Cold Vengeance p-11

by Douglas Preston

  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 last image 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 cure her. 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 nineteen seventies 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 Times of 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 Gr
eene, 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.

  CHAPTER 46

  NINE STORIES, AND EXACTLY ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FEET, below Dr. Felder’s table in the Main Reading Room, Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast was listening intently to the ancient bibliophile researcher known as Wren. If Wren had a first name, nobody — including Pendergast — knew what it was. Wren’s entire history — where he lived, where he’d come from, what exactly he did every night and most days in the deepest sublevels of the library — was a mystery. Years without sunlight had faded his skin to the color of parchment, and he smelled faintly of dust and binding paste. His hair stuck out from his head in a halo of white, and his eyes were as black and bright as a bird’s. But for all his eccentric appearance, he had two assets Pendergast prized above all others: a unique gift for research, and a profound knowledge of the New York Public Library’s seemingly inexhaustible holdings.

  Now, perched upon a huge stack of papers like a scrawny Buddha, he spoke quickly and animatedly, punctuating his speech with sudden, sharp gestures. “I’ve traced her lineage,” he was saying. “Traced it very carefully, hypocrite lecteur. And it was quite a job, too — the family seems to have been at pains to keep details of their bloodline private. Thank God for the Heiligenstadt Aggregation.”