The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

“And then, not twenty-four hours later, Puck’s body was found, gored on a dinosaur in the Archives. After having been butchered, most likely in those very same Archives. An operation like that takes time, Mr. Brisbane. Clearly, it was done by somebody who knew the Museum’s ways very well. Someone with a security clearance. Someone who could move around the Museum without exciting notice. An insider, if you will. And then, Nora Kelly gets a phony note, typed on Puck’s typewriter, asking her to come down—and she herself is attacked, pursued with deadly intent. Nora Kelly. The other thorn in your side. The third thorn, the FBI agent, was in the hospital at this point, having been attacked by someone wearing a derby hat.”

  Brisbane stared at him in disbelief.

  “Why didn’t you want Puck to help Nora Kelly in her—what did you call them—external projects?”

  This was answered by silence.

  “What were you afraid she would find? They would find?”

  Brisbane’s mouth worked briefly. “I… I…”

  Now Custer slipped in the knife. “Why the copycat angle, Mr. Brisbane? Was it something you found in the Archives? Is that what prompted you to do it? Was Puck getting too close to learning something?”

  At this, Brisbane found his voice at last. He shot to his feet. “Now, just a minute—”

  Custer turned. “Officer Noyes?”

  “Yes?” Noyes responded eagerly.

  “Cuff him.”

  “No,” Brisbane gasped. “You fool, you’re making a terrible mistake—”

  Custer worked his way out of the chair—it was not as smooth a motion as he would have wished—and began abruptly booming out the Miranda rights: “You have the right to remain silent—”

  “This is an outrage—”

  “—you have the right to an attorney—”

  “I will not accept this!”

  “—you have the right—”

  He thundered it out to the bitter end, overriding Brisbane’s protestations. He watched as the gleeful Noyes slapped the cuffs on the man. It was the most satisfying collar Custer could ever remember. It was, in fact, the single greatest job of police work he had done in his life. This was the stuff of legend. For many years to come, they’d be telling the story of how Captain Custer put the cuffs on the Surgeon.

  FIVE

  PENDERGAST SET OFF UP RIVERSIDE ONCE AGAIN, BLACK suit coat open and flapping behind him in the Manhattan night. Nora hurried after. Her thoughts returned to Smithback, imprisoned in one of these gaunt buildings. She tried to force the image from her mind, but it kept returning, again and again. She was almost physically sick with worry about what might be happening—what might have already happened.

  She wondered how she could have been so angry with him. It’s true that much of the time he was impossible—a schemer, impulsive, always looking for an angle, always getting himself into trouble. And yet many of those same negative qualities were his most endearing. She thought back to how he’d dressed up as a bum to help her retrieve the old dress from the excavation; how he’d come to warn her after Pendergast was stabbed. When push came to shove, he was there. She had been awfully hard on him. But it was too late to be sorry. She suppressed a sob of bitter regret.

  They moved past guttered mansions and once elegant townhouses, now festering crack dens and shooting galleries for junkies. Pendergast gave each building a searching look, always turning away with a little shake of his head.

  Nora’s thoughts flitted briefly to Leng himself. It seemed impossible that he could still be alive, concealed within one of these crumbling dwellings. She glanced up the Drive again. She had to concentrate, try to pick his house out from the others. Wherever he lived, it would be comfortable. A man who had lived over a hundred and fifty years would be excessively concerned with comfort. But it would no doubt give the surface impression of being abandoned. And it would be well-nigh impregnable—Leng wouldn’t want any unexpected visitors. This was the perfect neighborhood for such a place: abandoned, yet once elegant; externally shabby, yet livable inside; boarded up; very private.

  The trouble was, so many of the buildings met those criteria.

  Then, near the corner of 138th Street, Pendergast stopped dead. He turned, slowly, to face yet another abandoned building. It was a large, decayed mansion, a hulking shadow of bygone glory, set back from the street by a small service drive. Like many others, the first floor had been securely boarded up with tin. It looked just like a dozen other buildings they had passed. And yet Pendergast was staring at it with an expression of intentness Nora had not seen before.

