Two Graves

27

SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST ENTERED HIS DAKOTA apartment and walked into the reception room. There he paused, irresolutely, listening to the whisper of water over stone. After a moment, he stepped over to a small Monet painting and straightened it, back and forth, although it was already perfectly aligned against the rose-colored wall. Next, he moved to a twisted bonsai tree, picked up a tiny pair of hand-forged clippers that lay on the table beside it, and carefully snipped off a few new shoots of growth. His hand trembled slightly as he did so.

That done, he paced the room restlessly, pausing to rearrange the lotus petals that floated in the base of the fountain.

He had something he must do, but the prospect of doing it was almost unbearable.

Finally, he stepped over to the flush door that led into the apartment proper. Opening it, he walked down the length of hallway, passing a number of doors. He nodded to Miss Ishimura, who was resting in her sitting room, reading a book in Japanese, and soon reached the end of the corridor, where the hallway made a ninety-degree turn to the right. Pendergast opened the first door to the left after the turn and stepped into the room beyond.

The walls on either side were lined floor-to-ceiling with recessed mahogany bookshelves, each filled with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century leather-bound books. The wall before him was taken up by a deep window embrasure of polished mahogany, with two banquette seats facing each other, fitted with plush cushions. Between these lay a large picture window overlooking the intersection of Central Park West and Seventy-Second Street. Beyond lay the broad vastness of Central Park, its trees bare and stark in the winter sun.

He closed his eyes, let his body relax, and carefully regulated his breathing. Slowly, outside existence began to fall away; first the room, then the apartment, the building, the island, then the world itself, in an ever-widening circle of orchestrated oblivion. The process took fifteen minutes to complete. When it was done, he held himself suspended in the close darkness, waiting for absolute emptiness, absolute calm. When he had achieved it, he slowly opened his eyes—not physically, but mentally—slowly, slowly.

The small room was revealed in all its detailed perfection. But it remained empty.

Pendergast did not allow himself the luxury of surprise. He was highly skilled in the art of Chongg Ran, an ancient Himalayan mental discipline that he had taken years to master. It was rare for him to fail to achieve stong pa nyid—the State of Pure Emptiness. Clearly, there was resistance lurking somewhere in his mind.

He would need to take more time—much more time.

Once again, he regulated his breathing, allowing his heart rate to slow to forty beats a minute. He let his mind go blank, to still the inner voice, to let go of his hopes and desires, to forget even his purpose in coming to this room. For a long moment, he lingered again, weightless, in empty space. Then—infinitely more slowly this time—he began building a perfect model of Manhattan Island in his mind, starting with his apartment and moving outward. He went first room by room, then building by building, and then—with loving attention—block by block. Pendergast knew the topography of Manhattan as well as any living person, and he allowed himself to linger on every structure, every intersection, every obscure point of architectural interest, in a harmonious mental braid of memory and reconstruction, assembling every detail into a whole and holding it, in its entirety, in his mind. Step by step the great mental construction was made, expanding until it was bordered by the Hudson River to the west and the Harlem River to the east, Battery Park in the south and Spuyten Duyvil in the north. For a long, long moment he held the entire island in his head, its every feature existing simultaneously with every other in his mental reconstruction. And then—after assuring himself of its perfection—he vaporized it in a one-second flick of the mind. Vanished. Extinguished. Nothing remained but darkness.

Now, in his mind, he opened his eyes again. Five hours had passed. And Helen Esterhazy Pendergast was sitting in the window seat across from him. Of all the rooms in the Dakota apartment, this had been Helen’s favorite. She had not been especially fond of New York, and this tiny den—cozy with books and the smell of polished wood, the view of Central Park spread out before it—had been her particular retreat.

Of course, Helen was not there in the literal sense; but in every other way she existed: everything in Pendergast’s mind that touched on her, every memory, every tiny detail, was part of that mental construct, so much so that she could be said to have assumed a quasi-autonomous existence.

Such was the beauty and power of Chongg Ran.

Helen’s hands were folded in her lap, and she was wearing a dress he well remembered—black satin, with pale coral-colored stitching traced along the low neckline. She was younger—about the age she had been at the time of the hunting accident.

Accident. The irony of it was that it had been an accident—only not in the way he’d believed these many years.

“Helen,” he said.

Her eyes rose to meet his briefly. She smiled and then looked down again. The smile caused him to flinch in pain and grief; and the scene wavered and almost flew apart. He waited until it stabilized, until his heart slowed back down.

“There is a serial killer loose in the city,” he said. He could hear the quaver in his own voice, along with a formal tone uncharacteristic of his usual exchanges with his wife. “He has killed three times. Each time, he left a message. The second message was Happy Birthday.”

There was a silence.

“This second killing took place on my birthday. Because of that—and certain other elements of the murders—I began to suspect they were the work of my brother, Diogenes. This seemed to be confirmed when I compared my DNA with that of the killer and learned that we were, in fact, closely related. Close enough to be brother-to-brother.”

He stopped, checking to see the impact these words were having on his wife. But she continued to look down at the hands clasped in her lap.

