The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(86)

Pendergast closed the door and glided toward Nora, hands behind his back.

“May I get you anything? Mineral water? Lillet? Sherry?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Then if you will excuse me for a moment.” And Pendergast disappeared through a doorway that had been set, almost invisibly, into one of the rose-colored walls.

“Nice place,” she said to O’Shaughnessy.

“You don’t know the half of it. Where’d he get all the dough?”

“Bill Smi—That is, a former acquaintance of mine said he’d heard it was old family money. Pharmaceuticals, something like that.”

“Mmm.”

They lapsed into silence, listening to the whispering of the water. Within a few minutes, the door opened again and Pendergast’s head reappeared.

“If the two of you would be so kind as to come with me?” he asked.

They followed him through the door and down a long, dim hallway. Most of the doors they passed were closed, but Nora caught glimpses of a library—full of leather-and buckram-bound volumes and what looked like a rosewood harpsichord—and a narrow room whose walls were covered with oil paintings, four or five high, in heavy gilt frames. Another, windowless, room had rice paper walls and tatami mats covering its floor. It was spare, almost stark, and—like the rest of the rooms—very dimly lit. Then Pendergast ushered them into a vast, high-ceilinged chamber of dark, exquisitely wrought mahogany. An ornate marble fireplace dominated the far end. Three large windows looked out over Central Park. To the right, a detailed map of nineteenth-century Manhattan covered an entire wall. A large table sat in the room’s center. Upon it, several objects resting atop a plastic sheet: two dozen fragments of broken glass pieces, a lump of coal, a rotten umbrella, and a punched tram car ticket.

There was no place to sit. Nora stood back from the table while Pendergast circled it several times in silence, staring intently, like a shark circling its prey. Then he paused, glancing first at her, then at O’Shaughnessy. There was an intensity, even an obsession, in his eyes that she found disturbing.

Pendergast turned to the large map, hands behind his back once again. For a moment, he simply stared at it. Then he began to speak, softly, almost to himself.

“We know where Dr. Leng did his work. But now we are confronted with an even more difficult question. Where did he live? Where did the good doctor hide himself on this teeming island?

“Thanks to Dr. Kelly, we now have some clues to narrow our search. The tram ticket you unearthed was punched for the West Side Elevated Tramway. So it’s safe to assume Dr. Leng was a West Sider.” He turned to the map, and, using a red marker, drew a line down Fifth Avenue, dividing Manhattan into two longitudinal segments.

“Coal carries a unique chemical signature of impurities, depending on where it is mined. This coal came from a long-defunct mine near Haddonfield, New Jersey. There was only one distributor for this coal in Manhattan, Clark & Sons. They had a delivery territory that extended from 110th Street to 139th Street.”

Pendergast drew two parallel lines across Manhattan, one at 110th Street and one at 139th Street.

“Now we have the umbrella. The umbrella is made of silk. Silk is a fiber that is smooth to the touch, but under a microscope shows a rough, almost toothy texture. When it rains, the silk traps particles—in particular, pollen. Microscopic examination of the umbrella showed it to be heavily impregnated with pollen from a weed named Trismegistus gonfalonii, commonly known as marsh dropseed. It used to grow in bogs all over Manhattan, but by 1900 its range had been restricted to the marshy areas along the banks of the Hudson River.”

He drew a red line down Broadway, then pointed to the small square it bordered. “Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that our Dr. Leng lived west of this line, no more than one block from the Hudson.”

He capped the marker, then glanced back at Nora and O’Shaughnessy. “Any comments so far?”

“Yes,” said Nora. “You said Clark & Sons delivered coal to this area uptown. But why was this coal found downtown in his laboratory?”

“Leng ran his laboratory in secret. He couldn’t have coal delivered there. So he would have brought small amounts of coal down from his house.”

“I see.”

Pendergast continued to scrutinize her. “Anything else?”

The room was silent.

“Then we can assume our Dr. Leng lived on Riverside Drive between 110th Street and 139th Street, or on one of the side streets between Broadway and Riverside Drive. That is where we must concentrate our search.”

“You’re still talking hundreds, maybe thousands, of apartment buildings,” said O’Shaughnessy.

“Thirteen hundred and five, to be exact. Which brings me to the glassware.”

Pendergast silently took another turn around the table, then reached out and picked up a fragment of glass with a pair of rubber-tipped tweezers, holding it into the light.

“I analyzed the residue on this glass. It had been carefully washed, but with modern methods one can detect substances down to parts per trillion. There was a very curious mix of chemicals on this glassware. I found similar chemicals on the glass bits I recovered from the floor of the charnel. Quite a frightening mixture, when you begin to break it down. And there was one rare organic chemical, 1,2 alumino phosphocyanate, the ingredients for which could only be purchased in five chemists’ shops in Manhattan at the time, between 1890 and 1918, when Leng appears to have used his downtown laboratory. Sergeant O’Shaughnessy was most helpful in tracking down their locations.”