The Cabinet of Curiosities

by Douglas Preston

  At last Nora paused, putting her trowel aside to take stock. She removed her safety helmet, drew the back of her hand across her brow, replaced the helmet on her head. It was well past midnight, and she felt exhausted. The excavation at its deepest point had gone down more than four feet below grade: a lot of work. It was difficult, also, to work this rapidly while maintaining a professional excavation.

  She turned to O’Shaughnessy. “Take five. I’d like to examine this soil profile.”

  “About time.” He straightened up, resting on his shovel. His brow was streaming with sweat.

  Nora shone her flashlight along the carefully exposed wall of dirt, reading it as one might read a book. Occasionally she would shave off a little with a trowel to get a clearer view.

  There was a layer of clean fill on the top going down six inches—laid, no doubt, as a base for the more recent brick floor. Below was about three feet of coarser fill, laced with bits of post-1910 crockery and china. But she could see nothing from Leng’s laboratory—at least, nothing obvious. Still, she had flagged and bagged everything, by the book.

  Beneath the coarse fill, they had struck a layer containing bits of trash, rotting weeds, pieces of mold-blown bottles, soup bones, and the skeleton of a dog: ground debris from the days when the site had been a vacant lot. Under that was a layer of bricks.

  O’Shaughnessy stretched, rubbed his back.“Why do we have to dig so far down?”

  “In most old cities, the ground level rises at a fixed rate over time: in New York it’s about three quarters of a meter every hundred years.” She pointed toward the bottom of the hole. “Back then, that was ground level.”

  “So these old bricks below are the original basement flooring?”

  “I think so. The floor of the laboratory.” Leng’s laboratory.

  And yet it had yielded few clues. There was a remarkable lack of debris, as if the floor had been swept clean. She had found some broken glassware wedged into the cracks of the brick; an old fire grate with some coal; a button; a rotten trolley ticket, a few other odds and ends. It seemed that Leng had wanted to leave nothing behind.

  Outside, a fresh flash of lightning penetrated the coat Nora had hung over the window. A second later, thunder rumbled. The single bulb flickered, browned, then brightened once again.

  She continued staring thoughtfully at the floor. At last, she spoke. “First, we need to widen the excavation. And then, I think we’ll have to go deeper.”

  “Deeper?” said O’Shaughnessy, a note of incredulity in his voice.

  Nora nodded. “Leng left nothing on the floor. But that doesn’t mean he left nothing beneath it.”

  There was a short, chilly silence.

  Outside, Doyers Street lay prostrate under a heavy rain. Water ran down the gutters and disappeared into the storm drains, carrying with it trash, dog turds, drowned rats, rotting vegetables, the guts of fish from the market down the street. The occasional flash of lightning illuminated the darkened facades, shooting darts of light into the curling fogs that licked and eddied about the pavement.

  A stooped figure in a derby hat, almost obscured beneath a black umbrella, made its way down the narrow street. The figure moved slowly, painfully, leaning on a cane as it approached. It paused, ever so briefly, before Number 99 Doyers Street; then it drifted on into the miasma of fog, a shadow merging with shadows until one could hardly say that it had been there at all.

  FIVE

  CUSTER LEANED BACK in his oversized mediterranean office chair with a sigh. It was a quarter to twelve on Saturday morning, and by rights he should have been out with the bowling club, drinking beer with his buddies. He was a precinct commander, for chrissakes, not a homicide detective. Why did they want him in on a frigging Saturday? Goddamn pointless public relations bullshit. He’d done nothing but sit on his ass all morning, listening to the asbestos rattle in the heating ducts. A waste of a perfectly good weekend.

  At least Pendergast was out of action for the time being. But what, exactly, had he been up to? When he’d asked O’Shaughnessy about it, the man was damned evasive. You’d think a cop with a record like his would do himself a favor, learn what to kiss and when. Well, Custer had had enough. Come Monday, he was going to tighten the leash on that puppy, but good.

  The buzzer on his desk rang, and Custer poked at it angrily. “What the hell is it now? I was not to be disturbed.”

