“The St. Louis Cemetery Number One is just around the corner,” he went on. “Let us go.”
By the time they reached the cemetery, the heavens had opened up and rain was driving down, lightning forking through the black skies, peals of thunder echoing across the city. The branches of the live oaks along Basin Street lashed and twisted in the wind, as if under torture.
It was a small and ancient cemetery, surrounded by a whitewashed wall, in which ancient and dilapidated tombs were jumbled together amid meandering alleys, cheek by jowl with marble and granite mausoleums in various stages of decay. It was very different from the splendor of the Metairie Cemetery.
Hunched under her umbrella, Constance followed Pendergast through mazelike passageways. They finally reached the southeastern corner, up against the Basin Street wall, where a sadly neglected mausoleum in marble announced the name PENDERGAST.
It was a miniature temple with a pillar on either side holding up a pediment, with a bronze door in the middle. Above the door a shield had been carved, containing a lidless eye over two moons: one crescent, the other full. Beneath was a lion couchant. The entire plot was surrounded by a wrought iron fence with broken spikes, the gate rusted ajar.
They squeezed through the gate and Pendergast approached the bronze door. Most unusually, the lock on the door resisted his overtures — he fumbled with it for almost two minutes before succeeding. He pressed against the door and it inched open with a groan. One after the other, they squeezed into the tiny interior space.
Constance shook out her umbrella, leaned it against the door, then looked around curiously, following the beam of Pendergast’s penlight as it roved around, illuminating crypts along the two walls and the back. A few of the closest crypts, she saw, were apparently occupied, but there was no carving on them save for death’s heads. She was as curious about who might be interred in them as she was about the existence of this mausoleum in the first place. She could understand why a family plot existed at Penumbra, the old family plantation, but why had Comstock Pendergast insisted on this structure when the family had a large private crypt beneath the Maison de la Rochenoire? Pendergast had never told her what happened to the remains of his parents, both killed in the fire. Maybe this was their final resting place.
“Ah. Here it is.” Pendergast’s light fell on a crypt in the back row that, unlike the others, had a bronze instead of a marble door.
“I can’t begin to imagine,” he murmured, “who might be resting peacefully within. I should like to see for myself.” He handed her the flashlight. “Hold this, if you please.”
Constance shone the light over his shoulder while Pendergast knelt before the tomb. Taking a small knife from his suit coat, he slid it between the door and the marble jamb, working it around and loosening years’ worth of encrustation. After a minute of prying, it came free. Pendergast eased out the knife and laid it aside; Constance handed him the light and he shone it in.
“Empty,” he said. “No bones.”
“Not surprising,” Constance replied, “considering it’s the tomb of a nonexistent person.”
He continued shining his light around. “Not only empty, but clean. Too clean. And... look!”
Constance knelt and peered in while the light played on the back panel of the crypt. At the bottom of the panel was a handle.
“How peculiar.” Pendergast reached inside, grasped the handle, and pulled. Immediately, the bottom of the crypt swung open on hinges, revealing a staircase descending into blackness.
They paused a moment, staring into the dark passage beneath the crypt.
“Isn’t this an occasion for one of your imperishable bon mots?” Constance asked.
“I find myself too surprised for speech.” He took a step forward. “I’ll be back shortly.” He paused to reach into his suit coat, remove his Les Baer 1911 Colt.45 pistol, rack a round into the chamber, and reholstered it.
“Aloysius, please.” And with that, Constance withdrew the antique Italian stiletto she always kept hidden on her person. “I’m armed as well.”
“Very well — if you insist. I hope you won’t mind if in this instance I don’t allow the lady to go first.”
“As you wish.”
Pendergast nodded. He eased himself down the stairs and Constance followed. As they descended, the ceiling gradually rose until there was enough room to stand. The narrow staircase went down steeply about ten feet before leveling out into a brick passageway, its walls covered with niter. The tunnel ahead was flooded.
Pendergast stopped on the second-to-last step, eased his leg into the water, found the bottom, put the other foot in, and waded out.
“It’s only a foot deep.”
Constance hesitated, looking down at herself. Her pleated skirt fell just below the knee, and could of course be cleaned, but her leather flats were custom-made Perugias with a gommato finish and had cost $1,000. The foul water would surely ruin them, if they hadn’t already been destroyed by the tramp through the muddy cemetery. But the dark passage ahead appeared curiously alluring.
She followed Pendergast into the water.
A damp, unwholesome odor arose as they moved slowly along the corridor, tracing the winding course of the tunnel. It appeared to be heading southeast. A bloated rat drifted past. Insects, disturbed by Pendergast’s light, skittered along the walls — greasy centipedes, water bugs, and giant vinegaroons, some so startled that they dropped into the water and thrashed about, trying to climb up on their legs.
As they waded along, the humidity and the foulness of the air increased. The passage continued a few hundred yards farther, turning here and there but generally maintaining the same southeasterly direction.
And then Pendergast’s light fell upon a stout doorway that marked the end of the passage. It was also of bronze, heavily corroded with verdigris. Once again, Pendergast worked on the lock and the door reluctantly yielded, swinging open to reveal a vast, dark space.
As they stepped through, the beam of light revealed a capacious crypt, with a vaulted and groined ceiling held up by pillars. Like the passage, it was partially flooded. Row after row of marble sarcophagi stood half-submerged in the water.
“Good Lord,” Pendergast breathed. “We’re in the Pendergast family catacombs. We must be directly beneath the site of Rochenoire!”
As he played the beam around, Constance abruptly realized why the space had looked familiar to her: it was similar to the sub-basements of the mansion at 891 Riverside Drive — which had, she knew, been built to replicate the old layout of the house on Dauphine Street.
“I thought this was sealed up and lost forever,” said Pendergast in a whisper. “But now... now I begin to understand. Comstock was a magician, and his shows sometimes involved terror, injury, or worse to members of his audience.” His silvery eyes gleamed in the reflected light, registering vast surprise. “I can see now why he insisted on building that mausoleum in St. Louis Cemetery Number One when the family had a perfectly satisfactory and far more private crypt here. And it wasn’t, my dear, to bury the dead.”
“So Comstock needed an escape route?” said Constance.
“Exactly,” Pendergast said, nodding slowly. “If a mob came for him, this was his back door. How ironic that the fire that destroyed Rochenoire happened after his death.” He turned to Constance. “This must be the way Bertin and a number of servants managed to escape. Strange he wouldn’t speak of it to me — or explain how he knew of its existence.”