The Cabinet of Curiosities (45 page)

The Surgeon. Professor Enoch Leng.

The sound of a footfall brought him to full alertness. There was a scraping noise, then a painfully bright rectangle of light appeared in the wall of darkness ahead. In the reflected light, Smithback could see he was in a small basement room with a cement floor, stone walls and an iron door. He felt a surge of hope, even gratitude.

A pair of moist lips appeared at the iron opening. They moved.

“Please do not discompose yourself,” came the voice. “All this will be over soon. Struggle is unnecessary.”

There was something almost familiar in that voice, and yet inexpressibly strange and terrible, like the whispered tones of nightmare.

The slot slid shut, leaving Smithback in darkness once more.

T
HE BIG
R
OLLS
-R
OYCE GLIDED ITS WAY ALONG THE ONE-LANE ROAD THAT
crossed Little Governors Island. Fog lay thick in the marshes and hollows, obscuring the surrounding East River and the ramparts of Manhattan that lay beyond. The headlights slid past a row of ancient, long-dead chestnut trees, then striped their way across heavy wrought iron gates. As the car stopped, the lights came to rest on a bronze plaque:
Mount Mercy Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

A security guard stepped out of a booth into the glare and approached the car. He was heavyset, tall, friendly looking. Pendergast lowered the rear window and the man leaned inside.

“Visiting hours are over,” he said.

Pendergast reached into his jacket, removed his shield wallet, opened it for the guard.

The man gave it a long look, and then nodded, as if it was all in a day’s work.

“And how may we help you, Special Agent Pendergast?”

“I’m here to see a patient.”

“And the name of the patient?”

“Pendergast. Miss Cornelia Delamere Pendergast.”

There was a short, uncomfortable silence.

“Is this official law enforcement business?” The security guard didn’t sound quite so friendly anymore.

“It is.”

“All right. I’ll call up to the big house. Dr. Ostrom is on duty tonight. You can park your car in the official slot to the left of the main door. They’ll be waiting for you in reception.”

Within a few minutes Pendergast was following the well-groomed, fastidious-looking Dr. Ostrom down a long, echoing corridor. Two guards walked in front, and two behind. Fancy wainscoting and decorative molding could still be glimpsed along the corridor, hidden beneath innumerable layers of institutional paint. A century before, in the days when consumption ravaged all classes of New York society, Mount Mercy Hospital had been a grand sanatorium, catering to the tubercular offspring of the rich. Now, thanks in part to its insular location, it had become a high-security facility for people who had committed heinous crimes but were found not guilty by reason of insanity.

“How is she?” Pendergast asked.

There was a slight hesitation in the doctor’s answer. “About the same,” he said.

They stopped at last in front of a thick steel door, a single barred window sunk into its face. One of the forward guards unlocked the door, then stood outside with his partner while the other two guards followed Pendergast within.

They were standing in a small “quiet room” almost devoid of decoration. No pictures hung on the lightly padded walls. There was a plastic sofa, a pair of plastic chairs, a single table. Everything was bolted to the floor. There was no clock, and the sole fluorescent ceiling light was hidden behind heavy wire mesh. There was nothing that could be used as a weapon, or to assist a suicide. In the far wall stood another steel door, even thicker, without a window.
Warning: Risk of Elopement
was posted above it in large letters.

Pendergast took a seat in one of the plastic chairs, and crossed his legs.

The two forward attendants disappeared through the inner door. For a few minutes the small room fell into silence, punctuated only by the faint sounds of screams and an even fainter, rhythmic pounding. And then, louder and much nearer, came the shrill protesting voice of an old woman. The door opened, and one of the guards pushed a wheelchair into the room. The chair’s five-point leather restraint was almost invisible beneath the heavy layer of rubber that covered every metal surface.

In the chair, securely bound by the restraints, sat a prim, elderly dowager. She was wearing a long, old-fashioned black taffeta dress, Victorian button-up shoes, and a black mourning veil. When she saw Pendergast her complaints abruptly ceased.

“Raise my veil,” she commanded. One of the guards lifted it from her face, and, standing well away, laid it down her back.

