The Cabinet of Curiosities

by Douglas Preston

  The dissection mimics a description of a surgical procedure, discovered in an old document in the New York Museum. The document, found hidden in the archives, describes in detail a series of experiments conducted in the late nineteenth century by an Enoch Leng. These experiments were an attempt by Leng to prolong his own life span. On October 1, thirty-six alleged victims of Leng were uncovered during the excavation of a building foundation on Catherine Street. Nothing more is known about Leng, except that he was associated with the New York Museum of Natural History.

  “What we have here is a copycat killer,” said Police Commissioner Karl C. Rocker. “A very twisted individual read the article about Leng and is trying to duplicate his work.” He declined to comment further on any details of the investigation, except to say that more than fifty detectives had been assigned to the case, and that it was being given “the highest priority.”

  Smithback let out a howl of anguish. The tourist in Central Park was the murder assignment that, like a complete fool, he’d turned down. Instead, he had promised his editor Fairhaven’s head on a platter. Now, not only did he have nothing to show for his day of pounding the pavement, but he’d been scooped on the very story he himself had broken—and by none other than his old nemesis, Bryce Harriman.

  It was his own head that would be on a platter.

  SIX

  NORA TURNED OFF canal street onto Mott, moving slowly through the throngs of people. It was seven o’clock on a Friday evening, and Chinatown was packed. Sheets of densely printed Chinese newspapers lay strewn in the gutters. The stalls of the fish sellers were set up along the sidewalks, vast arrays of exotic-looking fish laid out on ice. In the windows, pressed duck and cooked squid hung on hooks. The buyers, primarily Chinese, pushed and shouted frantically, under the curious gaze of passing tourists.

  Ten Ren’s Tea and Ginseng Company was a few hundred feet down the block. She pushed through the door into a long, bright, orderly space. The air of the tea shop was perfumed with innumerable faint scents. At first she thought the shop was empty. But then, as she looked around once more, she noticed Pendergast at a rear table, nestled between display cases of ginseng and ginger. She could have sworn that the table had been empty just a moment before.

  “Are you a tea drinker?” he asked as she approached, motioning her to a seat.

  “Sometimes.” Her subway had stalled between stations for twenty minutes, and she’d had plenty of time to rehearse what she would say. She would get it over with quickly and get out.

  But Pendergast was clearly in no hurry. They sat in silence while he consulted a sheet filled with Chinese ideographs. Nora wondered if it was a list of tea offerings, but there seemed to be far too many items—surely there weren’t that many kinds of tea in the world.

  Pendergast turned to the shopkeeper—a small, vivacious woman—and began speaking rapidly.

  “Nin hao, lao bin liang. Li mama hao ma?”

  The woman shook her head. “Bu, ta hai shi lao yang zi, shen ti bu hao.”

  “Qing li Dai wo xiang ta wen an. Qing gei wo yi bei Wu Long cha hao ma?”

  The woman walked away, returning with a ceramic pot from which she poured a minuscule cup of tea. She placed the cup in front of Nora.

  “You speak Chinese?” Nora asked Pendergast.

  “A little Mandarin. I confess to speaking Cantonese somewhat more fluently.”

  Nora fell silent. Somehow, she was not surprised.

  “King’s Tea of Osmanthus Oolong,” said Pendergast, nodding toward her cup. “One of the finest in the world. From bushes grown on the sunny sides of the mountains, new shoots gathered only in the spring.”

  Nora picked up the cup. A delicate aroma rose to her nostrils. She took a sip, tasting a complex blend of green tea and other exquisitely delicate flavors.

  “Very nice,” she said, putting down the cup.

  “Indeed.” Pendergast glanced at her for a moment. Then he spoke again in Mandarin, and the woman filled up a bag, weighed it, and sealed it, scribbling a price on the plastic wrapping. She handed it to Nora.

  “For me?” Nora asked.

  Pendergast nodded.

  “I don’t want any gifts from you.”

  “Please take it. It’s excellent for the digestion. As well as being a superb antioxidant.”

