Dance Of Death

SEVEN

Somewhere, a clock chimed midnight, its deep, bell-like tones muted by the plush drapes and hanging tapestries of the library in the old mansion at 891 Riverside Drive.

D'Agosta sat back from the table and stretched in the leather armchair, fingertips working the kinks out of the small of his back. This time the library felt a lot more cheery: a fire was crackling atop wrought-iron firedogs, and light from half a dozen lamps threw a mellow glow into the remotest corners. Constance was sitting beside the fire, sipping tisane from a china cup and reading Spenser's Faerie Queene. Proctor, who had not forgotten D'Agosta's own taste in beverages, had drifted in a few times, replacing warm, half-finished glasses of Budweiser with chilled ones.

Constance had produced all the materials Pendergast saved concerning his brother, and D'Agosta had spent the evening poring over them. Here, in this familiar room, with its walls of books and its scent of leather and woodsmoke, D'Agosta could almost imagine Pendergast at his side, helping him take up the long-cold trail, pale eyes glittering with curiosity at the onset of the chase.

Except there was precious little here to chase. D'Agosta glanced over the documents, clippings, letters, photographs, and old reports that littered the table. Pendergast had clearly taken his brother's threat seriously: the collection was beautifully organized and annotated. It was almost as if Pendergast knew that, when the time ultimately came, he might not be around to face the challenge; that the task might be left to others. He'd saved every scrap of information, it seemed, that he had been able to obtain.

Over the last several hours, D'Agosta had read everything on the table two and, in some cases, three times. After Diogenes had severed his connection with the Pendergast clan following the death of his mother and father, he had gone largely into hiding. For almost a year, there was no word at all. Then a letter arrived from a family lawyer, asking that a sum of $100,000 be wired to a Zurich bank for Diogenes's benefit. This was followed a year later by another, similar letter, demanding that $250,000 be wired to a bank in Heidelberg. The family rejected this second request, and it prompted a response from Diogenes. That letter now sat on the table, sealed between two panels of clear Lucite. D'Agosta glanced once again at the spidery, meticulous script, so curiously inappropriate for a boy of seventeen. There was no date or location, and it was addressed to Pendergast:

Ave, frater-

I find it disagreeable to write you on this subject, or any other for that matter. But you force my hand. For I have no doubt you are the one behind the denial of my request for funds.

I need not remind you I will come into my inheritance in a few years. Until that time I shall now and then require certain trifling sums such as I requested last month. You will find it in your best interests, and in the best interests of others you may or may not know, to honor such requests. I should have thought our final discussion in Baton Rouge would have made that clear. I am very much preoccupied at present with various lines of research and study and have no time to earn money in the conventional manner. If forced to do so, I will obtain the funds I need-in a manner amusing to myself. If you do not wish to see my attentions diverted in this way, you will honor my request with all haste.

The next time I write you, it shall be on a matter of my own choosing, not yours. I will not bring this up again. Good-bye, brother. And bonne chance.

D'Agosta put the letter aside. Records showed that the money was promptly sent. The following year, a similar sum was wired to a bank in Threadneedle Street, London. A year later, another sum was sent to a bank in Kent. Diogenes surfaced briefly on his twenty-first birthday to claim his inheritance-eighty-seven million dollars. Two months later, he was reported to have been killed in an automobile accident in Canterbury High Street. Burned beyond recognition. The inheritance was never found.

D'Agosta turned the bogus death certificate over in his hands.

I am very much preoccupied at present with various lines of research and study. But what, exactly? Diogenes certainly didn't say, and his brother was silent on the matter. Or almost silent. D'Agosta let his eye fall on a pile of news clippings. They had been taken from a variety of foreign magazines and newspapers. Each had been labeled with an attribution and a date, and those in foreign languages had translations attached-once again, Pendergast thinking ahead.

Most of these clippings dealt with unsolved crimes. There was an entire family in Lisbon, killed by botulism, yet without any trace of food found in their stomachs. A chemist at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, was discovered with radial arteries of both wrists severed and the body carefully exsanguinated. Yet there was no blood at the murder scene. Files on several of the chemist's experiments were found to be missing. Additional clippings described still other deaths, more grisly, in which the corpses seemed to have been victims of various tortures or experimentation-the bodies were too badly damaged to be certain. And yet other clippings were mere obituaries. There seemed to be no logic or pattern to the deaths, and Pendergast did not leave any commentary on what it was that he had found interesting.

D'Agosta picked up the pile, riffled through it. There was a variety of thefts, too. A pharmaceutical manufacturing company, reporting the robbery of a freezer full of experimental drugs. A collection of diamonds mysteriously vanished from a vault in Israel. A rare, fist-sized piece of amber containing a leaf from a long-extinct plant, lifted from a wealthy couple's apartment in Paris. A unique, polished T. rex coprolite, dating precisely from the K-T boundary.

