Page 40 of Angel of Vengeance
“It was all going perfectly until you came. I had Leng precisely where I wanted him.”
“You had him as a doomed rabbit has a fox when caught in its jaws. Leng, where you wanted him? Quite the reverse. He was simply enjoying the spectacle, toying with you, as you foolishly exulted in your so-called success.”
“Spectacle?” she raged. “This was my home, my world—” Her throat grew tight with emotion, and for a moment she could not speak. “Make all the excuses you want, but your meddling is what ruined everything… and killed Mary.”
He stood his ground. “This is not your home,” he said. “It is not your time. It’s not even your universe. This delusional image you paint of your ‘family,’ sailing happily off to lands unknown… it never would have happened. The decades you spent in his house have left you blind to how consummately clever Leng is, and—”
“This is my home—as much as I can ever have one! You think my home is back on Riverside Drive, with you? I had to escape. You were cold. And what’s worse—indifferent.”
“Cold? Indifferent? I’ve been good to you in every way.”
“Is being good to me sharing only a sliver of your life—denying me the part of you I most wanted?”
“I always treated you with the utmost respect and decency.”
“Decency?” She was almost crying. “If only you’d showed me a little less of your damned decency.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Be human. Give in to impulse. Be indecent for a change, and not such a weak-kneed prude!”
She could see from his expression this had struck home, and she was glad. Before he could respond, she went on. “And then the heartlessness you showed by following me to this place, even as I was trying to put the misery and loneliness behind me. Didn’t the note I left make it clear? Did you even read it?”
She raised her hand to strike him again, but this time he caught her wrist. The ferocity of her intended strike unbalanced her, and she tipped forward against his chest. When she tried to pull back her arm he continued to hold it in a grip of iron.
“Let me go!”
He said nothing, pulling her closer to him, his face inches from hers. She felt the sudden warmth of his breath; she could see his pupils dilate in the ice-chip eyes, see the mark of her slap blossoming on the alabaster of his cheek.
“I read it a thousand times,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “I know it better than you do yourself.”
“Prove it.”
“I see my own lonely, loveless future,” he said, voice lower still. “If I can’t have you on my own terms, I can’t have—”
But he was abruptly silenced as Constance pulled him still closer, joining her mouth with his. There was the briefest of intervals—brief, yet strangely limitless in its counterpoise of anger and hunger—and then they came together in a passionate embrace.
34
DIOGENES PENDERGAST WALKED ALONG Central Park South, slowly swinging a billy club by its leather strap and whistling “She Was Poor but She Was Honest,” a tune that seemed to be on everyone’s lips that season. He had temporarily exchanged his foppish dress for the uniform of the Metropolitan Police—a disguise that both made him forgettable and ensured he could do almost anything without arousing curiosity.
Not that there would be any witnesses: it was two in the morning, and he had only the gas lamps for company.
Ahead and to the right rose a dark outline that, he thought with distaste, resembled the “Big Ciggy”—the grotesque Skidmore, Owings & Merrill sculpture that, a century in the future, would dominate a section of the Richmond, Virginia, skyline. The half-completed structure thrust up into the sky like a square straw, devoid of decoration. Tiny slots punctuated its flanks, following an invisible spiral, like the arrow slits of Caernarfon Castle. These, Diogenes assumed, were for wind bracing. The full moon threw a spectral illumination over its bulk, and he could see that its surface was covered in brick for perhaps two-thirds of its height: above that rose a wooden skeleton and steel frame. This was the work of Daniel Burnham, architect and developer, and it was awaiting the final delivery of bricks and precut steel.
He moved closer. Peering into one of the lower slits, he could make out a plumb bob, a sort of pendulum made from a string with a piece of chalk fixed to its base and touching a slate board—a rude implement for measuring the sway of the tower in the wind.
Unfinished, its top partially exposed to the elements, it was easy to see why the eccentric-looking thing was already being called “Burnham’s Folly.” It had none of the finishing touches that would make it the observation tower scheduled to open in three months. But Burnham’s intentions were still bigger: in Chicago, bids were currently being taken for the commission to design the Montauk Building. That, Diogenes knew, was where Burnham’s true interest lay: in constructing the tallest building in America—at fourteen stories, taller than either the Equitable Building or the Tribune Building, both erected in Manhattan over the last ten years. And in the future universe of Diogenes, Burnham had succeeded in building the Montauk—one of the most spectacular high-rises built up to that time, even though it enjoyed only a short life, being demolished around 1900. This ugly tower was the one thing that, to him, seemed an anomaly of this place—a construct that never existed in the Central Park of his own world. It was a vulgar and intrusive excrescence.
Stepping smartly up to the barricade erected around the structure, he undid the padlock with a policeman’s skeleton key and slipped inside. The base of the tower was surrounded by construction site detritus: piles of dirt, sawhorses, cut bricks, and pieces of steel. One foundation section was still exposed, and Diogenes noted the massive footings.
He made his way through the clutter and reached the entrance to the tower itself, which he unlocked with the same method. No workmen would be on site, day or night, until the rest of the building materials arrived. No guards were on hand, either, if for no other reason than there was nothing worth stealing.
After closing the door behind him, Diogenes lit a dark lantern. In one corner, surrounded by worktables, stood a small steel room, fashioned out of sheet metal, carefully welded. This functioned as a vault in which tools and other things of value were normally kept. Its door was set in place with a combination lock.
Diogenes approached the lock and twisted the dial right, then left, then right until the tumblers fell into place. The interior of the vault contained an array of equipment and four small, stout wooden boxes, covered with a drop cloth. Aloysius had been as good as his word: his man, Bloom, had contrived to have the fraternity of New York construction workers drop off the boxes earlier in the evening. Setting the lantern on a peg, he stepped in, pulled away the tarp, and—grabbing a nearby claw hammer—pried off their tops. He examined the neatly stacked red tubes of black powder with their coils of fuses, caps, and plaster inside.
He spent the next half hour gingerly carrying the sticks of explosives up the wooden steps and affixing them at various well-hidden spots. He made his way upward until, at last, he placed the final load directly beneath the wooden ceiling.