The man’s eyes finally settled on him.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about a homicide that took place two weeks ago in the New York Museum of Natural History.”
The man looked at him placidly, then his eyes drifted away.
“When were you last in New York?”
“The lilies,” the man replied. His voice was surprisingly high and musical for such a large man.
“What lilies?”
“The lilies,” the man said in a tone of wistfulness combined with pained reverie.
“What about the lilies?”
“The lilies,” the man said, his eyes snapping back to D’Agosta, startling him.
This was nuts. “Does the name Jonathan Waldron ring a bell?”
“The smell,” the man said, the wistful tone in his voice increasing. “That lovely smell, the scent of lilies. It’s gone. Now… it smells terrible. Awful.”
D’Agosta stared at the man. Was he faking? “We know you stole the identity of Professor Jonathan Waldron to gain access to a skeleton in the Museum of Natural History. You worked with a technician in the Osteology Department of the Museum by the name of Victor Marsala.”
The man went abruptly silent.
D’Agosta leaned forward, clasped his hands together. “I’m going to get to the point. I think you killed Victor Marsala.”
The rocking stopped. The man’s eyes drifted away from D’Agosta.
“In fact, I know you killed him. And now that we’ve got your DNA, we’re going to look for a match with DNA from the crime scene. And we’re going to find it.”
Silence.
“What’d you do with the leg bone you stole?”
Silence.
“You know what I think? I think you’d better get yourself an attorney, pronto.”
The man had gone still as a statue. D’Agosta took a deep breath.
“Listen,” he said, increasing the menacing tone. “You’re being held here because you assaulted a federal officer. That’s bad enough. But I’m here because the NYPD are going to extradite you to the fine Empire State for murder one. We’ve got eyewitnesses. We’ve got you on video. If you don’t start cooperating, you’re going to be so far up shit creek that not even Lewis and Clark could paddle you back. Last chance.”
The man was now looking around the room as if he’d forgotten D’Agosta was even there.
A great weariness settled over D’Agosta. He hated interrogations like this, with the repeated questions and mulish suspects—and this guy seemed loony, to boot. He was sure they had their man—they were just going to have to build the case without a confession.
The door slid open, and D’Agosta looked up to see the dark figure of Pendergast standing in the hallway. He gave a gesture as if to say: Mind if I try?
D’Agosta picked up his notebook and stood up. Sure, his answering shrug said, knock yourself out.
He went into the observation room next door and took a seat beside Spandau. He watched as Pendergast made himself comfortable in one of the chairs opposite the suspect. He seemed to spend an interminable amount of time adjusting his tie, buttoning his jacket, examining his cufflinks, adjusting his collar. At last, he sat forward, elbows on the desk, fingertips resting lightly on the scuffed wood. For a moment the fingertips drummed a nervous tattoo, then—as if recollecting himself—he curled them into his palms. He stared across the table, gaze resting lightly on his attacker. And then—just when D’Agosta thought he would burst from pent-up impatience—Pendergast began to speak in his dulcet, gracious accent.
“In the parts I come from, it is seen as unbearably rude not to refer to somebody by his proper name,” he began. “The last time we met, you seemed unwilling to supply that name—a name that I know is not Waldron. Have you changed your mind?”
The man looked back at him but did not reply.
“Very well. Since I abhor rudeness, I shall confer on you a name of my choosing. I shall call you Nemo, which, as you may know, is Latin for ‘no one.’ ”
This did not elicit any result.
“I don’t wish to waste as much time on this visit as I did on my last, Mr. Nemo. So let us be brief. Are you willing to tell me who hired you?”
Silence.
“Are you willing to tell me why you were hired, or the purpose of that bizarre trap?”
Silence.
“If you do not wish to provide names, are you at least willing to tell me what the intended outcome of all this was to be?”
Silence.