He replaced the clippings on the table with a sigh.

Next his eye fell on a small sheaf of papers from Sandringham, a private school in the south of England that Diogenes attended-unknown to his family-to finish out his last year of upper school. He had managed to get himself accepted on the strength of several forged documents and a phony set of parents hired for the occasion. Despite a first- semester report card putting him in the first of every form, he was expelled a few months later. Judging from the paperwork, the school gave no reason for the expulsion and responded to Pendergast's queries with evasion, even agitation. Other papers showed that Pendergast had contacted a certain Brian Cooper on several occasions-Cooper had briefly been the roommate of Diogenes at Sandringham-but it seemed the boy refused to respond. A final letter from the youth's parents said Brian had been placed in an institution, where he was being treated for acute catatonia.

Following the expulsion, Diogenes slipped completely out of view for more than two years. And then he had surfaced to claim his inheritance. Four months later, he staged his own death in Canterbury.

After that, silence.

No-that wasn't quite true. There was one final communication. D'Agosta turned toward a folded sheet of heavy linen paper, sitting alone at one corner of the table. He reached for it, opened it thoughtfully. At the top was an embossed coat of arms, a lidless eye over two moons, a lion crouched beneath. And at the very center of the sheet was a date, written in violet ink with what D'Agosta now recognized as Diogenes's handwriting: January 28.

Inexorably, D'Agosta's mind returned once again to the October day when he'd first held the letter-here, in this room, on the eve of their departure to Italy. Pendergast had shown it to him and spoken briefly of Diogenes's plan to commit the perfect crime.

But D'Agosta had returned from Italy alone. And now it was up to him-and nobody else-to follow through for his dead partner, to stop the crime that presumably would occur on January 28.

Less than a week away.

He felt a rising panic; there was so little time left. The roommate at Sandringham: now, there was a lead. He'd call the parents tomorrow, see if the boy was talking. Even if he struck out there, undoubtedly there were other boys at the school who had known Diogenes.

D'Agosta folded the paper carefully and returned it to the table. Beside it lay a single black-and-white photograph, scuffed and creased with age. He picked it up, held it to the light. A man, a woman, and two young boys, standing before an elaborate wrought-iron railing. An imposing mansion could be seen in the middle distance. It was a warm day: the boys were in shorts, and the woman wore a summer dress. The man stared at the camera with a patrician face. The woman was beautiful, with light hair and a mysterious smile. The boys were perhaps eight and five. The elder stood straight, arms behind his back, looking gravely into the lens. His light blond hair was carefully parted, his clothes pressed. Something about the shape of the cheekbones, the aquiline features, told D'Agosta this was Agent Pendergast.

Beside him was a younger boy with ginger hair, hands pressed together, fingers pointed skyward, as if in prayer. Unlike his older sibling, Diogenes seemed faintly disheveled. But there was nothing in his dress or his grooming to account for this. Maybe it was something in the relaxed, almost languid draping of his limbs, so out of context with the chastely positioned hands. Maybe it was the parted lips, too full and sensual for a person so young. Both eyes looked the same- this must have been before the illness.

Still, D'Agosta was drawn to the eyes. They weren't looking at the camera, but at some point past it if they were looking at anything at all. They seemed dull, almost dead, out of place in that childish little face. D'Agosta felt an uncomfortable sensation in the pit of his stomach.

There was a rustle beside him and D'Agosta jumped. Constance Greene had suddenly materialized at his side. She seemed to have Pendergast's ability to approach with almost total silence.

"I'm sorry," Constance said. "I didn't mean to startle you."

"No problem. Looking at all this stuff is enough to creep anyone out."

"Excuse me. Creep out?"

"It's just an expression."

"Have you found anything interesting? Anything at all?"

D'Agosta shook his head. "Nothing we didn't talk about earlier." He paused. "The only thing is, I didn't see anything in here about Diogenes's illness. Scarlet fever, according to Aunt Cornelia. She said it changed him."

"I wish there was more information I could give you. I've searched the collections and the family papers, just in case there was something Aloysius overlooked. But he was very thorough. There's nothing else."

Nothing else. Diogenes's whereabouts, his appearance, his activities, even the crime he planned to commit: everything was a blank.

There was only a date-January 28. Next Monday.

"Maybe Pendergast was wrong," D'Agosta said, trying to sound hopeful. "About the date, I mean. Maybe it's not for another year. Or maybe it's something else entirely." He gestured at the documents strewn across the table. "All this seems so far away and long ago. It's hard to believe something big's about to happen."

The only response from Constance was a faint, and fleeting, smile.