Pend00 - Extraction

by Lincoln Child

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  Extraction

  Three people occupied the large, dimly lit library within the mansion that stood alone and aloof at 891 Riverside Drive, New York City. Two of them sat in armchairs before a crackling fire. One, Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast, was paging listlessly through a catalog of Bordeaux wine futures. Across from him, his ward Constance was absorbed in a treatise titled Medieval Trephination: Tools and Techniques.

  The third occupant of the room was not seated, but instead paced irritably up and down. He was a strange, comical figure: small of stature, dressed in a swallowtail coat, with all manner of odd charms and relics dangling from his neck on silver chains, which clanked and jingled with his movements. As he walked, he supported himself upon a cudgel-like cane whose handle was carved into the semblance of a grinning skull. Now and then his stomach could be heard to growl in empty complaint. This was Monsieur Bertin, Pendergast’s old childhood tutor in natural history, zoology, and more outré subjects. He was currently in New York City, visiting his old protégé.

  “This is outrageous!” he called across the library. “Fou, très fou! Why, in New Orleans I would have finished dinner hours ago. Look—it’s practically midnight!”

  “It’s not yet half past eight, maître,” Pendergast said with a faint smile.

  A form appeared in the doorway of the library, and Pendergast glanced over. “Yes, Mrs. Trask?”

  “It’s Cook,” the housekeeper replied. “She’s asked me to tell you that dinner will be half an hour late.”

  Bertin gave an expostulation of disgust.

  “I’m afraid she overboiled the pasta,” Mrs. Trask went on, “and will have to make another batch.”

  “Tell her not to concern herself about it,” Pendergast replied. “We’re in no rush.”

  Mrs. Trask nodded, turned, and vanished from sight.

  “No rush!” Bertin said. “Speak for yourself. Here I am, a guest in your house—starved like a prisoner in the Bastille. After tonight, my digestion will never be the same.”

  “Believe me, maître, it will be worth the wait. Tagliatelle al tartufo bianco is a very simple dish, and yet nevertheless of great refinement.” Pendergast paused, as if already tasting, in his mind, the meal to come. “It is made of the finest fresh white truffles, finely shaved; butter; and tagliatelle pasta. Cook is using truffles from Alba, of course, in the Piedmont. They are the finest in the world—by weight they cost almost as much as gold.”

  “Gah!” Bertin said. “I will never understand this Yankee fascination for undercooked pasta.”

  Now Constance spoke for the first time. “It’s no Yankee fascination. The Italians themselves prefer their pasta firm: al dente—to the tooth.”

  This explanation seemed only to irritate Bertin. “Well, I like my spaghetti soft—just like my rice and my grits. So that makes me a philistine, oui? Al dente—bah!” He turned to Constance. “Ask your guardian about ‘dents.’ Now, there’s a story to pass the time while one is dying of hunger.”

  He left in a huff, the sound of his cane gradually diminishing as it clacked across the floor of the reception room beyond.

  For a moment the library went quiet. Constance glanced over at Pendergast. His eyes were lingering on the doorway through which Bertin had just exited. Then he turned to Constance. “Bertin is certainly an edacious fellow. Pay no attention. By the time we reach the main course, his good cheer will have returned, I assure you.”

  “What did he mean by a story about ‘dents’?” Constance asked.

  Pendergast hesitated. “You wouldn’t care to hear it. I’m sure. It isn’t pleasant. And… it involves my brother.”

  A brief, unreadable look passed over Constance’s face. “That only whets my interest more.”

  For a long time, Pendergast did not speak. His gaze went very far away. Constance said nothing, waiting patiently. Finally, with a deep breath, Pendergast began.

  “You know the children’s fable of the tooth fairy?”

  “Of course. When I was a child, my parents would slip a penny under my pillow in exchange for a tooth—when they had any money, that is.”

  “Quite. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, where I spent much of my childhood, we had that same quaint legend. Except we also had an additional, or perhaps parallel, legend to go with it.”

  “Parallel?”

  “A few of the young children in our neighborhood believed the usual fantasy, as you’ve just described it. But the majority believed something quite different—that the tooth fairy wasn’t an ephemeral being who visited at night. No, the tooth fairy of the French Quarter lived nearby, just down the street from our house in fact, and he was none other than a person whom we all called Old Dufour.”

  “Dufour… A French name, ‘of the oven.’ I believe that would be the equivalent of Baker in English.”

  “His full name was Maurus Dufour, and he was a recluse of ancient and uncertain age who lived in a decaying mansion a few blocks away, on Montegut Street. He probably hadn’t been out of his house in fifty years. I have no idea how he managed to eat. As children, we sometimes saw his hunched shadow at night, moving against the dimly lit windows of his domicile. Naturally, the neighborhood children told all sorts of wild and frightening stories about him: that he was an ax murderer, that he ate human flesh, that he tortured small animals. Sometimes the older neighborhood delinquents would go there at night and throw a rock or two through his windows before running away—but that was the extent of even their bravery. Nobody would have ever summoned the courage to, say, ring the doorbell.” Pendergast paused. “It was one of those old mansions built in the Creole style, but with a mansard roof and oriel windows. It was a fright, with most of the windows broken, the roof slates loose, the porch about to fall off, and the front garden overgrown with dying palmettos.”