Pendergast examined his gold watch with an idle gesture. “I hold the key to whether you will be tried in state or federal court. By talking or not talking to me, you can choose between Rikers Island or the Florence Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado. Rikers is a hell on earth. ADX Florence is a hell that not even Dante could have imagined.” He peered at the man with a peculiar intensity. “The furniture in each cell is made of poured concrete. The shower is on a timer. It goes off three times a week, at five AM, for exactly three minutes. From the window, you can see only cement and sky. You get one hour of ‘exercise’ a day in a concrete pit. ADX Florence has fourteen hundred remote-controlled steel doors and is surrounded by pressure pads and multiple rings of twelve-foot razor-wire fences. There your very existence will vanish from the tablets of history. If you don’t talk to me right now, you truly will become ‘no one.’ ”
Pendergast stopped speaking. The man shifted in his seat. D’Agosta, watching through the one-way glass, was now convinced the guy was crazy. No sane man could have resisted that line of questioning.
“There are no lilies in ADX Florence,” Pendergast said quietly.
D’Agosta exchanged a puzzled glance with Spandau.
“Lilies,” the man said, slowly, as if tasting the word.
“Yes. Lilies. Such a lovely flower, don’t you think? With such a delicate, exquisite aroma.”
The man hunched forward. Pendergast had finally gotten his attention.
“But then, the scent is gone, isn’t it?”
The man seemed to tense. He shook his head slowly, from side to side.
“No—I’m wrong. The lilies are still there; you said as much. But something’s wrong with them. They’ve gone off.”
“They stink,” the man muttered.
“Yes,” Pendergast said, his voice a curious mixture of empathy and mockery. “Nothing smells worse than a rotting flower. What a stench it produces!”
Pendergast had suddenly raised his voice.
“Get it out of my nose!” the man screamed.
“I can’t do that,” Pendergast said, his voice abruptly dropping to a whisper. “You won’t have lilies in your cell at ADX Florence. But the stink will remain. And it will grow as the rottenness increases. Until you—”
With a sudden, animal cry, the man leapt out of his chair and across the table at Pendergast, his cuffed hands like talons, his eyes wide with murderous fury, flecks of foam and spittle flying from his mouth as he screeched. With a swift dodge, like a bullfighter, Pendergast rose out of his chair and sidestepped the attack; the two guards came forward, Tasers at the ready, and zapped the man. It took three shots to subdue him. In the end he lay draped across the table, twitching spasmodically, tiny wisps of smoke rising toward the microphone and ceiling lights. Pendergast stood to one side, examining the man with a clinical eye, then turned and strolled out of the room.
A moment later Pendergast entered the observation room, flicking a piece of lint off the shoulder of his suit with a look of irritation. “Well, Vincent,” he said. “I don’t see much point in our remaining here any longer. What is the expression? I’m afraid our friend is, ah, ‘bird-shit’ crazy?”
“Bat-shit crazy.”
“Thank you.” He turned to Spandau. “Once again, Mr. Spandau, I thank you for your invaluable assistance. Please let me know if his ravings grow lucid.”
Spandau shook the proffered hand. “I will.”
As the two left the prison, Pe
ndergast took out his cell phone and began to dial. “I’d worried we might have to take the red-eye back to New York,” he said. “But our friend proved so unforthcoming we may catch an earlier flight. I’ll just check, if you don’t mind. We aren’t going to get anything else out of him now—or, I fear, ever.”
D’Agosta took a deep breath. “Mind telling me what the hell just happened in there?”
“What do you mean?”
“All those crazy questions. About flowers, lilies. How’d you know he’d react that way?”
Pendergast stopped dialing and lowered the phone. “It was an educated guess.”
“Yeah, but how?”
There was a pause before Pendergast replied. When he did, it was in a low tone indeed. “Because, my dear Vincent, our prisoner is not the only one who has begun smelling flowers of late.”