  “Commissioner Rocker is on line one, Captain,” came Noyes’s voice, carefully neutral.

  Omigod holy shit sonofabitch, thought Custer. His shaking hand hovered over the blinking light on his telephone. What the hell did the commissioner want with him? Hadn’t he done everything they’d asked him to do, the mayor, the chief, everybody? Whatever it was, it wasn’t his fault…

  A fat, trembling finger depressed the button.

  “Custer?” The commissioner’s desiccated voice filled his ear.

  “What is it, sir?” Custer squeaked, making a belated effort to lower the pitch of his voice.

  “Your man. O’Shaughnessy.”

  “Yes sir? What about O’Shaughnessy?”

  “I’m a little curious here. Why, exactly, did he request a copy of the forensic report from the ME’s office on the remains found down on Catherine Street? Did you authorize this?” The voice was slow, weary.

  What the hell was O’Shaughnessy up to? Custer’s mind raced. He could tell the truth, say that O’Shaughnessy must have been disobeying his orders. But that would make him look like a fool, a man who couldn’t control his own. On the other hand, he could lie.

  He chose the latter, more habitual course.

  “Commissioner?” he managed to bring his voice down to a relatively masculine pitch. “I authorized it. You see, we didn’t have a copy down here for our files. It’s just a formality, you know, dotting every t and crossing every i. We do things by the book, sir.”

  There was a silence. “Custer, since you are so nimble with aphorisms, you surely know the expression ’Let sleeping dogs lie’?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I thought the mayor made it clear we were going to let that particular sleeping dog lie.” Rocker didn’t sound like he had the greatest faith in the mayor’s judgment.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “O’Shaughnessy isn’t freelancing, is he, Custer? He’s not, by any chance, helping that FBI agent while he’s laid up—is he?”

  “He’s a solid officer, loyal and obedient. I asked him to get the report.”

  “In that case, I’m surprised at you, Custer. Surely you know that once the report is down at the precinct, every cop there will have access to it. Which is one step from laying it on the doorstep of the New York Times.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t think of that.”

  “I want that report—every copy of that report—sent back up to me. Personally. By courier. You understand? No copy is to remain at precinct.”

  “Yes, sir.” Christ, how was he going to do that? He would have to get it from O’Shaughnessy, the son of a bitch.

  “I get the funny feeling. Custer, that you don’t quite appreciate the full situation here. This Catherine Street business has nothing to do with any criminal investigation. It is a historical matter. That forensic report belongs to Moegen-Fairhaven. It’s private property. They paid for it and the remains were found on their land. Those remains have been given a respectful but anonymous burial in a private cemetery, with the appropriate religious ceremonies, all arranged by Moegen-Fairhaven. The matter is closed. Follow me so far?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, Moegen-Fairhaven is a good friend of the mayor—as the mayor has taken pains to point out to me—and Mr. Fairhaven himself is working very hard to see that he is re-elected. But if this situation gets any more botched up, Fairhaven might not be so enthusiastic in his support. He might decide to sit this one out. He might even decide to throw his weight behind the other fellow who’s running.”

  “I understand, sir.”

&nb
sp; “Good. Now we’ve got a psychopath out there, this so-called Surgeon, carving people up. If you’d focus your talents on that, Custer, I’d appreciate it. Good day.”

  There was a click as the line went abruptly dead.

  Custer sat up in his chair, gripping the phone, his porcine frame trembling. He swallowed, brought his shaking voice under control, and pressed the buzzer on his desk. “Get O’Shaughnessy on the line. Try whatever you need, radio, emergency frequency, cell, home number, whatever.”

  “He’s off duty, Captain,” Noyes said.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what he is. Get him.”

  “Yes, sir.” And the speaker crackled back into silence.

  SIX

  NORA TOOK HER TROWEL, knelt, and began prying up one of the old bricks that made up the ancient floor. It was rotten and waterlogged, and it crumbled under the trowel. She quickly plucked out the pieces, then began prying up its neighbors, one after the other. O’Shaughnessy stood above her, watching. They had worked through the night, and past noon of the following day, widening the excavation to eight square meters. She felt weary beyond description. But this was still one task she wanted to do herself.