  Nora took it irritably, then saw the price. “Wait a minute, this is two hundred dollars?”

  “It will last three or four months,” said Pendergast. “A small price when one considers—”

  “Look,” said Nora, setting down the bag. “Mr. Pendergast, I came here to tell you that I can’t work for you anymore. My career at the Museum is at stake. A bag of tea isn’t going to change my mind, even if it is two hundred bucks.”

  Pendergast listened attentively, his head slightly bowed.

  “They implied—and the implication was very clear—that I wasn’t to work with you anymore. I like what I do. I keep this up, I’ll lose my job. I already lost one job when the Lloyd Museum closed down. I can’t afford to lose another. I need this job.”

  Pendergast nodded.

  “Brisbane and Collopy gave me the money I need for my carbon dates. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me now. I can’t spare the time.”

  Pendergast waited, still listening.

  “What do you need me for, anyway? I’m an archaeologist, and there’s no longer any site to investigate. You’ve got a copy of the letter. You’re FBI. You must have dozens of specialists at your beck and call.”

  Pendergast remained silent as Nora took a sip of tea. The cup rattled loudly in the saucer when she replaced it.

  “So,” she said. “Now that’s settled.”

  Now Pendergast spoke. “Mary Greene lived a few blocks from here, down on Water Street. Number 16. The house is still there. It’s a five-minute walk.”

  Nora looked at him, eyebrows narrowing in surprise. It had never occurred to her how close they were to Mary Greene’s neighborhood. She recalled the note, written in blood. Mary Greene had known she was going to die. Her want had been simple: not to die in complete anonymity.

  Pendergast gently took her arm. “Come,” he said.

  She did not shrug him off. He spoke again to the shopkeeper, took the tea with a slight bow, and in a moment they were outside on the crowded street. They walked down Mott, crossing first Bayard, then Chatham Square, entering into a maze of dark narrow streets abutting the East River. The noise and bustle of Chinatown gave way to the silence of industrial buildings. The sun had set, leaving a glow in the sky that barely outlined the tops of the buildings. Reaching Catherine Street, they turned southeast. Nora glanced over curiously as they passed Henry and the site of Moegen-Fairhaven’s new residential tower. The excavation was much bigger now; massive foundations and stem walls rose out of the gloom, rebar popping like reeds from the freshly poured concrete. Nothing was left of the old coal tunnel.

  Another few minutes, and they were on Water Street. Old manufacturing buildings, warehouses, and decrepit tenements lined the street. Beyond, the East River moved sluggishly, dark purple in the moonlight. The Brooklyn Bridge loomed almost above them; and to its left, the Manhattan Bridge arced across the dark river, its span of brilliant lights reflected in the water below.

  Near Market Slip, Pendergast stopped in front of an old tenement. It was still inhabited: a single window glowed with yellow light. A metal door was set into the first-floor facade. Beside it was a dented intercom and a series of buttons.

  “Here it is,” said Pendergast. “Number sixteen.”

  They stood in the gathering darkness.

  Pendergast began to speak quietly in the gloom. “Mary Greene came from a working-class family. After her father’s upstate farm failed, he brought his family down here. He worked as a stevedore on the docks. But both he and Mary’s mother died in a minor cholera epidemic when the girl was fifteen. Bad water. She had a younger brother: Joseph, seven; and a younger sister: Constance, five.”

  Nora said
nothing.

  “Mary Greene tried to take in washing and sewing, but apparently it wasn’t enough to pay the rent. There was no other work, no way to earn money. They were evicted. Mary finally did what she had to do to support her younger siblings, whom she evidently loved very much. She became a prostitute.”

  “How awful,” Nora murmured.

  “That’s not the worst. She was arrested when she was sixteen. It was probably at that point her two younger siblings became street children. They called them guttersnipes in those days. There’s no more record of them in any city files; they probably starved to death. In 1871 it was estimated there were twenty-eight thousand homeless children living on the streets of New York. In any case, later Mary was sent to a workhouse known as the Five Points Mission. It was basically a sweatshop. But it was better than prison. On the surface, that would have seemed to be Mary Greene’s lucky break.”

