to himself. But it wasn’t just her beauty – it was also her strange otherworldliness. There was something unique about Constance Greene, something that went beyond her evident madness. And it was this something that drove Felder on, that pushed him to understand her. In a way he did not quite understand, Felder felt a deep-seated need to help her, to cureher. This need was only sharpened by her apparent lack of interest in receiving help.

And it was into this strange tinderbox of emotion that Dr. Ernest Poole had just intruded. Felder was aware his feelings about Poole were mixed. He felt a certain proprietary interest in Constance, and the idea that another psychiatrist had previously studied her was oddly annoying. Yet Poole’s own experience with Constance – quite unlike his own, apparently – promised perhaps the best chance yet of penetrating her mysteries. The fact that Poole’s clinical evaluations were so different was both perplexing and encouraging. It could offer a uniquely three-dimensional vantage onto what would be – he felt increasingly certain – the case study of his career.

He put his fingers on the keyboard and paused again. I was indeed born on Water Street in the ’70s – the 1870s.Funny: Constance’s intensity of belief, coupled with her photographic, as-yet-unexplained knowledge of the old neighborhood, almost had him believing she was, in fact, a hundred and forty years old. But Poole’s talk of her lacunar amnesia, her dissociative fugue, had brought him back to reality. Still, he felt he owed Constance enough benefit of doubt to undertake one final search.

Typing quickly, he brought up the library’s database of periodicals. He would make one last search, this time of the nineteenseventies and later – the time frame during which Constance could reasonably be expected to have been born.

He moved the cursor down to the “search parameters” field, then paused, consulting his notes. When my parents and sister died, I was orphaned and homeless. Mr. Pendergast’s house at Eight Ninety-one Riverside Drive was then owned by a man named Leng. Eventually it became vacant. I lived there.

He would search for three items: Greene, Water Street, and Leng. But he knew from past experience he’d better keep the terms of the search vague – scanned newspapers were notorious for typos. So he’d create a regular expression, using a logical AND query.

Typing once again, he entered the SQL-like search conditions:

SELECT WHERE (match) = = ‘Green*’ && ‘Wat* St*’ && ‘Leng*’

Almost immediately, he got a response. There was a single hit: a three-year-old article in The New York Timesof all places. Another quick tapping of keys brought it to the screen. He began reading – then caught his breath in disbelief.

Newly-Discovered Letter Sheds Light on 19th-Century Killings

By WILLIAM SMITHBACK JR.

NEW YORK – October 8. A letter has been found in the archives of the New York Museum of Natural History that may help explain the grisly charnel discovered in lower Manhattan early last week.

In that discovery, workmen constructing a residential tower at the corner of Henry and Catherine Streets unearthed a basement tunnel containing the remains of thirty-six young men and women. Preliminary forensic analysis showed that the victims had been dissected, or perhaps autopsied, and subsequently dismembered. Preliminary dating of the site by an archaeologist, Nora Kelly, of the New York Museum of Natural History, indicated that the killings had occurred between 1872 and 1881, when the corner was occupied by a three-story building housing a private museum known as “J. C. Shottum’s Cabinet of Natural Productions and Curiosities.” The cabinet burned in 1881, and Shottum died in the fire.

In subsequent research, Dr. Kelly discovered the letter, which was written by J. C. Shottum himself. Written shortly before Shottum’s death, it describes his uncovering of the medical experiments of his lodger, a taxonomist and chemist by the name of Enoch Leng. In the letter, Shottum alleged that Leng was conducting surgical experiments on human subjects, in an attempt to prolong his own life.

The human remains were removed to the Medical Examiner’s office and have been unavailable for examination. The basement tunnel was subsequently destroyed by Moegen-Fairhaven, Inc., the developer of the tower, during normal construction activities.

One article of clothing was preserved from the site, a dress, which was brought to the Museum for examination by Dr. Kelly. Sewn into the dress, Dr. Kelly found a piece of paper, possibly a note of self-identification, written by a young woman who apparently believed she had only a short time to live: “I am Mary Greene, agt [sic] 19 years, No. 16 Watter [sic] Street.” Tests indicated the note had been written in human blood.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken an interest in the case. Special Agent Pendergast, from the New Orleans office, has been observed on the scene. Neither the New York nor the New Orleans FBI offices would comment.

No. 16 Watter Street. Mary Greene had misspelled the street name – that was why he’d missed it before.

Felder read it once, then again, and then a third time. Then he sat back very slowly, gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that his knuckles hurt.