The Line Up (38 page)

He blushed. “I had not thought of it quite so cruelly, but I suppose that is more or less what I had supposed. Pretty women sometimes are led to believe that charm can overcome any deficit in intelligence or experience.”

“I can hear Charlotte’s laughter in my mind as you say that,” Vespasia responded. “She is very observant of small things, as women often are. She notices tone of voice, the way people stand, look at each other, the expressions on faces when they imagine themselves unobserved. But of course she would be far too wise to tell you what she had seen—at least she would now.”

“And earlier?”

“That was a different matter,” Vespasia admitted. “If one’s mistakes are dramatic enough, one does not repeat them.”

“You alarm me, and intrigue me,” he said. “I shall most certainly meet Mrs. Pitt. Tell me, do you think she will wish him to take this position, should it be offered him?”

Vespasia thought for several moments. “Oh yes, she will wish him to accept it. She was never a coward. But she will not be blind to its costs. She will know that the decisions he has to make will at times be dangerous and painful. He will make mistakes, because we all do, and he will grieve over them. He will lie awake wondering how he can spare people, knowing there is no way and yet still laboring to find one. He is a man born poor, who understands the poor, the ordinary, and the fearful. He will speak to the common man as an equal. He will at times be something of a prude and offend the aristocratic, as he has offended the king. He will not always know when to laugh and when to keep silent. But sooner or later he will earn their respect, because they will come to know that they can trust both his judgment and his kindness. That is a lot to say of any man, Sir Peter.”

“And Mrs. Pitt?” he asked.

“Oh, you may trust her to be shocking, charming, disastrously frank, and utterly loyal. You will like her, whether you wish to or not, because you will not be afraid of her. She is impractical only in the things that do not matter at all, except to people who have no sense of proportion.” Her face tightened fractionally. “A sense of proportion is going to matter in the times ahead, I think. We will need to know with great certainty what it is we value, what we are prepared to give our lives to preserve. Yes, Sir Peter, the prime minister should offer this position to Thomas Pitt. He is the essential Englishman, rooted in the soil of his ancestry, willing to live and die for the common decencies of life, the honor and tolerance, the kindness and the absurdities.

“You will be happy to sit at the kitchen table with him and drink tea with a slice of cake at the end of a long case, and know that you have done your best.”

He rose to his feet. “Thank you, Lady Vespasia. I shall recommend to the prime minister that we overrule His Majesty’s misgivings and do exactly that. I appreciate your candor. I believe that I now know more of Thomas and Charlotte Pitt than anyone else could have told me.”

She inclined her head and smiled, with a faraway, dreaming look of long and happy memory.

DOUGLAS PRESTON and LINCOLN CHILD

Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956. He graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, California, where he studied mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, anthropology, geology, astronomy, and English. He worked at New York’s American Museum of Natural History for eight years as writer and editor of the in-house publication, eventually writing the nonfiction book Dinosaurs in the Attic for St. Martin’s Press, where his editor was Lincoln Child. They formed a friendship that resulted in their coauthoring the bestselling FBI Agent Pendergast series and other novels.

Lincoln Child was born in Westport, Connecticut, in 1957. He graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, majoring in English. He took a job with St. Martin’s in 1979 and, after editing more than a hundred books and founding the company’s horror division, left in 1987 for a position with MetLife as a programmer and systems analyst. His first collaborative novel with Preston, Relic, was published in 1995.

Preston and Child have collaborated on thirteen novels, nine about Pendergast and four stand-alones: Mount Dragon (1996), Riptide (1998), Thunderhead (1999), and The Ice Limit (2000).

On his own, Child has written the thrillers Utopia (2002), Death Match (2004), Deep Storm (2007), and Terminal Freeze (2009).

Preston’s solo works are Dinosaurs in the Attic (1985), Jennie (1994), The Royal Road with José Antonio Esquibel and photographs by Christine Preston (1998), Cities of Gold (1999), The Codex (2004), Tyrannosaur Canyon (2005), Blasphemy (2008), and Monster of Florence with Mario Spezi (2008).

