City of Endless Night

51

Dusk was falling over the city as Mrs. Trask bustled her way northward up Riverside Drive, her string bag full of groceries for the evening’s dinner. Normally she didn’t wait until such a late hour to do her shopping, but she had gotten preoccupied rearranging and cleaning the third-best set of china, and hadn’t realized how late it had become. Proctor had offered to drive her, but these days she preferred to get out for a bit of a walk — an early evening’s constitutional did her good, and besides, what with all the gentrification the neighborhood had undergone in recent years, it had become a pleasure to do her own shopping at the local Whole Foods. But as she walked across the circular driveway of 891 Riverside, heading toward the servants’ entrance at the back of the house, she was dismayed to see a dark figure hovering in a shadow near the front door.

Her immediate instinct was alarm, and to call for Proctor — until she saw that the figure was no more than a boy. He looked shiftless and dirty — what she would have referred to growing up in London’s East End as a street urchin — and as she approached he came out of the shadows.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said, “but is this the residence of Mister, um, Pendergast?” He even had the Bow Bells accent and speech of a street urchin.

She stopped well short of him. “Why do you want to know, young man?”

“Because I was paid to give him this.” And he pulled an envelope out of his back pocket. “And there doesn’t seem to be anyone as is answering the door.”

Mrs. Trask considered a moment. Then she extended her hand. “Very well, I’ll see that he gets it. Now scarper.”

The youth handed her the letter. Then, with a tug of a forelock, he turned and hurried away down the driveway.

Mrs. Trask watched him vanish into the bustle of the city. Then, shaking her head, she made her way to the back kitchen entrance. Really, one never knew what to expect, working for her employer.

She found him sitting in the library, a cup of green tea untouched on the table beside him, staring into the low fire burning in the grate.

“Mr. Pendergast,” she said, standing in the doorway.

The agent did not respond.

“Mr. Pendergast?” she said in a slightly louder tone.

At this, he roused himself. “Yes, Mrs. Trask?” he said, turning toward her.

“I found a young boy waiting outside. He said nobody was answering the door. Did you not hear the bell?”

“I did not.”

“He said he’d been paid to bring you this letter.” She advanced, bringing with her the dirty, folded envelope on a silver salver. “I wonder why Proctor did not answer the door?” she couldn’t help but add — as she slightly disapproved of Proctor and the liberties he sometimes took with the master.

Pendergast looked at the letter with an expression Mrs. Trask could not quite fathom. “I believe he did not answer because the doorbell was never rung. The boy lied to you. Now, if you would please place it on the table.”

She put the salver down beside the tea set. “Will there be anything else?”

“Not for the present, thank you, Mrs. Trask.”

Pendergast waited until she had exited the library; until her steps had died away down the hallway; until the entire mansion was quiet once again. And still he did not stir, or act, or do anything but regard the envelope the way he might an explosive device. What it was, he could not be sure — and yet he had all too strong a premonition.

At last, he leaned forward, picked it up by one edge, and unfolded it. The envelope was printed with a single word, typed on a manual typewriter: ALOYSIUS. He regarded this for a long moment, his sense of premonition increasing. Then, he gingerly slit the envelope open along its narrow edge with a switchblade he kept nearby for a letter opener. Looking inside, he saw a single sheet of foolscap and a small USB memory stick. He slid the sheet out onto the salver, then used the tip of the switchblade to unfold it.

The typewritten note it contained was not long.

Pendergast read the letter through twice. He took the USB stick and inserted it into the port on his laptop. There was only one file on it. He clicked it.

A video sprang to life: D’Agosta and Longstreet, tied, gagged, and immobilized, each with a single hand free. They were staring at the camera, sweat beading on their brows, holding between them with their free hands that morning’s New York Times. The video had no sound. The background appeared to be a derelict, warehouse-like room. The two men were beaten, bruised, and bloodied — D’Agosta worse than Longstreet. The video lasted only ten seconds and it played again, and again, in an endless loop.

Pendergast viewed the video a few more times and read the note again before putting both back in the envelope and sliding it into his suitcoat pocket. For three minutes he remained very still in the library, his face bathed in flickering firelight, before rising to his feet.

The Decapitator was right: he simply had no choice but to comply.

Pendergast had only a vague knowledge of King’s Park, a gigantic decaying psychiatric hospital complex on Long Island not far from the city. A quick Internet search filled in the details: it had been abandoned decades ago, leaving numerous crumbling buildings scattered over expansive grounds sealed up behind chain-link fences; it was infamous for the electroshock treatments it so liberally administered to hopeless cases, before the advent of effective psychiatric drugs. The campus was situated in Sussex County between Oyster Bay and Stony Brook.

He printed out a map of the psychiatric center, folded it into his coat pocket, removed a spare .45 magazine from a drawer, checked to see it was full of rounds and slipped it into his other pocket, then removed his Les Baer to confirm it was fully loaded. He racked a round into the chamber, removed the magazine to insert a fresh round, and pocketed the gun.

As he was putting on his vicuña overcoat in the front hall, Proctor approached silently, like a cat. “May I be of assistance, sir?”

Pendergast glanced at him. Mrs. Trask must have told him of the letter. There was an eagerness in Proctor’s face that was both unusual and disturbing. The man, of course, always knew or guessed a great deal more than he let on.

