Dance of Death (35 page)

But only Constance had ever walked this way before.

Until a few days ago, she had hoped never to come here again. It was a reminder of the old times-the bad times-when she had seen things no living being should ever have to witness. When
he
had come, with violence and murder, and had taken from her the only human being she had known, a man who was like a father to her.
The murderer
had upended the ordered world she had grown so used to. She had fled here then, into the chill recesses of the earth. For a time, it seemed, sanity itself also fled, under the shock.

But her mind had been too carefully trained, over too many years, to ever become fully lost. Slowly, slowly, she came back. Once again, she grew interested in the ways of the waking, the living; once again, she began creeping back up to her old home, her world, the mansion at 891 Riverside. That was when she began watching the man named Wren and-finally-revealed herself to the kindly old gentleman.

Who, in turn, had brought her to Pendergast.

Pendergast.
He had reintroduced her to the world, helped her move out of a shadowy past into a brighter present.

But the work was not yet done. All too well, she was aware of that tenuous line still separating her from instability. And now
this
had happened...

As she walked, Constance bit her lip to keep back a sob.

But it shall be all right,
she tried to tell herself.
It shall be all right.
Aloysius had promised her so. And he could do anything, it seemed; even rise from the dead.

She had made a promise to him as well, and she would keep it: to spend her nights here, where not even Diogenes Pendergast could ever find her. She would keep her promise, despite the dreadful weight this place, and its memories, placed on her heart.

Ahead, the passage narrowed, then split into two. To the right, the tunnel kept corkscrewing down into darkness. To the left, a narrower way led off horizontally. Constance chose this passage, following its twists and turns for a hundred yards. Then she stopped and, at last, turned on the lamp.

Its yellow light revealed that the passage widened abruptly, dead-ending in a small, snug chamber, perhaps ten feet by six. Its floor was covered by an expensive Persian carpet, taken from one of the basement storage rooms of the mansion above. The lines of the bare rock walls were softened by reproductions of Renaissance paintings: Parmigianino's
Madonna with the Long Neck,
Giorgione's
Tempest,
half a dozen others. A cot was set into the rear of the niche, and a small table lay at one side. Works by Thackeray, Trollope, and George Eliot were stacked neatly beside Plato's
Republic
and St. Augustine's
Confessions.

It was much warmer here, belowground. The air smelled, not unpleasantly, of rock and earth. Yet the relative warmth, the small attempts at domesticity, afforded Constance little comfort.

She set the lamp upon the table, sat down before it, and glanced to one side. There was a recess in the rock face here, perhaps three feet above the level of the floor. She pulled a leather-bound book from it: the most recent volume of a diary she had kept in the old days, when she had been the ward of Pendergast's ancestor.

She opened the diary and turned its pages over slowly, thoughtfully, until she reached the final entry. It was dated July of the previous year.

Constance read the entry once, then again, brushing away a stray tear as she did so. Then, with a quiet sigh, she replaced the diary into the recess, beside its mates.

Forty-two other volumes, identical in size and shape, stood there. While the closer volumes looked quite new, the ones farther along the recess grew increasingly cracked and worn with age.

Constance sat there, looking at them, her hand resting pensively on the edge of the niche. The movement had pulled back the material of her sleeve, exposing a long row of small, healed scars on her forearm: twenty or thirty identical marks, lined up precisely in parallel with one another.

With another sigh, she turned away. Then she extinguished the light and-saying a brief prayer to the close and watchful darkness-she stole toward the cot, turned her face to the wall, and lay down, eyes open, preparing herself as best she could for the nightmares that would inevitably come.

FORTY-THREE

viola Maskelene picked up her luggage at the international arrivals carousel at Kennedy Airport, engaged a luggage porter to load it onto a cart, and followed it through customs. It was after midnight, and the wait was brief; the bored official asked her a few desultory questions, stamped her U.K. passport, and ushered her through.

A small crowd of people was waiting at the arrivals area. She paused, scanning the crowd, until she noticed a tall man in a gray flannel suit standing at the fringe. She recognized him instantly, so uncanny was the resemblance to his brother, with his high smooth forehead, aquiline nose, and aristocratic bearing. Just seeing a person with such a close resemblance to Pendergast made her heart accelerate. But there were differences, too. He was taller and less wiry, a little more heavily built perhaps; but his face was sharper, the cheekbones and bony ridges around the eyes more pronounced, all of which, taken together, gave his face a curiously asymmetrical feeling. His hair was ginger-colored and he sported a thick, neatly trimmed beard. But the most startling difference was in his eyes: one was a rich hazel green, the other a glaucous blue. She wondered if he was blind in the pale eye-it looked dead.

She smiled, gave him a quick wave.

He, too, broke into a smile and came walking over with a languid step, his hands outstretched. He grasped her hand in both of his, hands cool and soft. "Lady Maskelene?"

"Call me Viola."

"Viola. I'm charmed." His voice had much of his brother's buttery southern tones, yet although his manner of speech was almost as languorous as his walk, his words were very precisely enunciated, as if bitten off at the ends. It was an unusual, almost strange combination.

"A pleasure to meet you, Diogenes."

"My brother has been quite mysterious about you, but I know he's anxious to see you. Is this your luggage?" He snapped his fingers and a porter came rushing over. "See that this lady's luggage is brought to the black Lincoln parked just outside," Diogenes told him. "The trunk is open." A twenty appeared in his hand as if by magic, but the man was so captivated by Viola that he barely saw it.

Diogenes turned back to Viola. "And how was your trip?"

"Bloody awful."

