“I see.” Nora scribbled some more notes. “But you never met Leng?”
There was a pause. “I met him once. He came to our house late one night, with a specimen for my father, and was turned away at the door. He left the specimen behind. A graven artifact from the South Seas, of little value.”
“And?”
“My father disappeared the next day.”
“And you’re convinced it was Leng’s doing?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
The old lady patted her hair. Her sharp eyes fixed on hers. “My dear child, how could I possibly know that?”
“But why would Leng murder him?”
“I believe my father found out something about Leng.”
“Didn’t the Museum investigate?”
“No one had seen Leng in the Museum. No one had seen him visit my father. There was no proof of anything. Neither Perceval nor Burleigh spoke up. The Museum found it easier to smear my father’s name — to imply that he ran away for some unknown reason — than to investigate. I was just a girl at the time. When I grew older and demanded a reopening of the case, I had nothing to offer. I was rebuffed.”
“And your mother? Was she suspicious?”
“She was dead by that time.”
“What happened to Leng?”
“After his visit to my father, nobody ever saw or heard from him again.”
Nora took a breath. “What did Leng look like?”
Clara McFadden did not answer immediately. “I’ll never forget him,” she said at last. “Have you read Poe’s ‘Fall of the House of Usher’? There’s a description in the story that, when I came upon it, struck me terribly. It seemed to describe Leng precisely. It’s stayed with me to this day, I can still quote the odd line of it from memory: ‘a cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and very luminous… finely molded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy.’ Leng had blond hair, blue eyes, an aquiline nose. Old-fashioned black coat, formally dressed.”
“That’s a very vivid description.”
“Leng was the kind of person who stayed with you long after he was gone. And yet, you know, it was his voice I remember most. It was low, resonant, strongly accented, with the peculiar quality of sounding like two people speaking in unison.”
The gloom that filled the parlor seemed inexplicably to deepen. Nora swallowed. She had already asked all the questions she had planned to. “Thank you very much for your time, Ms. McFadden,” she said as she rose.
“Why do you bring all this up now?” the old lady asked abruptly.
Nora realized that she must not have seen the newspaper article or heard anything about the recent copycat killings of the Surgeon. She wondered just what she should say. She looked about the room, dark, frozen in shadowy Victorian clutter. She did not want to be the one to upset this woman’s world.
“I’m researching the early cabinets of curiosities.”
The old lady transfixed her with a glittering eye. “An interesting subject, child. And perhaps a dangerous one.”
ELEVEN
SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST lay in the hospital bed, motionless save for his pale eyes. He watched Nora Kelly leave the room and close the door. He glanced over at the wall clock: nine P.M. precisely. A good time to begin.
He thought back over each word Nora had uttered during her visit, looking for any trivial fact or passing reference that he might have overlooked on first hearing. But there was nothing more.
Her visit to Peekskill had confirmed his darkest suspicions: Pendergast had long believed Leng killed Shottum and burned the cabinet. And he felt sure that McFadden’s disappearance was also at the hands of Leng. No doubt Shottum had challenged Leng shortly after placing his letter in the elephant’s-foot box. Leng had murdered him, and covered it up with the fire.
Yet the most pressing questions remained. Why had Leng chosen the cabinet as his base of operations? Why did he begin volunteering his services at the houses of industry a year before killing Shottum? And where did he relocate his laboratory after the cabinet burned?
In Pendergast’s experience, serial killers were messy: they were incautious, they left clues. But Leng was, of course, very different. He was not, strictly speaking, a serial killer. He had been remarkably clever. Leng had left a kind of negative imprint wherever he went; the man seemed defined by how little was known about him. There was more to be learned, but it was deeply hidden in the masses of information strewn about his hospital room. There was only one way to coax this information out. Research alone would not suffice.
And then there was the growing problem of his increasing lack of objectivity regarding this case, his growing emotional involvement. If he did not bring himself sharply under control, if he did not reassert his habitual discipline, he would fail. And he could not fail.
It was time to make his journey.
Pendergast’s gaze shifted to the massings of books, maps, and old periodicals that filled half a dozen surgical carts in his room. His eyes moved from surface to tottering surface. The single most important piece of paper lay on his bedside table: the plans for Shottum’s Cabinet. One last time, he picked it up and gazed at it, memorizing every detail. The seconds ticked on. He laid down the yellowing plat.
It was time. But first, something had to be done about the intolerable landscape of noise that surrounded him.
After his condition was upgraded from serious to stable, Pendergast had himself transferred from St. Luke’s — Roosevelt to Lenox Hill Hospital. The old facility on Lexington Avenue had the thickest walls of any building in the city, save for his own Dakota. Even here, however, he was assaulted by sounds: the bleat of the blood-oxygen meter above his bed; the gossiping voices at the nurses’ station; the hissings and beepings of the telemetry machines and ventilators; the adenoidal patient snoring in the adjacent room; the rumble of the forced-air ducts deep in the walls and ceiling. There was nothing he could do that would physically stop these sounds; yet they could be made to disappear through other means. It was a powerful mind game he had developed, an adaptation of Chongg Ran, an ancient Bhutanese Buddhist meditative practice.
Pendergast closed his eyes. He imagined a chessboard inside his head, on a wooden table, standing in a pool of yellow light. Then he created two players. The first player made his opening move; the second followed. A game of speed chess ensued; and then another, and another. The two players changed strategies, forming adaptive counterattacks: Inverted Hanham, Two Knights Defense, Vienna Gambit.
One by one, the more distant noises dropped away.
When the final game ended in a draw, Pendergast dissolved the chess set. Then, in the darkness of his mind’s eye, he created four players, seated around a card table. Pendergast had always found bridge a nobler and subtler game than chess, but he rarely played it with others because, outside of his late family, he had found few worthy partners. Now the game began, each player ignorant of all but his own thirteen cards, each player with his own strategies and intellectual capabilities. The game began, with ruffs and slams and deep finesses. Pendergast toyed with the players, shifting Blackwood, Gerber, and Stayman conventions, positing a forgetful declarer, misunderstood signals between East and West.