City of Endless Night

66

D’Agosta quietly followed Pendergast around Anton Ozmian’s home in the Time Warner Center. Like the man’s vast office in Lower Manhattan, the huge eight-bedroom condo was practically in the clouds. Only the view was different: instead of New York Harbor, outside and below these windows lay the toy trees, lawns, and winding boulevards of Central Park. It was as if the man scorned the banality of a life lived at sea level.

The CSU team had come and gone long ago — there was precious little evidence of Grace Ozmian’s shooting to be documented — and now there was just a small knot of NYPD techs on hand, snapping pictures here and there, taking notes, and chatting in low whispers. Pendergast had not spoken to them. He’d arrived with a long roll of architect’s blueprints under his arm, along with a small electronic unit — a laser measuring tool. He had laid out the plans on a black granite table in the expansive living room — the industrial style of the condo was similar to that of the DigiFlood offices — and studied them in great detail, every now and then straightening up to peer around at the surrounding room. At one point he rose and measured the room’s dimensions with the laser tool, moved through several adjacent rooms taking measurements, and then came back.

“Curious,” he said at last.

“What is?” D’Agosta asked.

But Pendergast had turned away from the table and walked over to a long wall covered with polished mahogany bookcases, punctuated here and there by objets d’art mounted on plinths. He walked along the bookcases slowly, then stepped back a moment, like a dilettante studying a painting in a museum. D’Agosta watched, wondering what he was up to.

Two days ago, when Pendergast had reappeared mere minutes before he was to be blown sky-high, D’Agosta had felt mostly a huge rush of relief that he wasn’t, after all, going to die in a most humiliating and ignominious way. Since then, he’d had plenty of time to think, and his feelings had become a lot more complicated.

“Hey, listen, Pendergast—” he began.

“One moment, Vincent.” Pendergast lifted a small Roman bust from its stand, then replaced it. He continued down the row of bookcases, pushing here, prodding there. After a few moments, he paused. One book in particular seemed to get his attention. He reached for it, slid it out, and peered into the empty slot left by its absence. He snaked a hand into the space, felt around, and appeared to press something. There was a loud snick of a lock and then the entire section of bookshelf rolled forward, disengaging itself from the wall.

“Remind you of a certain library we both know, Vincent?” Pendergast murmured as he swung the shelf away on well-oiled hinges.

“What the hell is this?”

“Certain inconsistencies in the blueprints for this condo made me suspicious that it might contain a hidden space. My measurements proved it. And this book—” he held up a tattered copy of J. H. Patterson’s Man-Eaters of Tsavo—“seemed too appropriate to be overlooked. As for what I’ve found — don’t you think there is still a large piece missing from this puzzle?”

“Um, no, not really.”

“No? What about the heads?”

“The police think—” D’Agosta paused. “Oh, Jesus. Not here.”

“Oh, yes — here.” Pulling a flashlight from his pocket and snapping it on, Pendergast stepped into the dark space revealed by the swinging bookcase. D’Agosta followed, suppressing a sense of dread.

A small alcove led to a mahogany door. Pendergast opened it to reveal a tiny, odd-shaped room, about six feet wide by fifteen feet long, paneled in wood with a Persian runner. As Pendergast’s flashlight beam licked over the room, D’Agosta’s gaze was immediately transfixed by a bizarre sight: the right-hand wall held a series of plaques, and mounted on each plaque was a human head, beautifully preserved, glass eyes gleaming, the skin a fresh, natural color, the hair carefully combed and coiffed, the faces waxwork-like in their strange stillness of perfection — and, most grotesque of all, each head had been given a faint smile. There was an odor of formalin in the air.

Beneath each plaque, a small brass plate had been screwed into the wall, engraved with a name. Revolted, yet fascinated despite himself, D’Agosta followed the FBI agent down the grisly corridor space. GRACE OZMIAN read the plate under the first head: a bleach-blond girl with a remarkably pretty face, red lipstick, and green eyes; MARC CANTUCCI read the plaque beneath the second head: an older, graying, heavyset man with brown eyes and a queer, wry little smile. And so it went, the procession of mounted heads leading to the rear of the secret room, until the two arrived at a single, empty plaque. There was a brass plate already in place below it. ALOYSIUS PENDERGAST read the legend engraved on it.

At the very end of the room stood a leather wing chair with a small accent table beside it on which sat a cut-glass decanter and a brandy snifter. Next to the table was a standing lamp of Tiffany glass. Pendergast reached over and pulled the cord. The room was suddenly illuminated in soft light, the six mounted heads throwing ghoulish shadows across the ceiling.

“Ozmian’s trophy room,” Pendergast murmured as he slipped his flashlight back into his pocket.

D’Agosta swallowed. “Crazy son of a bitch.” He couldn’t tear his eyes from the empty plaque at the end of the row — the one that had been intended for Pendergast.

