The Obsidian Chamber

66

Constance stood on the sand, the semiconscious girl moaning at her feet, and stared in utter disbelief. Pendergast—is it really him? — was approaching, gun in hand. He was like a vision; she could hardly comprehend what she was seeing.

“Aloysius,” she breathed. “My God. You’re alive!”

She started to rush toward him, but something in his expression stopped her dead in her tracks.

“Ave, frater,” Diogenes said again. He was weaving in place slightly, almost as if he were drunk.

Pendergast raised the gun. At first, he aimed it somewhere between Constance and Diogenes. Then, after a moment, he trained it squarely on his brother. His eyes, however, were on Constance.

“Before I kill him,” he said, “I need to know: do you love him?”

Constance looked at him in shock and disbelief. “What?”

“The question is clear. Do you love him?”

She felt movement at her feet. The girl, having regained her senses, had taken advantage of the standoff and made a shambolic run for a nearby cluster of mangroves. Pendergast paid no attention to her.

Now Constance was beginning to recover from the shock of seeing Pendergast standing, alive, before her. A hundred questions rose in her mind: What happened? Where have you been? Why didn’t you reach out to me? But the look on Pendergast’s face made it clear this was no time for questions.

“I detest him,” she said. “I always have — and always will.”

“Love lives on hope,” Diogenes said in a singsong voice. “And dies when hope is dead.”

Pendergast ignored this, his gaze fixed on Constance. “Then perhaps you could explain why you left our Riverside Drive residence with him of your own free will — injuring Lieutenant D’Agosta in the process.”

Constance took a deep breath. Her head was clearing from the fight, and she felt that amazing strength returning. In a calm, steady voice, she told him how she’d believed him to be dead; how she’d been wooed by Diogenes with confessions of love and the revelation that Leng’s synthesized arcanum had begun to backfire — and of her own secret plan: how she hated Diogenes and realized his reappearance was her opportunity to wreak a vengeance on him more terrible than death. “You must trust me, Aloysius,” she concluded. “I will explain it all, in full — in due time.” She gestured at Diogenes, standing there, listening. “But meanwhile, you can see the result for yourself. Look at him: a broken man.”

Pendergast listened to the entire recitation in silence, gun lowered. “So you were lying to him? From the very beginning?”

“Yes.”

“And you do not love him,” Pendergast repeated, as if unable to quite comprehend.

“No. No!”

“I’m so glad.” And he repointed the gun at Diogenes’s head.

“Wait!” Constance cried.

Pendergast looked at her.

Diogenes stepped forward, grasped the muzzle of the gun, pressed it hard against his own temple. “Go ahead, frater. Do it.”

“Don’t kill him,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Much better to spare his life — to force him to live with his loneliness, with the memory of his wrongdoing. And…” She hesitated. “I learned something about him.”

“Which is?” Pendergast’s voice was cool, clipped.

Constance glanced back at Diogenes, who was still standing there, swaying in the moonlight, muzzle held against his head. “I didn’t want him to hear me say this — but now there’s nothing for it. He’s not totally responsible for what he’s become. You, of all people, know that. And there’s a small seed of good in him — I’ve seen it. I believe he truly did want to reform, to start a new life. What he wants now, I can’t say. Looking at him in this condition, my thirst for vengeance is thoroughly slaked. If you let him live, perhaps — just perhaps — he’ll nurture that seed.” Then she added, bitterly: “Perhaps he can water it with his tears.”

As she spoke, a change came across Pendergast’s face. It lost just a little of its marble-like hardness. But it was still impossible to know what was going on in his mind.

“Please,” Constance whispered.

In the distance now, over the low whisper of wind among the palm trees, she could hear the sound of helicopter blades — faint, but growing ever closer.