The Cabinet of Curiosities

by Preston; Child

  He began to walk away. Then he stopped, as if struck by an idea.

  “Want to come along?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Come on,” the reporter said. “You don’t look like you’re on duty.”

  “I said no.”

  Smithback took a step closer. “You know, now that I think about it, maybe we could help each other out here. Know what I mean? I need to keep in touch with this investigation into the Surgeon.”

  “The Surgeon?”

  “Haven’t you heard? That’s what the Post is calling this serial killer. Cheesy, huh? Anyway, I need information, and I’ll bet you need information. Am I right?”

  O’Shaughnessy said nothing. He did need information. But he wondered if Smithback really had something, or was just bullshitting.

  “I’ll level with you, Sergeant. I got scooped on that tourist killing in Central Park. And now, I have to scramble to get new developments, or my editor will have my ass for brunch. A little advance notice here and there, nothing too specific, just a nod from a friend—you, for instance. That’s all.”

  “What kind of information do you have?” O’Shaughnessy asked guardedly. He thought back a minute to what Pendergast had said. “Do you have anything on, say, Fairhaven?”

  Smithback rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding? I’ve got a sackful on him. Not that it’ll do you much good, but I’m willing to share. Let’s talk about it over a drink.”

  O’Shaughnessy glanced up and down the street. Despite his better judgment, he found himself tempted. Smithback might be a hustler, but he seemed a decent sort of hustler. And he’d even worked with Pendergast in the past, though the reporter didn’t seem too eager to reminisce about it. And finally, Pendergast had asked him to put together a file on Fairhaven.

  “Where?”

  Smithback smiled. “Are you kidding? The best bars in New York City are just one block west, on Columbus. I know a great place, where all the Museum types go. It’s called the Bones. Come on, the first round’s on me.”

  THIRTEEN

  THE FOG GREW thicker for a moment. Pendergast waited, maintaining his concentration. Then through the fog came flickerings of orange and yellow. Pendergast felt heat upon his face. The fog began to clear.

  He was standing outside J. C. Shottum’s Cabinet of Natural Productions and Curiosities. It was night. The cabinet was burning. Angry flames leapt from the first- and second-story windows, punching through billowing clouds of black, acrid smoke. Several firemen and a bevy of police were frantically roping off the street around the building and pushing curious onlookers back from the conflagration. Inside the rope, several knots of firefighters arced hopeless streams of water into the blaze, while others scurried to douse the gaslights along the sidewalk.

  The heat was a physical force, a wall. Standing on the street corner, Pendergast’s gaze lingered appreciatively on the fire engine: a big black boiler on carriage wheels, belching steam, Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in gold letters on its sweating sides. Then he turned toward the onlookers. Would Leng be among them, admiring his handiwork? No, he would have been long gone. Leng was no pyromaniac. He would be safely ensconced in his uptown house, location unknown.

  The location of the house was a great question. But another, perhaps more pressing, question remained: where had Leng moved his laboratory?

  There was a tremendous, searing crack; roof timbers collapsed inward with a roiling shower of sparks; an appreciative murmur rose from the crowd. With a final look at the doomed structure, Pendergast began threading his way through the crowd.

  A little girl rushed up, no older than six, threadbare and frighteningly gaunt. She had a battered straw broom in her hand, and she swept the street corner ahead of him industriously, clearing away the dung and pestilential garbage, hoping pathetically for a coin. “Thank you,” Pendergast said, tossing her several broad copper pennies. She looked at the coins, eyes wide at her good fortune, then curtsied awkwardly.

  “What’s your name, child?” Pendergast asked gently.

  The girl looked up at him, as if surprised to hear an adult speak to her in a solicitous tone. “Constance Greene, sir,” she said.

  “Greene?” Pendergast frowned. “Of Water Street?”

  “No, sir. Not—not anymore.” Something seemed to have frightened the girl, and, with another curtsy, she turned and melted away down a crowded side street.

