Chapter 65
A. X. L. PENDERGAST, UNSHAVEN AND dirty, dressed in a soiled suit coat and shabby tuxedo pants, carrying a bottle of Night Train in a stained paper bag, lounged in a doorway near the corner of Chestnut and Washington, observing the Garden District mansion with narrowed eyes.
The mansion, surrounded by yellow crime scene tape, was swarming with NOPD and FBI agents.
Estevez had arrived an hour before with two additional agents to join the search—a search from which Pendergast had been firmly and pointedly excluded.
There was, of course, established procedure for taking him off the case; as the junior partner to an agent who had been murdered, he could no longer participate in the investigation: his objectivity, his credibility as a witness, and his emotional fitness had all been compromised—or so FBI protocol insisted.
On top of this was the highly ambiguous role he had played in the previous night’s destruction of the Fant?me and the shocking suicide of Dr. Dorion Magnus.
In his initial debriefing—which Estevez had silently listened in on but not participated in directly—there were a number of things Pendergast had failed to mention, not the least of which was the mysterious room Magnus had hinted would be found in his mansion.
It was, apparently, to serve the same purpose as the highly secure one he’d built aboard his ship, but seemingly far more incriminating.
Pendergast had pondered what that purpose might be for some time but had been unable to draw any but the most grotesque and improbable conclusions.
The secure cabin on the boat appeared to be a trysting hideaway of some kind—but for whom? And why the secrecy?
As he watched the FBI come and go, he had grave doubts they would be able to find the secret Magnus had hinted at.
His was a big, beautiful antebellum mansion, thoroughly renovated—a renovation that would have given Magnus plenty of opportunities to create, somewhere in its depths, a well-hidden room.
But Pendergast knew he was damned if he would cede that coup to another agent who had just stepped into the case. It was a mystery that had not permitted him sleep the evening before.
Raising the bottle of Night Train to his lips, he took a small sip, swished it around like mouthwash, and spat it out.
Then, pushing himself away from the doorframe, he wobbled down the street toward the front of the mansion.
Several big-bellied NOPD cops were standing guard, and as he teetered by he paused in front of one, swaying.
“What’s going on?” he asked, giving the cop a good blast of his alcohol-laden breath as he peered down the walk toward the open front door. He glimpsed Estevez inside busily directing his agents. The sight annoyed him.
“Move on, pal,” said the cop.
“Has there been violence?” he asked eagerly. “A murder?”
“I said, move on.”
Doffing his soiled hat, Pendergast staggered down the street and turned the corner.
There was another cop guarding the far end of the building, but it was quieter on the side lane.
He could see, halfway down it, a private alleyway blocked by a wrought iron gate, which had once been the carriage entrance to the mansion.
He headed down the lane, clutching the paper bag.
The cop at the end gave him a quick glance and, seeing nothing of interest, turned away.
Pendergast continued until he was opposite the iron gate; then, in a flash, he seized the bars, launched himself up and over the tall spikes, and clambered down the other side, discarding the bottle in a dark corner as he did so.
In seconds he had disappeared.
Now to get inside. The entrance to the old carriage house had been bricked over to create an additional space, but an old window remained.
He peered in, discovering it was a small exercise room—empty.
With his elbow, Pendergast gently broke a windowpane, reached in to unlock it, lifted, and entered.
His knowledge of antebellum mansions led him to believe that the staircase to the cellar would be found nearby, in the back of the house. After listening at the door and hearing nothing, he eased it open, entered a service hall—and there, at its end, was the door to the basement.
As he made his way down the hall, he could hear the heavy tramping of feet above and the muffled voices of the searchers as they went through the mansion.
The suicide of Magnus; his grievous but strange injuries; the burning and sinking of the famous boat; and the discovery of Agent Chambers’s waterlogged corpse had become an explosive—if still utterly confused—story, which Pendergast’s obfuscations and explanations had done little to clarify.
He eased open the door to the cellar and paused at the top of the stairs, listening. Voices filtered up from below: it appeared a few cops were currently searching the basement. That would complicate things… but not unduly.
Slipping down the stairs, Pendergast kept to the darkest corners while the cops—he saw there were only two—talked loudly about the latest Saints game while shuffling and poking their way through the basement’s many rooms and alcoves, flashing their lights around willy-nilly, turning things over, opening chests, and picking through heaps of decaying furniture.
They had no idea what they were looking for, and it was immediately clear to Pendergast they would find nothing.
Crouching in the shadows, he watched them work, waiting for his opportunity.
It didn’t take long. After twenty minutes, the two decided to conclude their search and returned upstairs, the conversation having shifted to a heated evaluation of the sudden size increase of the breasts of some country-western singer Pendergast had never heard of.
Hearing the door close above him, he took out his penlight and began moving through the dark spaces, playing the beam along the basement’s brick walls.
The mansion was, like many of its New Orleans counterparts, primarily an aboveground structure, but nevertheless the walls oozed niter and a frosting of crusted carbonate from the moisture of two centuries.
The air was heavy with the smell of mold and rotting wood.