  Pendergast fell silent. A barge on the river gave out a distant, mournful bellow.

  “What happened to her then?”

  “The paper trail ends at the lodging house door,” Pendergast replied.

  He turned to her, his pale face almost luminous in the gloaming. “Enoch Leng—Doctor Enoch Leng—placed himself and his medical expertise at the service of the Five Points Mission as well as the House of Industry, an orphanage that stood near where Chatham Square is today. He offered his time pro bono. As we know, Dr. Leng kept rooms on the top floor of Shottum’s Cabinet throughout the 1870s. No doubt he had a house somewhere else in the city. He affiliated himself with the two workhouses about a year before Shottum’s Cabinet burned down.”

  “We already know from Shottum’s letter that Leng committed those murders.”

  “No question.”

  “Then why do you need my help?”

  “There’s almost nothing on record about Leng anywhere. I’ve tried the Historical Society, the New York Public Library, City Hall. It’s as if he’s been expunged from the historical record, and I have reason to think Leng himself might have eradicated his files. It seems that Leng was an early supporter of the Museum and an enthusiastic taxonomist. I believe there may be more papers in the Museum concerning Leng, at least indirectly. Their archives are so vast and disorganized that it would be virtually impossible to purge them.”

  “Why me? Why doesn’t the FBI just subpoena the files or something?”

  “Files have a way of disappearing as soon as they are officially requested. Even if one knew which files to request. Besides, I’ve seen how you operate. That kind of competence is rare.”

  Nora merely shook her head.

  “Mr. Puck has been, and no doubt will continue to be, most helpful. And there’s something else. Tinbury McFadden’s daughter is still alive. She lives in an old house in Peekskill. She’s ninety-five, but I understand very much compos mentis. She may have a lot to say about her father. She may have even known Leng. I have a sense she’d be more willing to speak to a young woman like yourself than to an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “You’ve still never really explained why you’ve taken such an interest in this case.”

  “The reasons for my interest in the case are unimportant. What is important is that a human being should not be allowed to get away with a crime like this. Even if that person is long dead. We do not forgive or forget Hitler. It’s important to remember. The past is part of the present. At the moment, in fact, it’s all too much a part of the present.”

  “You’re talking about these two new murders.” The whole city was buzzing with the news. And the same words seemed to be on everyone’s lips: copycat killer.

  Pendergast nodded silently.

  “But do you really think the murders are connected? That there’s some madman out there who read Smithback’s article, and is now trying to duplicate Leng’s experiments?”

  “I believe the murders are connected, yes.”

  It was now dark. Water Street and the piers beyond were deserted. Nora shuddered again. “Look, Mr. Pendergast, I’d like to help. But it’s like I said. I just don’t think there’s anything more I can do for you. Personally, I think you’d do better to investigate the new murders, not the old.”

  “That is precisely what I am doing. The solution to the new murders lies in the old.”

  She looked at him curiously. “How so?”

  “Now is not the time, Nora. I don’t have sufficient information to answer, not yet. In fact, I may have already said too much.”

  Nora sighed with irritation. “Then I’m sorry, but the bottom line is that I simply can’t afford to put my job in jeopardy a second time. Especially without more information. You understand, don’t you?”

  There was a moment’s silence. “Of course. I respect your decision.” Pendergast bowed slightly. Somehow, he managed to give even this simple gesture a touch of elegance.

  Pendergast asked the driver to let him out a block from his apartment building. As the Rolls-Royce glided silently away, Pendergast walked down the pavement, deep in thought. After a few minutes he stopped, staring up at his residence: the Dakota, the vast, gargoyle-haunted pile on a corner of Central Park West. But it was not this structure that remained in his mind: it was the small, crumbling tenement at Number 16 Water Street, where Mary Greene had once lived.