"I'm sorry I couldn't suggest a more convenient flight. It's been rather a hectic time for my brother, as you know, and the logistics of arranging the meeting were a bit daunting."

"No matter. The important thing is that I'm here."

"Indeed it is. Shall we go?" He offered her his arm and she took it. It was surprisingly strong, the muscles hard as steel cables, very different from the soft, languid impression his movements gave.

"There'd be no mistaking you for anyone but Aloysius's brother," she said as they walked out of the baggage claim area.

"I'll take that as a compliment."

They went through the revolving doors into a blast of cold air. A dusting of fresh snow glittered on the sidewalks beyond the covered walkway.

"Brrr!" Viola said, recoiling. "When I left Capraia, it was a balmy twenty degrees. This is barbaric!"

"That would be twenty degrees Celsius, of course," said Diogenes with a wink. "How I envy you, able to live there year-round. My car." He opened the door for her, then went around, waited for the skycap to dose the trunk, then slipped in the other side.

"I don't actually live there year-round. Normally at this time of year, I'm in Luxor, working on a dig in the Valley of the Nobles. But this year, with the blasted state of the Middle East, I ran into some permit problems."

Diogenes accelerated smoothly from the curb and merged into the traffic headed for the airport exit. "An Egyptologist," he said. "How fascinating. I myself spent some time in Egypt, a junior member of the von Hertsgaard expedition."

"Not the one that went into Somalia looking for the diamond mines of Queen Hatshepsut? The one where Hertsgaard was found decapitated?"

"The very one."

"How exciting! I'd love to hear about it."

" 'Exciting' is certainly one way to describe it."

"Is it true that Hertsgaard may have found the Hatshepsut mines just before he was murdered?"

Diogenes laughed quietly. "I sincerely doubt it. You know how these rumors get started. What I find more interesting than those mythical mines is the very real Queen Hatshepsut herself-the only female pharaoh-but, of course, you know all about her, I'm sure."

"Fascinating woman."

"She claimed legitimacy by saying that her mother slept with the god Amon and that she was the issue. How does that famous inscription go?
Amon found the queen sleeping in her room. When the pleasant odors that proceeded from him announced his presence she awoke. He showed himself in his godlike splendor, and when he approached the queen she wept for joy at his strength and beauty and gave herself to him."

Viola was intrigued: Diogenes seemed to be as much of a polymath as his brother.

"So tell me, Viola. What kind of work are you doing in the Valley of the Nobles?"

"We've been excavating the tombs of several royal scribes."

"Find any treasures-gold or, even better, jewels?"

"Nothing like that. They were all robbed in antiquity. We're after inscriptions."

"What a marvelous profession, Egyptology. It seems my brother appreciates interesting women."

"I hardly know your brother, to tell you the truth."

"That will change this week, I have little doubt."

"I'm looking forward to it." She laughed a little self-consciously. "Actually, I still can't believe I'm here. This whole trip is such a ... a caprice. So
mysterious.
I love mysteries."

"So does Aloysius. It seems you two are made for each other."

Viola felt herself coloring. She quickly changed the subject. "Do you know anything about this case he's been working on?"

"It's been one of the most difficult of his career. Fortunately, it's almost over. Today, in fact, will come the denouement-and then he'll be free. The case involves a serial killer, a truly insane individual, who for various obscure reasons has conceived a deep hatred for Aloysius. He's been killing people and taunting my brother with his inability to catch him."

"How
terrible."

"Yes. My brother was forced to go underground so abruptly in order to conduct his investigation that it gave everyone the impression he'd been killed."

"I thought he was dead. Lieutenant D'Agosta told me as much."

"Only I knew the truth. I helped him after that Italian ordeal, nursed him back to health. I saved his life, if I may be allowed a moment of self-congratulation."

"I'm so glad he has a brother like you."

"Aloysius has few real friends. He's very old-fashioned, somewhat forbidding, a bit standoffish. And so I've tried to be his friend as well as his brother. I'm so glad he found you. I was so worried about him after that dreadful accident with his wife in Tanzania."

Wife? Tanzania?
Suddenly, Viola found herself wanting very much to ask what had happened. She resisted: Aloysius would tell her in good time, and she had always had the English abhorrence of prying into someone else's personal life.

"He hasn't really found me yet. We're just the most casual of new friends, you know."

Diogenes turned his strange, bicolored eyes to her and smiled. "I believe my brother is already in love with you."

This time Viola colored violently, feeling a sudden mixture of excitement, embarrassment, and foolishness.
Stuff,
she thought.
How could he be in love with me after one meeting?

"And I have reason to believe you are in love with him."

Viola managed a careless laugh, but she was tingling all over with the strangest sensation. The car hurtled through the frosty night. "This is all
far
too premature," she finally managed to say.

"While Aloysius and I are much alike, I do differ from him in terms of directness. Forgive me if I've embarrassed you."

"Think nothing of it."

The Long Island Expressway stretched ahead, a snowy alley of darkness. It was almost one o'clock in the morning and there were few cars on the road. Flakes of snow were drifting down, whipping up and over the windshield of the car as they hurtled along.

"Aloysius was always the indirect one. I could never tell what he was thinking, even when he was a boy."

"He does seem a bit inscrutable, I suppose."

"Very inscrutable. Rarely does he ever reveal his real motivations for doing things. For example, I've always believed he devoted himself to public service to make up for some of the black sheep in the Pendergast line."

"Really?" Viola's curiosity was piqued again.

An easy laugh. "Yes. Take Great-Aunt Cornelia, for example. Lives not far from here, at the Mount Mercy Hospital for the Criminally Insane."