He slowly worked his way around the perimeter of the basement, convinced that the secret room would not have been built along the perimeter, but rather hidden somewhere in the vast labyrinth of the basement’s interior spaces, taking full advantage of the reconstruction project.
He began examining the interior walls as he slowly continued his search.
Even here, his light glittered off a crust of many tiny crystals, built up over centuries of seepage—not as obvious as on the exterior walls, but evident nevertheless.
There. He paused his beam and peered more closely.
There was a section of brickwork that did not look quite right.
It wasn’t cleaned—that would be too obvious—but his beam did not reflect the buildup of crystals in quite the right way, and on careful inspection Pendergast noticed that the crust on this section of wall was not real but cleverly painted onto the bricks in a faux approximation of actual seepage.
An even closer inspection with a magnifying glass showed suspicious seams in the brickwork, which, when traced, outlined a door of sorts.
It had been clever to use an interior wall, where the lighter layer of crust would be easier to imitate. It would also have made his secret installation—whatever it was—that much easier to accomplish.
Pendergast gave the wall a push, but it did not budge. There would be a trick, of course; a hidden release somewhere. A quick search of the wall disclosed nothing obvious. However, standing against the wall was a bookcase stuffed with decaying tomes.
Surely Magnus wouldn’t have gone for such an obvious trope, would he? Sounding the man’s character, or what he knew of it, Pendergast decided he would: given Magnus’s clear disdain for the intelligence of his fellow residents, it would probably seem a delicious irony to him.
The light passed along the spines, alighting on Canon Medicinae Avicennae, Avicenna’s famous thousand-year-old textbook of human anatomy.
Ah yes, thought Pendergast, no longer in doubt: that was just the sort of volume Magnus would select as a lever.
He pulled out the book, to be greeted a moment later by a grating noise.
Then a section of the brickwork swung open, revealing an inner wall—and, once again, a stainless-steel door.
This lock did not yield easily to Pendergast’s tools, but after five minutes of coaxing it came open, swinging inward to reveal a dark space. Pendergast paused a moment. Then, finding the light switch, he turned it on—and stared in perfect amazement.
It was almost identical to, although rather larger than, the space on the boat: a beautiful, elegant, welcoming bedroom, with sporting prints on the walls, fine Persian rugs on the floor, a large Louis XIV gilt mirror, a ladies’ side table overspread with bottles of perfume, a silver and tortoiseshell brush and comb set, jewelry, and what appeared to be a Fabergé egg.
A matching side table and chair, beautifully inlaid, stood near the door; on the table was a silver salver with vertical panels holding soiled, much-thumbed letters.
The room smelled strongly of formalin, methanol, erythrosin, glycerin, and phenols.
The only thing that broke the illusion of past elegance was, apparently, a cryogenic chamber, countersunk into the brickwork, flush with the wall.
And, as on the boat, a stainless-steel gurney sat next to a rack of chemicals, needles, tubes, and trocars.
In addition, it contained a large bottle of baby oil—opened and half full.
In the middle of this bizarre tableau was a bed—a beautiful bed draped in rich damask silks, satin, and gold brocade.
But unlike that on the Fant?me, this bed was occupied.
A woman lay within, her golden hair spreading fetchingly over the satin pillow, her eyes closed, her hands folded demurely upon the silk coverlet, a look of contentment and peaceful satiety on her face.
And she was dead.
As Pendergast leaned closer, he saw that she was not only dead, but very dead, severely decayed, falling apart—even though it was clear that much skilled effort had been made to keep her body as fresh and lifelike as possible, with makeup, emollients, oils, paint, preservatives, prosthetic inserts, embalming chemicals, and filler.
He grasped the edge of the covers and drew them back to reveal the entire body.
The woman was nude. Pendergast stared, paralyzed with horror.
For the first time in his life, he found himself forced to look away from a sight so ghastly it was unbearable.
It was clear—clear as day—that the corpse had been used—repeatedly violated over many months… or, more likely, years.
Pendergast, head still averted, allowed the coverlet to fall back.
Shocked to the core, he backed out of the room like an automaton, grasping only by instinct the sheaf of letters displayed on the salver.
Leaving the door open, he stumbled across the cellar to the staircase.
Voices filtered down from above. He had finally discovered Magnus’s hidden psychosis.
He took several deep breaths, composing himself. He smoothed his dirty suit, tightened the knot of his tie, relaxed his facial muscles, and put his disordered mind into order. Then he ascended the stairs—to find Estevez in the kitchen with his two new agents and a gaggle of NOPD.
Estevez stared at him, eyes narrowing. “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?”
Pendergast took out a handkerchief and, with a shaking hand, wiped his face clean.
“Pendergast? What the devil? What are you doing here, looking like a bum? You were debriefed and taken off the case!”
“In the basement,” Pendergast managed to say. “Something you need to see.” He could utter nothing more.
“I’ll be seeing you before a board of inquiry, mister…!” roared Estevez. But Pendergast, already moving unsteadily toward the front door—with its promise of freedom and oblivion beckoning from beyond—did not hear him.