  Pendergast stared down the foul street and its seething crowds for some time. Then, with a troubled expression on his face, he turned and slowly retraced his steps. A barker stood in the doorway of Brown’s Restaurant, delivering the bill of fare in a loud, breathless, ceaseless litany:

  Biledlamancapersors.

  Rosebeefrosegoorosemuttonantaters—

  Biledamancabbage, vegetaybles—

  Walkinsirtakaseatsir.

  Pendergast moved on thoughtfully, listening to the City Hall bell toll the urgent fire alarm. Making his way to Park Street, he passed a chemist’s shop, closed and shuttered, an array of bottles in diverse sizes and colors decorating the window: Paine’s Celery Compound; Swamp Root; D. & A. Younce’s Indian Cure Oil (Good for Man and Beast).

  Two blocks down Park, he stopped abruptly. He was fully attentive now, eyes open to every detail. He had painstakingly researched this region of old New York, and the fog of his memory construct retreated well into the distance. Here, Baxter and Worth Streets angled in sharply, creating a crazy-quilt of intersections known as the Five Points. In the bleak landscape of urban decay that stretched before him, there was none of the carefree revelry Pendergast had found earlier, along Bowery.

  Thirty years before, in the 1850s, the “Points” had been the worst slum in all New York, in all America, worse even than London’s Seven Dials. It remained a miserable, squalid, dangerous place: home to fifty thousand criminals, drug addicts, prostitutes, orphans, confidence men, villains of all shape and description. The uneven streets were broken and scored into dangerous ruts, brimming with garbage and offal. Hogs wandered about, rooting and wallowing in the fouled gutters. The houses seemed prematurely aged, their windows broken, tarpaper roofs hanging free, timbers sagging. A single gas lamp threw light into the intersection. On all sides, narrow streets marched off into endless darkness. The doors of the first-floor taverns were flung wide against the summer heat. The smells of liquor and cigar smoke issued forth. Women, bare-breasted, lolled in the doorways, exchanging obscene jeers with whores in the neighboring saloons or soliciting passersby in lurid tones. Across the way, nickel-a-night flophouses, riddled with vermin and pestilence, sat between the shabby cow-sheds of fencers of stolen goods.

  Pendergast gazed carefully around at the scene, scrutinizing the topography, the architecture, for any clue, any hidden link that a mere study of historical records could not provide. At last he turned eastward, where a vast, five-story structure sat, decayed and listing, dark even in the light of the gas lamp. This was the former Old Brewery, at one time the worst of all the Five Points tenements. Children who had the misfortune to be born within were known to pass months or even years without tasting the outside air. Now, thanks to the efforts of a charitable group, it had been rebuilt as the Five Points Mission. An early urban renewal project for which, in 1880, the good Dr. Enoch Leng had volunteered his medical services, pro bono. He had continued to work there into the early ’90s, when the historical record on Leng vanished abruptly.

  Pendergast walked slowly toward the building. An ancient sign for the Old Brewery remained painted along its upper story, dominating the far newer and cleaner Five Points Mission sign beneath. He considered entering the building, then decided against it. There was another visit he had to make first.

  Behind the Five Points Mission, a tiny alley ran north into a dark cul-de-sac. Moist, fetid air seeped out from the darkness. Many years before, when the Points region had been a marshy pond known as the collect, Aaron Burr had installed a large subterranean pump for the natural springs at this spot, founding
the New Amsterdam Water Company. The pond grew increasingly foul, however, and eventually had been filled in to make way for tenements.

  Pendergast paused thoughtfully. Later, this alleyway had been known as Cow Bay, the most dangerous street in the Five Points. It had been crowded with tall wooden tenements with names like “Brickbat Mansion” and “The Gates of Hell,” tenanted by violent alcoholics who would stab a man for the clothes on his back. Like many structures in the Five Points, these were warrens of vile-smelling chambers, honeycombed with secret panels and doors that connected to other houses on adjoining streets by networks of underground passageways, allowing criminals easy escape from pursuing law enforcement. In the mid-nineteenth century, the street had averaged a murder a night. Now it was home to an ice delivery company, a slaughterhouse, and an abandoned substation of the city’s waterworks, shut down in 1879 when the uptown reservoir rendered it obsolete.

