The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  Nora took a breath. “What did Leng look like?”

  Clara McFadden did not answer immediately. “I’ll never forget him,” she said at last. “Have you read Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’? There’s a description in the story that, when I came upon it, struck me terribly. It seemed to describe Leng precisely. It’s stayed with me to this day, I can still quote the odd line of it from memory: ‘a cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and very luminous… finely molded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy.’ Leng had blond hair, blue eyes, an aquiline nose. Old-fashioned black coat, formally dressed.”

  “That’s a very vivid description.”

  “Leng was the kind of person who stayed with you long after he was gone. And yet, you know, it was his voice I remember most. It was low, resonant, strongly accented, with the peculiar quality of sounding like two people speaking in unison.”

  The gloom that filled the parlor seemed inexplicably to deepen. Nora swallowed. She had already asked all the questions she had planned to. “Thank you very much for your time, Ms. McFadden,” she said as she rose.

  “Why do you bring all this up now?” the old lady asked abruptly.

  Nora realized that she must not have seen the newspaper article or heard anything about the recent copycat killings of the Surgeon. She wondered just what she should say. She looked about the room, dark, frozen in shadowy Victorian clutter. She did not want to be the one to upset this woman’s world.

  “I’m researching the early cabinets of curiosities.”

  The old lady transfixed her with a glittering eye. “An interesting subject, child. And perhaps a dangerous one.”

  ELEVEN

  SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST LAY IN THE HOSPITAL BED, motionless save for his pale eyes. He watched Nora Kelly leave the room and close the door. He glanced over at the wall clock: nine P.M. precisely. A good time to begin.

  He thought back over each word Nora had uttered during her visit, looking for any trivial fact or passing reference that he might have overlooked on first hearing. But there was nothing more.

  Her visit to Peekskill had confirmed his darkest suspicions: Pendergast had long believed Leng killed Shottum and burned the cabinet. And he felt sure that McFadden’s disappearance was also at the hands of Leng. No doubt Shottum had challenged Leng shortly after placing his letter in the elephant’s-foot box. Leng had murdered him, and covered it up with the fire.

  Yet the most pressing questions remained. Why had Leng chosen the cabinet as his base of operations? Why did he begin volunteering his services at the houses of industry a year before killing Shottum? And where did he relocate his laboratory after the cabinet burned?

  In Pendergast’s experience, serial killers were messy: they were incautious, they left clues. But Leng was, of course, very different. He was not, strictly speaking, a serial killer. He had been remarkably clever. Leng had left a kind of negative imprint wherever he went; the man seemed defined by how little was known about him. There was more to be learned, but it was deeply hidden in the masses of information strewn about his hospital room. There was only one way to coax this information out. Research alone would not suffice.

  And then there was the growing problem of his increasing lack of objectivity regarding this case, his growing emotional involvement. If he did not bring himself sharply under control, if he did not reassert his habitual discipline, he would fail. And he could not fail.

  It was time to make his journey.

  Pendergast’s gaze shifted to the massings of books, maps, and old periodicals that filled half a dozen surgical carts in his room. His eyes moved from surface to tottering surface. The single most important piece of paper lay on his bedside table: the plans for Shottum’s Cabinet. One last time, he picked it up and gazed at it, memorizing every detail. The seconds ticked on. He laid down the yellowing plat.

  It was time. But first, something had to be done about the intolerable landscape of noise that surrounded him.

  After his condition was upgraded from serious to stable, Pendergast had himself transferred from St. Luke’s–Roosevelt to Lenox Hill Hospital. The old facility on Lexington Avenue had the thickest walls of any building in the city, save for his own Dakota. Even here, however, he was assaulted by sounds: the bleat of the blood-oxygen meter above his bed; the gossiping voices at the nurses’ station; the hissings and beepings of the telemetry machines and ventilators; the adenoidal patient snoring in the adjacent room; the rumble of the forced-air ducts deep in the walls and ceiling. There was nothing he could do that would physically stop these sounds; yet they could be made to disappear through other means. It was a powerful mind game he had developed, an adaptation of Chongg Ran, an ancient Bhutanese Buddhist meditative practice.

