The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  “No attitude, sir. I’m just here to protect and serve.” He pronounced sairve in his best Irish brogue. “Top of the mornin’ to you, Captain.”

  As O’Shaughnessy turned and left the office, he heard Custer mutter “wise ass” to Noyes.

  THREE

  “A PERFECT AFTERNOON TO TAKE IN A MUSEUM,” SAID Pendergast, looking up at a lowering sky.

  Patrick Murphy O’Shaughnessy wondered if it was some kind of joke. He stood on the steps of the Elizabeth Street precinct house, staring off into nowhere. The whole thing was a joke. The FBI agent looked more like an undertaker than a cop, with his black suit, blond-white hair, and movie-cliché accent. He wondered how such a piece of work ever got his ass through Quantico.

  “The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a cultural paradigm, Sergeant. One of the great art museums of the world. But of course you knew that. Shall we go?”

  O’Shaughnessy shrugged. Museums, whatever, he was supposed to stay with this guy. What a crappy assignment.

  As they descended the steps, a long gray car came gliding up from where it had been idling at the corner. For a second O’Shaughnessy could hardly believe it. A Rolls. Pendergast opened the door.

  “Drug seizure?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

  “No. Personal vehicle.”

  Figures. New Orleans. They were all on the take down there. Now he had the guy pegged. Probably up here on some kind of drug business. Maybe Custer wanted in. That’s why he put him, of all the cops in the precinct, on this guy’s ass. This was looking worse by the minute.

  Pendergast continued holding the door. “After you.”

  O’Shaughnessy slid in the back, sinking immediately into creamy white leather.

  Pendergast ducked in beside him. “To the Metropolitan Museum,” he told the driver. As the Rolls pulled away from the curb, O’Shaughnessy caught a glimpse of Captain Custer standing on the steps, staring after them. He resisted the impulse to flip him the bird.

  O’Shaughnessy turned to Pendergast and gave him a good look. “Here’s to success, Mister FBI Agent.”

  He turned away to look out the window. There was a silence on the other side.

  “The name is Pendergast,” came the soft voice, finally.

  “Whatever.”

  O’Shaughnessy continued to look out the window. He allowed a minute to pass, and then he said: “So what’s at the museum? Some dead mummies?”

  “I have yet to meet a live mummy, Sergeant. However, it is not the Egyptian Department we are going to.”

  A wise guy. He wondered how many more assignments he’d have like this. Just because he made a mistake five years ago, they all thought he was Mister Expendable. Any time there was something funny coming down the pike, it was always: We’ve got a little problem here, O’Shaughnessy, and you’re just the man to take care of it. But it was usually just penny-ante stuff. This guy in the Rolls, he looked big-time. This was different. This looked illegal. O’Shaughnessy thought of his long-gone father and felt a stab of shame. Thank God the man wasn’t around to see him now. Five generations of O’Shaughnessys in the force, and now everything gone to shit. He wondered if he could hack the eleven more years required before an early severance package became available.

  “So what’s the game?” O’Shaughnessy asked. No more sucker work: he was going to keep his eyes open and his head up on this one. He didn’t want any stray shit to fall when he wasn’t looking up.

  “Sergeant?”

  “What.”

  “There is no game.”

  “Of course not.” O’Shaughnessy let out a little snort. “There never is.” He realized the FBI agent was looking at him intently. He continued looking away.

  “I can see that you’re under a misapprehension here, Sergeant,” came the drawl. “We should rectify that at once. You see, I can understand why you’d jump to that conclusion. Five years ago, you were caught on a surveillance tape taking two hundred dollars from a prostitute in exchange for releasing her. I believe they call it a ‘shakedown.’ Have I got that right?”

  O’Shaughnessy felt a sudden numbness, followed by a slow anger. Here it was again. He said nothing. What was there to say? It would have been better if they’d cashiered him.

  “The tape got sent to Internal Affairs. Internal Affairs paid you a visit. But there were differing accounts of what happened, nothing was proven. Unfortunately, the damage was done, and since that time you’ve seen your career—how should I put it?—remain in stasis.”