  Pendergast moved on another block, then turned left onto Little Water Street. At the far corner was the Five Points House of Industry, the other orphanage graced with the medical attention of Enoch Leng. It was a tall Beaux Arts building, punctuated along its north end by a tower. A small rectangular widow’s walk, buttressed by iron fencing, sat atop its mansard roof. The building looked woefully out of place among the shabby wooden houses and ramshackle squatteries.

  He stared up at the heavy-browed windows. Why had Leng chosen to lend his services to these two missions, one after the other, in 1880—the year before Shottum’s Cabinet burned? If he was looking for an endless source of impoverished victims whose absence would cause no alarm, the cabinet was a better choice than a workhouse. After all, one could have only so many mysterious disappearances before someone grew suspicious. And why had Leng chosen these missions in particular? There were countless others in lower Manhattan. Why had Leng decided to work—and, presumably, draw his pool of victims—from this spot?

  Pendergast stepped back onto the cobbles, glancing up and down the lane, thinking. Of all the streets he had traveled, Little Water Street was the only one no longer extant in the twentieth century. It had been paved over, built upon, forgotten. He had seen old maps that showed it, naturally; but no map ever drawn had superimposed its course onto present-day Manhattan…

  An incredibly shabby man with a horse and cart came down the street, ringing a bell, collecting garbage for tips, a brace of tame hogs following behind. Pendergast did not need him. Instead, he glided back down the narrow road, pausing at the entrance to Cow Bay. Although with the disappearance of Little Water Street it was difficult to tell on modern maps, Pendergast now saw that the two missions would both have backed onto these terrible old tenements. Those dwellings were gone, but the warren of tunnels that once served their criminal residents would have remained.

  He glanced down both sides of the alley. Slaughterhouse, ice factory, abandoned waterworks… It suddenly made perfect sense.

  More slowly now, Pendergast walked away, headed for Baxter Street and points north. He could, of course, have ended his journey at this point—have opened his eyes to the present-day books and tubes and monitor screens—but he preferred to continue the discipline of this mental exercise, to take the long way back to Lenox Hill Hospital. He was curious to see if the fire at Shottum’s Cabinet had been brought under control. Perhaps he would hire a carriage uptown. Or better yet, walk up past the Madison Square Garden circus, past Delmonico’s, past the palaces of Fifth Avenue. There was much to think about, much more than he had previously imagined—and 1881 was as good a place as any to do it in.

  FOURTEEN

  NORA STOPPED AT the nurses’ station to ask directions to Pendergast’s new room. A sea of hostile faces greeted the question. Clearly, Nora thought, Pendergast was as popular at Lenox as he had been at St. Luke’s—Roosevelt.

  She found him lying up in bed, the blinds shut tight against the sun. He looked very tired, his face gray. His blond-white hair hung limply over his high forehead, and his eyes were closed. As she entered, they slowly opened.

  “I’m sorry,” Nora said. “This is a bad time.”

  “Not at all. I did ask you to see me. Please clear off that chair and sit down.”

  Nora moved the stack of books and papers from the chair to the floor, wondering again what this was about. She’d already given him her report about her visit with the old lady and told him it would be her last assignment for him. He had to understand that it was time for her to get back to her own career. As intriguing as it was, she was not about to commit professional hara kiri over this business.

  Pendergast’s eyes had drooped until they were almost closed, but she could still see the pale irises behind the shtted lids.

  “How are you?” Courtesy required she ask that question, but there wouldn’t be any others. She’d listen to what he had to say, then leave.

  “Leng acquired his victims from the cabinet itself,” Pendergast said.

  “How do you know?”

