Dance of Death (46 page)

The Event which had robbed Diogenes of color had also stolen his ability to sleep. Full oblivion was denied him. Instead, he drifted, he lay on his bed in a world of waking dreams: memories of the past, conflagrations, conversations, conflations, certain animals poisoned and dying with exquisite restraint, racked bodies on splintered roods, a hair shirt fashioned from nerve ganglia, a mason jar of freshblood-the disconnected images from his past played on the screen of his mind like a magic-lantern show. Diogenes never resisted them. Resistance would be futile, and futility itself was, of course, to be resisted. He let the scenes drift in and out as they would.

All this would change. The great wheel would come around, because he-after all-was about to break a butterfly upon a wheel. The thing that had preyed upon his mind would at long last be exorcised. His revenge on his brother was all but complete.

As he drove, Diogenes let his thoughts drift back almost thirty years. At first-after it had happened-he had lost himself in the inner maze of his mind, wandering as far from reality and sanity as it was possible to go, while even a small part of him remained prosaic, quotidian, able to interact with the outside world, whose true nature now-thanks to the Event-stood revealed to him.

But then-slowly, very slowly-insanity alone lost its power to shelter. It was no longer a comfort, even a bitter one. So he came back, but he was like a diver who had gone too deep, run out of air, and rushed to the surface only to be racked by the bends.

That was the worst moment of all.

And yet it was at this very moment, as he balanced on the cruel knife-edge of reality, that he comprehended there
was
a purpose waiting for him back in the real world. A double purpose: a reckoning and a reclamation. It would take decades of planning. It would be, in his own self-referential world, a work of art: the masterpiece of a lifetime.

Why then Ile fit you.

And so Diogenes did return to the world.

He knew now what kind of place it really was and what kind of creatures inhabited it. It was not a lovely world, no, not a lovely world at all. It was a world of pain and evil and cruelty, walked on by vile creatures of piss and excrement and bile. But his newfound purpose, the end toward which he had bent all his intellect, made such a world
just
bearable. He became a chameleon par excellence, hiding everything,
everything,
behind a fast-changing skin of disguise, prevarication, misdirection, irony, cool detachment.

At times, when his will threatened to crumble, he found that certain temporary pastimes were enough to divert him, to haul him up from the deeps. The emotion that sustained him some might call hatred, but for him it was the mead that nourished him, that gave him superhuman patience and a fanatic's attention to detail. He found he could live not merely a double life or a triple life, but in fact could assume the very personalities and lives of half a dozen invented people, in several different countries, as the needs of his work of art required.

Some of the personalities he had assumed years, even decades before, as he laid the complex groundwork of his master plan.

Ahead, an intersection. Diogenes slowed, turned right.

Night was relinquishing its hold on the world, but Suffolk County still slept. It gave Diogenes comfort to know that his brother, Aloysius, was not one of those sunken in voluptuous or erotic stupefaction. Nor would Aloysius sleep well again: ever. Just now he would be growing fully conscious of the dimensions of what he, Diogenes, had done to him.

His plan had the power and functional perfection of a well-oiled bear trap. And now Aloysius was caught in its jaws, awaiting the arrival of the hunter and the merciful bullet to the brain. Only, Diogenes would show no such mercy.

His eyes strayed back to the satchel on the passenger seat. He had not opened it since filling it hours before. The transcendental moment, when he looked at-or rather
into
-the diamonds at leisure had almost arrived. The moment of freedom, of release, he had so long yearned for.

For only through the intense, brilliant, refracted light issued by a deeply colored diamond could Diogenes escape, if only for a moment, his black-and-white prison. Only then could he recapture that faintest and most sought-after of his memories-the essence of color. And of all the colors he most longed for, red was his overriding passion. Red in all its myriad manifestations.

Lucifer's Heart. That was where he would begin and where he would end. The alpha and the omega of color.

Then there would be Viola to take care of.

The instruments had all been cleaned, polished, honed, and stropped to their sharpest edges. Viola would take some time. She was a
grand cru
wine that merited being taken up from the cellar, brought to room temperature, uncorked, and allowed to breathe- before being enjoyed, one exquisite sip after another, until nothing was left. She had to suffer-not for her sake, but for the marks it would leave on her body. And no one would be better able to interpret those marks than Aloysius. They would induce a suffering in him equal to, if not exceeding, the pain they caused the body's owner.

Perhaps he would start with a re-creation, in the cottage's damp stone basement, of the scene depicted in
Judith and Holofernes.
That had always been his favorite painting of Caravaggio's. He'd stood in front of it for hours, at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome, rapt in admiration: the lovely little furrow of determination on Judith's brow as she did the knifework; the way she kept every part of her body, save her bare hands and arms, away from the messy work in progress; the bright strong cords of blood that slashed diagonally across the bedsheets. Yes, that would make a fine start. Perhaps he and Viola could even study the painting together, before he got to work. Judith and Holofernes. With the roles reversed, of course, and the addition of a pewter bleeding bowl so that none of the precious nectar would be lost...

Diogenes passed through the empty village of Gerard Park. Gar-diners Bay appeared ahead of him, a dull cold sheet of zinc broken by the dark outlines of distant islands. The car eased right onto Gerard Drive, Acabonack Harbor on one side, the bay on his left. Less than a mile more now. As he drove, he smiled faintly.

"Vale, frater,"
he murmured in Latin.
"Vale."