  Constance leaned forward, a look of growing interest in her face.

  “How this particular tooth fairy legend got its start, nobody knew. All I can tell you is that it had been in place as long as any of us children could remember. And since Dufour was a recluse, and an object of terror, nobody could ask him what he might know about its origins—or what he thought of such an absurd notion. You know how it is, Constance, that these legends can sometimes sprout up among children and take on a life of their own, passed down from one generation to the next. And this is especially true in a place like the French Quarter, which—despite being at the center of a large city—was still highly insular and provincial. French remained the language of the old families, and many people didn’t even consider themselves American. In many ways it was cut off from the outside world, where Creole superstitions and strange beliefs—many of them very old—were allowed to flourish and spread… and suppurate.” Pendergast gestured toward the library’s empty doorway. “Take our famished friend. He is a perfect product of that insularity. You see the odd things he wears around his neck? Those are not eccentric decorations; they are amulets, gris-gris and charms to ward off evil, attract money, and, above all, help him maintain sexual potency in his declining years.”

  Constance made a
slight face of disgust.

  “He believes in, and practices, obeah, rootwork, and voodoo.”

  “How peculiar.”

  “Not for him, growing up in the environment he did. He was as respected as a medical doctor would be in any other community.”

  “Go on with the story.”

  “As I said, most of the young children believed that Old Dufour was the tooth fairy. Here is how it worked: when you lost a tooth, you had to wait for the next full moon. Then, just before bedtime, you would sneak over to the Dufour mansion and leave the tooth in a particular place on the front porch.”

  “What kind of place?” Constance asked.

  “It was a raised wooden box or a sort of pedestal, elaborately carved, with a hole in the top, inside of which had been affixed a small copper vessel. I would guess the original purpose had been as some sort of large ashtray or perhaps a small spittoon or cuspidor. It was set on the edge of the porch, right by the sagging front steps. You would have to sneak up to the porch without making a sound, drop the tooth in there, and then run for your life.”

  “And the reward?” Constance asked. “What did you get in return?”

  “Nothing. No reward.”

  “Then why do it? Wouldn’t it be better to put it under your pillow and collect some money?”

  “Oh, no. You see, you had to give it to Old Dufour. Because—” and here Pendergast lowered his voice a bit—“if you didn’t give the fairy your tooth, he would come to your house in the middle of the night, and… take it.”

  “Take what?”

  “His due.”

  Constance gave a light laugh. “What a gruesome legend. I wonder if Monsieur Dufour was even aware this was going on.”

  “He was well aware. As you shall hear.”

  “So the children were, in essence, warding off the evil Dufour by leaving their teeth?”

  “Precisely. The knowledge that the tooth fairy wouldn’t be paying you a dreadful visit in the middle of the night far surpassed the value of a dime, or quarter, or whatever you might receive if you’d placed that tooth under your pillow.” Pendergast paused again, recollecting. “At the time my story takes place, I had just turned nine. Naturally I thought the legend of the tooth fairy—Dufour or otherwise—to be pure rubbish. I looked on those who believed with disdain, even contempt. It was late August, the tail end of a long and hot summer. My mother was in the hospital, sick with malaria; my father was away in Charleston on business. A rather distant uncle of ours, a descendant of Erasmus Pendergast, had come to stay in our house on Dauphine Street, looking after us. His name was Everett Judgment Pendergast—Uncle Everett. He was a brandy-and-soda sort of fellow who kept to his books and pretty much left us to our own devices. As you might imagine, we liked that just fine.”

  Pendergast shifted, threw one knee over the other. “My brother Diogenes had just turned six. This was before various, shall we say, aberrant interests had taken possession of him. He was still an impressionable child and, perhaps to his misfortune, highly precocious. He had somehow gotten into our great-grandfather’s locked library cabinet, and he’d been reading a lot of old books he shouldn’t have—tomes on demonology, witchcraft, the Inquisition, deviant practices of all imaginable sorts, alchemy—books that I believe had a deleterious effect on him in later life. He also had a habit of listening very quietly and carefully to the talk of the house servants. He was, even at six, a secretive, devious little boy.

  “On the night in question—it was August twenty-fifth—I saw Diogenes hovering suspiciously around the back door, clutching something in one hand. I asked him what he was doing. He refused to say, so I seized his hand and tried to pry it open. We tussled. He was only six and lost the struggle. Inside the palm of his hand I found a grubby little baby tooth, with dried blood on it, obviously recently shed. I forced the story out of him. He had lost it two days before, and had been waiting for a full moon. That night, he was planning to sneak over to Montegut Street with his tooth, and place it in the copper pot on Old Dufour’s porch. He was terrified that if he didn’t, Dufour would come looking for him at night. Because Old Dufour had to have his due.”

  Pendergast paused. A serious, even pained look had gathered on his pale face.

  “I was a terrible older brother to Diogenes. I scoffed at his fear. I despised it. If one had to believe in a tooth fairy, I felt, one should at least believe in the traditional story, not some ridiculous tale whispered by house servants about a pathetic old man on the next block. It angered me that my own brother, a Pendergast, would fall victim to such a cretinous idea. I would not allow it.