  Silently, he turned the corner of 138th Street. Nora followed, watching him. The FBI agent moved slowly, eyes mostly on the ground, with just occasional darted glances up at the building. They continued down the block until they reached the corner of Broadway. The moment they turned the corner, Pendergast spoke.

  “That’s it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The crest carved on the escutcheon over the door. Three apothecary balls over a sprig of hemlock.” He waved his hand. “Forgive me if I reserve explanations for later. Follow my lead. And be very, very careful.”

  He continued around the block until they reached the corner of Riverside Drive and 137th. Nora looked at the building with a mixture of curiosity, apprehension, and outright fear. It was a large, four-story, brick-and-stone structure that occupied the entire short block. Its frontage was enclosed in a wrought iron fence, ivy covering the rusty pointed rails. The garden within was long gone, taken over by weeds, bushes, and garbage. A carriage drive circled the rear of the house, exiting on 138th Street. Though the lower windows were securely boarded over, the upper courses remained unblocked, although at least one window on the second story was broken. She stared up at the crest Pendergast had mentioned. An inscription in Greek ran around its edge.

  A gust of wind rustled the bare limbs in the yard; the reflected moon, the scudding clouds, flickered in the glass panes of the upper stories. The place looked haunted.

  Pendergast ducked into the carriage drive, Nora following close behind. The agent kicked aside some garbage with his shoe and, after a quick look around, stepped up to a solid oak door set into deep shadow beneath the porte-cochere. It seemed to Nora as if Pendergast merely caressed the lock; and then the door opened silently on well-oiled hinges.

  They stepped quickly inside. Pendergast eased the door closed, and Nora heard the sound of a lock clicking. A moment of intense darkness while they stood still, listening for any sounds from within. The old house was silent. After a minute, the yellow line of Pendergast’s hooded flashlight appeared, scanning the room around them.

  They were standing in a small entryway. The floor was polished marble, and the walls were papered in heavy velvet fabric. Dust covered everything. Pendergast stood still, directing his light at a series of footprints—some shod, some stockinged—that had disturbed the dust on the floor. He looked at them for so long, studying them as an art student studies an old master, that Nora felt impatience begin to overwhelm her. At last he led the way, slowly, through the room and down a short passage leading into a large, long hall. It was paneled in a very rich, dense wood, and the low ceiling was intricately worked, a blend of the gothic and austere.

  This hall was full of an odd assortment of displays Nora was unable to comprehend: weird tables, cabinets, large boxes, iron cages, strange apparatus.

  “A magician’s warehouse,” Pendergast murmured in answer to her unspoken question.

  They passed through the room, beneath an archway, and into a grand reception hall. Once again, Pendergast stopped to study several lines of footprints that crossed and recrossed the parquet floor.

  “Barefoot, now,” she heard him say to himself. “And this time, he was running.”

  He quickly probed the immense space with his beam. Nora saw an astonishing range of objects: mounted skeletons, fossils, glass-fronted cabinets full of wondrous and terrible artifacts, gems, skulls, meteorites, iridescent beetles. Th
e flashlight played briefly over all. The scent of cobwebs, leather, and old buckram hung heavy in the thick air, veiling a fainter—and much less pleasant—smell.

  “What is this place?” Nora asked.

  “Leng’s cabinet of curiosities.” A two-toned pistol had appeared in Pendergast’s left hand. The stench was worse now; sickly sweet, oily, that filled the air like a wet fog, clinging to her hair, limbs, clothes.

  He moved forward, warily, his light playing off the various objects in the room. Some of the objects were uncovered, but most were draped. The walls were lined with glass cases, and Pendergast moved toward them, his flashlight licking from one to the next. The glass sparked and shimmered as the beam hit it; dark shadows, thrown from the objects within, reared forward as if living things.

  Suddenly, the beam stopped dead. Nora watched as Pendergast’s pale face lost what little color it normally had. For a moment, he simply stared, motionless, not even seeming to draw breath. Then, very slowly, he approached the case. The beam of the flashlight trembled a bit as he moved. Nora followed, wondering what had had such a galvanic effect on the agent.

