Page 33 of Angel of Vengeance
“Let us take care of the cleric for you, Doctor,” came a voice. “The river’s always thirsty for more bodies.” A low chuckle arose.
Leng nodded slowly. “Precisely my thinking. Decla, please give this job some thought and let me know your recommendations.”
At this the pout left her face, to be replaced by a slow smile. Plotting murder was one of her favorite pastimes. “Scrape here will have him grinning in the muck of the East River in no time.”
Leng nodded again. “Very well. Just let me know when it’s done. And take nothing for granted with this one—be on the lookout for unexpected outcomes.”
“Why not do this mutton-shunter Pendergast at the same time?” another voice asked, to murmurs of agreement. “Get him out of the way along with the cleric.”
“I’m afraid he’s too wily for that. Trying to get the drop on him would only reduce the size of your crew. Rather, I think a breadcrumb gambit might be of better success.” He paused, thinking. “Yes… a double-breadcrumb gambit, perhaps.”
Even as he spoke, the idea was formulating in his head. A man as clever as Pendergast might, in fact, be too clever by half—that would prove his downfall.
Leng glanced at his watch; twenty minutes had passed since he’d first arrived, and he preferred to keep these gatherings short. “Just one more item of business. Humblecut, you have something to report?”
There was a brief stirring in the rear of the room, gray against black. Then a taciturn-looking man, who’d been leaning back in his chair, eased himself forward. He was older than the rest, midforties perhaps, and instead of the gray shirts, suspenders, and bowler hats, he wore a long, double-breasted trench coat of fine black leather. His eyes were hidden beneath the brim of a homburg, but he had a waxed handlebar mustache that he smoothed faintly with the tips of his fingers before he spoke.
“Thank you, Doctor. The boy, Joe, was spirited out of the house using a hearse and coffin as a ruse,” he said in a quiet, almost melodic voice. “It was meant to hold the body of his tutor. Instead, the boy was placed in the coffin and switched out when the hearse stopped briefly to mend a horseshoe—a contrivance, of course. From there, he and his policeman escort made their way to the train station. We didn’t cotton on to it until the last minute, and we were hindered in following.”
“Go on,” said Leng.
“We ultimately learned they had purchased tickets to Boston.”
“I see.” Leng thought a moment. That portal from the future, through which these adversaries had come—if he could only determine when it would reappear, access it… the results would be almost incalculable. Constance Greene had used its mere existence to threaten him: If you knew what the future holds… The next time you saw me, it would be with powers so formidable all your traps and your alley rats would be swept away like chaff.
My God, he thought. The great project that he’d always assumed would take decades, even a century, to complete could perhaps be accomplished in a matter of months, even less. What he needed was more information about the portal itself; information that only those who had used it would know. And he needed knowledge of the future century from which Ferenc and the rest had come. Once again, he bitterly regretted pushing Ferenc over the edge. That left only three.
“We can kill that meddlesome cleric, but Pendergast and the policeman—I want them alive for now.” He paused. “That is all. Thank you, my friends. Mind how you go. And remember—keep it dry.”
He lifted an index finger to his lips. The group began shuffling to their feet, preparing to leave the Hippodrome by their various routes.
Leng waited until his detective, Humblecut, approached. Then he motioned the man aside and—while Decla stood guard at the exit—began giving him further instructions in a low, urgent whisper.
25
PENDERGAST STOOD IN CATHERINE Street, gazing past the oyster cellars and cheap lodging houses toward an imposing brick building with granite cornices that dominated the corner: Shottum’s Cabinet of Curiosities. A cold winter mist drifted along the street, tinged a reddish orange from the gas lamps of the establishments lining both sides. The air smelled of old fish and urine, and he could hear the distant sound of drunken singing, the clatter of hooves, and the whistle of a steamship on the East River.
Dressed as a late-night grogshop patron in a shabby greatcoat and dirty spats, Pendergast made his way down the lane, weaving slightly. It was nearly three o’clock, there were few people in the street, and no one paid him any attention. Nearing the corner, he lurched into an alleyway that ran behind Shottum’s, bending over as if to vomit. When a quick glance around indicated he was alone and unobserved, he straightened and leapt up a wrought iron fence at the end of the alley, quickly hoisting himself over and down onto the other side. There was a service door here into Shottum’s Cabinet, padlocked—but the padlock seemed to prove no greater obstacle than an unlocked door. He slipped inside, easing the door shut behind him.