Pendergast slipped into the music room of the Riverside Drive mansion so abruptly that Constance, startled, stopped playing the harpsichord. She stopped to watch as he made his way to the sideboard, put down a large sheaf of papers, removed a bulbous glass, poured himself a large measure of absinthe, fitted a slotted spoon over the glass, placed a cube of sugar within, dribbled ice water over it from a carafe, and then picked up the papers and went straight to one of the leather armchairs.
“Don’t stop playing on my account,” he said.
Constance, taken aback by his terse tone, resumed playing the Scarlatti sonata. Even though she could only see him out of the corner of her eye, she sensed something was amiss. He took a hasty gulp of the absinthe and placed the glass down with a rattle, then took another, downing a good portion of the drink. One foot tapped against the Persian carpet, unevenly, out of time with the music. He leafed through the papers—which appeared to be an extensive assortment of old scientific treatises, medical journals, and news clippings—before putting them aside. On his third gulp of the drink, Constance stopped playing—it was a fiendishly difficult piece, and demanded absolute concentration—and turned to face him.
“I assume the trip to Indio was a disappointment,” she said.
Pendergast, who was staring now at one of the framed holographs, nodded without looking at her.
“The man remained silent?”
“On the contrary, he was most prolix.”
Constance smoothed down her skirt front. “And?”
“It was all gibberish.”
“What did he say, exactly?”
“As I said, gibberish.”
Constance folded her arms. “I would like to know exactly what he said.”
Pendergast turned to her, his pale eyes narrowing. “You’re rather insistent this evening.”
Constance waited.
“The man spoke of flowers.”
“Lilies, by any chance?”
A hesitation. “Yes. As I have repeatedly said, it was meaningless rubbish.”
Again, Constance fell silent. Neither spoke for several minutes. Pendergast continued to play with his glass, finished it off, rose, and returned to the side table. He reached for the absinthe bottle again.
“Aloysius,” she began. “The man may have spoken rubbish—but it was not meaningless rubbish.”
Ignoring her, Pendergast began preparations for a second drink.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about—a matter of some delicacy.”
“Well, pray be about it, then,” Pendergast said, pouring the absinthe into the reservoir at the bottom of the glass and placing the slotted spoon on top.
“Where’s the bloody sugar?” he muttered to himself.
“I’ve been researching your family history. During our meeting in the gun room yesterday the name of a Dr. Evans Padgett came up. Are you familiar with that name?”
Pendergast placed the cube and began dribbling the ice water. “I’m not fond of drama. Out with it.”
“Dr. Padgett’s wife was poisoned by your great-great-grandfather’s elixir. The man in the Indio jail is suffering from the same symptoms as Padgett’s wife—and as everyone else who took Hezekiah’s patent medicine.”
Pendergast gripped the absinthe glass and took a long drink.
“The person who apparently murdered the Osteological technician at the Museum—and who attacked you—stole a long bone from Padgett’s wife. Why? Perhaps because he was working for someone who was trying to reconstruct the elixir. Clearly, there must have been residues in the bone.”
“What rot,” said Pendergast.
“I fear not. My research into the elixir has been thorough. All the victims spoke of smelling lilies at first—that was part of the elixir’s sales pitch. When they first began taking the elixir, the smell was fleeting, accompanied by a feeling of well-being and mental alertness. With time, the scent became constant. Heavier. With additional doses of elixir, the smell of lilies began to go off, as if they were rotting. The victim became irritable, restless, unable to sleep. The feeling of well-being was replaced by anxiety and manic behavior, with periods of sudden listlessness. At this point, additional doses of the elixir were useless—in fact, they only served to accelerate the victim’s suffering. Ungovernable rages became common, interspersed with periods of extreme lethargy. And then the pain set in: headaches and joint pain, until it became almost impossible to move without excruciating suffering. In—” Constance hesitated. “In the end, death was a release.”
As she was speaking, Pendergast put down the glass and stood up. He began pacing about the room. “I’m well aware of my ancestor’s wrongdoing.”
“There’s another thing: the elixir was administered in vapor form. You didn’t take it as pills or drops. It had to be inhaled.”
More pacing.