  “So I argued with him. I told him that he would not bring the tooth to Dufour’s place, but instead do what normal children his age did and leave it under his pillow, even if I had to force him to do so. I disparaged the legend, mocked it, and said no brother of mine should fall for such bunkum.

  “But Diogenes was headstrong, and he snatched back the tooth while I was engaged in my heated argument. We wrestled for it again, but this time he broke away from me and ran out the back door… into the darkness of the night.

  “I ran after him but could not find him—Diogenes was already remarkably adept at concealment. I roamed about the neighborhood, becoming angrier and angrier. Finally, since I couldn’t determine his whereabouts, I did the next best thing. I went down to Montegut Street, to the Dufour Mansion, and hid myself among the riot of half-dead palmetto trees that grew in the abandoned front garden before the porch, waiting for my brother to arrive.

  “It was, I recall, an unsettled night. As I waited, the wind picked up, and I could hear faint rumbles of thunder from far away. There was a single dim light on in the house, high up in a broken oriel window, which cast no illumination. Several of the closest streetlamps were broken. The full moon was on the far side of the mansion, leaving the porch a pool of darkness. There was no chance of Diogenes detecting my presence. And so there I waited. The old Dufour place seemed to be waiting, too. Despite my scorn at my brother’s foolishness, as the minutes ticked by I nevertheless grew distinctly uneasy, hiding there in the shadow of that decaying pile. There was a feeling of something, some presence, that gathered about the mansion like a sickly miasma. On top of that, the heat and humidity in that forest of dying palmettos were unbearable, and a smell seemed to seep from the house: a foul odor that reminded me of the dead cat I had found in a dark corner of our garden a few months earlier.

  “At half past ten Diogenes finally appeared. He crept silently from the shadows on the far side of the house, come to leave his tooth. He looked furtively in both directions. I could see his pale, frightened face in the darkness. Then he glanced directly at the stand of palmetto trees in which I’d hidden myself. For a second I feared that my presence had been betrayed. But no: Diogenes skulked up to the old mansion; looked around again; and with infinite caution crept up the steps and dropped the tooth into the old cuspidor at the top. I heard the faint rattle that it made as it rolled around the little copper bowl. Then he turned, slipped down the steps, and made his way along the street, his little footsteps just barely audible. Silence returned almost immediately. Looking back upon it today, I find myself amazed that one so young could move with such deliberate stealth. In later life he would improve on that talent immeasurably.

  “I waited—ten minutes, then fifteen. To be honest, I was rather nervous about going up those steps. And I worried that Diogenes, who was a naturally suspicious creature, might have circled back and would be hiding nearby, watching to see if I was around. But all was silent as the grave, and eventually I screwed up my courage, rose from my hiding place, and crept through the palmettos toward the porch stairs. I well remember their dry rustle, and that smell of decay and rot, as I drew closer. I practically slithered up the steps. There was the wooden stand, once elaborately carved but now fearfully decayed, the paint mostly gone, the wood weathered and split. At the top was a dark, round hole, above which the lip of the copper vessel protruded. Holding
my breath, I reached my hand down the throat of the pot and felt about the bottom, looking for the tooth, grasped it, and pulled it out. I was surprised to encounter no other teeth in the vessel but that one. As I stared at it in the dim light—one small central incisor, white, with a faint streak of crimson on the root, nestled in my palm—I could tell that it was indeed Diogenes’s. It gave me a start to think that Dufour might actually be aware of his ‘status’ and had been collecting the teeth deposited there on a regular basis. But then I dismissed that as fantasy. Clearly the maid or someone else in residence had recently cleaned the pot; that was the obvious explanation. For a moment I looked up at the old mansion. All was quiet, all was calm. There was no sign of life beyond the lambent glow in the upper window.

  “I darted down the walk and into Montegut Street and paused at the corner of Burgundy, thinking.”

  Pendergast hesitated, and a new expression—dismay? Self-reproach?—moved across his face.

  “As I said, I intended to place the tooth under his pillow while he slept, then tell my uncle to replace it with a coin. But I was still angry at my brother. And I was afraid Diogenes would wake up when I slid the tooth under the pillow, or might otherwise learn of the deception. In that case he would probably take the tooth from under the pillow and bring it back to the old man’s porch, frustrating my plan to teach him a lesson. This brought on another surge of annoyance. How could my brother believe such drivel? And why was I wasting my time on it, spending hours crouched in the darkness? I’d show him how stupid he’d been. And so—in a childish fit of petulance—I flung the tooth down a storm drain at the corner of Montegut and Burgundy.

  “As I did so, I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a flicker of light from the broken oriel window high up in the mansion, as if the broken glass had briefly refracted the light of a lantern. I also saw—or thought I saw—a movement there, a shadow suddenly in motion, flitting away. But as I stared harder, I could see nothing further; no shadow, no movement, just the same dull glow. It had been my fancy, nothing more. Nobody had seen me either take the tooth or throw it away. I was letting my imagination run wild.