  The glass case was not like the rest. It did not contain a skeleton, stuffed trophy, or carven image. Instead, behind the glass stood the figure of a dead man, legs and arms strapped upright between crude iron bars and cuffs, mounted as if for museum display. The man was dressed in severe black, with a nineteenth-century frock coat and striped pants.

  “Who—?” Nora managed to say.

  But Pendergast was transfixed, hearing nothing, his face rigid. All his attention was concentrated on the mounted man. The light played mercilessly about the corpse. It lingered for a long time on one particular detail—a pallid hand, the flesh shrunken and shriveled, a single knucklebone poking from a tear in the rotten flesh.

  Nora stared at the exposed knuckle, red and ivory against the parchment skin. With a nauseous lurch in the pit of her stomach, she realized that the hand was missing all its fingernails; that, in fact, nothing remained of the fingertips but bloody stumps, punctuated by protruding bones.

  Then—slowly, inexorably—the light began traveling up the front of the corpse. The beam rose past the buttons of the coat, up the starched shirtfront, before at last stopping on the face.

  It was mummified, shrunken, wizened. And yet it was surprisingly well preserved, all the features modeled as finely as if carved from stone. The lips, which had dried and shriveled, were drawn back in a rictus of merriment, exposing two beautiful rows of white teeth. Only the eyes were gone: empty sockets like bottomless pools no light could illuminate.

  There was a hollow, muffled sound of rustling coming from inside the skull.

  The journey through the house had already numbed Nora with horror. But now her mind went blank with an even worse shock: the shock of recognition.

  She automatically turned, speechless, to Pendergast. His frame remained rigid, his eyes wide and staring. Whatever it was he had expected to find, it was not this.

  She shifted her horrified gaze back at the corpse. Even in death, there could be no question. The corpse had the same marble-colored skin, the same refined features, the same thin lips and aquiline nose, the same high smooth forehead and delicate chin, the same fine pale hair—as Pendergast himself.

  SIX

  CUSTER OBSERVED THE PERP—HE’D ALREADY BEGUN TO call him that—with deep satisfaction. The man stood in his office, hands cuffed behind him, black tie askew and white shirt rumpled, hair disheveled, dark circles of sweat beneath his armpits. How are the mighty fallen, indeed. He’d held out a long time, kept up that arrogant, impatient facade. But now, the eyes were red, the lips trembling. He hadn’t believed it was really going to happen to him. It was the cuffs that did it, Custer thought knowingly to himself. He had seen it happen many times before, to men a lot tougher than Brisbane. Something about the cool clasp of the manacles around your wrists, the realization that you were under arrest, powerless—in custody—was more than some people could take.

  The true, the pure, police work was over—now it was just a matter of collecting all the little evidentiary details, work for the lower echelons to complete. Custer himself could take leave of the scene.

  He glanced at Noyes and saw admiration shining in the small hound face. Then he turned back to the perp.

  “Well, Brisbane,” he said. “It all falls into place, doesn’t it?”

  Brisbane looked at him with uncomprehending eyes.

  “Murderers always think they’re smarter than everyone else. Especially the police. But when you get down to it, Brisbane, you really didn’t play it smart at all. Keeping the disguise right here in your office, for example. And then there was the matter of all those witnesses. Trying to hide evidence, lying to me about how often you were in the Archives. Killing victims so close to your own place of work, your place of residence. The list goes on, doesn’t it?”

  The door opened and a uniformed officer slipped a fax into Custer’s hand.

  “And here’s another little fact just in. Yes, the little facts can be so inconvenient.” He read over the fax. “Ah. And now we know where you got your medical training, Brisbane: you were pre-med at Yale.” He handed the fax to Noyes. “Switched to geology your junior year. Then to law.” Custer shook his head again, wonderingly, at the bottomless stupidity of criminals.

  Brisbane finally managed to speak. “I’m no murderer! Why would I kill those people?”

