Cold Vengeance (21 page)

C
HAPTER 43

R
ETURNING TO THE SECOND-FLOOR PARLOR
, Pendergast sipped his sherry in thoughtful silence. Although he’d told Maurice he was quite recovered, it was at heart a lie—and in no way was this clearer than in the oversight he now realized he had made.

In his earlier searches of Helen’s papers, he had neglected to note the one important document that was missing: her birth certificate. He had everything else. The news that she had entered the second grade speaking only Portuguese had been so astonishing that he had completely failed to consider the vexing question it raised about her birth certificate—or lack thereof. She must have hidden it in a place that was accessible and yet secure. Which suggested it was still somewhere in the last house she’d inhabited.

He took another sip of sherry, pausing to examine its rich amber color. Penumbra was a large, rambling mansion, and there would be an almost limitless number of places to hide a single piece of paper. Helen was clever. He would have to think it out.

Slowly, he began eliminating potential hiding places. It had to be in an area she spent time in, so that her presence there would not be considered unusual. A place she felt comfortable. A place where she would not be disturbed. And it would have to be in some corner, or within some piece of furniture, that would never be moved, emptied, dusted out, aired, or searched by someone else.

He remained in the parlor for several hours, deep in thought, mentally searching every room and corner of the mansion. Then—once he had definitively narrowed his search to a single room—he silently rose and descended the stairs to the library. He stood at its threshold, eyes traveling across the room, taking in the trophy heads, the great refectory table, the bookshelves and objets d’art, considering—then rejecting—dozens of possible hiding places in turn.

After thirty more minutes of thought, he had narrowed his mental search to a single piece of furniture.

The massive armoire that held the Audubon double elephant folio—Helen’s favorite book—stood against the left-hand wall. He entered the library, shut the sliding doors, and walked over to the armoire. After staring at it for some time, he slid open the bottom drawer that held the two massive books of the folio. He carried each book to the refectory table in the middle of the room and laid them carefully side by side. Then he went back to the armoire, took the drawer all the way out, and turned it over.

Nothing.

Pendergast allowed himself the faintest of smiles. There were only two logical hiding places within the armoire. The first had been empty. That meant the birth certificate would definitely be hidden in the other.

He reached inside the empty space where the drawer had been and felt around, running his hand along the bottom of the shelf above, his fingers brushing against the wood in the very back of the deep armoire.

Again, nothing.

Pendergast jerked back from the armoire as if he had been burned. He stood up, staring at it. One hand rose to his lips, the tips of his fingers trembling slightly. Then—after a long moment—he turned away and glanced around the library with an unreadable expression.

Maurice was a habitual early riser. It was always his practice to be out of bed no later than six, tidying up, inspecting the grounds, preparing breakfast. But this morning he stayed in bed until well after eight.

He had hardly slept a wink. Maurice had heard, as he lay in bed, Pendergast making muffled sounds all night: traipsing up and down the stairs, moving things about, dropping things on the floor, shuffling items from one spot to another. He had listened, with mounting concern, while the bumping, scraping, thumping, dragging, and slamming had gone on and on, from attic to parlor to morning room to back bedrooms to basement, hour after hour. And now, although the sun was fully up and morning well under way, Maurice was almost afraid to leave his room and face the house. The mansion must be in a dreadful state of disarray.

Nevertheless, it could not be put off forever. And so, with a sigh, he pushed back the bedcovers and pulled himself up to a sitting position.

He rose and went softly to the door. The house was intensely quiet. He put his hand on the knob, turned. The door creaked open. Gingerly—with mounting trepidation—he leaned his head out past the door frame.

The hallway was spotless.

Quietly, Maurice padded from one room to the next. Everything was in its place; Penumbra was in perfect order. And Pendergast was nowhere to be found.

C
HAPTER 44

Thirty-five thousand feet over West Virginia

A
NOTHER TOMATO JUICE, SIR?”

“No, thank you. There will be nothing else.”

“Very good.” And the cabin steward continued making her way down the plane’s central aisle.

In the first-class compartment, Pendergast examined the yellowing document he had—after hours of exhaustive and exhausting search—finally retrieved from the queerest place: rolled up inside an old rifle barrel, proving once again how little he really knew his wife. His eye traveled once again down the document.

República Federativa do Brasil

Registro Civil Das Pessoas Naturais

Certidão de Nascimento

Nome

Helen von Fuchs Esterházy

Local de Nacimento:
Nova Godói, RIO GRANDE do SUL

Filiação Pai:
András Ferenc Esterházy

Filiação Mãi:
Leni Faust Schmid

Helen had been born in Brazil—in a place called Nova Godói. Nova Godói—
Nova G.
He recalled the name from the burnt scrap of paper he and Laura Hayward had come across in the ruins of the Longitude pharmacology laboratory.