ALOYSIUS X. L. PENDERGAST

BY DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD

Douglas Preston

My first job out of college was as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was over a quarter mile from the front door of the museum to my office, way in the back, and it took seven and a half minutes to make that walk (I timed it). I had to pass through the great African Hall, with the elephants, a series of smaller halls, the Egyptian Alcove, the Hall of Man in Africa, the Hall of Birds of the World, the Precolumbian Gold Hall, and the Hall of Mexico and Central America. It is one of the largest museums in the world, and I found it an amazing place to work.

Part of my job was to write a column about the museum in Natural History magazine. I wrote about the Copper Man, about the Ahnighito meteorite, about Meshie the chimpanzee, about the dinosaur mummy, and the Star of India.

One day, I got a call from an editor at St. Martin’s Press. He had been reading my columns in the magazine and wondered if I would do him the kindness of joining him for lunch at the Russian Tea Room to talk about a possible book.

I said I would certainly do him that kindness, and I rushed down to the Salvation Army to buy a jacket so I could get into the Russian Tea Room. When the appointed day came, I showed up expecting to meet an éminence grise from St. Martin’s Press. Instead, waiting for me at a table in the back was a kid even younger than I was: Lincoln Child.

Lincoln Child

I had been a fan of the museum ever since coming to New York as a dewy-eyed college graduate. I loved nothing better than taking the behind-the-scenes tours and seeing the cubbyholes where real-life Indiana Joneses hung their pith helmets. After each such tour I would leave the museum thinking, “What an amazing old pile! When I retire I’ll have to write its history.” Then one day I realized: “You dolt! Why go to all that work when you can pay some other poor scrivener to do it?” After all, I was a book editor, and it was my job to find new projects for my house to publish. I found Doug’s articles in the museum’s magazine, and I invited him to lunch. He was exactly the kind of person I was looking for: young and hungry looking (note to Preston-Child readers: imagine Bill Smithback). I pitched the idea of an informal history and armchair tour of the museum, to be written by him. He immediately jumped at it: he was more than ready to graduate from articles to full-length books. And that was the birth of what was to become Doug’s nonfiction title Dinosaurs in the Attic.

During the writing of the book I was always pestering Doug for a real behind-the-scenes tour, not the two-bit one that the tourists got. But he was afraid to do it, because I didn’t have the appropriate security clearance and he wasn’t able to get it for me. But finally he hit on a plan: it would be a midnight tour, when presumably nobody would be around to check our credentials. Doug had a special key that would get us into many odd places and storage rooms full of strange things. So it was that, one midnight, Doug snuck me in for a personal guided tour. And what a tour! I saw flesh-eating beetles, whale eyeballs in formaldehyde, rooms full of dinosaur bones as big as VW Bugs. We ended up on the fourth floor, in the (then-named) Hall of Late Dinosaurs (no pun intended). There was a terrific storm outside, and flickers of lightning from the ceiling skylight illuminated the huge, ancient T. rex towering over us. I don’t know what possessed me, but I turned to Doug and said, “This is the scariest building in the world. Doug, we have to write a thriller set in a museum like this.”

He turned to me, eyes shining with emotion—or maybe it was just that last wee nip of Macallan making an unwelcome reappearance.

And then a guard making his rounds surprised us. I don’t know who was more scared: us, the guard, or the T. rex. But that’s a story for another time.

Doug

No, let’s tell that story now. When the guard surprised us, I thought, now I’m in deep shit. But Linc’s brilliant wit saved us—the first of many such rescues. As the guard inched into the dark hall, shining his light around, anxious voice booming out, “Who’s there?” Linc came up with the perfect reply. He cried out, “Thank God, you’ve finally found us! We’ve been wandering around for hours looking for the exit! How in the world do you get out of this place?”

The guard escorted us out the security exit, never knowing I was a rogue museum employee conducting an undercover tour.

Linc and I began discussing our novel, set in the museum, which we had decided to call Relic. One evening, Linc and I were sitting on his porch in Westchester County, sharing a bottle of good single malt. Between tipples of malt and discussions of what fine fellows we were, what rare geniuses, and how we would take the literary world by storm, we managed to hash out the plot to Relic. I agreed to take a crack at the first few chapters.