  O’Shaughnessy continued looking out the window, at the rush of buildings. Remain in stasis. You mean, go nowhere.

  “And you’ve caught nothing since but a series of questionable assignments and gray-area errands. Of which you no doubt consider this one more.”

  O’Shaughnessy spoke to the window, his voice deliberately tired. “Pendergast, I don’t know what your game is, but I don’t need to listen to this. I really don’t.”

  “I saw that tape,” said Pendergast.

  “Good for you.”

  “I heard, for example, the prostitute pleading with you to let her go, saying that her pimp would beat her up if you didn’t. Then I heard her insisting you take the two hundred dollars, because if you didn’t, her pimp would assume she had betrayed him. But if you took the money, he would only think she’d bribed her way out of custody and spare her. Am I right? So you took the money.”

  O’Shaughnessy had been through this in his own mind a thousand times. What difference did it make? He didn’t have to take the money. He hadn’t given it to charity, either. Pimps were beating up prostitutes every day. He should’ve left her to her fate.

  “So now you’re cynical, you’re tired, you’ve come to realize that the whole idea of protect and serve is farcical, especially out there on the streets, where there doesn’t even seem to be right or wrong, nobody worth protecting, and nobody worth serving.”

  There was a silence.

  “Are we through with the character analysis?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

  “For the moment. Except to say that, yes, this is a questionable assignment. But not in the way you’re thinking.”

  The next silence stretched into minutes.

  They stopped at a light, and O’Shaughnessy took an opportunity to cast a covert glance toward Pendergast. The man, as if knowing the glance was coming, caught his eye and pinned it. O’Shaughnessy almost jumped, he looked away so fast.

  “Did you, by any chance, catch the show last year, Costuming History?” Pendergast asked, his voice now light and pleasant.

  “What?”

  “I’ll take that as a no. You missed a splendid exhibition. The Met has a fine collection of historical clothing dating back to the early Middle Ages. Most of it was in storage. But last year, they mounted an exhibition showing how clothing evolved over the last six centuries. Absolutely fascinating. Did you know that all ladies at Louis XIV’s court at Versailles were required to have a thirteen-inch waist or less? And that their dresses weighed between thirty and forty pounds?”

  O’Shaughnessy realized he didn’t know how to answer. The conversation had taken such a strange and sudden tack that he found himself momentarily stunned.

  “I was also interested to learn that in the fifteenth century, a man’s codpiece—”

  This tidbit was mercifully interrupted by a screech of brakes as the Rolls swerved to avoid a cab cutting across three lanes of traffic.

  “Yankee barbarians,” said Pendergast mildly. “Now, where was I? Ah yes, the codpiece…”

  The Rolls was caught in Midtown traffic now, and O’Shaughnessy began to wonder just how much longer this ride was going to take.

  The Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum was sheeted in Beaux Arts marble, decorated with vast sprays of flowers, and almost unbearably crowded. O’Shaughnessy hung back while the strange FBI agent talked to one of the harried volunteers at the information desk. She picked up a phone, called someone, then put it down again, looking highly irritated. O’Shaughnes
sy began to wonder what this Pendergast was up to. Throughout the extended trip uptown he’d said nothing about his intended plan of action.

  He glanced around. It was an Upper East Side crowd, for sure: ladies dressed to the nines clicking here and there in high heels, uniformed schoolchildren lined up and well behaved, a few tweedy-looking academics wandering about with thoughtful faces. Several people were staring at him disapprovingly, as if it was in bad taste to be in the Met wearing a police officer’s uniform. He felt a rush of misanthropy. Hypocrites.

  Pendergast motioned him over, and they passed into the museum, running a gauntlet of ticket takers in the process, past a case full of Roman gold, plunging at last into a confusing sequence of rooms crowded with statues, vases, paintings, mummies, and all manner of art. Pendergast talked the whole time, but the crowds were so dense and the noise so deafening, O’Shaughnessy caught only a few words.

  They passed through a quieter suite of rooms full of Asian art, finally arriving in front of a door of shiny gray metal. Pendergast opened it without knocking, revealing a small reception area. A strikingly good-looking receptionist sat behind a desk of blond wood. Her eyes widened slightly at the sight of his uniform. O’Shaughnessy gave her a menacing look.