  Once he’d gotten wind of their progress, Pendergast had forced himself out of his hospital bed—despite the fearful protests of the doctors and nurses—and made the journey down to Doyers Street himself. Now he lay near the digsite on an orthopedic mattress, newly delivered from Duxiana. He remained there, arms across his chest, eyes closed, moving infrequently. With his black suit and pallid face, he looked alarmingly like a corpse. At Pendergast’s request Proctor, his chauffeur, had delivered a variety of items from the Dakota apartment: a small table, a Tiffany lamp, and an array of medicines, unguents, and French chocolates, along with a stack of obscure books and maps.

  The soil beneath the floor of Leng’s old laboratory was waterlogged and foul-smelling. Nora cleared a one-meter square of the floor bricks, then began digging a diagonal test trench with her trowel. Anything under the floor would not be deep. There wasn’t much farther to go. She was almost in the water table.

  She struck something. A deft bit of brushwork revealed a rusted, rotten nineteenth-century umbrella, only its whalebone skeleton intact. She carefully cleared around it, photographed it in situ, then removed it and laid its rotting pieces on a sheet of acid-free specimen paper.

  “You’ve found something?” Pendergast asked, eyes still closed. A long white hand removed a chocolate from a box and placed it in his mouth.

  “The remains of an umbrella.” She worked more quickly. The dirt was looser, muddier.

  Fourteen inches down, in the left-hand corner of the grid, her trowel struck heavily against something. She began clearing away the sodden dirt around it. Then her brush hand jerked aside reflexively. It was a circlet of hair about a smooth dome of brown bone.

  A distant rumble of thunder pierced the silence. The storm was still upon them.

  She heard a faint intake of breath from O’Shaughnessy.

  “Yes?” Pendergast’s voice came instantly.

  “We’ve got a skull here.”

  “Keep digging, if you please.” Pendergast didn’t sound surprised.

  Working carefully with the brush, heart pounding uncomfortably in her chest, Nora cleared away more dirt. The frontal bone came slowly into view, then two eye sockets, slimy, sticky matter still clinging inside. A foul smell rose and she gagged involuntarily. This was no clean Anasazi skeleton that had been buried a thousand years in dry sand.

  Plucking her T-shirt up over her nose and mouth, she continued. A bit of nasal bone became exposed, the opening cradling a twisted piece of cartilage. Then, as the maxilla was exposed, came a flash of metal.

  “Please describe.” Again Pendergast’s weak voice broke the silence of the room.

  “Give me another minute.”

  Nora brushed, working down the craniofacial bones. When the face was exposed, she sat back on her heels.

  “All right. We have a skull of an older adult male, with some hair and soft matter remaining, probably due to the anaerobic environment of the site. Just below the maxilla there are two silver teeth, partly fallen from the upper jaw, attached to some old bridgework. Below that, just inside the jaws, I see a pair of gold spectacles, one lens of which has black opaque glass.”

  “Ah. You have found Tinbury McFadden.” There was a pause and Pendergast added, “We must keep going. Still to be found are James Henry Perceval and Dumont Burleigh, members of the Lyceum and colleagues of our Dr. Leng. Two people unlucky enough to have also received J. C. Shottum’s confidences. The little circle is complete.”

  “That reminds me,” Nora said. “I remembered something, while I was digging last night. The first time I asked Puck to show me the Shottum material, he said in passing that Shottum was quite popular these days. I didn’t pay much attention to it then. But after what happened, I began to wonder who had—” She stopped.

  “Who had made that particular journey ahead of us,” Pendergast finished the thought for her.

  Suddenly there was the rattle of the doorknob.

  All eyes turned.

  The knob rattled, turned, turned again.

  There was a series of concussive raps on the door, which reverberated through the small apartment. A pause followed; then a second volley of frantic pounding.

  O’Shaughnessy looked up, hand dropping to his automatic. “Who’s that?”

  A shrill female voice sounded outside the door. “What go on here? What that smell? What you do in there? Open up!”

  “It’s Mrs. Lee,” Nora said as she rose to her feet. “The landlady.”