In the meantime, I had moved from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the calls began coming. How were the chapters going? Fine, just fine! I would reply. After a year of this, Linc’s patience began to wear thin. He is not normally the kind of person who employs vulgar language, but I do recall him telling me one time, “Doug, just write the fucking chapters already.”

So I finally did. To my great surprise, I enjoyed the experience. I had always thought of myself as a serious writer, in line for a Nobel Prize, but I found I enjoyed writing a novel about a brain-eating monster loose in a museum a lot more than I expected.

I sent the first few chapters to Linc. He called me and said he liked them very much, except for one thing. I had two New York City cops, partners, who were the investigating officers. “Doug, they’re both the same character,” Linc said.

“What do you mean?” I was immediately furious at this slight to my literary talent.

“You got this one guy, Vincent D’Agosta, ethnic New York City cop, rough on the outside with a heart of gold. And then you’ve got his partner—exactly the same, except he’s Irish.”

After profoundly damning Linc’s contemptible literary taste, I finally came around to seeing his point.

“What we need,” Linc said, “is a detective no one’s ever seen before. A real fish out of water. Someone who will act as a foil to D’Agosta and to New York City itself.”

“Oh, God,” I said, “not another ‘unique’ detective, please! What, you mean like an albino from New Orleans?”

There was a long silence and then I heard Linc say, “An albino from New Orleans… Intriguing… Very intriguing… ”

Linc

The thing one has to keep in mind is that we wrote Relic as a lark. Don’t get me wrong: we had high opinions of our writing skills and our ability to craft an interesting story. I’d edited dozens, hundreds, of novels, and Doug has always had a far deeper knowledge of literature than most English professors could boast (and he himself has taught writing at Princeton). What I mean is that we wrote the story to amuse ourselves rather than others. A lot of first-time novelists try to write what they think other people want to read, or cynically attempt to write a novel that will have the broadest appeal. Not us. We wrote—for want of a better word—irresponsibly. We created eccentric characters and put them in extravagant situations. Having two of us in on the job improved—or exacerbated—the situation. I’d read something Doug wrote, would be hugely amused, and would then expand on it. If he wrote a scene of a terrified mob stampeding past an upended table of free hors d’oeuvres, I’d add a gratuitous bit about a huge bolus of pâté being ground into mud beneath the running feet. And then Doug would have some character knocked to the ground, landing face first in the pâté, and so on, each trying to top the other.

It was into this hothouse atmosphere that Agent Pendergast first stepped. In those days Doug frequently wrote four out of every five new chapters, while I did significant rewriting and produced the outlines for the chapters to come. So one day I received, via 2,400-baud modem (don’t laugh; it was the Pony Express of its day), what would eventually become chapter fourteen of Relic. It was an exciting rough draft. Among other things, in it Lieutenant D’Agosta is so revolted by a particular sight that he vomits his breakfast of scrambled eggs, ham, cheese, and ketchup all over a museum courtyard. This happens moments after Agent Pendergast makes his very first appearance. (The two events are unrelated.)

What is remarkable is that even in this first chapter, Pendergast displays some of the traits that go on to become his defining attributes: touchstones that readers return to again and again like mantras. For example, the first word out of his mouth: “Excellent.” Or, when discussing certain personal flaws: “A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break.”

Doug had put the initial touches on a character that, I saw immediately, had the potential to be deeply cool. He was cultured and cultivated. He was unabashedly eccentric. He could take in a crime scene with a single heavy-lidded glance… though you wouldn’t comprehend the depth of his perspicacity unless he chose to reveal it to you. He could descant at length, and with extensive learning, on the beauty of a particular painting—and then point out in an offhand way the fresh bloodstains that had recently marred it. This was exactly the kind of character I could sink my teeth into. So I was quick to add my own eccentric touches. As I did so, I had several antecedents in mind: Sherlock Holmes (of course), Futrelle’s Thinking Machine, and (perversely) Christopher Walken’s character in The Dogs of War (from whence came the many references to Pendergast’s feline grace). But for me, the single biggest influence was Alastair Sim’s insouciant portrayal of Inspector Cockrill in the obscure English mystery film Green for Danger.