She looked directly at Jörgensen. “Where do you hide the combination to the vault?”
The briefest flicker of his eyes, and then he locked them back on her. “What an offensive question! I’ve wasted quite enough time with you already. Good day, Dr. Green.”
Margo rose and left. In that brief moment, his eyes had involuntarily flickered to a spot above and behind her head. As she turned to leave, she observed that the space was occupied by a small, framed botanical print.
She felt hopeful that behind that print would be a safe containing the combination. But how to get Jörgensen out of his bloody office? And even if she found a safe, where would she find its combination? And, assuming she managed to learn the combination, the Herbarium Vault was located deep within the Museum’s basement…
Nevertheless, she had to try.
In the middle of the hallway, she paused. Should she pull a fire alarm? But that would cause the wing to be evacuated and probably get her into trouble.
She continued walking down the hallway, offices and labs on either side. It was still lunch hour, and the place was relatively empty. In one empty lab she spied a Museum phone. She ducked inside, staring at the phone. Could she call him, pretend to be someone’s secretary, ask him to come to a meeting? But he didn’t look like someone who went to meetings… nor someone who would respond favorably to an unexpected summons. And wouldn’t he know most of the secretaries’ voices?
There must be a way to get him out of the office. And that way would be to get him mad, send him off in a fury to dress down a colleague.
She picked up the phone. Instead of calling Jörgensen, she called Frisby’s office. Disguising her voice, she said: “This is the Botany Department office. May I speak with Dr. Frisby? We have a problem.”
Frisby came on a moment later, out of breath. “Yes, what is it?”
“We received your memo about that woman, Dr. Green,” Margo said, keeping her voice muffled and low.
“What about it? She hasn’t been bothering you down there, has she?”
“You know old Dr. Jörgensen? He’s a good friend of Dr. Green. I’m afraid he’s planning to defy your express wishes and give her access to the collection. He’s been railing about your memo all morning. I only mention this because we don’t want trouble, and you know how difficult Dr. Jörgensen can be—”
Frisby slammed down the phone. Margo waited in the empty lab, its door partly open. In a few minutes she heard a huffing sound and an enraged Jörgensen came striding past, face red, looking remarkably robust for his age—no doubt heading for Frisby’s office to set him straight.
Margo quickly hustled down the hall and, to her relief, found that his office door had been left wide open in his hurried exit. She ducked in, eased the door shut, and lifted the botanical print from the wall.
Nothing. No safe—just a blank wall.
She felt crushed. Why had he looked in that direction? There was nothing else on the wall. Maybe it was just a random glance, or maybe she hadn’t gotten a good fix on it. She was about to put the picture back when she noticed a piece of paper taped to the rear of the frame, with a list of numbers on it. All the numbers had been crossed out but the last.
Aloysius Pendergast lay in bed, keeping as still as possible. Every movement, even the tiniest, was an agony. Just breathing in enough air to oxygenate his blood sent white-hot needles of pain through the muscles and nerves of his chest. He could feel a dark presence waiting at the foot of his bed, a succubus ready to climb on top and suffocate him. But whenever he tried to look at it, it vanished, only to reappear when he looked away.
He tried to will the pain away, to lose himself in the contents of his bedroom, to focus his concentration on a painting on the opposite wall, one in which he had often taken solace: a late work by Turner, Schooner off Beachy Head. He would sometimes lose himself for hours in the painting’s many layers of light and shadow, in the way Turner rendered the sheets of spume and the vessel’s storm-tossed sails. But the pain, and the vile reek of rotting lilies—cloying, sickly-sweet, like the stench of suppurating flesh—made such mental escape impossible.
All his usual mechanisms for coping with emotional or physical trauma had been taken away by the sickness. And now the morphine drip was exhausted and would not be replenished for another hour. There was nothing but a landscape of pain, stretching away endlessly on all sides.
