The Final Descent (The Monstrumologist #4)(56)

He held up his hands. Did it matter?

I said, “Mr. Faulk did not kill Francesco Competello.”

“That is something that will never leave this room,” he answered.

“Too many secrets,” I murmured.

“What did you say?”

I cleared my throat. It felt as if I’d swallowed a hot coal; the flesh was raw. “You should have told me. If you had, his nephews would be alive and so would he.”

His face had drained of what little color it had. He studied me for a long moment, motionless, expressionless.

“Who would I have confided in?” I asked. I was becoming annoyed. “I have no friends. No family. The grocer or the baker? You know me better. Lilly? Is that it? You were afraid I would tell Lilly? Why would I tell her? She is nothing to me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He forced a smile, the tight-lipped, painful, perfectly Warthropian one. “Opium can be quite pleasant, I understand, but it can also produce hallucinations and paranoid delusions.”

I watched him pour another cup of cold tea. No one else on earth would notice the slight quiver at the ends of his fingers, but I noticed.

“The last of its kind,” I said. “More valuable than a king’s ransom. What might be done with it? You cannot kill it. It goes against everything you believe in. But you can’t keep it secret, either. It very well may be your last, best chance at glory, the immortality you crave because it’s the only sort of immortality you believe in. So you are faced with an impossible choice: kill it, or hide it away somewhere and sacrifice all personal glory.”

He was shaking his head, impassively studying my face. “That is a false choice.”

“Exactly! And you found your way out of it. You had to have an accomplice—well, two. I’m fairly certain you needed Meister Abram on this end, to arrange the Italian guards and the Irish thieves. I don’t think he was Maeterlinck’s ‘client.’ I think that was another monstrumologist—probably Acosta- Rojas.”

“Him? Why him?” Studying me.

“He’s from T. cerrejonensis’s stomping grounds. He even may have been the one who found the nest.”

He crossed his long legs, folded his hands around his upraised knee, and tilted back his chin. I was reminded of Competello the moment before I shot him.

“Right before I shot him, Francesco told me he had kept his promises. That struck me as odd. What promises was he talking about?”

“The one promise to provide security before the congress and the second to help us locate what had been stolen from us.”

“That’s what I would have assumed, too, if a few hours before you had not said, ‘Everything was perfect, down to this latest instance.’ How could anything in this latest instance be characterized as perfect? Everything went wrong practically from the beginning. Unless there was no theft, no lost treasure, and Competello’s promise was to deliver up to you manufactured evidence of the creature’s demise, to convince the world that it was dead.”

He was rocking back and forth in the chair; his body moved, but his eyes remained locked on mine. “I believe you saw what was in that box with your own eyes.”

I smiled. “There is no measurable difference, at this stage in its development, between T. cerrejonensis and a common constrictor. Or so you’ve told me. That is how you planned to have your cake and eat it too. Who in all of monstrumology would question the word of the first among equals, the great Pellinore Warthrop? And besides, it wouldn’t be a complete fraud. The creature does exist, after all.”

“Hmm. Isn’t it more likely that Competello is the fraud? That he sacrificed some poor animal so he might pursue the prize without fear of some meddling scientist?”

If I’d had the strength, I would have leapt from the bed and choked the life out of him. The galling arrogance of the man!

“It was you! I shouted. “It was you from the beginning! You—or someone you knew—who hired the broker to bring the egg to New Jerusalem. It was you who scraped the dregs of Five Points for the poor suckers to ‘steal’ it for you, and you who conscripted Competello’s men to witness the so-called crime! You didn’t go to Elizabeth Street to ask him to help find what you had lost—you never lost it! You went to make sure he was still going to keep the second part of the bargain. And for your trouble you were kidnapped and held hostage, until I butted my head in and ruined your perfect plan.”

He didn’t say anything for a long moment. I was winded, out of breath and out of patience. And he had said I had betrayed him!

“Well,” he said at last. “That is very interesting, Will Henry. And quite ludicrous.”

“Where is it, Warthrop? Back in the Monstrumarium? That’s my guess. Safest place, at least while you’re here. Gives you time to make arrangements for a more permanent home for it.”

“Your theory of the case is entertaining, but terribly flawed. I was shot in the leg by my own coconspirator? Why would he do that?”

“That’s the other thing!” I cried. “Thank you, sir, for reminding me! I should have seen it then—you saw it almost immediately—that Pellinore Warthrop would never give up something so important so easily. ‘Give it to him!’ ” I laughed. “You did want me to give it to him—you had hired him, after all, to take it!”