  Pendergast closed his eyes. He imagined a chessboard inside his head, on a wooden table, standing in a pool of yellow light. Then he created two players. The first player made his opening move; the second followed. A game of speed chess ensued; and then another, and another. The two players changed strategies, forming adaptive counterattacks: Inverted Hanham, Two Knights Defense, Vienna Gambit.

  One by one, the more distant noises dropped away.

  When the final game ended in a draw, Pendergast dissolved the chess set. Then, in the darkness of his mind’s eye, he created four players, seated around a card table. Pendergast had always found bridge a nobler and subtler game than chess, but he rarely played it with others because, outside of his late family, he had found few worthy partners. Now the game began, each player ignorant of all but his own thirteen cards, each player with his own strategies and intellectual capabilities. The game began, with ruffs and slams and deep finesses. Pendergast toyed with the players, shifting Blackwood, Gerber, and Stayman conventions, positing a forgetful declarer, misunderstood signals between East and West.

  By the time the first rubber was completed, all distractions were gone. The noises had ceased. In his mind, only a profound silence reigned. Pendergast turned further inward.

  It was time for the memory crossing to begin.

  Several minutes of intense mental concentration passed. Finally, he felt ready.

  In his mind’s eye, he rose from his bed. He felt light, airy, like a ghost. He saw himself walk through the empty hospital corridors, down the stairwell, across the arched foyer, and out onto the wide front steps of the hospital.

  Only the building was no longer a hospital. A hundred and twenty years before, it had been known as the New York Rest Home for Consumptives.

  Pendergast stood on the steps for a moment, glancing around in the gathering dusk. To the west, toward Central Park, the Upper East Side had become a patchwork of hog farms, wild lands, and rocky eminences. Small groups of hovels sprouted up here and there, huddled together as if for protection against the elements. Gas lamps stood along the avenue, infrequent this far north of the populous downtown, throwing small circles of light down onto the dusky macadam.

  The prospect was vague, indistinct: detail at this location was unimportant. Pendergast did, however, allow himself to sample the air. It smelled strongly of coal smoke, damp earth, and horse manure.

  He descended the steps, turning onto Seventy-sixth Street and walking east toward the river. Here it was more thickly settled, newer brownstones abutting old wood-and-frame structures. Carriages swayed down the straw-strewn street. People passed him silently, the men dressed in long suits with thin lapels, women in bustles and veiled hats.

  At the next intersection he boarded a streetcar, paying five cents for the ride down to Forty-second Street. There, he transferred to the Bowery & Third Avenue elevated railway, paying another twenty cents. This extravagant price ensured him a palace car, with curtained windows and plush seats. The steam locomotive heading the train was named the Chauncey M. Depew. As it hurtled southward, Pendergast sat without moving in his velveteen chair. Slowly, he allowed sound to intrude once more into his world: first the clatter of the wheels on the tracks, and
then the chatter of his passengers. They were engrossed with the concerns of 1881: the president’s recovery and the imminent removal of the pistol ball; the Columbia Yacht Club sailing regatta on the Hudson earlier that afternoon; the miraculous curative properties of the Wilsonia Magnetic Garment.

  There were still gaps, of course—hazy dark patches, like fog—about which Pendergast had little or no information. No memory crossing was ever complete. There were details of history that had been irrevocably lost.

  When the train at last reached the lower stretches of the Bowery, Pendergast disembarked. He stood on the platform a moment, looking around a little more intently now. The elevated tracks were erected over the sidewalks, rather than along the middle of the street, and the awnings below were covered in a greasy film of oil drippings and ash. The Chauncey M. Depew gave a shriek, beginning its furious dash to the next stop. Smoke and hot cinders belched from its stack, scattering into the leaden air.