Viola had pulled the chair up to the barred window, and she watched the first streak of light creep over the black Atlantic-a smudge of dirty chalk-with a sense of surreal detachment. It was like a nightmare she couldn't wake from, a dream as real and vivid as it was senseless. What scared her most of all was the realization of just how much trouble and expense Diogenes had gone to in creating this prison cell-riveted steel walls, floor, and ceiling, a steel door with a tumbler lock from a safe, not to mention the unbreakable windows, the special plumbing and wiring. It was as secure as a cell in the highest security prison-maybe more so.

Why?
Was it really possible that, with dawn approaching, she had mere minutes to live?

Yet again, she forced this useless speculation from her mind.

She had long since concluded that escape was impossible. A great deal of thought had gone into constructing her prison, and her every effort to seek a way out had been anticipated and blocked. He had been gone all night-at least that's what the utter silence seemed to tell her. From time to time, she had banged and screamed on the door, at one point striking a chair against it again and again until the chair had come apart in her hands. No one had come.

The smear of chalk took on a faintly bloody tinge: a lurid glow over the heaving Atlantic. A ferocious wind dotted the dark ocean with dim flecks of whitecaps. Wisps of frozen snow-or was it sand?-whipped along the ground.

Suddenly, she sat up, abruptly alert. She had heard the faint muffled sound of a door opening. She rushed to her own door, pressed an ear against it. The very faintest of sounds came from below: a footfall, the closing of a door.

He was back.

She felt a sudden surge of fear and glanced across the room toward the window. The limb of the sun was just now climbing above the gray Atlantic, and just as quickly rising into a black bar of storm cloud. He had made it a point to arrive just at dawn. In time for the execution.

Viola curled her lip. If he thought he was going to kill her without a struggle, he was sorely mistaken. She would fight him to the death...

She swallowed, realizing how foolish her bravado was, aimed against a man who would surely have a gun and know exactly how to use it.

She fought against a sudden, panicky hyperventilation. A strange set of conflicting feelings rose within her: on the one hand, an urgent, instinctive desire for survival at whatever the cost; on the other, an ingrained need to die-if death, in fact, was near-with dignity, not with screaming and struggling.

There were more sounds and, without thinking, she immediately lay down on the floor to listen at the tiny space between the door and the threshold. The sounds were still faint and muffled.

She rose and ran into the bathroom, tore the toilet paper from its receptacle, unraveled it with a fierce shake of her hand, and pulled the cardboard tube free. Then she ran back to the door frame, pressing one end of the tube to her ear and squeezing the other end up against the long crack of the jamb.

Now she could hear much better: the rustle of clothing, the setting down of several things, the sound of a latch being undone.

There was a sudden, sharp intake of breath. Next, a long, long silence. Five minutes passed.

Then came a strange and terrible sound: a low, agonized keening, almost like the warning moan of a cat. It rose and fell in singsong fashion before suddenly ascending in volume to become a shriek of pure, undistilled, absolute anguish. It was inhuman, it was the shriek of the living dead, it was the most horrifying sound she had ever heard-and it came
from him.

FIFTY-SIX

The cab pulled up in front of the Times Building. Smithback impatiently signed the credit card receipt-the fare was $425-paying with the card he'd picked up at his apartment. He handed the slip back to the cabbie, who took it with a frown.

"Where's the tip?" the driver said.

"Are you kidding? I could've flown to Aruba for what I just paid you."

"Look, pal, I got gas, insurance, expenses up the wazoo-"

Smithback slammed the door and ran into the building, sprinting for the elevator. He would just touch base with Davies, let his boss know he was back in town, make sure his job wasn't on the line- and then head straight to the museum and Nora. It was quarter after nine: she hadn't been at the apartment, and he assumed she'd already left for work.

He punched the button for the thirty-third floor and waited while the elevator rose with maddening slowness. At last, it arrived, and he exited the car and jogged down the hall, pausing outside Davies's door just long enough to catch his breath and smooth down the unruly cowlick that always seemed to pop up at the worst possible time.

He took a deep breath, gave the door a polite rap.

"It's open," came the voice.

Smithback stepped forward into the doorway. Thank God: Harriman wasn't anywhere in sight.

Davies glanced up from his desk. "Bill! They told me you were at St. Luke's, practically at death's door."

"I made a quick recovery."

Davies looked him over, his eyes veiled. "Glad to see you looking so fat and happy." He paused. "I take it you'll be providing us with a note from your doctor?"

"Of course, of course," Smithback stammered. He assumed Pendergast could fix that, as he seemed able to fix everything else.

"You picked a convenient time to disappear." Davies's voice was laced with irony.

"I didn't pick it. It picked me."

"Have a seat."

"Well, I was just on my way-"

"Oh, I beg your pardon-I didn't realize you had a pressing engagement."

On hearing the icy tone in the voice, Smithback decided to sit down. He was dying to see Nora, but it wouldn't pay to piss off Davies any more than he already had.

"Bryce Harriman was able to take up the slack during your recent indisposition, both on the Duchamp killing and that other one up at the museum, since the police are now saying they're linked-"

Smithback sat forward in the chair. "Excuse me. Did you say a murder up at the museum? What museum?"

"You really have been out of it. The New York Museum of Natural History. A curator was murdered there three days ago-"

"Who?"

"Nobody I'd heard of. Don't worry about it, you're long off that story-Harriman's taken it over." He snapped up a manila envelope. "Here's what I've got for you, instead. It's a big story, and I'll be frank with you, Bill: I feel a certain trepidation entrusting it to someone in shaky health. I'd have considered passing it on to Harriman, too, only he's got a lot on his plate as it is and he was already in the field when the news broke twenty minutes ago. There was a big robbery at the museum last night. Seems it's a busy place these days. You're the one with contacts there, you wrote that book on the place-so it's your story, despite my feelings of concern."

"But who-?"