Brimstone

by Douglas Preston

  With another screech, the cockatoo hopped off his shoulder onto the table, waddled over to the stand, climbed it with metal claws, and resumed its place, casting its beady LED eyes on Pendergast.

  And now at last, the count turned with a smile and bow, offering Pendergast his hand. "I am so sorry to keep you waiting. My friend—as you see—requires his exercise."

  "Most interesting," said Pendergast dryly.

  "No doubt it is! It is true, I cut a ridiculous figure with my pets."

  "Pets?"

  "Yes. And you see how they love me! My cockatoo and—" He inclined his suety head toward the other side of the room, where what looked like a pack of mice were disporting themselves within an elaborate wire pagoda with various clicks and whirs and digital squeaks. "And my dear little white mice! But, of course, of all my pretties, Bucephalus here is my pride and joy." And Fosco turned toward the cockatoo. "Are you not, my pretty?"

  The bird's only response was to bury its massive black bill within a fluff of fake beak feathers, as if rendered timid by the compliment.

  "You must forgive Bucephalus!" Fosco said, tut-tutting. "He is not partial to strangers. He is slow to make friends and screams when displeased—ah, my friend, such screams as you would not believe! I have been forced to take the two apartments adjoining this and keep them unoccupied, at great personal expense. Mere walls, you see, are no defense against the lungs of this magnificent creature!"

  The robotic cockatoo gave no acknowledgment of this panegyric, continuing to eye Pendergast motionlessly.

  "But they are all quite fond of opera. As Congreve said, music hath charms et cetera. Perhaps you heard my poor singing. Did you recognize the piece?"

  Pendergast nodded. "Pollione's aria from Norma, 'Abbandonarmi così potresti.' "

  "Ah! Then you liked it."

  "I said I recognized it. Tell me, Count, did you build these robots yourself?"

  "Yes. I am a lover of animals and gadgets. Would you like to see my canaries? The real ones, I mean: I rarely distinguish between my own children and those of nature."

  "Thank you, no."

  "I should have been born an American, a Thomas Edison, where my inventiveness would have been encouraged. But instead I was born into the stifling, decaying Florentine aristocracy, where skills such as mine are useless. Where I come from, counts are supposed to keep both feet firmly in the eighteenth century, if not earlier."

  Pendergast stirred. "May I trouble you with some questions, Count Fosco?"

  The count waved his hand. "Let us do away with this 'Count' business. We are in America, and here I am Isidor. May I call you Aloysius?"

  There was a short silence before Pendergast spoke again, voice cool. "If it's all the same to you, Count, I would prefer to keep this interview on a formal level."

  "As you like. I see the good Pinketts supplied you with refreshment. He's a treasure, don't you think? The English lorded it over the Italians for so many centuries that it gives me pleasure to have at least one Englishman under my thumb. You're not English, are you?"

  "No."

  "Well then, we can speak freely of the English. Bah! Imagine, the only composer of note they ever produced was a man named Byrd." The count settled himself into a wing chair opposite, and as he did so, Pendergast noted again how lightly and easily the enormous man seemed to move, how delicately he seated himself.

  "My first question, Count Fosco, involves the dinner party. When did you arrive?"

  The count placed his white hands together reverently, as if about to pray, and sighed. "Grove wanted us at seven. And on a Monday night, too—very unlike him. We came straggling in, fashionably late, between seven-thirty and eight. I was the first to arrive."

  "What was Grove's mental state?"

  "Very poor, I should say. As I told you, he seemed nervous, high-strung. No so much that he couldn't entertain. He had a cook, but he prepared the main dishes himself. He was quite a good chef. He prepared an exquisite sole, lightly grilled over the fire, with lemon. Nothing more, nothing less. Perfection. Then he followed with—"

  "I already have the menu, thank you. Did he give any indication why he was nervous?"

  "No. In fact, he seemed to be at great pains to hide it. His eyes darted everywhere. He locked the door after each guest was let in. He hardly drank, which was quite out of character. He was a man who normally liked a good claret, and even on this occasion, he served some excellent wines, starting with Tocai from Friuli and then a '90 Petrus, truly magnificent."