  He descended skeletal wooden stairs to ground level, alighting outside a small shop. He glanced at its signboard: George Washington Abacus, Physiognomic Operator and Professor of the Tonsorial Art. The broad throughfare before him was a sea of bobbing plug hats. Trams and horsecars went careering down the center of the road. Peddlers of all kinds jostled the narrow sidewalk, crying out their trade to all who would listen. “Pots and pans!” called a tinker. “Mend your pots and pans!” A young woman trundling a steaming cauldron on wheels cried, “Oysters! Here’s your brave, good oysters!” At Pendergast’s left elbow, a man selling hot corn out of a baby’s perambulator fished out an ear, smeared it with a butter-soaked rag, and held it out invitingly. Pendergast shook his head and eased his way into the milling crowd. He was jostled; there was a momentary fog, a loss of concentration; and then Pendergast recovered. The scene returned.

  He moved south, gradually bringing all five senses fully alive to the surroundings. The noise was almost overwhelming: clattering horseshoes, countless snatches of music and song, yelling, screaming, whinnying, cursing. The air was supercharged with the odors of sweat, dung, cheap perfume, and roasting meats.

  Down the street, at 43 Bowery, Buffalo Bill was playing in the Scout of the Plains stage show at the Windsor. Several other theaters followed, huge signs advertising current performances: Fedora, Peck’s Bad Boy, The Darkness to the North, Kit, the Arkansas Traveler. A blind Civil War veteran lay between two entrances, cap held out imploringly.

  Pendergast glided past with barely a glance.

  At a corner, he paused to get his bearings, then turned onto East Broadway Street. After the frenzy of Bowery, he entered a more silent world. He moved past the myriad shops of the old city, shuttered and dark at this hour: saddleries, millinery shops, pawnbrokers, slaughterhouses. Some of these buildings were distinct. Others—places Pendergast had not succeeded in identifying—were vague and shadowy, shrouded in that same indistinct fog.

  At Catherine Street he turned toward the river. Unlike on East Broadway, all the establishments here—grog shops, sailors’ lodging houses, oyster-cellars—were open. Lamps cast lurid red stripes out into the street. A brick building loomed at the corner, low and long, streaked with soot. Its granite cornices and arched lintels spoke of a building done in a poor imitation of the Neo-Gothic style. A wooden sign, gold letters edged in black, hung over the door.

  J. C. SHOTTUM’S CABINET OF NATURAL PRODUCTIONS & CURIOSITIES

  A trio of bare electric bulbs in metal cages illuminated the doorway, casting a harsh glare onto the street. Shottum’s was open for business. A hired hawker shouted at the door. Pendergast could not catch the words above the noise and bustle. A large signboard standing on the pavement in front advertised the featured attractions—See the Double-Brained Child & Visit Our New Annex Showing Bewitching Female Bathers in Real Water.

  Pendergast stood on the corner, the rest of the city fading into fog as he focused his concentration on the building ahead, meticulously reconstructing every detail. Slowly, the walls came into sharper focus—the dingy windows, the interiors, the bizarre collections, the maze of exhibit halls—as his mind integrated and shaped the vast quantity of information he had amassed.

  When he was ready, he stepped forward and queued up. He paid his two pennies to a man in a greasy stovepipe hat and stepped inside. A low foyer greeted his eye, dominated on the far side with a mammoth skull. Standing next to it was a moth-eaten Kodiak bear, an Indian birchbark canoe, a petrified log. His eyes traveled around the room. The large thighbone of an Antediluvian Monster stood against the far wall, and there were other eclectic specimens laid out, helter-skelter. The better exhibits, he knew, were deeper inside the cabinet.

  Corridors ran off to the left and right, leading to halls packed with teeming humanity. In a world without movies, television, or radio—and where travel was an option only for the wealthiest—the popularity of this diversion was not surprising. Pendergast bore left.

  The first part of the hall consisted of a systematic collection of stuffed birds, laid out on shelves. This exhibit, a feeble attempt to insinuate a little education, held no interest to the crowd, which streamed past on the way to less edifying exhibits ahead.

  The corridor debouched into a large hall, the air hot and close. In the center stood what appeared to be a stuffed man, brown and wizened, with severely bowed legs, gripping a post. The label pinned below it read: Pygmy Man of Darkest Africa, Who Lived to Be Three Hundred Fifty-Five Years of Age Before Death by Snakebite. Closer inspection revealed it to be a shaved orangutan, doctored to look human, apparently preserved through smoking. It gave off a fearful smell. Nearby was an Egyptian mummy, standing against the wall in a wooden sarcophagus. There was a mounted skeleton missing its skull, labeled Remains of the Beautiful Countess Adele de Brissac, Executed by Guillotine, Paris, 1789. Next to it was a rusty piece of iron, dabbed with red paint, marked: The Blade That Cut Her.