Mime had said Helen’s native language was Portuguese. Now it made sense.

Brazil. Pendergast thought for a moment. Helen had spent almost five months in Brazil before they were married, on a mission with Doctors With Wings. Or at least that was what she had said at the time. As he’d learned the hard way, no assumption about Helen was safe.

He glanced again at the birth certificate. At the very bottom was a box labeled O
BSERVAÇÕES
/A
VERBAÇÕES
—observations/annotations. He looked at it closely, and then removed a small magnifying glass from his pocket to examine it further.

Whatever had been in this box had not merely been blacked out: the paper itself had been excised and painstakingly replaced with an unmarked piece of paper with the same engraved background pattern, microscopically stitched together with the utmost craft. It was an exceedingly professional piece of work.

He finally accepted, at that moment, that he truly had not known his beloved wife. Like so many other fallible human beings, he had been blinded by love. He had not even begun to crack the ultimate mystery of her identity.

With care bordering on reverence, he refolded the birth certificate and placed it deep in a suit pocket.

C
HAPTER 45

New York City

D
R.
J
OHN
F
ELDER SLOWLY CLIMBED THE STAIRS
of the Forty-Second Street branch of the New York Public Library. It was late afternoon, and the broad steps were busy with students and camera-wielding tourists. Felder ignored them, passing between the marble lions that guarded the Beaux-Arts façade and pushing his way into the echoing entrance hall.

For years, Felder had used this main branch of the library as a kind of retreat. He loved the way it mixed a sense of elegance and wealth with scholarly research. He’d grown up bookish and poor, the son of a dry-goods salesman and a public-school teacher, and this had always been his haven away from the commotion of Jewel Avenue. Even now, with all the research materials available to him at the Department of Health, he nevertheless found himself returning to the library again and again. Just entering its book-perfumed confines was a comforting act, leaving the squalid world behind for a better place.

Except for today. Today felt different, somehow.

He climbed the two flights of stairs to the Main Reading Room and made the long walk past dozens of long oaken tables to a far corner. Setting his case down on the scarred wooden surface, he pulled a nearby keyboard to him, then paused.

It had been half a year, roughly, since he’d first become involved with the case of Constance Greene. Originally it had been routine: another court-appointed interview with a criminal psychiatric patient. But it had quickly become more than that. She had been like no other patient he’d encountered. He’d found himself mystified, perplexed, intrigued—and aroused.

Aroused
. Yes, that too. He’d finally come to admit it to himself. But it wasn’t just her beauty—it was also her strange otherworldliness. There was something unique about Constance Greene, something that went beyond her evident madness. And it was this something that drove Felder on, that pushed him to understand her. In a way he did not quite understand, Felder felt a deep-seated need to help her, to
cure
her. This need was only sharpened by her apparent lack of interest in receiving help.

And it was into this strange tinderbox of emotion that Dr. Ernest Poole had just intruded. Felder was aware his feelings about Poole were mixed. He felt a certain proprietary interest in Constance, and the idea that another psychiatrist had previously studied her was oddly annoying. Yet Poole’s own experience with Constance—quite unlike his own, apparently—promised perhaps the best chance yet of penetrating her mysteries. The fact that Poole’s clinical evaluations were so different was both perplexing and encouraging. It could offer a uniquely three-dimensional vantage onto what would be—he felt increasingly certain—the case study of his career.

He put his fingers on the keyboard and paused again.
I was indeed born on Water Street in the ’70s—the 1870s.
Funny: Constance’s intensity of belief, coupled with her photographic, as-yet-unexplained knowledge of the old neighborhood, almost had him believing she was, in fact, a hundred and forty years old. But Poole’s talk of her lacunar amnesia, her dissociative fugue, had brought him back to reality. Still, he felt he owed Constance enough benefit of doubt to undertake one final search.

Typing quickly, he brought up the library’s database of periodicals. He would make one last search, this time of the
nineteen
seventies and later—the time frame during which Constance could reasonably be expected to have been born.

He moved the cursor down to the “search parameters” field, then paused, consulting his notes.
When my parents and sister died, I was orphaned and homeless. Mr. Pendergast’s house at Eight Ninety-one Riverside Drive was then owned by a man named Leng. Eventually it became vacant. I lived there.

He would search for three items: Greene, Water Street, and Leng. But he knew from past experience he’d better keep the terms of the search vague—scanned newspapers were notorious for typos. So he’d create a regular expression, using a logical AND query.

Typing once again, he entered the SQL-like search conditions:

SELECT WHERE (match) = = ‘Green*’ && ‘Wat* St*’ && ‘Leng*’

Almost immediately, he got a response. There was a single hit: a three-year-old article in
The New York Times
of all places. Another quick tapping of keys brought it to the screen. He began reading—then caught his breath in disbelief.