  “May I help you?” She addressed Pendergast, but her eyes continued to flicker anxiously toward O’Shaughnessy.

  “Sergeant O’Shaughnessy and Special Agent Pendergast are here to see Dr. Wellesley.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Alas, no.”

  The receptionist hesitated. “I’m sorry. Special Agent—?”

  “Pendergast. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  At this she flushed deeply. “Just a moment.” She picked up her phone. O’Shaughnessy could hear it ringing in an office just off the reception area.

  “Dr. Wellesley,” the secretary said, “there is a Special Agent Pendergast from the FBI and a police officer here to see you.”

  The voice that echoed out of the office was easily heard by all. It was a crisp, no-nonsense voice, feminine, yet cold as ice, and so unrelievedly English it made O’Shaughnessy bristle.

  “Unless they are here to arrest me, Heather, the gentlemen can make an appointment like everyone else. I am engaged.”

  The crash of her telephone hitting the cradle was equally unmistakable.

  The receptionist looked up at them with high nervousness. “Dr. Wellesley—”

  But Pendergast was already moving toward the office from which the voice had issued. This is more like it, O’Shaughnessy thought, as Pendergast swung open the door, placing himself squarely in the doorway. At least the guy, for all his pretensions, was no pushover. He knew how to cut through the bullshit.

  The unseen voice, laden with sarcasm, cut the air. “Ah, the proverbial copper with his foot in the door. Pity it wasn’t locked so you could batter it down with your truncheon.”

  It was as if Pendergast had not heard. His fluid, honeyed voice filled the office with warmth and charm. “Dr. Wellesley, I have come to you because you are the world’s foremost authority on the history of dress. And I hope you’ll permit me to say your identification of the Greek peplos of Vergina was most thrilling to me personally. I have long had an interest in the subject.”

  There was a brief silence. “Flattery, Mr. Pendergast, will at least get you inside.”

  O’Shaughnessy followed the agent into a small but very well-appointed office. The furniture looked like it had come directly from the museum’s collection, and the walls were hung with a series of eighteenth-century watercolors of opera costumes. O’Shaughnessy thought they might be the characters of Figaro, Rosina, and Count Almaviva from The Barber of Seville. Opera was his sole, and his secret, indulgence.

  He seated himself, crossing and then uncrossing his legs, shifting in the impossibly uncomfortable chair. No matter what he did, he still seemed to take up too much space. The blue of his uniform seemed unbearably gauche amid the elegant furnishings. He glanced back up at the watercolors, allowing the bars of an aria to go through his head.

  Wellesley was an attractive woman in her mid-forties, beautifully dressed. “I see you admire my pictures,” she said to O’Shaughnessy, eyeing him shrewdly.

  “Sure,” said O’Shaughnessy. “If you like dancing in a wig, pumps, and straitjacket.”

  Wellesley turned to Pendergast. “Your associate has a rather queer sense of humor.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Now what can I do for you gentlemen?”

  Pendergast removed a bundle from under his suit, loosely wrapped in paper. “I would like you to examine this dress,” he said, unrolling the bundle across the curator’s desk. She backed up slightly in horror as the true dimensions of its filth were exposed to view.

  O’Shaughnessy thought he detected a peculiar smell. Very peculiar. It occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, Pendergast wasn’t on the take—that this was for real.

  “Good lord. Please,” she said, stepping farther back and putting a hand before her face. “I do not do police work. Take this revolting thing away.”

  “This revolting thing, Dr. Wellesley, belonged to a nineteen-year-old girl who was murdered over a hundred years ago, dissected, dismembered, and walled up in a tunnel in lower Manhattan. Sewn up into the dress was a note, which the girl wrote in her own blood. It gave her name, age, and address. Nothing else—ink of that sort does not encourage prolixity. It was the note of a girl who knew she was about to die. She knew that no one would help her, no one would save her. Her only wish was that her body be identified—that she not be forgotten. I could not help her then, but I am trying to now. That is why I am here.” The dress seemed to quiver slightly, and O’Shaughnessy realized with a start that the FBI agent’s hand was trembling with emotion. At least, that’s how it looked to him. That a law officer would actually care about something like this was a revelation.