“Crazy, yes, but a man with extraordinary criminal skills — in breaching security, hiding in plain sight, disappearing almost without a trace. Take, for example, the very expensive silicone mask he must have used to impersonate Roland McMurphy. Combine those skills with extreme intelligence, a perfect absence of compassion and empathy, and a high degree of ambition, and you get a psychopath of the highest order.”

“But here’s one thing I don’t understand,” D’Agosta said. “How did he get into Cantucci’s place? I mean, the town house was a fortress, and that security specialist Marvin and everyone else said only an employee of Sharps and Gund could have gotten past all the alarms and countermeasures.”

“Not so formidable for a computer genius like Ozmian, with a stable of prize hackers — not just extremely well paid, but some being blackmailed by Ozmian for their previous hactivist crimes — at his beck and call, in one of the most sophisticated and powerful dot-com companies in the world, with access to all the latest digital tools. Look what he and his people did to frame that reporter, Harriman. A diabolical piece of work. Having a brain trust like that on hand would make getting inside Cantucci’s residence not so difficult.”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

Pendergast turned to leave.

“Um, Pendergast?”

The agent turned. “Yes, Vincent?”

“I think I owe you an apology.”

Pendergast arched his eyebrows in query.

“I was stupid, I was desperate for answers, I had everyone from the mayor on down climbing up my ass…I bought that damned reporter’s theory hook, line, and sinker. And then I mouthed off at you when you tried to warn me the theory was bogus—”

Pendergast raised a hand to silence him. “My dear Vincent. Harriman’s story seemed to fit the facts, it was an attractive theory as far as it went, and you weren’t the only one taken in. A lesson for all of us: things are not always as they seem.”

“That’s for sure.” D’Agosta glanced at the grisly row of trophy heads. “Not in a million years would I have guessed this.”

“And that’s why our Behavioral Science Unit wasn’t able to profile the man. Because he wasn’t, psychologically speaking, a serial killer. He was truly sui generis.”

“Sweet generous…Him? What the—?”

“Just an old Latin phrase. It means ‘of its own kind; in a class by itself.’”

“I gotta get out of here.”

Pendergast looked at the blank plaque with his name on it. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” he murmured again in Latin. And then he turned away and quickly stepped out of the little chamber of horrors.

They returned to the vast living room of Ozmian’s apartment with its sprawling views. D’Agosta went to the window, breathing deeply. “Some things I wish I could unsee.”

“To be a witness to evil is to be human.”

Pendergast joined him at the window, and they gazed out for a moment in silence. The wintry landscape of New York was suffused with the pale-yellow glow of the dying afternoon.

“In a strange way, that jackass Harriman was right about the one percenters ruining this city,” said D’Agosta. “It’s also kind of funny that the killer turned out to be a one percenter himself. Just another super-rich, entitled bastard, getting his jollies at the expense of everyone else. I mean, look at this place! It makes me want to puke: these arrogant assholes in their penthouses, lording it around town in their stretch limos, with their chauffeurs and butlers…” His voice suddenly trailed off and he felt his face go red. “Sorry. You know I didn’t mean you.”

For the first time he could recall, he heard Pendergast laugh. “Vincent, it isn’t the content of one’s bank account that’s important, it’s the content of one’s character, to paraphrase a wise man. The divide between the wealthy and everyone else is a false dichotomy — and one that obscures the real problem: there are many wicked people in the world, rich and poor. That is the real divide — between those who strive to do good, and those who strive only for themselves. Money magnifies the harm the wealthy can do, of course, allowing them to parade their vulgarity and malfeasance in full view of the rest of us.”

“So what’s the answer?”

“To paraphrase another wise man, ‘The rich will always be with us.’ There is no answer, except to make sure we wealthy are not allowed to use our money as a tool of oppression and subversion of democracy.”

D’Agosta was surprised at this uncharacteristic bit of philosophizing. “Yeah, but this town, New York, it’s changing. Now only the rich can afford Manhattan. Brooklyn and even Queens are going the same way. Where are working people like me going to live in ten, twenty years?”

“There’s always New Jersey.”

D’Agosta choked. “You were making a joke, right?”

“I’m afraid the trophy room of horrors has provoked in me an inappropriate levity.”

D’Agosta understood immediately. It was like those M.E.’s, with a murder victim opened up on the gurney, who cracked jokes about spaghetti and meatballs. Somehow, the horror of what they’d just witnessed needed to be exorcised by unrelated banter.

“Getting back to the case,” Pendergast said hastily, “I must admit to you I feel personally distressed and even chastened.”

“How’s that?”

“Ozmian completely took me in. Until he tried to foist Hightower as a suspect on us, I hadn’t the slightest inkling that he was a possible suspect. That will trouble me for a very, very long time.”