The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(156)
Within the library, all the sheets had been removed from the skeletons and mounted animals. The light was dimmer here, but Nora could see that half the shelves were empty, and the floor covered with carefully piled stacks of books. Pendergast threaded his way through them to the vast fireplace in the far wall, then—at last—turned back toward his two guests.
“Dr. Kelly,” he said, nodding to her. “Mr. Smithback. I’m pleased to see you looking well.”
“That Dr. Bloom of yours is as much an artist as he is a surgeon,” Smithback replied, with strained heartiness. “I hope he takes Blue Cross. I have yet to see the bill.”
Pendergast smiled thinly. A brief silence ensued.
“So why are we here, Mr. Pendergast?” Nora asked.
“You two have been through a terrible ordeal,” Pendergast replied as he pulled off the heavy gloves. “More than anyone should ever have to endure. I feel in large part responsible.”
“Hey, that’s what bequests are for,” Smithback replied.
“I’ve learned some things in the last several weeks. Far too many are already past help: Mary Greene, Doreen Hollander, Mandy Eklund, Reinhart Puck, Patrick O’Shaughnessy. But for you two, I thought perhaps hearing the real story—a story nobody else must ever know—might help exorcize the demons.”
There was another brief pause.
“Go ahead,” Smithback said, in an entirely different tone of voice.
Pendergast looked from Nora, to Smithback, then back again.
“From childhood, Fairhaven was obsessed with mortality. His older brother died at age sixteen of Hutchinson-Guilford syndrome.”
“Little Arthur,” Smithback said.
Pendergast looked at him curiously. “That’s correct.”
“Hutchinson-Guilford syndrome?” Nora asked. “Never heard of it.”
“Also known as progeria. After a normal birth, children begin to age extremely rapidly. Height is stunted. Hair turns gray and then falls out, leaving prominent veins. There are usually no eyebrows or eyelashes, and the eyes grow too large for the skull. The skin turns brown and wrinkled. The long bones become decalcified. Basically, by adolescence the child has the body of an old man. They become susceptible to atherosclerosis, strokes, heart attacks. The last is what killed Arthur Fairhaven, when he was sixteen.
“His brother saw mortality compressed into five or six years of horror. He never got over it. We’re all afraid of death, but for Anthony Fairhaven the fear became an obsession. He attended medical school, but after two years was forced to leave for certain unauthorized experiments he’d undertaken; I’m still looking into their exact nature. So by default he went into the family business of real estate. But health remained an obsession with him. He experimented with health foods, diets, vitamins and supplements, German spas, Finnish smoke saunas. Taking hope from the Christian promise of eternal life, he became intensely religious—but when his prayers were slow in being answered he began hedging his bets, supplementing his religious fervor with an equally profound and misplaced fervor for science, medicine, and natural history. He became a huge benefactor to several obscure research institutes, as well as to Columbia Medical School, the Smithsonian, and of course the New York Museum of Natural History. And he founded the Little Arthur Clinic, which in fact has done important work on rare diseases of children.
“We cannot be sure, exactly, when he first learned of Leng. He spent a lot of time digging around in the Museum Archives, following up some line of research or other. At some point, he came across information about Leng in the Museum’s Archives. Whatever he found gave him two critical pieces of information: the nature of Leng’s experiments, and the location of his first lab. Here was this man who claimed to have succeeded in extending his life. You can imagine how Fairhaven must have reacted. He had to find out what this man had done, and if he had really succeeded. Of course, this is why Puck had to die: he alone knew of Fairhaven’s visits to the Archives. He alone knew what Fairhaven had been examining. This wasn’t a problem until we found the Shottum letter: but then it became essential to remove Puck. Even a casual mention by Puck of Fairhaven’s visits would have linked him directly to Leng. It would have made him suspect number one. By luring you down there, Dr. Kelly, Fairhaven figured he could kill two birds with one stone. You had proven yourself unusually dangerous and effective.
“But I get ahead of myself. After Fairhaven discovered Leng’s work, he next wondered if Leng had succeeded—in other words, if Leng was still alive. So he began to track him down. When I myself started to hunt for Leng’s whereabouts, I often had the sense someone had walked the trail before me in the not too distant past.
“Ultimately, Fairhaven discovered where Leng had once lived. He came to this house. Imagine his exultation when he found my great-grand-uncle still alive—when he realized that Leng had, in fact, succeeded in his attempt to prolong life. Leng had the very secret that Fairhaven so desperately wanted.
“Fairhaven tried to make Leng divulge his secret. As we know, Leng had abandoned his ultimate project. And I now know why. Studying the papers in his laboratory, I realized that Leng’s work stopped abruptly around the first of March 1954. I wondered a long time about the significance of that date. And then I understood. That was the date of Castle Bravo.”
“Castle Bravo?” Nora echoed.