  The silence that followed Pendergast’s statement was profound.

  Without a word, Wellesley bent down over the dress, fingered it, turned up its lining, gently stretched the material in several directions. Reaching into a drawer of her desk, she pulled out a large magnifying glass and began examining the stitching and fabric. Several minutes passed. Then she sighed and sat down in her chair.

  “This is a typical workhouse garment,” she said. “Standard issue in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Cheap woolen fabric for the exterior, scratchy and coarse but actually quite warm, lined with undyed cotton. You can see from the pattern cuts and stitching that it was probably made by the girl herself, using fabric issued to her by the workhouse. The fabrics came in several basic colors—green, blue, gray, and black.”

  “Any idea which workhouse?”

  “Impossible to say. Nineteenth-century Manhattan had quite a few of them. They were called ‘houses of industry.’ They took in abandoned children, orphans, and runaways. Harsh, cruel places, run by the so-called religious.”

  “Can you give me a more precise date on the dress?”

  “Not with any accuracy. It seems to be a rather pathetic imitation of a style popular in the early eighteen eighties, called a Maude Makin. Workhouse girls usually tried to copy dresses they liked out of popular magazines and penny press advertisements.” Dr. Wellesley sighed, shrugged. “That’s it, I’m afraid.”

  “If anything else comes to mind, I can be contacted through Sergeant O’Shaughnessy here.”

  Dr. Wellesley glanced up at O’Shaughnessy’s name tag, then nodded.

  “Thank you for your time.” The FBI agent began rolling up the dress. “That was a lovely exhibition you curated last year, by the way.”

  Dr. Wellesley nodded again.

  “Unlike most museum exhibitions, it had wit. Take the houppelande section. I found it delightfully amusing.”

  Concealed in its wrapper, the dress lost its power to horrify. The feeling of gloom that had settled over the office began to lift. O’Shaughnessy found himself echoing Custer:
what was an FBI agent doing messing around with a case 120 years old?

  “Thank you for noticing what none of the critics did,” the woman replied. “Yes, I meant it to be fun. When you finally understand it, human dress—beyond what is necessary for warmth and modesty—can be marvelously absurd.”

  Pendergast stood. “Dr. Wellesley, your expertise has been most valuable.”

  Dr. Wellesley rose as well. “Please call me Sophia.” O’Shaughnessy noticed her looking at Pendergast with new interest.

  Pendergast bowed and smiled. Then he turned to go. The curator came around her desk to see him through the waiting room. At the outer door, Sophia Wellesley paused, blushed, and said, “I hope to see you again, Mr. Pendergast. Perhaps soon. Perhaps for dinner.”

  There was a brief silence. Pendergast said nothing.

  “Well,” said the curator crisply, “you know where to reach me.”

  They walked back through the thronged, treasure-laden halls, past the Khmer devatars, past the reliquaries encrusted with gems, past the Greek statues and the Red Attic vases, down the great crowded steps to Fifth Avenue. O’Shaughnessy whistled an astringent little chorus of Sade’s “Smooth Operator.” If Pendergast heard, he gave no sign.

  Moments later, O’Shaughnessy was sliding into the white leather cocoon of the Rolls. When the door shut with a solid, reassuring thunk, blessed silence returned. He still couldn’t figure out what to make of Pendergast—maybe the guy, for all his expensive tastes, was on the up-and-up. He sure as hell knew this: he was going to keep his eyes and ears open.

  “Across the park to the New York Museum of Natural History, please,” Pendergast told the driver. As the car accelerated into traffic, the agent turned to O’Shaughnessy. “How is it that an Irish policeman came to love Italian opera?”

  O’Shaughnessy gave a start. When had he mentioned opera?

  “You disguise your thoughts poorly, Sergeant. While you were looking at the drawings from The Barber of Seville, I saw your right index finger unconsciously tapping the rhythm to Rosina’s aria, ‘Una voce poco fa.’ ”