“Surely you can see where this is headed,” said Constance.
Pendergast brushed this away with a dismissive gesture.
“Aloysius, for God’s sake, you’ve been poisoned with the elixir. Not only that—but by what was evidently a very concentrated dose!”
“You are growing shrill, Constance.”
“Have you begun to smell lilies?”
“It is a common enough flower.”
“After our conference yesterday, I asked Margo to do a follow-up investigation. She discovered that somebody—no doubt using a false name—did research into Hezekiah’s elixir at both the New York Public Library and the New-York Historical Society.”
Pendergast halted. He sat back down in the armchair and picked up his glass. Leaning back in the chair, he took a quick swig before setting it down.
“Forgive my being blunt. But somebody has taken revenge on you for your ancestor’s sins.”
Pendergast did not seem to hear. He tossed the last of the absinthe down and began to prepare another one.
“You’ve got to get help now, or you’ll end up like that man in California.”
“There is no help for me,” said Pendergast with sudden savagery, “save what I can do for myself. And I will thank you not to interfere with my investigations.”
Constance rose from the piano bench and took a step toward him. “Dear Aloysius. Not so long ago, in this very room, you called me your oracle. Allow me to play that part. You’re growing ill. I can see it. We can help you—all of us. Self-delusion will be fatal—”
“Self-delusion?” Pendergast issued a peal of harsh laughter. “There’s no self-delusion here! I’m acutely aware of my condition. Don’t you think I’ve tried my utmost to find a way to remedy the situation?” He snatched up the pile of papers and dashed them into a corner of the room. “If my ancestor Hezekiah, whose own wife was dying as a result of his elixir, could not find a cure… then how can I? What I cannot abide is your meddling. It’s true, I did call you my oracle. But now you’re becoming my albatross. You’re a woman with an idée fixe, as you demonstrated so dramatically when you precipitated your late paramour into the Stromboli volcano.”
A change came over Constance. Her body went rigid. Her fingers flexed—once only. Sparks flashed in her violet eyes. The v
ery air darkened around her. The change was so abrupt, and with such an undercurrent of menace, that Pendergast, in raising his glass for another sip, was startled and inadvertently jostled his arm, slopping the drink onto his hand.
“If any other man were to have said that to me,” she told him in a low voice, “he would not live out this night.” Then she pivoted on her heel and left the room.
There’s someone to see you, Lieutenant.”
Peter Angler, looking up from the pile of printouts that sat on his desk, raised an inquiring eyebrow at his assistant, Sergeant Slade, who stood in the doorway.
“Who is it?”
“The prodigal son,” Slade said with a thin smile as he stepped aside. A moment later, the lean, ascetic form of Special Agent Pendergast appeared in the doorway.
Angler did a good job of concealing his surprise. Wordlessly, he motioned Pendergast to a chair. There was a different look to the man today, Angler sensed; he wasn’t quite sure what it was, but he thought it had to do with the cast of the man’s eyes, which seemed unusually bright in what was otherwise a pallid face.
He leaned back in his chair, away from the printouts. He’d done enough wooing of this man; he would let the FBI agent speak first.
“I wanted to congratulate you, Lieutenant, on your inspired discovery,” Pendergast began. “It would never have occurred to me to search for an anagram of my son’s name in the passenger manifests from Brazil. It was just like Alban to make a game of it.”
Of course it wouldn’t, Angler thought; that was not the way Pendergast’s mind worked. He wondered, idly, if Alban Pendergast had perhaps been more intelligent than his father.
“I find myself curious,” Pendergast went on. “What day did Alban fly into New York, exactly?”
“It was June fourth,” Angler replied. “On an Air Brazil flight from Rio.”
“June fourth,” Pendergast repeated, almost to himself. “A week before he was murdered.” He glanced back at Angler. “Naturally, once you had found the anagram, you went back and checked earlier manifests?”
“Naturally.”
“And did you find anything else?”
Blue Labyrinth Page 15