  Pendergast lay still. His pale cat’s eyes flitted open for a moment, then closed again. He looked as if he was settling in for a nap.

  “Open up! What go on in there?”

  Nora climbed out of the trench, moved to the door. “What’s the problem?” she said, keeping her voice steady. O’Shaughnessy joined her.

  “Problem with smell! Open up!”

  “There’s no smell in here,” said Nora. “It must be coming from somewhere else.”

  “It come from here, up through floor! I smell all night, it much worse now when I come out of apartment. Open up!”

  “I’m just cooking, that’s all. I’ve been taking a cooking class, but I guess I’m not very good yet, and—”

  “That no cooking smell! Smell like shit! This nice apartment building! I call police!” Another furious volley of pounding.

  Nora looked at Pendergast, who lay still, wraith-like, eyes closed. She turned to O’Shaughnessy.

  “She wants the police,” he said with a shrug.

  “But you’re not in uniform.”

  “I’ve got my shield.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  The pounding continued.

  “The truth, of course.” O’Shaughnessy slid toward the door, undid the locks, and let the door fall open.

  The squat, heavyset landlady stood in the door. Her eyes darted past O’Shaughnessy, saw the gigantic hole in the living room floor, the piles of dirt and bricks beyond, the exposed upper half of a skeleton. A look of profound horror blossomed across her face.

  O’Shaughnessy opened his wallet to display his shield, but the woman seemed not to notice. She was transfixed by the hole in the floor, the skeleton grinning up at her from the bottom.

  “Mrs.—Lee, was it? I’m Sergeant O’Shaughessy of the New York Police Department.”

  Still the lady stared, slack-jawed.

  “There’s been a murder in this apartment,” O’Shaughnessy said matter-of-factly. “The body was buried under the floor. We’re investigating. I know it’s a shock. I’m sorry, Mrs. Lee.”

  Finally, the woman seemed to take notice of him. She turned slowly, looking first at his face, then at his badge, then at his gun. “Wha—?”

  “A murder, Mrs. Lee. In your apartment.”

  She looked back at the huge hole. Within it, the s
keleton lay peacefully, wrapped in its mantle of earth. Above, in the bed, Pendergast lay still, arms crossed over his chest, in a similar attitude of repose.

  “Now, Mrs. Lee, I’m going to ask you to go back quietly to your apartment. Tell no one about this. Call no one. Lock and bolt your door. Do not let anyone in unless they show you one of these.” O’Shaughnessy shoved the badge closer to her face.

  “Do you understand, Mrs. Lee?”

  She nodded dumbly, eyes wide.

  “Now go on upstairs. We need twenty-four hours of absolute quiet. Then of course there will be a large group of police arriving. Medical examiners, forensic experts—it will be a mess. Then you can talk. But for now—” He lifted a finger to his lips and pantomimed an exaggerated shhhhhh.

  Mrs. Lee turned and shuffled up the stairs. Her movements were slow, like a sleepwalker’s. Nora heard the upstairs door open, then close. And then all was quiet once again.

  In the silence, Pendergast opened one eye. It swiveled around to O’Shaughnessy, then to Nora.

  “Well done, you two,” he said in a weak voice. And the faintest of smiles played about his lips.

  SEVEN

  AS THE SQUAD car carrying Captain Sherwood Custer turned the corner onto Doyers Street, the captain stared through the windshield, tensing at the noisy group of reporters. It was a smallish group, but he could see they were the worst of the lot.

  Noyes angled the car into the curb and Custer opened his door, heaving his frame out onto the street. As he approached the brownstone, the reporters began calling to him. And there was the worst of all, that man—Smithbutt, or whatever—arguing with the uniformed officer standing on the front steps. “It isn’t fair!” he was crying in an outraged tone, oversized cowlick jiggling atop his head. “You let him in, so you’ve got to let me in!”

  The officer ignored this, stepping aside to let Custer pass the yellow crime scene tape.

  “Captain Custer!” the reporter cried, turning to him: “Commissioner Rocker has refused to speak with the press. Will you comment on the case, please?”