“No, thank you, Proctor.”

“No need for a driver?”

“I have a yen to take a night drive by myself.” He held out his hands for the keys.

For a moment, Proctor stood immobile, his face a mask. Pendergast was well aware Proctor knew he was lying, but there was no time to prevaricate in a more satisfactory fashion.

Reaching into a pocket, Proctor wordlessly handed Pendergast the keys to the Rolls-Royce.

“Thank you.” And with a nod, Pendergast slipped past him and headed toward the garage, buttoning his overcoat as he went.

Just forty-eight minutes later, he turned off Route 25A onto Old Dock Road, which ran through the main campus of King’s Park Psychiatric Center. It was now almost nine, and a bitter night had fallen. He guided the big car down the deserted road, dark shapes of buildings, shuttered and forlorn, passing by on both sides.

He slowed, made a U-turn, pulled the Silver Wraith up and over the curb, turned off the headlights, then drove the vehicle over the frozen ground, pulling it in behind a stand of trees where it would not be visible from the road. There he stopped and consulted the map. Across the road stood a cluster of buildings his map identified as GROUP 4, or THE QUAD, which had once housed the geriatric insane. To his right, two hundred yards behind the chain-link fence surrounding the campus, rose a vast, ten-story structure shown on the map as BUILDING 93, its gables and towers rising up against the night sky. The massive façade was bathed in ghostly moonlight and punctuated with empty, inky windows, which stared over the frozen campus like some monstrous, many-eyed beast. As Pendergast contemplated it, he felt a whisper, a shiver, of the memories it retained of the patients who had been shuttered inside, gibbering, weeping, beyond despair, subjected to experimental drug testing, lobotomies, electroshock treatments, and perhaps worse. A bloated moon, veiled by scudding clouds, was rising above its battlements.

Hidden within the building’s immense shadow, Pendergast knew from the map, lay the much smaller two-story structure known as Building 44. This was where he would find the Decapitator.

Exiting the vehicle and quietly closing its door, he made sure the street was empty before approaching the fence. A set of wire clippers appeared in one gloved hand, and it was the work of two minutes to cut a flap in the cheap chain-link fence large enough to permit entry without catching and tearing his overcoat, of which he was very fond. Slipping through, he walked silently over the hard ground, his breath flaring in the moonlight, past Building 29—a power plant constructed in the early 1960s, now rusting and deserted like everything else. Beyond, he picked up an abandoned railroad spur line and followed it to where it ended at the loading dock of Building 44.

Pendergast’s research indicated Building 44 had been a warehouse for the storage of food for the psychiatric center. The small structure was sealed, its windows covered with plywood and tin, its doors locked and chained. Not a glimmer of light could be seen through the cracks.

He glanced around once again, then lightly sprang up onto the building’s loading bay at the end of a railroad trestle. Grasping a handle, he lifted the door slowly, keeping to a minimum the inevitable complaint of rusted metal, until it was just high enough to allow him to slip underneath. He waited, listening. But there was no sound from within.

He found himself in a large loading area, empty of everything except a stack of wooden packing crates piled in one corner, covered in cobwebs. Ahead, across the wide floor of cracked concrete, a door stood open in the far wall. The faintest illumination could be seen beyond. It looked like a trap — which Pendergast had known from the beginning was precisely what it was.

A trap intended for him; but traps sometimes worked both ways.

Pausing, he glanced at his watch. It was nine oh two — three minutes left until the time limit expired.

Silently, he crossed the expanse of the loading area and approached the door. Placing the fingertips of one hand on it, he slowly opened it wider. Beyond lay a narrow corridor, punctuated on both sides by open doors. From one of the right-hand doors, almost closed, leaked the light that faintly illuminated the hallway. Absolute silence reigned.

Pulling his Les Baer, Pendergast slipped through the doorway and moved down the corridor until he reached the lighted door. He waited a few moments to assure himself there was no activity. Then he placed his palm on the door, gave it a sharp shove, stepped forward with the weapon raised, and panned the room.

The light was sufficiently dim as to illuminate only the immediate portion of the space he was standing in. The deeper recesses, going back through rows of empty shelves, were too dark to make out. There was a table in the center of the pool of light, with a figure seated in a chair, his back to Pendergast. He recognized the man instantly: even from the rear, the rumpled suit, powerful frame, and long gray hair could only belong to one man — Howard Longstreet. He was, it seemed, looking into the inky darkness at the rear of the room, head propped on one arm in an attitude of alert repose.

Pendergast paused for a moment, frozen by surprise. The man was not bound — in fact, he seemed to be under no restraint whatsoever.

“H?” he said in a voice barely more than a whisper.

Longstreet did not reply.

Pendergast took a step toward the seated figure. “H?” he said again.

Still Longstreet said nothing. Was he unconscious? Pendergast stepped toward the seated figure and reached out, resting a hand on Longstreet’s shoulder and giving him a gentle shake.

With a quiet, slippery kind of sigh, the man’s head fell off, hit the table with a dull thud, rolled away, and came to rest, rocking slightly, Longstreet’s gray eyes staring up at Pendergast in silent agony.

At the same time, the lights abruptly went off. And from out of the darkness came a low chuckle of triumph.