Even in this extremity of his illness, Pendergast knew that the malady afflicting him had its ebbs and swells. If he could survive this current onslaught of pain, it would—in time—subside to afford temporary relief. He would be able to breathe again, to speak, even to rise from his bed and move about. But then the swell of pain would return, as it always did—and each time it was worse and more prolonged than before. And he sensed that at some point soon, the escalation of pain would stop subsiding, and the end would come.
And now, at the periphery of his consciousness, came the crest of the wave of pain: a creeping blackness at the edges of his vision, a vignetting of sorts. It was a signal that, within minutes, he would lose consciousness. Initially, he had welcomed this release. But in a cruel twist, he had soon learned there was, in fact, no release. Because the blackness led, not to a void, but to a hallucinogenic underworld of his subconscious self that had proven in some ways even worse than the pain.
Moments later the blackness caught him in its grip, tugging him from the bed and the dimly lighted room like an undertow catching an exhausted swimmer. There was a brief, sickening sensation of falling. And then the darkness melted away, revealing the scene like a curtain parting from a stage.
He was standing on a scarified ledge of hardened lava, high on the flanks of an active volcano. It was twilight. To his left, the ribbed flanks of the volcano led down to a distant shore, so far away as to seem a different world, where little clutches of whitewashed buildings huddled at the edge of the spume, their evening lights piercing the gloom. Directly ahead and below him was an immense chasm—a monstrous gash ripped into the very heart of the volcano. He could see the living lava roiling like blood within it, glowing a rich angry red in the shadow of the crater that rose just above. Clouds of sulfur steamed up from the chasm, and black flecks of ash, whipped by a hell-wind, skittered through the air.
Pendergast knew precisely where he was: standing on the Bastimento Ridge of the Stromboli volcano, looking down into the infamous Sciara del Fuoco—the Slope of Fire. He had stood on this same ridge once before, just over three years ago, when he had witnessed one of the most shocking dramas of his life.
Except the place now looked different. Brutal at the best of times, it had become—playing out as it was in the theater of his fevered hallucination—something of pure nightmare. The sky encircling him was not the deep purple of twilight, but rather a sickly green, the color of rotten eggs. Livid flashes of orange and blue lightning seared the heavens. Bloated crimson-colored clouds scudded before a guttering, sallow sun. A ghastly Technicolor hue illuminated the entire scene.
As he took in the hellish vision, he was startled to see a person. Not ten feet in front of him, a man sat on a deck chair set upon a fin of old lava that stood out precariously from the ridge above the smoking Sciara del Fuoco. He was wearing dark glasses, a straw hat, a floral shirt, and Bermuda shorts, and was sipping what looked like lemonade out of a tall glass. Pendergast did not need to draw any closer to recognize, in profile, the aquiline nose, neatly trimmed beard, ginger-colored hair. This was his brother, Diogenes. Diogenes—who had disappeared at this very spot, in the horrific scene that had played out between himself and Constance Greene.
As Pendergast watched, Diogenes took a long, slow sip of the lemonade. He gazed out over the boiling fury of the Sciara del Fuoco with the placid expression of a tourist gazing out at the Mediterranean from the balcony of a Nice hotel. “Ave, Frater,” he said without turning toward him.
Pendergast did not reply.
“I would ask after your health, but present circum
stances obviate the need for that particular bit of hypocrisy.”
Pendergast merely stared at this bizarre materialization: his dead brother, lounging on a beach chair at the edge of an active volcano.
“Do you know,” Diogenes went on, “I find the irony—the fitting irony—of your present predicament almost overwhelming. After all we’ve been through, after all my schemes, your end will come at the hands, not of myself, but of your own issue. Your very own son. Think on’t, brother! I should have liked to have met him: Alban and I would have had a lot in common. I could have taught him many things.”
Pendergast did not respond. There was no point in reacting to a feverish delusion.
