Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(82)
She took a deep breath and went back to work, briskly telling Gregor where to put the lights, repositioning the fog machine, working out her exposures. Gregor was unusually cooperative and subdued, and she could see that he was genuinely spooked. This, if nothing else, was a refreshing change. Maybe he should be scared more often. The only one who seemed unaffected, in fact, was Pavel, the Steadicam operator. He looked, as always, as if he was on the verge of falling asleep. Staring at his heavy-lidded, drooping eyes helped to calm her down—if only a little.
55
THE REST OF THE story can be quickly summarized,” Constance said. “She didn’t tell me how she spent the two decades between her Midwest sojourn and coming to Savannah, but by the time she arrived here, she was wealthy. She told me she liked the idea of rescuing a historic building and restoring it into an upscale hotel. On a visit to Savannah she fell in love with the city and found the right building. She bought the abandoned factory and rebirthed it as the Chandler House. It would be a place where she could indulge in her love of books, paintings, and music. She became an imperious and eccentric proprietress, brilliant and commanding. She continued to make profitable trades but never let herself become seduced by the machine. She realized that it would be dangerous to push the technology further, even as computing power vastly increased over the years. She made just enough money to live well and have all she wanted, but not beyond. She naturally kept the device secret.”
“Who could you trust with it?” Coldmoon mused.
“Precisely the conundrum,” said Constance. “So the years passed. And passed. And passed. Eventually, she felt age beginning to creep up on her.”
She fell silent for a moment, and the moment lengthened. Confused, Coldmoon looked from Constance to Pendergast and back again.
“More and more,” she resumed, “she began turning to Patrick Ellerby, her hotel manager, for help. He had started as assistant manager, a handsome and somewhat roguish fellow. Exactly how the two became so close is something Frost refused to discuss. It’s clear she felt a genuine affection for him. I think to some degree he served as a replacement for Dr. Quincy: empathetic, a little awkward perhaps, independent, fond of poetry and mathematics. But unlike Quincy, Ellerby wasn’t an honorable man. He saw in Frost a route to a comfortable existence for himself. Perhaps he began to work upon her in the mode of The Aspern Papers, ingratiating himself, romancing her, gaining her trust. In time, she shared her deepest secret with him: the machine she had secretly set up in the basement, and just as importantly, the physics behind how it operated. This is, essentially, the same information she gave me in response to our third question: How can this machine see into the future? And this provided a lot of the science underpinning what Aloysius has just explained, along with—”
Abruptly, Constance paused again.
“Are you all right, my dear?” Pendergast asked after a moment.
“I’m fine.” She took a breath. “As I was saying, eventually Frost turned over the operation of the device to Ellerby, since she was increasingly confined to her fifth-floor rooms.”
At this she turned to Pendergast. “Tell the rest, please.”
Pendergast shifted position. “Here, a new element enters the picture. Ellerby studied the device and the schematics that came with it, and he apparently realized—with advances in computational hardware, software, and a deeper knowledge of quantum mechanics and brane cosmology—that the device, now almost fifty years old, could be made more powerful. Much more powerful. And he had the mathematical and computer skills to, ah, ‘goose’ it, as the saying goes. Ellerby was confident that by increasing the machine’s power, he could look not one minute into the future, but thirty minutes, maybe even an hour. That’s enough to make billions.
“Of course, he tried to conceal these ambitions from Frost—but she was too shrewd a judge of character not to have understood what he was up to. As the financial logs and computer forensics show, he suddenly began to make money—vast amounts of money. Two hundred million dollars in three weeks. All perfectly legal and aboveboard. Because, you see, there are no laws against using a time machine to play the market. It was around this point that Frost took the extraordinary step of leaving her rooms and investigating the basement—where she found Ellerby doing the one thing she’d expressly forbidden. This led to their infamous argument, which was overheard by half the staff. But in her elderly state, she could do nothing to stop him.”
“So you’re saying Ellerby found a way to increase the machine’s power,” Coldmoon asked, “to poke a bigger hole in that parallel universe?”
Pendergast nodded. “Your analogy to poking a hole is apt. Because that’s where Ellerby’s story ends—and our murder inquiry begins. And that is where my fourth and last question comes into play.”
“Which was?” Coldmoon asked.
“Was Ellerby’s death connected to the device in the suitcase?” Pendergast replied. “But here we move into more speculative territory that Frost refused to explain to Constance. But it stands to reason that the ‘hole’ Ellerby poked became larger and larger as the machine grew more powerful; Ellerby made more and more money on the market…and then it happened.”
“It?” Coldmoon repeated.
“The hole grew big enough for…” He paused and fixed both of them with glittering eyes. “Something to come through it.”