  Château Petrus 1990, considered the best since the fabled '61, was one of Pendergast's own most prized wines; he had a dozen bottles of the $2,000 Pomerol laid down in his cellar in the Dakota. He chose not to mention this fact.

  The count continued his description with great good humor and volubility. "Grove also opened, quite spontaneously, a wine from the Castello di Verrazzano, their so-called bottiglia particolare, the one with the silk label. Exceptional."

  "Did you know the other guests?"

  The count smiled. "Lady Milbanke I know quite well. Vilnius I'd met a few times. Jonathan Frederick I knew only from his writings."

  "What did you talk about at dinner?"

  The smile widened. "It was most peculiar."

  "Yes?"

  "The first part of the dinner was taken up with a conversation about the Georges de la Tour painting you saw in my sitting room. What do you think of it, Agent Pendergast?"

  "Shall we stay on the subject, Count Fosco?"

  "This is the subject. Bear with me. Do you think it's a de la Tour?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "The brushwork on the lace is very characteristic, and the glow of the candle through the fingers is handled in pure de la Tour fashion."

  The count looked at Pendergast curiously, a faint gleam of something indefinable in his eyes. After a long silence, he said very quietly and seriously, "You surprise me very much, Pendergast. I am truly impressed." The jocular, familiar note had vanished from his voice. He paused, then continued. "Twenty years ago I found myself in a little financial embarrassment. I put that very painting up for sale at Sotheby's. The day before the auction, Grove wrote a little piece in the Times calling it one of the Delobre fakes, done around the turn of the century. It was pulled from the auction, and despite my having the provenance in hand, I lost fifteen million dollars."

  Pendergast considered this. "And that's what you talked about? His branding your de la Tour a forgery?"

  "Yes, in the beginning. Then the conversation moved to Vilnius and his paintings. Grove reminded us of Vilnius's first big show, in SoHo in the early eighties. At the time, Grove wrote a legendarily scathing review. Suffice to say, Vilnius's career never recovered."

  "An odd topic of conversation."

  "Indeed. And then Grove brought up the subject of Lady Milbanke and the affair he'd had with her some years back."

  "I imagine this was quite a lively dinner party."

  "I have rarely seen its equal."

  "And how did Lady Milbanke react?"

  "How would you expect a lady to react? The affair broke up her marriage. And then Grove treated her abominably, left her for a boy."

  "It sounds as if each of you had reason to be mortal enemies of Grove."

  Fosco sighed. "We were. We all hated him, including Frederick. I don't know the man at all, but I understand that some years ago, when he was editor of Art and Style, he had the temerity to write something nasty about Grove. Grove had friends in high places, and the next thing Frederick knew he'd been fired. The poor fellow couldn't find a job for years."

  "When did the dinner party break up?"

  "After midnight."

  "Who left first?"

  "I was the first to stand and announce my departure. I have always required a great deal of sleep. The others rose at the same time. Grove was most reluctant to see us go. He kept pressing after-dinner drinks on us, coffee. He was most anxious that we stay."

  "Do you know w
hy?"

  "He seemed frightened of being alone."

  "Do you recall his precise words?"

  "To a certain extent." Fosco broke out into a high-pitched, upper-class drawl that was startling in its realism. "My friends! You're not going already? Why, it's just midnight! Come, let's toast our reconciliation and bid good riddance to my years of misguided pride. I have an excellent port that you must try, Fosco—and he plucked my sleeve—a Graham's Tawny, 1972 vintage." Fosco gave a sniff. "I was almost tempted to stay when I heard that."

  "Did you all leave together?"

  "More or less. We said our good-byes and straggled out across the lawn."

  "And that was when? I'd like to know as precisely as possible, if you please."

  "Twelve twenty-five." He looked at Pendergast for a moment and then said, "Mr. Pendergast, forgive me if I observe that, among all these questions, you haven't asked the most important one of all."