Diogenes took another sip of lemonade. “But what makes the irony so deliciously complete is that Alban was merely the precipitant of your undoing. Your real killer is our own great-great-grandfather Hezekiah. Talk about the sins of the fathers! Not only is it his own ‘elixir’ killing you—but it is because of the elixir that an indirect victim of it, this Barbeaux fellow, is now taking his revenge.” Diogenes paused. “Hezekiah; Alban; myself. It all makes for a nice family circle.”
Pendergast remained silent.
Still offering only his profile, Diogenes stared out over the violent spectacle churning at their feet. “I’d think you would welcome this chance for atonement.”
Pendergast, goaded, finally spoke. “Atonement? What for?”
“You, with your prudery, your hidebound sense of morality, your misguided desire to do right in the world—it’s always been a mystery to me that you weren’t tortured by the fact we’ve lived comfortably off Hezekiah’s fortune all our lives.”
“You’re talking about something that happened a hundred and twenty-five years ago.”
“Does the span of years do anything to lessen the agony of his victims? How long does it take to wash the blood from all that money?”
“It is a false syllogism. Hezekiah profited unscrupulously, but we were the innocent inheritors of that wealth. Money is fungible. We are not guilty.”
Diogenes chuckled—barely audible over the roar of the volcano—then shook his head. “How ironic that I, Diogenes, have become your conscience.”
The enervating anguish of Pendergast’s conscious self began to break through the hallucination. He staggered on the ridge of lava; righted himself. “I…” he began. “I… am not… responsible. And I will not argue with a hallucination.”
“Hallucination?” And now, finally, Diogenes turned to face his brother. The right side of his face—the side he had been presenting to Pendergast—looked as normal and as finely cast as it always had. But the left side was horribly burned, scar tissue puckering and veining the skin from chin to hairline like the bark of a tree, cheekbone and the orbit of a missing eye exposed and white.
“Just keep telling yourself that, frater,” he said over the roar of the mountain. And as slowly as he had turned to face Pendergast, Diogenes now turned away once more, hiding the horrible sight, his gaze once again on the Sciara del Fuoco. And as he did so the nightmare scene began to waver, dissolve, and fade away, leaving Pendergast once again in his own bedroom, the lights dim around him, fresh waves of pain surging over him once more.
Far below Pendergast’s bedroom, Constance stood at one of the last of the long sub-basement rooms, breathing hard. A black nylon bag was slung over her shoulder. Traceries of cobwebs hung from her dress.
She had reached the end of Dr. Enoch’s cabinet. It was two thirty PM, and she’d spent hours trying to assemble the necessary compounds for the antidote. Putting the nylon bag down, she consulted her list again, although she knew perfectly well what was still missing. Chloroform and oil of chenopodium.
She had found a large carboy of chloroform, but it hadn’t been well sealed and, over the years, had evaporated. She had found no trace of chenopodium. Chloroform was available by prescription, but that would take too long and Constance did not expect that it would be easy to persuade Dr. Stone, upstairs, to write a scrip. But oil of chenopodium was the bigger problem, as it was no longer used in herbal preparations because of its toxic nature. If she couldn’t find it down here, she would be out of luck. There had to be some in the collections somewhere, as it had been a common ingredient in patent medicines.
But she had seen none.
She started back through the rooms, sweeping beneath the archways. She had skipped the few remaining ruined storage rooms on her outward exploration. Now she would inspect those, too. Over the months, she and Proctor had undertaken the painstaking cleaning process—tossing away the piles of broken glass, gingerly clearing away the crushed artifacts or spilled chemicals.
What if the bottles of oil of chenopodium had been among those broken and disposed of…?
She paused in the one room they had not yet restored. Toppled shelves lay strewn about, and millions of fragments of broken glass winked and glittered on the floor, which was stained with various colored substances and sticky, dried pools. A vile, moldy smell hung in the air here like a toxic miasma. But not everything was broken: many bottles lay on the floor intact, and some shelves still were upright or leaning, crowded with jars of numerous colors, each with a label written in Enoch Leng’s elegant hand.
She started going through the unbroken bottles on some shelves that had escaped the general destruction. The bottles rattled under her fingers as she sorted through them, one Latin name after another, an endless procession of compounds.