  Pendergast stood at the center of the hall and turned his attention to the noisy audience. He found himself mildly surprised. There were many more young people than he had assumed, as well as a greater cross section of humanity, from high to low. Young bloods and fancy men strolled by, puffing on cigars, laughing condescendingly at the exhibits. A group of tough-looking youths swaggered past, sporting the red flannel firemen’s shirts, broadcloth pantaloons, and greased “soap-lock” hair that identified them as Bowery Boys. There were workhouse girls, whores, urchins, street peddlers, and barmen. It was, in short, the same kind of crowd that thronged the streets outside. Now that the workday was done for many, they came to Shottum’s for an evening’s entertainment. The two-penny admission was within reach of all.

  Two doors at the far end of the hall led to more exhibits, one to the bewitching ladies, the other marked Gallery of Unnatural Monstrosities. This latter was narrow and dark, and it was the exhibit that Pendergast had come to see.

  The sounds of the crowds were muffled here, and there were fewer visitors, mostly nervous, gaping youngsters. The carnival atmosphere had changed into something quieter, more eerie. The darkness, the closeness, the stillness, all conspired to create the effect of fear.

  At the first turn of the gallery stood a table, on which was a large jar of thick glass, stoppered and sealed, containing a floating human baby. Two miniature, perfectly formed arms stuck out from its forehead. Pendergast peered closer and saw that, unlike many of the other exhibits, this one had not been doctored. He passed on. There was a small alcove containing a dog with a cat’s head, this one clearly fake, the sewing marks visible through the thinning hair. It stood next to a giant clam, propped open, showing a skeletonized foot inside. The label copy told the gruesome story of the hapless pearl diver. Around another corner, there was a great miscellany of objects in jars of formaldehyde: a Portuguese man-of-war, a giant rat from Sumatra, a hideous brown thing the size of a flattened watermelon, marked Liver, from a Woolly Mammoth Frozen in Siberian Ice. Next to it was a Siamese-twinned giraffe fetus. The next turn revealed a shelf with a hum
an skull with a hideous bony growth on the forehead, labeled The Rhinoceros Man of Cincinnati.

  Pendergast paused, listening. Now the sounds of the crowd were very faint, and he was alone. Beyond, the darkened hall made one last sharp turn. An elaborately stylized arrow pointed toward an unseen exhibit around the corner. A sign read: Visit Wilson One-Handed: For Those Who Dare.

  Pendergast glided around the corner. Here, it was almost silent. At the moment, there were no other visitors. The hall terminated in a small alcove. In the alcove was a single exhibit: a glass case containing a desiccated head. The shriveled tongue still protruded from the mouth, looking like a cheroot clamped between the twisted lips. Next to it lay what appeared to be a dried sausage, about a foot long, with a rusty hook attached to one end by leather straps. Next to that, the frayed end of a hangman’s noose.

  A label identified them:

  THE HEAD OF THE NOTORIOUS MURDERER AND ROBBER WILSON ONE-HANDED HUNG BY THE NECK UNTIL DEAD DAKOTA TERRITORY JULY 4, 1868

  THE NOOSE FROM WHICH HE SWUNG

  THE FOREARM STUMP AND HOOK OF WILSON ONE-HANDED WHICH BROUGHT IN A BOUNTY OF ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS

  Pendergast examined the cramped room. It was isolated and very dark. It was cut off from view of the other exhibits by a sharp turn of the corridor. It would comfortably admit only one person at a time.

  A cry for help here would be unheard, out in the main galleries.

  The little alcove ended in a cul-de-sac. As Pendergast stared at it, pondering, the wall wavered, then disappeared, as fog once again enshrouded his memory construct and the mental image fell away. But it did not matter: he had seen enough, threaded his way through sufficient passages, to understand.

  And now—at last—he knew how Leng had procured his victims.