The woman stared at Pendergast, her palsied, liver-spotted face trembling slightly.

Pendergast turned to Dr. Ostrom. “Will you kindly leave us alone?”

“Someone must remain,” said Ostrom. “And please give the patient some distance, Mr. Pendergast.”

“The last time I visited, I was allowed a private moment with my great-aunt.”

“If you will recall, Mr. Pendergast, the last time you visited—” Ostrom began rather sharply.

Pendergast held up his hand. “So be it.”

“This is a rather late hour to be visiting. How much time do you need?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Very well.” The doctor nodded to the attendants, who took up places on either side of the exit. Ostrom himself stood before the outer door, as far from the woman as possible, crossed his arms, and waited.

Pendergast tried to pull the chair closer, remembered it was bolted to the floor, and leaned forward instead, gazing intently at the old woman.

“How are you, Aunt Cornelia?” he asked.

The woman bent toward him. She whispered hoarsely, “My dear, how lovely to see you. May I offer you a spot of tea with cream and sugar?”

One of the guards snickered, but shut up abruptly when Ostrom cast a sharp glance in his direction.

“No, thank you, Aunt Cornelia.”

“It’s just as well. The service here has declined dreadfully these past few years. It’s so hard to find good help these days. Why haven’t you visited me sooner, my dear? You know that at my age I cannot travel.”

Pendergast leaned nearer.

“Mr. Pendergast, not quite so close, if you please,” Dr. Ostrom murmured.

Pendergast eased back. “I’ve been working, Aunt Cornelia.”

“Work is for the middle classes, my dear.

Pendergasts do not work.” Pendergast lowered his voice. “There’s not much time, I’m afraid, Aunt Cornelia. I wanted to ask you some questions. About your great-uncle Antoine.”

The old lady pursed her lips in a disapproving line. “Great-uncle Antoine? They say he went north, to New York City. Became a Yankee. But that was many years ago. Long before I was born.”

“Tell me what you know about him, Aunt Cornelia.”

“Surely you’ve heard the stories, my boy. It is an unpleasant subject for all of us, you know.”

“I’d like to hear them from you, just the same.”

“Well! He inherited the family tendency to madness. There but for the grace of God…”The old woman sighed pityingly.

“What kind of madness?” Pendergast knew the answer, of course; but he needed to hear it again. There were always details, nuances, that were new.

“Even as a boy he developed certain dreadful obsessions. He was quite a brilliant youth, you know: sarcastic, witty, strange. At seven you couldn’t beat him in a game of chess or backgammon. He excelled at whist, and even suggested some refinements that, I understand, helped develop auction bridge. He was terribly interested in natural history, and started keeping quite a collection of horrid things in his dressing room—insects, snakes, bones, fossils, that sort of thing. He also had inherited his father’s interest in elixirs, restoratives, chemicals. And poisons.”

A strange gleam came into the old lady’s black eyes at the mention of poisons, and both attendants shifted uneasily.

Ostrom cleared his throat. “Mr. Pendergast, how much longer? We don’t want to unduly disturb the patient.”

“Ten minutes.”

“No more.”

The old lady went on.

“After the tragedy with his mother, he grew moody and reclusive. He spent a great deal of time alone, mixing up chemicals. But then, no doubt you know the cause of
that
fascination.”

Pendergast nodded.

“He developed his own variant of the family crest, like an old apothecary’s sign it was, three gilded balls. He hung it over his door. They say he poisoned the six family dogs in an experiment. And then he began spending a lot of time down… down
there.
Do you know where I mean?”

“Yes.”

“They say he always felt more comfortable with the dead than with the living, you know. And when he wasn’t there, he was over at St. Charles Cemetery, with that appalling old woman Marie LeClaire. You know, Cajun voodoo and all that.”

Pendergast nodded again.

“He helped her with her potions and charms and frightful little stick dolls and making marks on graves. Then there was that unpleasantness with her tomb, after she died…”

“Unpleasantness?”