It was maddening. The cataloging system Dr. Enoch had used had all been in his own head—and after his death she had never been able to decipher it. She suspected it was random—and that the doctor had simply recorded the entire library of chemicals in his photographic memory.
Completing one shelf, she started on the next, and then the next. A bottle fell and shattered; she kicked the pieces aside. A stench rose up. She kept going, sorting faster and faster, more bottles dropping in her haste. She looked at her watch. Three o’clock.
With a hiss of irritation, she moved to the intact bottles lying about the floor—the ones that hadn’t broken. Stooping, her feet crunching over broken glass, she continued searching, plucking up a bottle, reading the label, tossing it aside. Here were many oils: calendula, borage seed, primrose, mullein, poke root… but no chenopodium. With sudden frustration she lashed out at one of the shelves she had already ransacked, sweeping all the bottles to the floor. They landed with a crashing and popping sound, and now a truly horrific stench rose up.
She stepped aside. Her loss of control was regrettable. Taking a series of deep breaths, she regained her presence of mind and began searching the last of the shelves. Still nothing.
And suddenly there it was: a big bottle labeled OIL OF CHENOPODIUM. Right in front of her.
Scooping up the bottle, she put it in her bag and continued searching for chloroform. Almost the next bottle she picked up turned out to be a small, well-sealed vial of that, too. She stuffed it into the bag, rose, and swept toward the stairs leading to the elevator.
She took this sudden reversal of luck to be a sign. But even as she reached the library, the bookshelves sliding back into place, Mrs. Trask was there, proffering her a phone.
“It’s the lieutenant,” she said.
“Tell him I’m not in.”
With a look of disapproval, Mrs. Trask continued holding out the telephone. “He’s most insistent.”
Constance took the phone and made an effort to be cordial. “Yes, Lieutenant?”
“I want you and Margo down here, on the double.”
“We’re rather occupied at the present time,” said Constance.
“I’ve got some vital information. There are some really, really bad people involved in this. You and Margo are going to get yourselves killed. I want to help.”
“You can’t help us,” said Constance.
“Why?”
“Because…” She went silent.
“Because you’re planning some illegal shit?”
&
nbsp; No answer.
“Constance, get your ass down here now. Or so help me God I’ll come up there with a posse and bring you down myself.”
Let’s go through it,” D’Agosta said. It was late afternoon, and Margo and Constance were seated in the lieutenant’s office. “You say you’ve found a cure for what poisoned Pendergast?”
“An antidote,” said Constance. “Developed by Hezekiah Pendergast to counteract the effects of his own elixir.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“Not positive,” said Margo. “But we’ve got to try.”
D’Agosta sat back. This sounded crazy. “And you’ve got all the ingredients?”
“All but two,” Margo said. “They’re plants, and we know where to get them.”
“Where?”
Silence.
D’Agosta stared at Margo. “Let me guess: you’re going to rob the Museum.”
More silence. Margo’s face looked white and strained, but there was a hard glitter in her eyes.
D’Agosta smoothed a hand over his balding pate and looked back at the two defiant women sitting across the desk. “Look. I’ve been a cop for a long time. I’m not an idiot, and I know you’re planning something illegal. Frankly, I don’t care about that right now. Pendergast is my friend. What I do care about is you being successful in getting those plants. And not being killed in the process. You understand?”
Margo finally nodded.
D’Agosta turned to Constance. “You?”
“I understand,” said Constance, but he could tell from her face that she did not agree. “You said you had vital information. What is it?”
“If I’m right, this Barbeaux is a lot more dangerous than anyone imagined. You’re going to need backup. Let me help you get those plants, wherever they are.”
More silence. Finally, Constance rose. “How can you help us? You yourself pointed out that what we’re doing is illegal.”
“Constance is right,” said Margo. “Can you imagine the red tape? Look. Pendergast—your friend—is dying. We are almost out of time.”
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