City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(17)

Longstreet sat back, using the raised hand to make a dismissive gesture. Pendergast stood, nodded dispassionately, then turned and left the office.





10

AN HOUR LATER, Pendergast was back in his set of three adjoining apartments in the Dakota, overlooking Central Park West and West Seventy-Second Street. For several minutes he moved restlessly through the many rooms, picking up an objet d’art and then putting it down, pouring himself a glass of sherry but leaving it forgotten on a sideboard. It was curious, these days, how he found so little pleasure in the diversions that had once offered him interest and reward. The meeting with Longstreet had put him out of sorts—although it was not the meeting, exactly, so much as the probing and irritating comments with which it had ended.

I can see you’re not your usual self.

He frowned at the memory. He knew from his Chongg Ran training that the thoughts you most try to banish are the ones that most persistently push themselves back in. The best way to not think of something is to possess it fully, and then cultivate indifference.

Moving from the more public spaces of the apartment to the private, he wandered into the kitchen, where he had a brief discussion in ASL with his deaf housekeeper, Miss Ishimura, about that evening’s dinner menu. After some back and forth they ultimately agreed on okonomiyaki pancakes with yam batter, octopus, and pork belly.

It had been over three weeks since Pendergast’s ward, Constance, had—with an abrupt declaration—left their home at 891 Riverside Drive to go live with her young son in a remote monastery in India. In the aftermath of her departure, Pendergast had fallen into a most uncharacteristic emotional state. But as the days and weeks went on, and the voices that sounded in his head grew still one by one, a single voice remained—a voice, he knew, that was at the heart of his strange disquiet.

Can you love me the way I wish you to? The way I need you to?

He pushed this voice away with sudden violence. “I will master this,” he murmured to himself.

Moving out of the kitchen, he made his way down the hall to a tiny, windowless, ascetic room not unlike a monk’s chamber. It contained only a plain wooden desk, unvarnished, and a straight-backed chair. Taking a seat, Pendergast opened the desk’s single drawer and, one at a time, carefully took out the three items it contained and placed them on the tabletop: a hardbound notebook; a cameo; and a comb. He sat a moment, looking at each in turn.

And I—I love you. But you made it very clear that you don’t return my love.

The notebook was of French make, with an orange cover of Italian leatherette, containing blank sheets of vellum Clairefontaine paper ideal for fountain pens. It was the kind Constance had used exclusively for the last dozen years, ever since the venerable English purveyor of leather-bound journals she always preferred had gone out of business. Pendergast had taken it from her private rooms in the sub-basement below the mansion: it was her most recent journal, left incomplete on her sudden departure for India.

He had not yet opened it.

Next he turned to the antique tortoiseshell comb and the old, elegant cameo in a frame of eighteen-karat yellow gold. The latter had been carved, he knew, from the prized sardonyx of Cassis madagascariensis.

Both items had been among Constance’s most favored possessions.

Knowing what I know, having said what we’ve said—continued living under this roof would be intolerable…

Plucking all three from the tabletop, Pendergast exited the room, went down the hall, and opened the unprepossessing door that led into the third and most private of his apartments. Beyond the door was a small room that ended in a shoji, a sliding wood-and-rice-paper partition. And beyond the shoji was—hidden deep within the massive walls of the old and elegant apartment building—a tea garden, recreated by Pendergast to the most exacting specifications.

He slowly closed the partition behind him, then paused, listening to the soft cooing of doves and inhaling the scent of eucalyptus and sandalwood. Everything—the path of flat stones meandering before him, the dwarf pines, the waterfall, the chashitsu or teahouse that lay half-hidden in the greenery ahead—was dappled in hazy, indirect light.

Now he made his way down the path, past the stone lanterns, to the teahouse. Bending low, he entered the dim confines of the chashitsu. He closed its sadouguchi, carefully set the three items he’d been carrying down to one side, then glanced around, making sure that everything necessary for the tea ceremony—the mizusashi, whisks, scoops, brazier, kama iron kettle—was in readiness. He set the tea bowl and container of matcha powder in their proper places, then took a seat on the tatami mat. Over the next thirty minutes, he immersed himself completely in the ceremony: ritually cleaning the various utensils; heating the water; warming the chawan tea bowl and, after at last scooping hot water into it, whisking in the proper proportion of matcha. Only then, once every last preparation had been completed with almost reverential exactitude, did he taste the tea, taking it in with barely perceptible sips. And as he did so, he allowed himself—for the first time in almost a month—to let the weight of grief and guilt fully occupy his mind, and in so doing, slowly fall away.

At long last, equanimity restored, he carefully and deliberately went through the final steps of the ceremony, re-cleaning the implements and returning them to their proper places. Now he again glanced at the three items he had brought with him. After a moment, he reached for the notebook and—for the first time—opened it at random and allowed himself to read a single paragraph. Instantly, Constance’s personality leapt out through her written words: her mordant tone, her cool intelligence, her slightly cynical, slightly macabre world view—all filtered through a nineteenth-century perspective.