The old woman sighed, lowered her head. “The interference with her grave, the violated body and all those dreadful little cuts. Of course you
must
know that story.”

“I’ve forgotten.” Pendergast’s voice was soft, gentle, probing.

“He believed he was going to bring her back to life. There was the question of whether she had put him up to it before she died, charged him with some kind of dreadful after-death assignment. The missing pieces of flesh were never found, not a one. No, that’s not quite right. I believe they found an ear in the belly of an alligator caught a week later out of the swamp. The earring gave it away, of course.” Her voice trailed off. She turned to one of the attendants, and spoke in a tone of cold command. “My hair needs attention.”

One of the attendants—the one wearing surgical gloves—came over and gingerly patted the woman’s hair back into place, keeping a wary distance.

She turned back to Pendergast.

“She had a kind of sexual hold over him, as dreadful as that sounds, considering the sixty-year difference in their ages.” The old lady shuddered, half in disgust, half in pleasure. “Clearly, she encouraged his interest in reincarnation, miracle cures, silly things like that.”

“What did you hear about his disappearance?”

“It happened at the age of twenty-one, when he came into his fortune. But ‘disappearance’ really isn’t quite the word, you know: he was asked to leave the house. At least, so I’ve been told. He’d begun to talk about saving, healing the world—making up for what his father had done, I suppose—but that cut no mustard with the rest of the family. Years later, when his cousins tried to track down the money he’d inherited and taken with him, he seemed to have vanished into thin air. They were terribly disappointed. It was so
very
much money, you see.”

Pendergast nodded. There was a long silence.

“I have one final question for you, Aunt Cornelia.”

“What is it?”

“It is a moral question.”

“A moral question. How curious. Is this connected by any chance with Great-Uncle Antoine?”

Pendergast did not answer directly. “For the past month, I have been searching for a man. This man is in possession of a secret. I am very close to discovering his whereabouts, and it is only a matter of time until I confront him.”

The old woman said nothing.

“If I win the confrontation—which is by no means certain—I may be faced with the question of what to do with his secret. I may be called upon to make a decision that will have, possibly, a profound effect on the future of the human race.”

“And what is this secret?”

Pendergast lowered his voice to the merest ghost of a whisper.

“I believe it is a medical formula that will allow anyone, by following a certain regimen, to extend his life by at least a century, perhaps more. It will not vanquish death, but it will significantly postpone it.”

There was a silence. The old lady’s eyes gleamed anew. “Tell me, how much will this treatment cost? Will it be cheap, or dear?”

“I don’t know.”

“And how many others will have access to this formula besides yourself?”

“I’ll be the only one. I’ll have very little time, maybe only seconds after it comes into my hands, to decide what to do with it.”

The silence stretched on into minutes. “And how was this formula developed?”

“Suffice to say, it cost the lives of many innocent people. In a singularly cruel fashion.”

“That adds a further dimension to the problem. However, the answer is quite clear. When this formula comes into your possession, you must destroy it immediately.”

Pendergast looked at her curiously. “Are you quite sure? It’s what medical science has most desired since the beginning.”

“There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only to the very rich, it will cause riots, wars, a breakdown of the social contract. Either way, it will lead directly to human misery. What is the value of a long life, when it is lived in squalor and unhappiness?”

“What about the immeasurable increase in wisdom that this discovery will bring, when you consider the one, maybe two hundred years, of additional learning and study it will afford the brilliant mind? Think, Aunt Cornelia, of what someone like Goethe or Copernicus or Einstein could have done for humanity with a two-hundred-year life span.”

The old woman scoffed. “The wise and good are outnumbered a thousand to one by the brutal and stupid. When you give an Einstein two centuries to perfect his science, you give a thousand others two centuries to perfect their brutality.”

This time, the silence seemed to stretch into minutes. By the door, Dr. Ostrom stirred restlessly.

“Are you all right, my dear?” the old lady asked, looking intently at Pendergast.

“Yes.”

He gazed into her dark, strange eyes, so full of wisdom, insight, and the most profound insanity. “Thank you, Aunt Cornelia,” he said.