  The house would contain no specific information; it had not been worth searching. And yet it possessed something less definable. It was not just the facts and figures of the past that he needed to know, but its shape and feel. Mary Greene had grown up there. Her father had been part of that great post—Civil War exodus from the farms to the cities. Her childhood had been hard, but it may well have been happy. Stevedores earned a living wage. Once upon a time, she had played on those cobbles. Her childish shouts had echoed off some of those very bricks. And then cholera carried away her parents and changed her life forever. There were at least thirty-five other stories like hers, all of which ended so cruelly in that basement charnel.

  There was a faint movement at the end of the block, and Pendergast turned. An old man in black, wearing a derby hat and carrying a Gladstone bag, was painfully making his way up the sidewalk. He was bowed, moving with the help of a cane. It was almost as if Pendergast’s musings had conjured a figure out of the past. The man slowly made his way toward him, his cane making a faint tapping noise.

  Pendergast watched him curiously for a moment. Then he turned back toward the Dakota, lingering a moment to allow the brisk night air to clear his mind. But there was little clarity to be found; instead there was Mary Greene, the little girl laughing on the cobbles.

  SEVEN

  IT HAD BEEN days since Nora was last in her laboratory. She eased the old metal door open and flicked on the lights, pausing. Everything was as she had left it. A white table ran along the far wall: binocular microscope, flotation kit, computer. To the side stood black metal cabinets containing her specimens—charcoal, lithics, bone, other organics. The still air smelled of dust, with a faint overlay of smoke, piñon, juniper. It momentarily made her homesick for New Mexico. What was she doing in New York City, anyway? She was a Southwestern archaeologist. Her brother, Skip, was demanding she come home to Santa Fe on almost a weekly basis. She had told Pendergast she couldn’t afford to lose her job here at the Museum. But what was the worst that could happen? She could get a position at the University of New Mexico, or Arizona State. They both had superb archaeology departments where she wouldn’t have to defend the value of her work to cretins like Brisbane.

  The thought of Brisbane roused her. Cretins or not, this was the New York Museum. She’d never get another opportunity like this again—not ever.

  Briskly, she stepped into the office, closing and locking the door behind her. Now that she had the money for the carbon-14 dates, she could get back to real work. At least that was one thing this whole fiasco had done for her: get her the money. Now she could prepare the charcoal and organics for shipping to the radiocarbon lab at the University of Michi
gan. Once she had the dates, her work on the Anasazi-Aztec connection could begin in earnest.

  She opened the first cabinet and carefully removed a tray containing dozens of stoppered test tubes. Each was labeled, and each contained a single specimen: a bit of charcoal, a carbonized seed, a fragment of a corn cob, a bit of wood or bone. She removed three of the trays, placing them on the white table. Then she booted her workstation and called up the catalogue matrices. She began cross-checking, making sure every specimen had the proper label and site location. At $275 a shot for the dating, it was important to be accurate.

  As she worked, her mind began to wander back to the events of the past few days. She wondered if the relationship with Brisbane could ever be repaired. He was a difficult boss, but a boss nonetheless. And he was shrewd; sooner or later he’d realize that it would be best for everyone if they could bury the hatchet and—

  Nora shook her head abruptly, a little guilty about this selfish line of thought. Smithback’s article hadn’t just gotten her into hot water—it had apparently inspired a copycat killer the tabloids were already dubbing “The Surgeon.” She couldn’t understand how Smithback thought the article would help. She’d always known he was a careerist, but this was too much. A bumbling egomaniac. She remembered her first sight of him in Page, Arizona, surrounded by bimbos in bathing suits, giving out autographs. Trying to, anyway. What a joke. She should have trusted her first impression of him.

  Her mind wandered from Smithback to Pendergast. A strange man. She wasn’t even sure he was authorized to be working on the case. Would the FBI just let one of their agents freelance like this? Why was he so evasive about his interest? Was he just secretive by nature? Whatever the situation, it was most peculiar. She was out of it now, and glad. Very glad.

  And yet, as she went back to the tubes, she realized she wasn’t feeling all that glad. Maybe it was just that this sorting and checking was tedious work, but she realized Mary Greene and her sad life were lingering in the back of her mind. The dim tenement, the pathetic dress, the pitiful note…