Pendergast [07] The Book of the Dead(43)

“It seems awfully tame. And one doesn’t usually find white mice running around loose.”

“Perhaps it was somebody’s pet that escaped,” she said with some irritation, and rose. “I’m tired. I hope you’ll excuse me. Good night.”

After she had left, there was a moment of silence, and then Glinn spoke again, his voice low. “There was another message from Pendergast in those papers—urgent—not relating to the matter at hand.”

“What was it about?”

“Her. He asked that you, Mr. Wren, keep a careful watch over her during the daytime—when you are not sleeping, of course. And that when you leave for your nighttime job at the library, you make sure the house is secure, and she in it.”

Wren seemed pleased. “Of course, of course! Glad to, very glad indeed.”

Glinn’s eye turned to D’Agosta. “Even though you’re living in the house, he asked if you could make it a point to drop in and check on her from time to time during working hours as well.”

“He seems worried.”

“Very.” Glinn paused, then opened a drawer and began to remove items and place them on the desk: a hip flask of whiskey, a computer flash drive, a roll of duct tape, a rolled-up sheet of mirrored Mylar plastic, a capsule of brown liquid, a hypodermic needle, a small pair of wire cutters, a pen, and a credit card.

“And now, Lieutenant, let us go over the prep work you will be expected to accomplish once you are inside Herkmoor…”

Later on—once all the maps and boxes and charts had been packed away, and as D’Agosta was seeing Glinn and Wren out at the mansion’s front door—the old librarian lingered behind.

“Listen a moment, if you would,” he said, plucking at D’Agosta’s sleeve.

“Sure,” D’Agosta said.

Wren leaned in close, as if to impart a secret. “Lieutenant, you are not familiar with the—the circumstances of Constance’s past existence. Let me just say that they are… unusual.”

D’Agosta hesitated, surprised by the look of agitation in the strange man’s eyes. “Okay,” he said.

“I know Constance well: I was the person who found her in this house, where she’d been hiding. She has always been scrupulously honest—sometimes painfully so. But tonight, for the first time, she lied.”

“The white mouse?”

Wren nodded. “I have no idea what it means, except that I’m convinced she’s in some kind of trouble. Lieutenant, she’s an emotional house of cards, just waiting for a puff of wind. We both need to keep a close eye on her.”

“Thank you for the information, Mr. Wren. I’ll check in as frequently as I can.”

Wren held his gaze for a moment, staring at him with remarkable urgency. Then he nodded, grasped D’Agosta’s hand briefly in his own bony claw, and vanished into the chill darkness.





20





The prisoner known only as A sat on the bunk in solitary 44, deep within the Federal High-Risk Violent Offender Pretrial Detention Facility—the Black Hole—of Herkmoor. It was a cell of monastic spareness, eight feet by ten, with freshly whitewashed walls, a cement floor with a central drain, a toilet in one corner, a sink, a radiator, and a narrow metal bed. A fluorescent bulb, recessed into the ceiling and protected by a wire cage, provided the cell’s sole light. There was no switch: the bulb went on at 6 A.M. and went off at 10 P.M. High up on the far wall was the room’s only window, deep and barred, two inches wide and fifteen inches high.

The prisoner, dressed in a neatly pressed gray jumpsuit, had been sitting on the mattress for many hours in utter stillness. His slender face was pale and without expression, the silvery eyes half hooded, white-blond hair combed back. Nothing moved, not even his eyes, as he listened to the soft, rapid sounds filtering from the cell next door: solitary 45.

They were the sounds of drumming: a tattoo of extraordinary rhythmic complexity that rose and fell, sped up and slowed down, moving from metal bed rail to mattress to the walls, toilet, sink, bars, and back again. At present, the prisoner was drumming on the iron bedstead rail with an occasional slap or turn played out on the mattress, while making rapid popping and clucking sounds with his lips and tongue. The endless rhythms rose and fell like the wind, working into a machine gun-like frenzy and then dying back into a lazy syncopation. At times, it almost—but not quite—seemed to come to a stop: except that a single ostinato tap… tap… tap indicated that the beat went on.

An aficionado of rhythm might have recognized the extraordinary diversity of rhythmical patterns and styles coming from solitary 45: a kassagbe Congo beat segueing into a down-tempo funk-out and then into a pop-and-lock, moving sequentially through a shakeout, a wormhole, a glam, then into a long pseudo-electroclash riff; then a quick eurostomp ending in a nasty, followed by a hip-hop twist-stick and a tom club. A moment’s silence… and then a slow Chicago blues fill began, evolving into innumerable other beats both named and nameless, twining and intertwining in an eternal braid of sound.