  "And what question would that be, Count Fosco?"

  "Why did Jeremy Grove ask us, his four mortal enemies, to be with him on the final night of his life?"

  For a long time, Pendergast did not answer. He was carefully considering both the question and the man who had just posed it. Finally he said simply, "A good question. Consider it posed."

  "It was the very question Grove himself asked when he gathered us around his table at the beginning of the dinner party. He repeated what his invitation said: that he invited us to his house that night because we were the four people he had most wronged. He wished to make amends."

  "Do you have a copy of the invitation?"

  With a smile, Fosco removed it from his shirt pocket and handed it over—a short, handwritten note.

  "And he'd already begun to make amends. As with his reappraisal of Vilnius's work."

  "A splendid review, don't you think? I understand Vilnius has just landed Gallery 10 to show his work, and they've doubled his prices."

  "And Lady Milbanke? Jonathan Frederick? How did he make amends to them?"

  "While Grove couldn't put Lady Milbanke's marriage back together, he did give her something in compensation. He passed her an exquisite emerald necklace across the table, more than enough to replace that dried-up old husk of a baron she lost. Forty carats of flawless Sri Lankan emeralds, worth a million dollars if a penny. She practically swooned. And Frederick? He was a long shot for the position of president of the Edsel Foundation, but Grove arranged the job for him."

  "Extraordinary. And what did he do for you?"

  "Surely you already know the answer to that."

  Pendergast nodded. "The article he was writing for Burlington Magazine. 'A Reappraisal of Georges de la Tour’s The Education of the Virgin.' "

  "Precisely. Proclaiming himself in error, making appropriately abject apologies, beating his breast and affirming the glorious authenticity of the painting. He read the article aloud to us over the dinner table."

  "It remained beside his computer. Unsigned and unmailed."

  "Only too true, Mr. Pendergast. Of the four of us, I was the only one cheated by his death." He spread his hands. "If the murderer had waited a day, I would be forty million richer."

  "Forty million? I thought it had been put up for sale at fifteen."

  "That was Sotheby's estimate twenty years ago. That painting would go for at least forty million today. But with Grove on record that it's one of the Delobre fakes…" Fosco shrugged. "An unsigned article beside a dead man's computer means nothing. There is one good thing: I'll have the lovely painting to look at for the rest of my life. I know it's real, and you know it's real, even if no one else does."

  "Yes," Pendergast said. "Ultimately that's all that matters."

  "Well put."

  "And the Vermeer that hangs beside it?"

  "Real."

  "Indeed?"

  "It has been dated to 1671, between the period of Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid and The Allegory of Faith"

  "Where did it come from?"

  "It's been in my family for several hundred years. The counts of Fosco never felt the need to trumpet their possessions."

  "I'm truly astonished."

  The count smiled, bowed. "Do you have time to see the rest of my collection?"

  Pendergast hesitated for only a second. "As a matter of fact, I do."

  The count rose and went to the door. Just before they exited, he turned to the mechanical cockatoo, still on his perch.

  "Keep an eye on the place, Bucephalus, my pretty."

  The bird gave a digitized squawk in reply.

  { 14 }

  D'Agosta moved fast through the trees, seeking the darkest area of the park—a dense growth of trees and shrubs along an embankment leading down to the West Side Highway. He paused just long enough to glance back. Two figures were running after him, guns gleaming in their fists.

  Staying low, weaving between the trees, D'Agosta unsnapped the holster of his Glock. He withdrew the weapon, racked the slide. It was the chosen weapon of most modern police departments, and D'Agosta hadn't been given a choice about carrying it, on duty or off. It didn't have the punch of his personal .45, but it was light and reliable, and best of all, it held fifteen rounds. He'd left his extra clip in his desk drawer that morning—who needed an extra clip for a day of interviews?