All the gaslights inside were off and it was pitch black. New odors assaulted his senses—formaldehyde and mothballs, overlaid with the faint odor of suppuration. Pendergast removed the stub of a candle from his pocket and lit it, casting a feeble glow. He was in one of the exhibition halls. Bizarre and, supposedly, authentic displays loomed out of the shadows, which he viewed with detached amusement: a rearing “man-eating” grizzly bear with a fake arm clenched in its jaws; a mummified orangutan; the skeleton of a French countess executed during the French revolution, appropriately missing its skull. Crossing the hall, he passed through an archway marked Gallery of Unnatural Monstrosities and into a narrow corridor sporting such additional grotesqueries as a dog with a cat’s head and a hideous brown mass identified as the liver of a woolly mammoth, found frozen in a Siberian glacier. At last the corridor bisected at the display of a second-rank western outlaw, hanged by the neck until dead.
The passage to the left ended in a curtained alcove. Pendergast drew these back to expose a wooden wall. He pressed a small knothole and the rear of the cul-de-sac opened inward. A closet with a padlocked metal door lay beyond. Once again, this padlock seemed to melt open in his hands. The metal door led to a small landing, with a staircase both ascending and descending into blackness. Downstairs, he knew, was the basement coal tunnel. The staircase upward led to Leng’s first laboratory.
Before Leng had begun acquiring victims from Bellevue and the House of Industry, he had used this cul-de-sac in the Cabinet as a snatching point for victims. He would lie in wait, like a trapdoor spider, and seize an appropriate victim, smothering her with a chloroform-soaked rag and dragging her behind the wall. He sought out young women, poor, alone, often prostitutes—those who could disappear and never be missed. Shottum’s Cabinet was in fact frequented by many such women, as it was one of the few popular amusements available in the Five Points, and—at a cost of only a few pennies—a momentary respite from their hardscrabble lives.
Pendergast had learned there were currently no patients at Bellevue Hospital that met Leng’s particular needs. That meant Leng, having also had his flow of victims at the Mission and House of Industry shut off by Diogenes, might turn back to this scheme for acquiring victims—and he was determined to shut it off, as well.
Candle wavering, he ascended the staircase to the floor above. Leng had abandoned this laboratory when one of his dying victims had been discovered up there by the landlord, Shottum himself. What Leng had done with the man after killing him, Pendergast was unsure; this was another purpose of his visit.
He came to the third-floor landing, picked the lock and opened the door, and paused to survey the large, partitioned space beyond. Its vaulted roof lay under the eaves of the building, and one side contained several black soapstone tables, displaying the remains of partially stripped and abandoned chemistry apparatus and other scientific detritus. There was a strange smell here, not unlike a cured ham that had, perhaps, been left in the sun too long. The smell came from behind a heavy oilcloth curtain at the far end of the room.
Pendergast made his way past the tables to this partition and drew it aside.
There, on a marble gurney, lay two long wooden crates, each containing a human corpse. As Pendergast held the candle out to provide illumination, he saw the cadavers had been packed in coarse salt and what looked like natron as a preservative. Even though the features were distorted by shriveling and curing, one of these corpses could only be Shottum. The other probably belonged to Tinbury McFadden, a curator at the Natural History Museum to whom—Pendergast knew from old letters and journals—Shottum had conveyed his suspicions about Leng. No doubt the unfortunate gentlemen had been a little too curious about Leng’s doings on his rented third floor of the Cabinet. The salt was obviously how Leng had kept the bodies from possible discovery until—in Pendergast’s own timeline—Leng had ultimately burned Shottum’s Cabinet to the ground, leaving no trace. They were now of course in an alternate timeline, and anything could happen. Pendergast had contemplated burning Shottum’s himself but discarded that notion as being too risky to innocent lives in the crowded slum.
He had been in the Cabinet before—first as a construct of his own intellect, and later in person—and this would be his final visit. He was now satisfied as to the fate of Shottum, but he had further business down below, in the coal cellar, where Leng’s vivisected victims had been walled up in empty alcoves.
Leaving the laboratory, Pendergast padlocked the door and descended as far as the basement. At the bottom of the stairs, he paused to listen. He knew Munck was probably nearby, but he could hear no sound beyond the dripping of water. A coal tunnel ran away to the left, and to the right, another tunnel led deep into Leng’s underground complex.