“But now I’ve had a look at the mtDNA results as well. And they’ve shown me something else. The killer isn’t related to me alone. He’s also related to you.”

Helen looked up. She either could not, or would not, speak.

“Do you remember that trip you made to Brazil? It was about a year before we were married, and you were away a long time—almost five months. At the time, you told me you were on a mission for Doctors With Wings. But that was a lie—wasn’t it? The truth was that… that you went to Brazil in order to secretly bear a child. Our child.”

The words hung in the air. Helen returned his gaze, a stricken look on her face.

“I think I even know when the child was conceived. It was on that first moonrise we shared—two weeks after we met. Wasn’t it? And now… now you’ve left me to come to terms with the fact that I have not only a son I do not know, a son I’ve never met—but a son who is also a serial killer.”

Helen dropped her eyes once again.

“I’ve also seen documents that indicate your family—and, in fact, yourself and your brother, Judson—were involved in eugenics experiments that date back to the Nazi regime. Brazil; John James Audubon; Mengele and Wolfgang Faust; Longitude Pharmaceuticals; the Covenant, Der Bund—it’s a long, ugly story that I’m only beginning to piece together. Judson explained a piece of it to me once, not long before he died. He said: What I’ve become was what I was born to be. It’s what I was born into—and it’s something beyond my control. If you only knew the horror that Helen and I have been subjected to, you’d understand.”

He paused, swallowed.

“But the truth is that I don’t understand. Why did you hide so much from me, Helen? Your pregnancy, our child, your family’s past, the horrors Judson spoke of—why didn’t you let me help you? Why did you keep our child apart from me all these years—and in so doing perhaps allow him to become… what he has now become? As you surely knew, those tendencies are a dark strain in my family going back generations. The truth is, you never, ever mentioned him until your own dying words to me: He’s coming.”

Helen refused to look at him. She was clenching and unclenching the hands that lay in her lap.

“I’d like to believe you weren’t complicit—or, at least, merely tangentially complicit—in your sister’s death. I’d also like to believe Emma Grolier, as she was known, was already dead, mercifully euthanized, when you learned of the plan. I certainly hope that was the case. It would certainly have made the whole arrangement easier to swallow for you.

“But why did she have to die for you in the first place? I have been thinking about that for a long time now, and I believe I understand what happened. After learning about the Doane family tragedy, and the cruel way they were used, you must have threatened Charles Slade and Longitude—and by extension Der Bund—with exposure over the Audubon drug. So the decision was made, in turn, to kill you in order to keep you silent. Correct?”

Now Helen’s hands were trembling.

“Judson, your own brother, was tasked with the job. But he couldn’t do it—and the very assignment was, no doubt, what made him secretly break with the Covenant. Instead he devised a way, an elaborate way, to keep you alive. He knew that your damaged twin sister had a terminal illness—I’ve just today been able to glean that much of her medical history from the public record. So he arranged for that hunting accident with the Red Lion—planning to substitute your twin sister’s body for yourself. He told his minders about the blank cartridges in your gun; told them you’d be taking lead on the hunt. Der Bund was satisfied by that. He’d found a lion that would drag you away without harming you, but would also maul your sister’s body on command. And Judson kept the plan from you until the night before—didn’t he? That’s why you seemed out of sorts that final evening in Africa—he was there near the camp, along with the lion’s handlers and Emma’s recently deceased corpse. He called you out and explained the whole scheme. Only it didn’t go quite as expected; the lion didn’t exactly stick to the plan, and you lost a hand as it dragged you away. Good thing your sister’s body was, right afterward, sufficiently devoured as to allow Judson to leave your own hand—and the ring—behind as even more evidence proving your death. My word—the presence of mind he must have had.”

Pendergast shook his head bitterly. “What a fiendishly complex arrangement—but it had to be complex, to keep from arousing my suspicions. If what happened had not seemed absolutely, utterly an act of nature, I would not have rested until learning the truth—just as I am not resting now.”

A moment of terrible silence.

“But again—why didn’t you simply come to me, that night in the hunting camp? Why didn’t you let me help you? Why, why did you shut me out?”

He paused. “And there’s something else—something I have to know. Do you love me, Helen? Did you ever love me? I always felt in my heart that you did. But now, learning all this—now I can’t be certain. I’d like to believe you first met me simply for access to the Audubon records, but that you then, unexpectedly, fell in love with me. I’d like to believe that your pregnancy was a mistake. But am I wrong in so thinking? Was our marriage just a contrivance? Was I an unwitting pawn in some grand design I don’t yet understand the full extent of? Helen, please tell me. It is… it is a kind of agony for me, not knowing.”

Helen remained stock-still. A single tear welled up in one eye, then trickled down her cheek. It was an answer of a kind.

Pendergast looked at her, waiting, for a long time. Then, with a barely perceptible sigh, he closed his eyes. When he next opened them, the room was once again occupied only by himself.

And then faintly, from somewhere in the front of the apartment, he heard a deeply muffled scream.