  Custer shrugged philosophically. “The very question I asked you. But then, why do any serial killers kill? Why did Jack the Ripper kill? Why Jeffrey Dahmer? That’s a question for the psychiatrists to answer. Or maybe for God.”

  On this note, Custer turned back to Noyes. “Set up a press conference for midnight. One Police Plaza. No, hold on—let’s make it on the front steps of the Museum. Call the commissioner, call the press. And most importantly, call the mayor, on his private line at Gracie Mansion. This is one call he’ll be happy to get out of bed for. Tell them we collared the Surgeon.”

  “Yes, sir!” said Noyes, turning to go.

  “My God, the publicity…” Brisbane’s voice was high, strangled. “Captain, I’ll have your badge for this…” He choked up with fear and rage, unable to continue.

  But Custer wasn’t listening. He’d had another masterstroke.

  “Just a minute!” he called to Noyes. “Make sure the mayor knows that he’ll be the star of our show. We’ll let him make the announcement.”

  As the door closed, Custer turned his thoughts to the mayor. The election was a week away. He would need the boost. Letting him make the announcement was a clever move; very clever. Rumor had it that the job of commissioner would become vacant after reelection. And, after all, it was never too early to hope.

  SEVEN

  AGAIN, NORA LOOKED AT PENDERGAST. AND AGAIN SHE was unnerved by the depth of his shock. His eyes seemed glued to the face of the corpse: the parchment skin, the delicate, aristocratic features, the hair so blond it could have been white.

  “The face. It looks just like—” Nora struggled to understand, to articulate her thoughts.

  Pendergast did not respond.

  “It looks just like you,” Nora finally managed.

  “Yes,” came the whispered response. “Very much like me.”

  “But who is it—?”

  “Enoch Leng.”

  Something in the way he said this caused Nora’s skin to crawl.

  “Leng? But how can that be? I thought you said he was alive.”

  With a visible effort Pendergast wrenched his eyes from the glass case and turned them on her. In them, she read many things: horror, pain, dread. His face remained colorless in the dim light.

  “He was. Until recently. Someone appears to have killed Leng. Tortured him to death. And put him in that case. It seems we are now dealing with that other someone.”

  “I still don’t—”

  Pendergast held up one hand. “I cannot speak of it now,” was all he said.
<
br />   He turned from the figure, slowly, almost painfully, his light stabbing farther into the gloom.

  Nora inhaled the antique, dust-laden air. Everything was so strange, so terrible and unexpected; the kind of weirdness that happened only in a nightmare. She tried to calm her pounding heart.

  “Now he is unconscious, being dragged,” whispered Pendergast. His eyes were once again on the floor, but his voice and manner remained dreadfully changed.

  With the flashlight as a guide, they followed the marks across the reception hall to a set of closed doors. Pendergast opened them to reveal a carpeted, well-appointed space: a two-story library, filled with leather-bound books. The beam probed farther, slicing through drifting clouds of dust. In addition to books, Nora saw that, again, many of the shelves were lined with specimens, all carefully labeled. There were also numerous freestanding specimens in the room, draped in rotting duck canvas. A variety of wing chairs and sofas were positioned around the library, the leather dry and split, the stuffing unraveling.

  The beam of the flashlight licked over the walls. A salver sat on a nearby table, holding a crystal decanter of what had once been port or sherry: a brown crust lined its bottom. Next to the tray sat a small, empty glass. An unsmoked cigar, shriveled and furred with mold, lay alongside it. A fireplace carved of gray marble was set into one of the walls, a fire laid but not lit. Before it was a tattered zebra skin, well chewed by mice. A sideboard nearby held more crystal decanters, each with a brown or black substance dried within. A hominid skull—Nora recognized it as Australopithecine—sat on a side table with a candle set into it. An open book lay nearby.

  Pendergast’s light lingered on the open book. Nora could see it was an ancient medical treatise, written in Latin. The page showed engravings of a cadaver in various stages of dissection. Of all the objects in the library, only this looked fresh, as if it had been handled recently. Everything else was layered with dust.