  “He captured them at the back of one of the halls, most likely a small cul-de-sac housing a particularly gruesome exhibit. He would lie in wait until a visitor was alone, then he’d snatch his victim, take the unfortunate through a door at the rear of the exhibit, which led down the back stairs to the coal cellar. It was a perfect setup. Street people vanished all the time in that neighborhood. Undoubtably, Leng selected victims that would not be missed: street urchins, workhouse boys and girls.”

  He spoke in a monotone, as if reviewing his findings within his own mind instead of explaining them to her.

  “From 1872 to 1881 he used the cabinet for this purpose. Nine years. Thirty-six victims that we know of, perhaps many more Leng disposed of in some other way. As you know, there had in fact been rumors of people vanishing in the cabinet. These no doubt served to increase its popularity.”

  Nora shuddered.

  “Then in 1881 he killed Shottum and burned the cabinet. We of course know why: Shottum found out what he was up to. He said as much in his letter to McFadden. But that letter has, in its own way, been misleading me all this time. Leng would have killed Shottum anyway.” Pendergast paused to take a few breaths. “The confrontation with Shottum merely gave him the excuse he needed to burn the cabinet. You see, phase one of his work was complete.”

  “Phase one?”

  “He had achieved what he set out to do. He perfected his formula.”

  “You don’t seriously mean Leng was able to prolong his own life?”

  “He clearly believed he could. In his mind, the experimentation phase could cease. Production could begin. Victims would still be required, but many fewer than before. The cabinet, with its high volume of foot traffic, was no longer necessary. In fact, it had become a liability. It was imperative for Leng to cover his tracks and start afresh.”

  There was a silence. Then Pendergast resumed.

  “A year before the cabinet burned, Leng offered his services to two workhouses in the vicinity—the Five Points House of Industry and the Five Points Mission. The two were connected by the warren of old underground tunnels that riddled the entire Five Points area in the nineteenth century. In Leng’s day, a foul alley known as Cow Bay lay between the workhouses. Along with the sordid tenements you’d expect, Cow Bay was home to an ancient subterranean pumping station dating back to the days of the Collect Pond. The waterworks were shut down and sealed for good about a month before Leng allied himself with the workhouses. That is no mere coincidence of dates.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The abandoned waterworks was the site of Leng’s production laboratory. The place he went after burning Shottum’s Cabinet. It was secure, and better still it provided easy underground access to both workhouses. An ideal place to begin production of the substance he believed would prolong his life. I have the old plans for the waterworks, here.” Pendergast waved his hand, weakly.

  Nora glanced over at the complex set of diagrams. She wondered what had so exhausted the agent. He had seemed much better th
e day before. She hoped he hadn’t taken a turn for the worse.

  “Today, of course, the workhouses, the tenements, even many of the streets are gone. A three-story brownstone was built directly above the site of Leng’s production laboratory. Number 99 Doyers Street, erected in the 1920s off Chatham Square. Broken into one-bedroom flats, with a separate two-bedroom apartment in the basement. Any traces of Leng’s laboratory would lie under that building.”

  Nora thought for a moment. Excavating Leng’s production laboratory would no doubt be a fascinating archaeological project. There would be evidence there, and as an archaeologist she could find it. She wondered, once again, why Pendergast was so interested in these nineteenth-century murders. It would be of some historical solace to know that Mary Greene’s killer had been brought to light—She abruptly terminated the line of thought. She had her own work to do, her own career to salvage. She had to remind herself once again that this was history.

  Pendergast sighed, turned slightly in the bed. “Thank you, Dr. Kelly. Now, you’d better go. I’m badly in need of sleep.”

  Nora glanced at him in surprise. She had been expecting another plea for her help. “Why did you ask to see me, exactly?”

  “You’ve been a great help to me in this investigation. More than once, you’ve asked for more information than I could give you. I assumed you wished to know what I’ve discovered. You’ve earned that, at the very least. There’s a detestable term one hears bandied about these days: ’closure.’ Detestable, but in this case appropriate. I hope this knowledge will bring you some degree of closure, and allow you to continue your work at the Museum without a sense of unfinished business. I offer my sincerest thanks for your help. It has been invaluable.”