Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(119)

“Who?” Pendergast murmured.

“Viola Maskelene.”

Hayward sensed a sudden stillness behind her.

“Did you inquire as to how she happened to be there?” came the very cool voice from the backseat.

Hayward swerved around a lumbering garbage truck. “She was hired by the museum at the last minute to replace Wicherly.”

“Hired by whom?”

“The head of the Anthropology Department. Menzies. Hugo Menzies.”

Another pause, much briefer, before Pendergast spoke again. “Tell me, Captain, what’s the program for this evening?”

Pendergast seemed, in a way, to be waking up.

“Hors d’oeuvres and cocktails, seven to eight. The ribbon cutting and opening of the tomb, eight to nine. Dinner at nine-thirty.”

“Opening of the tomb—I assume that includes a tour?”

“A tour with a sound-and-light show. Nationally televised.”

“A sound-and-light show?”

“Yes.”

Pendergast’s voice—which had been so hollow and remote—was now laced with urgency. “For God’s sake, Captain, hurry!”

Hayward shot between two cabs that were stubbornly refusing to let her pass, clipping one bumper in the process. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw it fly upward, bouncing and flipping in a shower of sparks.

“What am I missing here?” D’Agosta asked.

“Captain Hayward is right,” Pendergast said. “This is it—the ‘perfect crime’ Diogenes boasted about.”

“Are you sure?”

“Listen carefully,” Pendergast said. He hesitated briefly. “I will only speak of this once. A wrong was done to my brother, many years ago. He was exposed—inadvertently, but exposed nevertheless—to a sadistic device. It was a ‘house of pain,’ its sole purpose to drive its victim insane or kill him from sheer fright. And now Diogenes—in the person of Menzies, whom he is no doubt posing as—will, through some hidden means of his own, re-create this at the opening tonight. Eli Glinn said it: Diogenes is motivated by a feeling of victimization. My brother wants to perpetrate the wrong done to him, but on a large scale. And, with a live television broadcast, the scale could be large indeed. This is what he has been building up to. All the rest was merely sideshow.”

He sank back in the rear seat and fell silent once again.

The car careened off the West Side Highway at the 79th Street exit ramp, then accelerated eastward toward the rear of the museum. In the distance ahead, all seemed calm—there were no flashing police lights, no hovering helicopters.

Maybe it hasn’t happened yet.

She tore right on Columbus, made the dogleg around 77th Street with a screeching of rubber, and flew onto Museum Drive, jamming on her brakes before a crush of idling limousines, taxis, and spectators. The squad car slewed sideways before the crowd and she leaped out, waving her badge, D’Agosta already in the lead, a one-man flying wedge.

“Captain Hayward, NYPD Homicide!” she cried. “Make way!”

The crowds parted in confusion, the slower ones scattered by D’Agosta, and in a moment they were at the velvet ropes. Without even pausing, D’Agosta knocked down a guard who had stepped in front of them. Hayward flashed her shield at the astonished police officers on duty and they sprinted up the carpeted steps toward the huge bronze doors of the museum.





55





Nora Kelly stepped down from the podium into a sea of applause, enormously relieved that her short speech had gone well. She had been the last speaker, directly following George Ashton, the mayor, and Viola Maskelene, and now the main event was about to begin: the cutting of the ribbon and the opening of the Tomb of Senef.

Viola joined up with her. “Brilliant speech,” she said. “You were actually interesting.”

“As were you.”

She saw Hugo Menzies gesturing for them to come over. She pushed through the crowd, Viola following. Menzies’s face was florid, his blue eyes sparkling, his white tie and tails giving him the air of an impresario. His arm was linked with that of the mayor of New York, Simon Schuyler, a balding, owlish man with spectacles, whose appearance belied an interior of slick and utterly lethal political genius. He was scheduled to give a short speech at dinner, and he looked the part. He was standing next to a brunet who was so well put together she could only have been a politician’s wife.

“Nora, my dear, you know Mayor Schuyler, of course,” Menzies said. “And this is Mrs. Schuyler. Simon, this is Dr. Nora Kelly, head curator of the Tomb of Senef and one of our most brilliant and interesting young scientists. And this is Dr. Viola Maskelene, the formidable British Egyptologist.”