  The men were already into the woods, moving fast. D'Agosta ran on, heedless of the noise he was making—the brush wasn't heavy enough to conceal him for more than a minute or two, at best. He headed south, twigs crackling underfoot. If he could lose them, even temporarily, maybe he could get back onto Riverside Drive and head toward Broadway. They wouldn't dare follow onto such a busy street. He quickly checked off his options. The nearest precinct house was located at 95th between Broadway and Amsterdam—that's where he'd head for.

  He could hear the men running behind him. One shouted out to the other, and a fainter response came back. D'Agosta immediately understood what had happened: they had divided and were still pursuing, one on either side of the narrow strip of park.

  Shit.

  Keeping low, he ran through the woods, gun in hand. No time to stop and strategize; no time to use his radio; no time for anything but a flat-out run. The faint lights of Riverside Drive flickered through the trees on his left; to his right lay the long, brush-filled slope running steeply down toward the West Side Highway. He could hear the droning rush of cars far below him. He briefly considered running down the embankment and trying to get out on the highway, but it would be easy to get hung up in the nasty bracken that clogged the slope.

  If that happened, he'd be a sitting duck, fired on from above.

  The stretch of woods ended abruptly, and he burst out into a moonlit scene of parallel walkways overlooking the river, gardens and trees between them. It was exposed, but he had no choice but to keep moving.

  Who the fuck's chasing me? Muggers? Cop haters? It didn't make sense. He was no longer just a target of opportunity. These killers were determined. They had followed him uptown. They were after him for a reason.

  He ran past the first formal garden, behind rows of iron benches, keeping low. Suddenly he saw something off to his left: a red spot of light chasing him, dancing around like an agitated firefly.

  Laser sight.

  He threw himself to the right as the shot came. It hit the metal bench with a sickening ricochet and hummed off into the darkness. D'Agosta fell into the flower bed, rolled clumsily, and rose on his knees in firing position. He saw a dark shape moving fast against the dimness of the open grass and fired—once, twice—rolled to the side, rose to his feet, and took off running again, cursing himself for not having kept up with his shooting practice. But even missed shots had a good effect—making them careful, slowing them down. At least that was the theory. He passed the far side of the garden and ducked in among the trees.

  Another jiggling red dot. He threw himself to the asphalt as the shot came, rolled, tearing his knee open against the pavement, and was up again and running. The sh
ooters were using some big-caliber sidearms and knew what they were doing. His own shots hadn't slowed them down at all.

  These guys were professional assassins.

  He ran through a playground, desperately leaping first the teeter-totter, then the sandbox, and across a small square with a fountain, gasping with the effort. Jeez, he was out of shape, gone to seed. Long gone were the days in the police gym, keeping trim and fit.

  He cut across a small square with a fountain, jumped a stone parapet, and was back on the steep, woodsy embankment leading down to the highway. He crouched behind the stone wall, waiting. They would have to cross the open walkway. That's when he'd have a shot at them. He held the weapon tightly in a two-hand combat grip, steadied himself, tried to get control of his wild breathing. Don’t squeeze the trigger. When it goes off, it should almost be a surprise. Make every shot count.

  Now! The dark shapes emerged from the trees, moving fast. He fired: once, twice, thrice.

  The red lights were dancing around the branches over his head, and he screamed an obscenity as he forgot his own careful advice and fired again and again at the dim shapes. He could hear nothing over the bark of his firearm, but he could feel the slap of bullets hitting the stone right before his face. These bastards didn't miss a beat.

  He, on the other hand, had missed by a mile, and no wonder. He hadn't taken a turn at the range in three damn years, and his shooting was as old and stale as all those shooting awards that hung on his wall.

  He scrambled back from the stone wall, running along it in a low crouch, praying his back wasn't exposed. As he ran, he popped the clip from the gun, peering at it in the dim light. Empty. That left him only two shots in the chamber… thirteen rounds wasted.

  Suddenly he saw something come into view through the trees up ahead: the bridge over the 110th Street off-ramp. The whole thing was chain-linked like a cage. If he got caught in there, he'd be the proverbial fish in a barrel.

  But turning back—jumping back over the stone wall and crossing the open walkway—meant running right into the arms of his pursuers. And that would be suicide.