Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(141)

“Understood, Captain.” The lieutenant turned to his officers and began barking orders. Several of them holstered their weapons and began moving deeper into the tomb, flashlight beams bobbing. Beyond them, Smithback could hear the approach of the crowd, the sounds of moaning, sobbing, and coughing, punctuated now and again by angry, incoherent cries. It sounded like an insane asylum on the move.

Pendergast was already helping Viola toward the exit. Smithback put his arm around Nora, and they fell in behind, headed for the gap blown in the corner of the burial chamber. Moments later, they were out of the mephitic tomb and inside the brightly lit subway station. A group of EMTs came running down the platform toward them, some carrying collapsible stretchers.

“We’ll take them, gentlemen,” one of the medical technicians said as they came up, while the rest rushed through the gap into the tomb.

In moments, Viola and Nora were strapped into stretchers and being carried up the stairs. Pendergast led the way. The flush had gone from his face, leaving it ashen and unreadable. Smithback walked beside Nora.

She smiled and reached up to grasp his hand. “I knew you’d come,” she said.





67





We serve breakfast beginning at six, sir,” the porter said to the handsome, impeccably dressed gentleman in the private compartment.

“I would prefer to be served in my bedroom. Thank you in advance for obliging me.”

The porter glanced down at the twenty-dollar bill being pressed into his hand. “No problem, sir, not a problem at all. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Yes. You could bring me a chilled glass, some crushed ice, a bottle of cold spring water, and a tin of sugar cubes.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll be back in a jiffy.” The man stepped out of the compartment, smiling and bowing, and shut the door with almost reverential caution.

Diogenes Pendergast watched the dwarfish man disappear down the corridor and out of sight. He heard the footsteps patter away, heard the clunk of the heavy door at the end of the railroad car. He heard the myriad sounds of Penn Station, commingled and yet disparate in his mind: the ebb and flow of conversation outside the train, the sonorous droning of the stationmaster’s announcements.

He shifted his gaze to the window, looked idly out at the platform. A landscape in shades of gray greeted him. A portly conductor stood there, patiently giving directions to a young woman, baby in her arms. A commuter trotted by, briefcase in hand, hurrying to catch the last Midtown Express to Dover on the adjoining track. An elderly woman tottered slowly by, frail and thin. She stopped to stare at the train, then at her ticket, before continuing on her precarious way.

Diogenes saw them all, yet he paid them little heed. They were simply visual ephemera, a distraction for his mind… to keep it from drifting toward other, more maddening thoughts.

After the first few minutes—moments of anguish, disbelief, and white-hot rage—he had more or less managed to keep the thought of his failure at arm’s length. The fact was, under the circumstances he had managed quite well: he always had multiple exit plans in place, and this evening he’d followed the most appropriate one to the letter. Barely half an hour had passed since he’d fled the museum. And yet already he was safely aboard the Lake Champlain, the overnight Amtrak train to Montreal. It was an ideal train for his purposes: it stopped at Cold Spring, on the Hudson, to change from electric to diesel, and all passengers were given thirty minutes to stretch their legs.

Diogenes would use the time to pay a final visit to his old friend Margo Green.

The hypo was already filled and lovingly nestled in its gift box, beautifully wrapped and beribboned. It was tucked safely away in his valise along with his most precious items—his scrapbooks, his personal pharmacopoeia of hallucinogens and opioids, his ghastly little trinkets and playthings of which nobody who’d ever caught sight had been permitted to live—all stowed in the overhead compartment. Enough clothing and disguises to get him safely home were hanging in the garment bag inside the small closet by the door. And safely tucked into his pocket were his documents and passports.

Now all that remained was to think as little as possible about what had happened. He did this by turning again, contemplatively, to Margo Green.

In his exhaustive, disciplined preparations for the sound-and-light show, she was the one indulgence he allowed himself. She was the only carryover from the earlier stage of his plan. Unlike the others, she was a sitting duck, to be played with and dispatched with little risk, time, or effort.

What about her, in particular, had drawn him back—more than, say, William Smithback, Nora Kelly, Vincent D’Agosta, or Laura Hayward? He wasn’t sure, but he guessed it was her long connection to the museum—to the pontificating, pedestrian, whoreson, didactic, beggarly, jejune, ossified, shit-encrusted minds amongst whom he had been buried—as Hugo Menzies—for more years than he cared to count. It had been an insufferably extended torture. The whole lot of them would have been dispatched by the sound-and-light show—except for her. He had failed with the others, but he would not fail with her.